Morse Music

Pearl Jam, Backspacer

2009-10-26T21:41:00.001-05:00

What a curious study Pearl Jam make for. Once the biggest band in the world, with a front man who epitomized the reluctant rock star of the '90s; a group that after three era-defining albums spent the next decade lowering its profile as much as possible, yet still could fill huge outdoor venues with rabid fans. They're arguably one of the least progressive bands of the last twenty years, having changed little about their musical approach over their past half-dozen albums. For thirteen years they've been solid, reliable as a Volvo station wagon, but also as unspectacular. Their gradual morph into a niche band illustrates the fragmented nature of today's audience: that red-meat, riff-driven hard rock has wound up with about as big an audience as, say, French techno.

And yet for most of that time, one got the sense that Pearl Jam were exactly where they wanted to be. Writing their songs, making their records. They played huge shows filled with people who loved every song. Their stop at Wisconsin's Alpine Valley Music Theater during the 2003 Riot Act tour was one of the most incredible concerts I've ever seen--the pure enjoyment among the band members, the rapport with the crowd, who sang along just as loudly to the new songs as to the classics. Playing to the people who get them, ignored by the ones who don't--the peaceful dream of any middle-aged rock band? Probably.

The buzz about their ninth studio album, Backspacer, is that this is their shot back at the mainstream. It is true that the songs are tighter and punchier, that there are fewer of them, that the band have somewhat tweaked the balance of rockers to ballads to anthems, and that they're promoting the album with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. But at the end of the day, Backspacer is still a Pearl Jam album much like any other Pearl Jam album. If you like Pearl Jam albums--and I do--then you may like this one more than some others; if you don't like or care about Pearl Jam albums, then it's hard to imagine this one changing your mind.

None of this is meant as a knock. The band's ascetic embrace of guitar-rock basics can be seen as a refusal to let style distract from substance. Their songs have always sunk or swum entirely on the strength of their songwriting and playing. They're not going to gussy up their music with techno beats or psychedelic flourishes; it took them twelve years to even put organ on a record. Such a classical, workmanlike approach is admirable, if not exciting.

And the songs on Backspacer are very good. Most notably, first single "The Fixer" is the most melodic, openly pop-oriented thing the band have done in years, possibly ever. It serves as the high point of the album's first section, a rapid-fire string of similarly terse bruisers. Midway through they break for an acoustic ballad, "Just Breathe"--a meditation on mortality and love that would have fit right in on Eddie Vedder's Into the Wild soundtrack from a couple years ago. From there the pace gets a bit more fluid, the music more dynamic. We get a couple of the band's most effective anthems in a while, particularly "Amongst the Waves," along with another rocker or two and a couple more ballads. Clocking in well under 40 minutes, it's a pretty nice survey of what this band does best.

One thing that I've found particularly compelling about Pearl Jam's post-Vitalogy output is its increasing sense of positivity. Certainly they haven't lacked for righteous anger and emotional desperation, but as opposed to the angst-ridden days of the early '90s the latter-day Pearl Jam almost always carries a sense of optimism and determination, a refusal to accept defeat. A song like "The Fixer," in which Vedder chants, "If something's cold, lemme put a little fire on it... If something's lost, I wanna fight to get it back again," shows Backspacer to be one of their brightest albums. That's not surprising for the first Obama-era record from a band that famously raged against George W. Bush's idea of America. It's also a sign of artists who've grown up and accepted their responsibility to do what they can in an imperfect world. As someone who went through high school and college with this band in my headphones, I find that both energizing and oddly moving.

Pearl Jam have been more active in promoting Backspacer, mainly because it's self-released: 90% of their money isn't going to the Sony Corp., and at the same time they can't count on the muscle of a huge corporation to push the album. So they've made a deal with Target (carving out some big protection for independent record stores), and they're doing Conan and Spin. I'm sure they'd like to win some new fans, but I don't think they've suddenly started courting a fad-driven mass audience. This is a band that once teetered on the brink of self-destruction under that kind of pressure. Since then, they've built one of the healthiest and most enduring careers in music by keeping their aims modest: to play good songs for people who want to hear them.

Secretly Great: George Michael's "Fastlove"

2009-10-01T17:13:00.000-05:00

Have you ever listened to a George Michael album? I have. One day I was stunned to discover that I owned not one, not two, but in fact the first three George Michael solo albums, encompassing roughly a decade of the former Wham! man's career. How did this happen? I honestly have no idea. But I did buy them all before the dawn of MP3s--those old, crusty days when if you wanted one good song you had to buy a whole album of dreck. And truly, there is no better exemplar of the worst excesses of the CD era than George Michael, who made you buy and possibly even listen to an hour or more of plodding, turgid, ponderous attempts at "serious" songcraft in order to get the one snappy dance tune that's on the radio. On his 1996 comeback disc, the fun-lovingly titled Older, that one song is "Fastlove."

(I'm not sure if people still remember this song. In the summer of '96, it sure seemed to be all over the radio--enough so that it got into my head and wouldn't leave, forcing me to buy the CD. If you haven't heard or don't remember it, I strongly urge you to spend the 99 cents to get it from iTunes.)

"Fastlove" begins firmly in clubland, with a whistling synthesizer, smooth disco beat, and R&B bassline. Michael delivers the first verse in a husky croon: "Looking for some education / Made my way into the night." The chorus promises that "I ain't Mr. Right," but that he can offer plenty of "fastlove," which is, in fact, "all that I've got on my mind." Some sax in the background, the beat, the bass--a solid dance cut.

What makes this song secretly brilliant is the polyphony of the background vocals. Michael (with co-producer Jon Douglas) plays them like keys on another instrument. Techno DJs of the day were looping and layering sampled vocals from different songs (one famous example being Orbital's live performances of "Halcyon," which united bits of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" with Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth"). Michael swipes the technique by looping original recordings. Just building up to the first verse, we've got the bass, the synth, a sing-songy chant of "Gotta get up to get down," and a falsetto "Ooh ooh baby baby" all running parallel. Michael cuts one or two elements out to make room for his lead vox, then brings everything back for a flourish at the chorus.

