Cover: Lissie, "Pursuit of Happiness"

The more I hear of Lissie, the more I am awed. I'd not heard the Kid Cudi original before this one. It's kind of a laid-back hip hop gem, not a bad song at all, but generally a relaxed and pretty pointed celebration of the high life. It's got a good groove, too.

What Lissie does is turn it into a manic explosion in a life where the only options are pathetic mundanity and self-destructive excess, and of course you know which side she falls on, swigging tequila before tearing into it and looking ready to collapse by the end. "Tell me what you know about dreamin'," Cudi seems merely dismissive, but Lissie is calling you out on your shit. There's no middle of the road for this woman. She's unstoppable.

Cover: Nirvana, "Love Buzz"

The original recording of "Love Buzz" is a decent-enough song... an appropriately-buzzy, slinky, funky, psychedelic song that sounds a whole lot like Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." The translation into Nirvana's version is like a template of nearly every Cobain song: the riff gets magnified, the vocals go from quiet moaning to louder-than-human wailing. When he asks "can you feel my love buzz?" it's so menacing, you don't want to. The guitars are just this side of mindless metallic showmanship, but you'd never accuse Cobain of being Kip Winger... he plays it good and sloppy because that serves the song way better, until he smashes it, then picks it back up and makes it wail for mercy. There's not a lot of love in the Cobain songbook. Maybe he covered songs like these because he just didn't see himself having much to say on the matter.

They released the Live at Reading CD/DVD in 2009, and it's one of the few non-Aerosmith live albums I've got. If you're a fan of the band and you don't have it, there's something wrong with you. Sadly, this track is the one they left out of the CD.

Marble Index: Marble Index

In "Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)" Neil Young famously warbled, over rough-clanging Crazy Horse guitars that "Rock and roll will never die," and after all these years, that's still true. No matter what happens, there will always be a fresh crop of young rock and rollers. There's just something so appealing about picking up a guitar in your garage, fingers on the frets, pick hammering strings, that generation after generation of suburban youths keep discovering how to make it work for them -- even as rebellious coolness shifts over to hip hop. I think the difference is, to be an MC, you have to be good with words. To be a rocker, you've really just got to be loud.

That said, if you are good at guitars, and loud and pissed off enough at the world and yourself, you might come up with something as good as Marble Index's self-titled debut from 2005.

For 42 minutes, this longplayer brings fresh, pulse-pounding, undiluted rock to your ears. Despite boasting an incredibly lush guitar sound, it manages to sound very stripped down, avoiding lame production tricks a lot of hot radio acts use to disguise the fact that they can't craft a hook -- you know them when you hear them. Marble Index never has to strain, and gets maximum mileage out of their work. Take the head-bobbingly simple wail of the opening track "I Believe," the burbling bass intro to "We Can Make It," or the blustery "On The Phone." Any number of these tracks, you'll swear have been around for years longer than they have. The band manages the unlikely feat of putting together a number of great songs that sound like they've just spontaneously formed themselves from a jam. Bloody hell, does it work. This is what rock sounds like when you imagine it, yet far too rarely when you actually hear it.

The album contains a great sense of urgency, never forgetting that it exists in the present tense. They play with great rhythm, driven by Adam Knickle's killer drums, but with a hell of an overtime shift by Brad Germain on vocals and guitars. I find it difficult to believe there's only one person playing guitar on here, although it's probably the bass is just that good too. Germain's vocals have a real charm. He sounds defiant yet optimistic on "I Believe" and "We Can Make It," weak and wanting on "Not So Bright" and the breathless "This Book," (killer lyric: "You don't ever call but I suspect you really want to",) defeated and frustrated on "Days Seem Longer" (which you may feel you vaguely already remember as a classic with its "Weakling for your love" refrain,) and "I Die." He adds the right amount of angst to the proceedings, effortless (and lordy do I ever hate fakey-sounding pretend-angst) and unafraid to let himself get ridiculously sloppy with his own lyrics. Seriously, you can only make out about half, maybe a third of the lyrics here. The rest are virtually unarticulated due to losing control of his own larynx. I chalk it up to a Joe Strummer influence, which can't be a bad thing. He sounds utterly committed to expressing himself, so that the words aren't always as important as the tone. The guitars back this up, foregoing simple, easily-hummed hooks for great rocky noise.