Midway through, the song takes a turn: we cut momentarily to just the beat, the instruments rearrange themselves, and we break out into a new, more confessional phase. Michael laments a lost romance, but turns his back on "stupid Cupid" to "make my way into the night." To casual lovers, he offers the come-on, "I do believe that we are practicing the same religion." And in the background loops a re-recording of Patrice Rushen's 1982 hit, "Forget Me Nots," joined shortly by the familiar "Gotta get up," which in the new context takes on an almost desperate tone--the singer begging a stranger to help him drown out his pain on the dancefloor and, one assumes, in the bedroom. Finally the beat drops out and Michael intones, "Looking for some affirmation?" with the "Gotta get up to get down" taking on the weight of a mantra, fading eventually into the dark.

After the fourth or fifth drug or men's room bust, it's easy to forget that George Michael can be, when he wants to, a tremendously compelling singer. He builds such drama and emotion into what is, broken down to its constituent parts, just a silly pop song. He weaves this array of melodies and rhythm into a genuine work of art--a song that begins as a disco toss-off but unfolds into a work of genuine musical beauty. The immaculate mixing job leaves room for every element to be heard clearly and occupy its own distinct space. There are any number of different lines you can follow, varying paths through the song. You keep hearing new things in it, new surprises in the combination of repeating elements.

If you're not, you know, proud, you can admit that George Michael is responsible for a handful of the best, catchiest pop songs of the past half-century--"Faith," "Father Figure," "Freedom '90," etc. For my money, though, "Fastlove" eclipses them all. It's a record that breathed in the fleeting sound of the clubs of its day, and breathed out something transcendent.

Maxwell, BLACKsummers'night

2009-09-01T20:00:00.000-05:00

It's not like I think I can fool anyone. I'm basically a rock guy. I try to keep abreast of what's happening across genres, and sample as I can. But my iPod gives me away: The Roots, yes; T.I., no. Whiskeytown, yes; Toby Keith, no. Madonna, yes; Lady Gaga, no. Even if it's not rock, it tends to be the stuff that the rock fans listen to. Enter neo-soul. In the late nineties and early 2000s, this was an R&B movement I could get behind: real instruments, serious songwriting, and impressive, grown-up singers.

Neo-soul's brightest stars--Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, Lauryn Hill--disappeared en masse from the face of the earth after about 2001, and the movement seemed to lose steam. Its fans gravitated towards a new generation of soul-inspired, socially conscious rappers like Talib Kweli, Rhymefest, and that Kanye guy. After building up a lot of excitement, at least among music critics, the whole thing seemed to have just fizzled out. The past year or so, though, has seen some promising signs of life, as the luminaries begin slowly to return. Erykah Badu put out an excellent, highly progressive album last year; and this summer, another long-missing voice, Maxwell, pops in with BLACKsummers'night.

I have not visited Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite before. I heard a lot about him back in the heyday, but at the time to a rock guy he seemed unnecessary alongside some of the others. In 2009, on the other hand, we're a little more parched for old-school jams. Where Badu is an impressionistic folk singer and D'Angelo a studio mad scientist, Maxwell focuses on that oldest of virtues, great singing. His slightly nasal, husky voice is flexible and expressive, and he uses it to drive the primary colors of BLACK's songs into a broader and more exciting spectrum.

The songwriting here is somewhere north of competent, but limited mainly to well-worn archetypes; witness titles like "Love You," "Stop the World," and "Cold." Only at the end, on the understated "Playing Possum," does the album offer something memorable enough for Maxwell to strip back much of the impresario performance and let the words stand on their own.

But R&B isn't necessarily about dazzling wordplay; more often it's about the emotion and sensuality that the singer can wring from classic tropes, and this is where Maxwell soars. Backed by a lean and muscular band, his touch is delicate and ethereal on the tender "Pretty Wings," intense and frustrated on the simmering "Bad Habits." Most impressively, he and the horn section turn "Help Somebody"--the album's hokiest, most hamfisted lyric--into a near triumph, pushing the song away from "Man in the Mirror" and towards "What's Goin' On."

Surprisingly, the commanding singer chooses to conclude the album with "Phoenix Rise," a funky instrumental workout. It might be meant as a cliffhanger, as BLACKsummers'night is supposedly the first in a trilogy of equally typographically and punctuationally challenged records: the follow-ups will be titled blackSUMMERS'night and blacksummers'NIGHT, in a clear sell-out to the caps-lock key industry. If those albums materialize; if Erykah Badu's promised New Amerykah Part Two materializes; and if someone can pull D'Angelo back out of the ether, then maybe we'll find that neo-soul was never dead; it was just playing possum.

The Dead Weather, Horehound

2009-08-24T20:56:00.000-05:00

Jack White is a peculiar breed of innovator. He's not a Bowie-like chameleon; his signature sounds more or less the same on most of his assorted projects. What he is, really, is the most accomplished pastiche artist of his era. His work is most revelatory when he takes familiar, even cliche'd musical ideas, combines, and recontextualizes them. This is the man who made blues-rock stomp sound fresh, exciting, and arty in the year 2001.

His latest supergroup side project, the Dead Weather, is another trip through the blues, this time by way of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. White tosses into the mixing bowl some heavy QOTSA guitars, the apocalyptic vocals of the Kills' Alison Mosshart, and--possibly for the joke value alone--his own steady drumming. Mosshart is at least notionally at the center of the band's debut, Horehound, but inevitably White's personality makes itself felt even on the songs he didn't write.