What we have here then, is a 12-song set that is most definitely meant to be played live, to be physically interacted with. A lot of the time, it feels like the guys in the band are right there next to you, you can hear the crackle in the air near the amps on songs like "On The Phone." Excellent production to match the supercharged playing, that's for sure. And although they don't shy away from the crash-bang assault music, they're really a nimble bunch of musicians, tweaking the balance of hooks and riffs and jangles and chords, playing the vocals up or down according to their importance. As it was released during the changeover between "neo-garage" (Strokes, White Stripes) and "Britrock" (Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand,) it doesn't seem like it came out of a trend, or like it depends on being heard at a certain place or time (*although ideally, you are a pissed-off teenager or twentysomething.) This type of music has a low ceiling/high floor type of quality. If it seems too basic, then it's really not gonna work for you, but for guys like me that just like awesome-sounding loud music, it can't go wrong.

If there are problems with the record, they're the dark side of its selling points. Despite each individual song's quality, the constant sonic assault may wear thin on the listener and cause them to tune out of some of the better mid- or late-album tracks. Everything between "This Book" and "I Die" might fall into wallpaper, despite being a solid collection of tracks. The album, surprisingly, rewards a lot of repeat listening to correct this, as you begin to anticipate the early tracks, you let yourself gain interest in the later tracks. It makes for good driving music. It's gritty and it's powerful, and it isn't desperate to go out of its way to show you how deep it's meant to be... which is actually pretty deep.

The annoying thing is, as good as the record is, quality may not be a recipe for a hit. "I Believe" maybe have been a great tune, but it doesn't have that radio-ready sound that has helped lesser bands attain multitudes more popularity than Marble Index ever had. The fact that they managed to get more of that sound on their second record, without sacrificing any awesomeness, and it doesn't seem to have worked, proves how unjust the music world can be sometimes.

Enjoy good bands, people.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

While I've got your attention...

Since I don't seem to get comments, I thought I'd ask: Has anything I've said on this blog made you interested in something you wouldn't already have listened to? Have you bought a CD, either physical or on iTunes, or downloaded something illegally, or even just repeatedly listened to something on YouTube because of me? I've been doing this blog nearly three months now, and I'm having fun so I won't stop, but it'd be nice to know whether it's getting out there to anyone.

So let me know: has this blog done anything for you lately?

Covers: William Shatner Fiesta

By a shocking coincidence, barely a month after I began "Cover Tuesdays," the Birthday of one of the most noteworthy cover artists of all time occurs on a Tuesday. Today, William Shatner himself turns 80. The clip of him performing(??) "Rocket Man" at the Sci-Fi awards is the sort of thing YouTube was invented for. It's intended as a semi-serious statement on identity and perception of the self, but it comes across as a pompous former Starship captain sitting on a stool smugly smoking a cigarette weirdly mumbling lyrics and helping to form the public parody of him we all know... I mean really, why did he have to say "I'm not the... MAN they think I am at home..." like that? Because it's hilarious is why. The second Shatner is delightfully hammy, and the third one is just goddamn ridicul-awesome.

I also had to make sure to get a version where you get Bernie Taupin's introduction. he man is clearly unhappy with his life as this was during a hiatus from his collaboration with Elton John, and it looks like he's reading his speech with a gun pointed at his head from just out of frame. You can tell he's skeptical of Shatner's take on his work.

Two and a half decades later, Mr. Shatner resumed his recording career with he critically acclaimed (yes!) Has Been, which featured this glorious interpretation of Pulp's cult hit single "Common People," which is worth every cent to hear Shatner snarl "You'll never dance and drink and screw 'cause there's nothing else to do!!" Wisely, his collaborator Ben Folds gets Joe Jackson to handle most of the singing parts, but Shatner wrings a real defiance out of his work, despite his questionable relationship to "common people." It's funny: "Rocket Man" made him a laugh, but "Common People" made him an artist.