Not that Mosshart can't hold her own. On the bottom-heavy first single, "Hang You From the Heavens," she takes ferocious command of the mic, snarling, "I'd like to grab you by the hair and drag you to the devil." It's an early Oh hell yeah moment on a record that delivers pretty regular ass-kickings to the listener. The Dead Weather bring a lot of heavy metal thunder to their devil's-music version of the blues.

And give Mosshart points for this, too: rather than simply turn over a couple songs to her bandmate who happens to be one of the most distinct and commanding singers in rock, she actually takes him head-on. The two fuse their voices into one deadly blade on the organ-fueled "I Cut Like a Buffalo." Later, on the disturbingly lascivious "Treat Me Like Your Mother," they trade lines in a vocal battle royale, providing one of the album's most electrifying high points. Mosshart's best moment, though, may be the Bob Dylan cover "New Pony," which she spits out with unbridled fury against White's chanted backing vox.

The Dead Weather may be the biggest and nastiest sounding thing Jack White has done; sonically, they're not too far from the hard-stomping White Stripes, but without the art-school eccentricity, the vaguely precious element to that band's persona. Not that this project is free of contrivance and self-consciousness--what heavy rock band is?--but the bluster and intensity are more single-minded here. It's a big, dirty, noisy record to be played at high volume; matching outfits are pretty low on this band's priority list.

Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

2009-08-16T19:46:00.002-05:00

Making their bid for indie pop album of the summer are the sunny young Frenchmen of Phoenix. Their latest, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, embraces new wave minimalism and colors it in with the kinds of keyboard flourishes we've heard from countrymen of theirs like Air and M83. Ten songs long, it's concise and relentlessly upbeat. Much like last summer's debut album by Vampire Weekend, Amadeus is a hit with the Wicker Park crowd because it's a pop record with some brainy aspirations. It all gets a little obtuse at points, but I'll still take this over the vampires any weekend.

With the words "great pop record" being so frequently attached to this album, it's worth briefly considering what such a description is really supposed to mean. Going by the reviews, I take it to refer to the melodies and rhythms--and those are pretty great. For a band without a drummer, they run an impressive rhythm section. Bassist Deck D'Arcy lays down a bouncy bottom end, over which part-time drummer Thomas Hedlund maintains a light, nimble touch. The guitar sounds are thin and clean--one shakes along with the beat and the other keens out hook after hook. There's a lot of low and high tones here, and not a lot of bombastic rock midtones.

It's an appealingly breezy, carefree sound, intensely hummable. These are tunes to get stuck in your head. I do tend to wonder, though, if singer Thomas Mars has been lulled into a daydream by them. His vocals--many of them run through digital processing--take on an almost robotic tone after a while. Early tracks like "Lisztomania" and "1901" come off charmingly, with Mars's unaffected, guilelessly bright delivery complementing the simple melodies and funky grooves. On "Fences," he uses a spooky falsetto to evoke the album's densest and most unique mood. But when on the later tracks it's still the same approach over the same basic song structures, he begins to sound like he's just singing on a heavy dose of Paxil.

I think what's actually happened is that this is the most appropriate way to sing these lyrics, which are filled with sharp wordplay and wonky allusions, light on raw emotion. If you open up the CD booklet and read them, you can appreciate the care that's gone into crafting these terse little poems. Coming out of your stereo, though, it's a little hard to discern what Mars is talking about, or even what words he's singing. For instance, the chorus of "Lisztomania," which the booklet tells me goes: Lisztomania / Think less but see it grow / Like a riot, like a riot, oh! / I'm not easily offended / It's not hard to let it go / From a mess to the masses. Alright, it's good fun and there's a lot you could read into it. But on the record, Mars tends to swallow some words (and yes, I know he's French), leaving me wondering what rhinos have to do with any of this. And even knowing what the words are, I'm not likely to be singing them in the shower. If a great pop album needs to be hummable, it should also be shower-singable.

Which is a long way of saying that I think "great pop album" is a bit of a misnomer in this case. There is a distinct indie preciousness to this album; it's not meant for serious mass appeal. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se--and if you like clever and literate songs with great melodies, you'll probably find Amadeus to be a great summer soundtrack. You might not think of it much come February, but that's probably alright too.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz!

2009-08-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

In the early part of the decade, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs rode the crest of the Brooklyn dance-punk wave, but have survived in much better shape than most of their contemporaries (hell, for that matter, what ever happened to the Strokes?). They kept a fairly low profile for a while after their debut LP, Fever to Tell (2003). It's Blitz! is only their third album, but it's a pretty big step forward.

Like the Talking Heads before them, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have opened up their sound way beyond the minimalism of their early days. It's Blitz! is awash in synthesizers, drum machines, disco rhythms, and pop hooks. It's a lot more accessible but also a lot more complex. Of course, in moving toward mainstream, they also team up with producer David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio, whose avant garde credentials are impeccable. It's an interesting turn by Sitek too, though, to focus the tracks so clearly on rhythm and melody rather than build them up with layers of noise.

The album catches your attention quickly with a string of danceable singles--most notably the propulsive opener, "Zero." But a few songs in is where it starts to get really interesting. First there's the pretty, beatless haze of "Skeletons," and then the band dust off their guitars for a pair of hard rockers--"Dull Life" and "Shame and Fortune." The former, in particular, is one of the band's best songs, teasing with a slow start before breaking out into fuzzed-out, wailing rock mania. Two more stylistic curveballs follow with the gothic melodrama of "Runaway," and the quirky "Dragon Queen," which channels Siouxsie and the Banshees.

As always, singer Karen O's voice drips with sexuality and charisma. While she does occasionally go over the top--for instance, faking an orgasm in the chorus of "Zero"--this album finds her, overall, exploring the subtleties of her vocal range more than ever. She's come a long way from the snarling Betty Boop impersonation of yesteryear. Particularly intriguing is the almost lilting approach she takes in songs like "Skeletons," "Hysteric," and "Little Shadows." Elsewhere, "Heads Will Roll" offers full-on glam. This band still is not writing songs in the same league as Jack White, but their delivery does a lot for the often vague lyrical imagery.

The most pleasing thing about It's Blitz! is its relentless creative momentum. Where so many albums spend their second half repeating the tricks you've already heard in the first, this one travels without looking back, continuing to open up new corners of its sound all the way through. You don't get sick of it after a month of listening; you're still getting into it.

Playing catch-up: Bob Dylan, Passion Pit

2009-07-30T20:27:00.000-05:00

Yes, I've been very bad, letting six or seven weeks go by in between my last two posts. I don't have any one really good reason. Sometimes, man, you just run out of time for stuff.

Anyway, I've missed updating this blog, and I'm hoping to get at least a post a week up for the foreseeable future. In the mean time, a number of albums have come out that I don't know if I'll get around to reviewing in full or not. So before they become completely old news, I thought I'd do quick takes on a couple.

Most egregiously, I've neglected Bob Dylan's new CD, Together Through Life, for months. This in spite of the fact that it's one of the most enjoyable, instantly likable records of the year. Some critics have faulted it for a certain perceived slightness--for Dylan's failure, this time out, to address the topics of death, history, and mankind's struggle toward nobility in sufficient detail. I say balls to that--what, now the guy can't write a song about a girl? These songs are meant to be fun, and they are. It's easy not to notice that they are also, at times, heartbreaking and profound. The album reminds me of some of the material on 1976's Desire--songs like "Mozambique," "Romance in Durango," and "Black Diamond Bay"--in spirit, if not in sound. Like Desire, this record is the product of a songwriting collaboration; in this case, Dylan works with the Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter. I think some see that as another clue that the album is a toss-off. I kind of think it is a toss-off, actually, and I like it all the more for it.

Also delightfully slight is Manners, the debut full-length by Massachusetts synth pop enthusiasts Passion Pit--an album that shares exactly no other characteristics with anything with which Bob Dylan has ever been associated. This record is a contender for '80s dance party of the summer, with keyboards so deep you could swim in them. All the vintage synth tones are here, everything you remember from Top 40 radio circa 1986, augmented by more contemporary, heavier drums and jittery beats. Plus on a couple songs they throw in that public school choir that sang "Viva la Vida" on YouTube. I've listened to the album a bunch of times and still can barely remember any of the lyrics--I think that's my brain protecting itself--but if you're like me and have a weakness for this stuff, it's done very well here, and I can think of nothing better to put in your car stereo on a hot day.

I was going to cover the new(ish) Yeah Yeah Yeahs album here too, but that's a pretty interesting one; I think I'll try and do a full review shortly. Also coming soon: Phoenix; I may have to check out that new Maxwell CD; and then there's the Dead Weather, although I may want to wait a couple weeks to see if Jack White comes out with another two or three new bands, and then just do a round-up. Personally, I'm holding out hope for a Michael Jackson tribute collaboration with Gene Simmons and Enya.

Wilco, Wilco (the album)

2009-07-24T20:13:00.004-05:00

Wilco will love you, baby. So claims Jeff Tweedy on "Wilco (the song)," the appropriately named opening track of Wilco (the album). I can't speak to the strength of Tweedy and company's love, but I can say this with confidence: Wilco will not let you down. They're the most reliably great rock band active today--inheritors of the mantle, perhaps, from R.E.M. Starting with the classic 1996 double album Being There, they've been working a string of now six winners in a row, running the gamut from pop psychedelia to experimental noise to bright and breezy rock. And now... a sense of humor?

Well, kind of. A number of elements--the gaudy suits, the album title, the self-mocking title track, the cover art featuring a camel in a party hat--convey the message that this band is trying not to take itself too seriously. At the end of the day, though, Jeff Tweedy can't keep his songs from veering back into the heartfelt. And God bless him for it. After that first jokey tune comes a five-song block whose better we'll be very lucky to hear this year. It starts with "Deeper Down," a lush yet eccentrically composed story-song about love, depression, violence, and redemption, swings through a lovely duet with Feist ("You and I"), and wraps up with a gift for radio programmers, the jamming rock single "You Never Know."

In between, it hits a stunning peak with "Bull Black Nova," a hysteric, lacerating murder fantasy--or rather nightmare, with the singer seeing blood in the sink, on the sofa, in the trunk of his car. Wired and freaking out, he drives the titular Chevy through a dark night of the soul, "Psycho Killer"-esque guitars crashing all around. At the end of the song, when Tweedy screams, "Pick up! Pick up!" it's bone-chilling. In concert, pair that up with "Via Chicago," and they'll have a killer (pardon the pun) one-two punch.

The second half of the album hews a bit closer to the straightforward rock sound of 2007's Sky Blue Sky, but the songwriting and playing are, as always, top-notch. Tweedy seems to have reached a point in his career where he doesn't feel the need to startle our senses with every track; sometimes a good lyric and melody speak best for themselves. It's hard to pin down a unifying musical idea for Wilco (the album), which may be the reason for punting on the title. It's presented as a group of Wilco songs--a variety pack of styles, lent cohesion by top-notch writing and musicianship. Whatever hat (or sequined suit) they're wearing, it's always a pleasure to listen to Wilco.

PJ Harvey & John Parish, A Woman a Man Walked By

2009-06-02T20:31:00.000-05:00

So, PJ Harvey's got this new album out, and I've been putting off writing a review because I hadn't thought of anything particularly profound or insightful to say about it. I still haven't, and I'm thinking that's pretty much going to be the status quo with me and this album. Where it's good, it's good in the ways that PJ Harvey is always good. And it's mostly good.

Actually, A Woman a Man Walked By is a collaboration between Harvey and multi-instrumentalist John Parish. The two have worked together a number of times before on Harvey's solo albums, and did one previous joint effort, too. One effect of this history is that we're not really seeing a new side of PJ Harvey. At most, we're seeing a greater emphasis than usual on one particular side of her. In other words, the album suffers from the most common deficit of the "side project"--a certain sense of slightness, of not really counting--but lacks the side project's biggest selling point--hearing an established artist in a markedly different context. What we have here is basically a reprise of the styles of To Bring You My Love (1995) and Is This Desire? (1998).