Elbow: The Seldom Seen Kid

"You Can't Always Get What You Want," as I expect any well-informed reader of this blog to know, is a great song by the Rolling Stones. After a (somewhat ponderous) London Bach Choir intro, it builds from a quiet acoustinc-strumming introduction into a big climactic moment where the choir returns and the guitars mix with horns and strings and everyone involved in the recording just lets it fly with orgasmic results. Not only is there a song on this album that reminds me very much of that climactic moment in music history, but the saying "You can't always get what you want" also seems to sum up my experience when first spinning this record.

I first encountered Elbow (who put out a new album between my buying and writing this,) via the song "Grounds For Divorce," which is a whip-cracking, booze-blues, hard-hearted jammed-up work song. The crunching fuzz guitar matched perfectly with vocalist Guy Garvey's mournful hazy reminiscences of the "seldom-seen kid," drowning the sorrows that weigh him down. It's pretty fiery hard rock, and in purchasing this album I expected at least a little more of it, but there was little to be found. The album is comprised mostly of drifty, dreary, dreamy, longing balladry and mid-tempo music. I did not, in fact, get "what I want" (more "Grounds for Divorce,") but maybe that lonely longing sound was just what I needed.

The album to paint its fuzzy, shifting picture with its opening track, a breathy, distant ballad called "Starlings," in which poetic lyrics are wrapped up in a watery backdrop with halting blasts of horns. Although he'll probably go unrecognized as a lyricist in his time, Garvey manages to get a number of great lines on the album and many of them appear in this song. He has a knack for coming up with complicated yet direct and evocative similes. And although Garvey's a good vocalist, coming off like a tired working-class poet in love, and the vocals are privileged heavily on this song and throughout the album, it's restrained. The album builds, and in its build the album's character emerges.

The second track, the exotic "The Bones of You" has a fair bit more pick-up, whirling like some distant underground club: like Elbow is the band that plays when the Mos Eisley Cantina band has the night off. He puts his voice to use on a number of different ballads: the sparkling crystal of "Mirrorball," the breezy, nostalgic "Weather to Fly," the bellowing, yawning "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver," the mournful "Some Riot," and the album-closing whimper, "Friend of Ours." All these songs are good in their own way, and similar but far from the same. In them middle of it is that gem, "Grounds for Divorce," and "An Audience With The Pope," which is like a Bond theme in training, applying some serious lyrical hoodoo to an otherwise merely decent tune. There is also the crooning duet "The Fix," which is a bit corny compared to the emotionally expressive reaches of the other songs.

So "Grounds For Divorce" becomes an oddity as the rest of the album is devoid of anything that could be thought of in terms of "guitar rock." And that's not a bad thing. Even though it makes the song hard to get in-context, it adds variety to an already varied album, with strings and horns and pianos and all other sorts of little sounds I can't quite identify. The main other instrument that keeps coming back to me is the drums, which add real character to each individual track, sometimes thundering, sometimes tapping lightly, and yes, sometimes nonexistent.

The major climax of the album is "One Day Like This," a song where I'd draw the comparison to "You Can't Always Get What You Want." It begins earnestly, with some strings and pianos, and ends with a massive, life-affirming invocation of "Throw those curtains wide / One day like this a year'd see me right!" and just like that everything can seem right with the world. The lyrics to the song are relatively more direct and simple than the others, which is fitting, because happiness is so much simpler a feeling than loneliness. The chant goes on and on as the strings pipe up and a guitar bubbles on in the background, and again the power of Garvey's voice is evident: when he tells you "It's looking like a beautiful day" you fuckin' believe him.

Like Arcade Fire, though, Elbow skips the opportunity to end their album on a note of release and energy, closing with the somber, jangling blues of "Friend of Ours," a mournful farewell to a friend that whimpers out, "Love you, mate," as the album fades into nothingness. The album will lug you around emotionally... it gains that power by the end.