Mind you, there is nothing in the world wrong with that. Those are two fantastic albums, and it goes without saying that PJ Harvey is an almost peerless artist. This is good music. She's in a particularly fierce mode on songs like the blown-out "Pig Will Not." On the title track, she snarls, "That woman man, I want his fuckin' ass" over and over again, while behind her Parish strums his acoustic guitar like he wants to break the strings. The album is rife with arcane little mood pieces like "April," a funereal dirge on organ and drum; and "The Soldier," on which Harvey inhabits a ghostly whisper. Parish does a great job of finding the unease and menace in antiquated musical sounds (as he did, far more memorably, on Harvey's stunning 2007 album, White Chalk). It's all good, but for the most part we've heard it before.

One standout is the opening track, "Black Hearted Love," a grungy, gothic rock song in the vein of something from Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000). The final two tracks are also among the most striking: On "Passionless, Pointless" Harvey digs deep for a lovely, aching performance. "Cracks in the Canvas" revisits familiar territory--death, bereavement, funerals--with an intriguing interplay between spoken lyrics and wispy backing vocals. These songs, like the others, are reprises of earlier styles, but they work a little better for being more direct and heartfelt. There's more soul to them.

A Woman a Man Walked By is a decidedly minor work, if only by the standards of one of the most fearless and accomplished artists in music. It adds some pretty good new songs to PJ Harvey's catalog. Unlike most of her other albums, though, it doesn't reveal new colors in her palette.

Peter Bjorn and John, Living Thing

2009-05-17T22:25:00.000-05:00

Like many people, I was hopelessly charmed by Peter Bjorn and John's last album, Writer's Block (2007). Not just because they were fighting the tough, uphill battle to redeem my ancestral homeland for the crimes of Ace of Base and Max Martin. And not just because "Young Folks" was just about the most irresistible song of the past five years. The surprising and delightful thing about that album was how idiosyncratic it was beneath the surface of all those great pop tunes. Where a lesser band might strive to make those tuneful gems into spotlessly perfect, radio-ready productions, PB&J made a point of leaving them ragged, the sound a little gritty. The songs almost sounded unfinished, abandoned in the middle stages of production. More accurately, though, they sounded like snapshots of continually evolving works in progress--as though that drum beat or synthesizer sound that comes in at one point could, in an alternate version, be the whole driving force of the song. It was one of the most musically open, effortless-sounding records I'd heard in ages.

Where Writer's Block was idiosyncratic, Living Thing is just plain weird--and give the band credit for that. The easy thing would have been to go back into the studio and bang out ten or twelve duplicates of the "Young Folks" bouncy guitar pop formula (whistling on at least half). Instead, on this album they've largely abandoned the two signature elements of its predecessor--Peter Morén's rough guitar and John Eriksson's nimble drumming--and built the sound around tinny keyboards and lo-fi drum machine beats, with some clownish backing vocals adorning seriously off-kilter time signatures and free-floating song structures. If you want to call Writer's Block this band's Rumours, then Living Thing is their Tusk.

Their adventurousness pays off most handsomely in the single "Nothing to Worry About," which builds a groove on a stomping electronic beat and bendy keyboard notes, topped off with a chorus sung by a group of schoolkids. All put together, it sounds very close to genius. "Lay It Down" is similarly loopy and giddy, with its chorus--"Hey, shut the fuck up, boy / You are starting to piss me off"--turned into a ridiculously bouncy singalong.

Elsewhere, PB&J use their new sonic palette to explore more familiar emotional territory. "Just the Past" rides a leisurely pace to a lush, melodic crescendo. "Blue Period Picasso" works its extended metaphor into a moving plea for love. "Stay This Way," probably the simplest and most direct song here, approaches the heart-on-sleeve purity of Writer's Block's "Paris 2004." Along the way, the title track references African pop, "Last Night" wanders into Cure-like territory, "It Don't Move Me" offers a danceable new wave groove, and "The Feeling" and "I'm Losing My Mind" are simply trippy.

One notable stabilizing element in all of this is the choice to allow Morén--the singer of "Young Folks"--to dominate the vocals. Although Eriksson and bassist Bjorn Yttling each get to sing a couple of songs--including the opening and closing cuts--Móren gets eight out of ten, basically the main body of the album. It's a smart choice, since he's easily the best singer in the group. The fact that he sounds an awful lot like John Lennon at times is a subtle reminder of another pop band that went all weird on us, and to very good effect. Writer's Block was more democratic, and that was part of its charm, but on this more challenging record, Morén is a valuable anchor.

Time will tell, of course, whether this is an experimental digression or the next step in the band's evolution. I'd probably be fine with either, really, because they seem to be in firm command of their musical faculties. It'll be fascinating to see what they do next.

Depeche Mode, Sounds of the Universe

2009-05-12T21:26:00.000-05:00

There is something about Depeche Mode. I wouldn't necessarily have expected it, but they have aged spectacularly well. As unlikely as it seems for a group of euro-weenies from the '80s dance scene, they've eked out, really, one of the great careers in rock. In fact, they're doing some of their best work now. While 2001's delicate and soulful Exciter was sadly underrated and overlooked, 2005's Playing the Angel was widely greeted as a commanding return to form. That album incorporated sonic highlights from throughout the band's career--gothic balladry, danceable beats, industrial noise, and loud guitars--and somehow made it all sound fresh. Sounds of the Universe is a bit more electronic in its focus, a little subtler, but possibly even more satisfying.