I wanted simple, and what I got was really quite the opposite. Here is a band interested most in poetic explorations of loneliness and longing, in quiet and loud, with a sonic palette far beyond what I'd expect, yet with songs that are well written and distinct.

It would make very good listening for a quiet, lonely Sunday afternoon, if it didn't leave you so chilled, quite frankly. Whether this is just due to the placement of "Friend of Ours" after "One Day Like This," I can't really say, but you should probably have something else to focus on while you have it on. And yet it seems too sophisticated, too meaningful to be mere background music. It can be appreciated, I think, both as a good piece of work and a sympathetic ear.

"What came first," Rob Gordon asked in High Fidelity, "The music or the misery?" I don't know whether Seldom-Seen Kid is enough to bum you out, but it will hit you hard according to how bummed you already are. In any case, it's an album with real feeling, and it works well to impart those feelings and share them with the listener. Such is the power of music. And sometimes, that's what's needed.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

Two weekends ago, when I finally sat down to listen to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, an internet person happened to ask me where I was from and how I felt about it. I told her that I was from a suburb of Toronto, and that living here was like being in an emotionally abusive relationship with a really pretty girl: you feel like you could do better, but if you walk away, you'll have to find one. If that doesn't necessarily sum up my feelings about this album, then it surely sums up my feelings about attempting to sum up my feelings about the type of place being described on it. I stared at that question and re-typed my answer for forty minutes before properly replying, and I still didn't feel satisfied. It's tough to really wrap your head around a place that seems oppressive and dull and yet comfortable and welcoming.

All this recursive uncertainty seems in line with the album's intentions: not to pack the idea of the "Suburbs" away into this or that, but to use it as a backdrop against which many peoples' lives -- quiet ones of opportunity and regret -- play out. It could be anything, and it is a lot of things. Ever since that day I've kept revisiting this album, finding myself unable to keep away. It seems so huge, so ominous, yet so familiar even in its strangeness.

Why does it sound so big? Maybe because at times it's willing to sound pretty small. It begins with this nondescript chung-ka-chung riff on the curtain-raising opening track, so homey and down to Earth it's almost not likable. It isn't until the song dissolves into a mantra of "Sometimes I can't believe it / I'm moving past the feeling" that it really starts to grow, become overwhelmed by increasingly-psychedelic guitars that wash up into the sunny skies of the piano backdrop, growing more and more disorienting with each pass. You're starting to get into some serious shit. In places like these all throughout the album, the lyrical narrative and the sound that goes along seems to come off like a ghost story told by flashlight in a tent in the backyard.

The title track bleeds into the first of a few real rippers on the album, the breathless "Ready to Start." The lyrics are chanted at a regular pace, but the guitar moves are so frantic, you can sense the unrest of a teenager eager to get the hell out, a future dad regretting his choices. The song quickly becomes a tornado, and much of the album seems to exist in relation to gathering storms and gathering darkness. Another earlyish highlight is "Rococo," a wringing out of hipster teens that feel too big for their britches in the 'burbs. It's all swimming, anxious strings and stomping rhythmic refrain with a bite. And on and on with atmospheric scene-setters like "Empty Room" and new instant classics like "City With No Children," with its hummable U2-type riff and its almost-singalong chorus (I can imagine someone at karaoke 10 years from now: "Feel like I've been livin' in / A City with no Children in it / A garden left for ruin, uh, buh... da da da da...!")

The song structure and sequencing on this album is remarkable, and is what indicates it is at least attempting to be a great piece of work. I like the structure of the songs on this album: unconventional yet familiar, generally averting verse-chorus-verse-solo, seeming to add together to create a whole rather than chopped-up discrete pop units. They take you down new routes to familiar territory, rearranging their own riffs and lyrics (note the repetition from "Month of May" in "Wasted Hours" as just one easy example.) Lyrics reappear and reconfigure themselves, like houses built from the same plan in different neighbourhoods. Disquieting in their way, because you recognize it as something else. There probably aren't that many different "riffs" or at any rate tunes on this album, yet they work them into such disparate songs and sounds you'd probably not notice. It's fitting, in a way, since it's hard to avoid conformity in the suburbs, where even the nonconformists rebel in unison (admit it.) But you can look at it this way: most film scores work around the same general theme, and The Suburbs is one of the most cinematic albums I've ever heard. It reminds me a lot of Dark Side of the Moon, and you can take that as a compliment or not, depending on your opinion of that album.