While working on this record, Martin Gore went on an eBay binge, buying up vintage analog synthesizers and drum machines. Those sounds are very much in vogue these days, but what comes off as retro in most bands' hands, Depeche Mode somehow manage to make timeless. It's surprising, in fact, how forward-looking many of the new songs are. The album opens rather bravely with "In Chains," a slow-building, seven-minute space-soul ballad that shows off Dave Gahan's recently discovered gift for crooning. The first single, "Wrong," is a ferocious assault of a song, with Gahan's percussive vocals punctuated by screeches of synth.

The key to Depeche's very good decade may indeed lie with Gahan. After literally dying of a heroin overdose in the mid-'90s (only to be revived by paramedics shortly thereafter), and barely managing to get a sound out of his vocal cords for much of the recording of 1997's Ultra, the newly sober singer seemed to rebuild his voice from the ground up, discovering a new sense of warmth, greater subtlety, and a much expanded emotional range. While songs like "In Sympathy" reprise the tried-and-true droning approach that characterized the band's early work, songs like "In Chains," "Wrong," the desperate "Come Back," and the hushed "Little Soul" showcase the work of a truly mature vocalist.

For the second album in a row, Gahan has also upped his creative participation by writing three songs himself, encroaching a bit on territory that had been exclusively Gore's for decades. But the balance that felt, on Playing the Angel, like the result of a complicated treaty--three Gahan songwriting credits, two Gore lead vocals, two instrumentals--here seems more like a genuine collaboration. The band's two driving forces appear to be working toward a common, cohesive purpose. And Gore is smart to surrender some of his control, because Gahan's songs turn out to be very good. Gore's own performance on "Jezebel" is also one of his best lead vocals in recent years (oddly enough, the songs he's written for himself to sing have often felt the most like throwaways).

Sounds of the Universe, like any Depeche Mode record, is fairly dark and gothic in its sound, but as the title implies, there is a certain sense of... What word am I looking for here? Optimism? Wonder? Openness? Something like that. Like its most recent couple of predecessors, it has a beating, human heart at its core, and it feels richer for it.

Of course, make no mistake: the macabre grooves are there in abundance. This band is, as always, a crowd pleaser. And song titles like "Jezebel," "Corrupt," and "In Sympathy" read like they could only have escaped use on earlier albums by blinding oversight. The band are not reinventing the wheel here. Their genius is in mining the endless possibilities of the same core elements they've worked with for thirty years. Basically, it's a Depeche Mode album, and I can't think of a single bad thing to say about it.

Coming attractions

2009-05-12T21:22:00.003-05:00

I've fallen woefully behind in my blogging duties. I have no excuse. But there'll be a Depeche Mode review up here in a minute, and there's a lot of other great stuff out recently that I hope to write up soon. Highlights include Peter Bjorn and John's weird new album; the latest collaboration between PJ Harvey and John Parish; and Bob freaking Dylan. So I'll get on it, honestly. But not until after the Lost season finale.

The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love

2009-04-26T16:21:00.000-05:00

Even if concept albums are not your cup of tea, you should respect this about the Decemberists' new opus: they did not do it halfway. Ever since the great heyday of the narrative concept album in the '70s and early '80s, the overwhelming tendency among those more modern bands willing to appear unhip enough to attempt one has been to compromise, creating more of a string of linked short stories than a coherent musical novel. The idea, I guess, is to go for the best of both worlds--a puzzle of a story to rope in dedicated fans, and some potential singles for the radio. Maybe it was Trent Reznor who popularized the hybrid form with Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral; who knows? Anyway, since then everyone from the Smashing Pumpkins to Tori Amos to Prince has taken their crack at that prog-rock staple, with varying degrees of success.

The Decemberists, on the other hand, go full-on rock opera with The Hazards of Love, presenting a continuous tale on the classic tension graph, with leading and supporting characters, a couple villains, and multiple plot threads. Almost none of the album's seventeen songs is likely to stand well on its own as a radio single (head-scratching props to WXRT for putting the infanticide-themed "The Rake's Song" in heavy rotation). Most of them bleed seamlessly into one another, with clearly defined themes and reprises. It works primarily as a single, elaborate, hour-long composition. Maybe it's because I've been listening to a lot of Genesis lately, but I dig it.

The story, put simply, is a fable set in a dark and ominous fairy-tale land (think Neil Gaiman, not Mother Goose), about the perilous lengths to which young, shape-shifting hero William will go to be with his true love, Margaret--in the process angering his adoptive mother, the forest Queen, who concocts a plot to have the girl abducted by a murderous Rake. Because it's the Decemberists, love and tragedy are irrevocably intertwined, and after a daring rescue, William and Margaret end up drowning at sea, determined to make a marriage of their last moments.

On the rock opera story coherence scale, Hazards rates with highly filmable tales like The Wall and Tommy. It's very deliberately and coherently told--it wouldn't be hard at all to put this on stage with actors. They even go so far as to bring in guest vocalists to play some of the assorted character roles. The best is Shara Worden, who channels PJ Harvey, delivering a bruising performance as the jealous, malevolent Queen. Front man Colin Meloy does impressive double duty as both starry-eyed William and the devilish Rake.

The sound is sweeping and stunningly dynamic. There are some lovely acoustic pieces of the sort we'd expect from this band; abundant harpsichord; the requisite prog-rock keyboards and organ. And at times it rocks really, really hard--quite a surprise from this twee band of literary-minded Oregonians. I think their guitar showdown with Stephen Colbert might have had a profound effect on them. One of many high points is the chilling "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)," in which the the Rake's murdered children--voiced by actual schoolkids--claim their ghastly justice, with warped strings screeching off of broken rails behind them.

The pleasures in listening to The Hazards of Love come in picking up on the little threads of musical continuity from one part to the next, taking in the epic sweep of the composition, and, much of the time, just grooving hard on the sound. It's best heard all at once, straight through, but you can also jump back in after pausing for a while and immediately be drawn into the musical drama. It's an impressive accomplishment--a big risk that could have gone badly awry. Instead, it's paid huge dividends.