The sequencing is unassailable: it rises and falls at its own agenda, like the gloriously serene "Half Light I" and her wild-eyed brother "Half Life II (No Celebration)." Or the somber, doomsaying "Suburban War" followed by the postapocalyptic garage punk pastiche of "Month of May" and then the sentimental yearning of the Neil Youngish "Wasted Hours." It alternates often between old and young, male and female, hopeful and remorseful. Even though my attention tends to wander during this stretch of the album, this effect causes me to never want to skip ahead, because I don't want to disrupt the continuity. So few albums manage to achieve that, even though it should be the goal of all.

The album is capped off by a few more instant classics: the uneasy, raging nostalgia of "We Used To Wait" and the gorgeous, far-beyond-town-limits "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," an aria masquerading as a new wave single, with its beautiful Regine Chassigne vocal and gesticulating synths, it builds as close as this album gets to a release. A lot of attention gets paid to what-sounds-like-what on this album, and for the record, the whole thing seems to remind me of anything Eno's ever done, (U2, Bowie, even Talking Heads on moments like "We Used to Wait" and "Modern Man," which also brings to mind Smashing Pumpkins' "1979.") It's lushly orchestrated and highly expressive, and makes me think I may have underestimated Owen "Final Fantasy" Pallett, who helped with the string arrangements (and the strings really make this album.) The whole thing, like I said, sounds humongous, which is fitting since when you're in the Suburbs, your meager little problems seem like the most pressing things in the world. Really, that's what this album seems to capture for me about the suburban experience: blowing every little slight and inconvenience so far out of proportion, way beyond rational thought and revealing your severe detachment from real emotional access. The suburbs have produced many great creators, but their creativity was usually borne out of a desire to get the fuck out of the suburbs: this humble (ch'yeah right) reviewer included.

So if, at times, it seems overly morose, overly joyful, overly serious, overly fantastic, that seems to be the point. This is an exaggerated album, to the point where its quiet moments are moments of exaggerated quietness. If I don't always find it the most pleasurable listening experience, I can at least always appreciate its artistic merit. It may not be something you'd put on at a party, but it's definitely something you can sit down with and contemplate. If you put it on in the background, every now and again you'll hear a stray lyric, working on a metaphor or putting a thought together, that makes you stop and tune in, and soon you'll be carried all the way to the end. If you're up for contemplation you'll dig this record, and if you'd rather not, feel free to don't. "Sprawl II" offers "near release," I say, because the album ends with a creepy reprise of the opening track (and is even title "The Suburbs [Continued]") suggesting an inability to escape, like you've finally circled back to your beginning in town. And in a way, that's sadly true, one of the many sad truths the album deals with: you grow up in the suburbs and hate it, you might leave, but then you're likely also to come back and start your own family there.

Whether The Suburbs is a definitive statement about the suburbs themselves, I won't say. It definitely manages to get a great deal of material out of the setting and feelings associated with it. Whether or not I think it's the best thing ever, I can definitely recognize that it's a damn good piece of work, and at the end of this review, I find myself thinking back to what I said when the album won the Grammy award for Album of the Year: this album was the only deserving winner "not in terms of quality, but in terms of effort, creativity and spirit." Here is music with real value: not just a collection of potential hits, but something that took great care and attention to detail to be itself. And it sounds pretty awesome while doing it. Even if you tune out from the lyrics, half or more of the songs will have you bobbing your head excitedly.

It's good music, and of course it doesn't have to be for everyone. But I will say that, if you've checked out a few tracks and are curious, don't hesitate any longer. With this album getting a bit more attention, we may have a mini-Nevermind on our hands, where something enjoyed by a select group can justifiably find wider attention and convert a lot of people who resisted. Myself included.

Buy this album from iTunes now!