Prince, Lotusflow3r / Mplsound / Some other album by Prince's new friend

2009-04-15T18:34:00.000-05:00

I just want to state, for the record, that it was not an easy thing to be a Prince fan in 1996. For the past few years, he's been back in vogue, back in his groove, and seems to have reaffirmed his enduring star power. It's respectable, even cool, to like Prince now. But dude--I went to a midnight sale to buy Emancipation. I skipped a day of classes to listen to all three hours of it. I bought Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic the day it came out. I tried really, really hard to like those albums, because I freaking love Prince. I love Purple Rain, Sign o' the Times, 1999, Dirty Mind, Around the World in a Day, and Parade so much that I even bought the albums he put out in the '90s that he explicitly said were just dashed out to fulfill his obligation to Warner Bros.

And if Prince has never recaptured the dancing-on-the-edge exhilaration of his '80s heyday, I still feel that my loyalty has been rewarded in this decade. Musicology was solid from start to finish, a perfect old-school jam. 3121 recaptured the eccentric, electric funk of '87, despite a few weak cuts. Even Planet Earth, though uninspired and laden with treacly ballads, was at least a concise dud; and it had its moments. His new release--nominally a 3-disc set, but really two Prince albums and a coaster--epitomizes the two musical modes that have done the most for him in recent years: Lotusflow3r gives us Prince the electrifying band leader and guitar god, while Mplsound is a warm bath of '80s funk grooves.

Judging by his promotional appearances, the former seems to be closer to his heart these days. The quality that comes through most powerfully in Lotusflow3r's psychedelic soul is joy. He loves playing his guitar, and he loves kicking back with his band and letting the grooves rise up organically. These twelve tracks are loose and improvisational, often flowing from one into the next without any pause. We get funk jams like "Feel Good, Feel Better, Feel Wonderful"; earnest love songs like "4ever," the deceptively mellow chill-out "Love Like Jazz," and some righteous anger in "Colonized Mind" and "Dreamer." A free-floating cover of "Crimson and Clover" works its way into the mix, too, along with a couple searing instrumentals.

It feels like some of Prince's most personal music, but for once it's not overly obtuse, heavy-handed, or preachy. The sound recalls the 2001 concept album The Rainbow Children, but Lotusflow3r is blissfully free of that record's intrusive and comically self-aggrandizing story. Although legendary as a one-man-band, Prince also has a knack for surrounding himself with great musicians, and here everyone is clearly having fun, creating an energizing, live-in-the-studio feel. The only gripe I have is that the conspicuously compressed mix somewhat deadens that effect. The drums get distorted, and at times the instruments all sound jammed into an inappropriately tight space. I'm not sure what the logic behind this is: bands usually compress their records to make them sound louder over a crappy radio signal, but Prince can't be expecting music like this to get very far on the FM dial.

If he made Lotusflow3r for himself, then Mplsound feels like a gift to the fans--a reprise of the drum machines, synthesizers, warped vocals, and dance grooves of those classic '80s albums. There's a certain drum machine sound at the beginning of "Chocolate Box" that instantly takes you back to "Computer Blue" and "Paisley Park." As the title suggests, these nine songs do everything possible to make you think it's 1984 and you're watching a battle of the bands between the Revolution and the Time. I won't even try to pretend I don't love it, even though the results are distinctly mixed.

The aforementioned "Chocolate Box," complete with a rap interlude by Q-Tip and about the closest thing to dirty lyrics we're likely to hear from Prince 2009, is one of the best moments. "Dance 4 Me" features the welcome return of Camille, the androgynous, pitch-shifted alter ego who dominated records like Sign o' the Times and The Black Album. "Valentina" is a "Cindy C."-like come-on to a starlet--this time Salma Hayek--but by way of the bizarre device of asking her newborn daughter to "tell your mama she should give me a call." In "Ol' Skool Company" he rants about politics and bailouts, but the groove mostly just makes you want to dance. The album does sag in the middle, with a handful of sugary ballads that waste all the adrenalin you've built up listening to the other songs.

Critics have reacted less favorably to Mplsound than to its sibling, for all the obvious reasons: it's a retro pastiche that never lives up to the albums that inspired it. Personally, I'm not bothered by that. In the most universally backward-looking pop-music climate I can recall, I'm happy to see '80s funk done by someone who knows how to do it right--who arguably invented it. It's not as good as Sign o' the Times or Purple Rain, but very few albums are. Prince isn't trying to push the envelope here, as he was back then; he's doing the opposite. If he wants to put out a retro dance party record for his fans to groove on all summer, why the hell not? And if he's going to package it alongside a much more adventurous album, all the better.

Then there is the matter of the third disc, the debut of Prince's latest female protegé, Bria Valente. Produced and probably mostly written by Prince (the package is disappointingly short on liner notes), Elixer is just about exactly what you'd expect: ten generally uninspired, sultry exercises in R&B featuring pleasant but undistinguished vocals. To be honest I've only listened to it once. There are a couple decent club jams, as I recall; if it shuffled up on my iPod I wouldn't automatically skip past it. Luckily, the whole 3-disc package sells for $11.98 at Target, so you can ignore Elixer and not feel like you've wasted your money.

It's true that Prince is no longer rewriting the rules of pop music like he did in the '80s. Maybe that's because he finds he doesn't need to anymore, having established a large enough sonic sphere to keep him busy for the forseeable future. And he doesn't talk as dirty as he used to--but that direction can only go so far anyway. In a world where lyrics like "Finger-fuck your pussy like you want some, girl" are commonplace, the let's-frighten-Tipper movement seems pretty played out. Now that the 50-year-old artist is done trying to blow your mind, he's left to rely on his songwriting acumen, legendary guitar skills, infectious energy, and eternal youth--poor guy. At the end of the day, he's Prince--and what, I ask you, if we're really being serious here, what in God's name is there not to love about Prince?

Real Ultimate Power

2009-03-23T12:23:00.001-05:00

Because it had been a few months, Trent Reznor is once again offering some free tunes. This time, it's a promotional EP for Nine Inch Nails' upcoming "NIN|JA 2009" tour with Jane's Addiction. The EP is downloadable in multiple formats from ninja2009.com, and includes two previously unreleased tracks each from NIN, Jane's, and supporting act Street Sweeper.

Seems like a pretty smart way to drive traffic to your website and help guarantee a lucrative tour. It's good to know somebody's making money these days. Reportedly Trent is planning to take an extended break from music after the tour; maybe he'll consider filling one of those open positions with the Treasury Department--if only to permanently scar the vetting team's minds with the Broken movie.

U2, No Line On the Horizon

2009-03-19T17:27:00.000-05:00

U2's last studio album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, hit stores amid the 2004 holiday shopping rush, and felt like a Christmas present: big, bright, and shiny; a little bit gaudy; instantly pleasing, but by April a lot of the thrill had worn off. It wasn't bad, but we all knew this band could do better than 45 minutes of bombastic tour fodder. 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind had been credible as a homecoming, a charming and welcome reassertion of the best-loved elements of U2's sound; Atomic Bomb felt formulaic by comparison, an overplaying of the back-to-basics card.

No Line On the Horizon strikes out in a very different direction. Where the past two albums openly courted the mass audience and the casual listener, this one recalls the Bono of 1991, who said of Achtung Baby, "We might lose some of the pop kids, but we don't need 'em." These eleven new songs are as much about groove and atmosphere as they are about hooks and choruses. They're slower, quirkier, and more oblique than anything this band has done in years. It's an album that requires multiple listenings, and close attention, to fully appreciate. As such, it's uniquely unsuited to the current climate, in which we download songs one at a time and listen to them while doing a dozen other things. For a great many listeners it's bound to be unsatisfying. Personally, though, I've been waiting ten years for U2 to make an album like this.

I've said before that at their core, U2 are really an artsy band playing at being rock stars. We may know them best for sing-along anthems like "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday," but more subtle, esoteric pieces like "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" and "Lemon" are every bit as central to their aesthetic. These are guys, after all, who hang out with Brian Eno and Salman Rushdie. No Line On the Horizon gives freer rein to that side of the band than any of their previous LPs.

The band have reprised their sporadic collaboration with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, for the first time inviting them in as essentially a fifth and sixth band member, sharing songwriting and performance credits on most of the songs. Their influence is all over this record--Eno's ambient electronic textures, Lanois' affinity for the slow build and cavernous atmospherics. Horizon's lineage can be traced to the 1995 U2/Eno "Passengers" collaboration, Bono and Lanois' soundtrack work for The Million Dollar Hotel in 2000, and Eno/Lanois' revelatory first production effort for the band, 1984's fluid and impressionistic The Unforgettable Fire.

This is very much an "album" album, meant to be heard as a whole. Over the course of fifty minutes or so, the band map out an impressively dynamic sonic space, one with room for improvisational jams, wispy quiet numbers, and a couple big rock crowd-pleasers. The sequencing of the tracks is critical, and at times a later song will shed new light on an earlier one. Certain key elements serve as touchstones along the way: Group-sung backing vocals play a big part--a calling card of Eno, who likens backing vox to a contemporary Greek chorus, a proxy for the audience. There are a lot of interesting rhythms, and Eastern-flavored percussion. Adam Clayton's bass playing--almost jazzy in the way it works around the rhythm--is a driving force.

Lyrically, a dominant voice emerges--alternately confused, ecstatic, and desperate, swimming through a huge and interconnected world. He stares in confoundment at his own reflection in an ATM screen; he wonders at a stranger's text message; he races without direction along a foreign speedway. This citizen of the world, lost in the world, feels like a confession from Bono the globe-trotting activist. We find him in "Moment of Surrender," the album's high point and the best U2 song in a decade--a slow-burning, seven-minute odyssey through addiction, compulsion, and the first glimpse of redemption, or as the singer puts it, "vision over visibility." The next song, "Unknown Caller," is a companion piece of sorts, in which the Greek chorus becomes more forceful and assertive, commanding the singer and us, "Go, shout it out, rise up."

Much of the album--the title track, "Magnificent," "FEZ-Being Born"--follows a similarly circuitous path through bewilderment and delirium, grasping after joy, with the six musicians painting sonic landscapes that overtake the vocals at times, recede at others. These songs are sonically loose, but still musically tight. They all have a clear direction, but they don't reach their destination at the first chorus.

Right in the middle, though, is a curious little three-song interlude of much pithier and more radio-friendly rock songs. The ringing anthem "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" is probably the album's low point, featuring a warmed-over Atomic Bomb riff and half-baked lyrics like "There's a part of me in the chaos that's quiet / And there's a part of you that wants me to riot." The much-dissected single "Get On Your Boots" packs an appealing punch, but is also one of the quirkiest songs, fusing a sixties fuzz-bass groove to a jittery electronic beat and a hip-hop breakdown. "Stand Up Comedy," in which Bono pontificates about love, evolution, ego, and whatever else ADD happens to deliver to his brain, rocks hard over the Edge's best Jimmy Page imitation.

It's a jarring transition, but after a handful of spins I'm convinced that it's meant to be. Because by the end, U2 have established musical parameters broad enough to accommodate nearly anything in the remaining tracks--and they take full advantage, serving up the most eccentric track, "FEZ-Being Born," followed by the slow, somber "White as Snow," and the uproarious rock jam "Breathe," featuring Bono's brashest and most free-form lyrics--for example, "Coming from a long line of traveling salespeople on my mother's side, I wasn't gonna buy just anyone's cockatoo."

In the haunting closer, "Cedars of Lebanon," a journalist abroad whispers a weary monologue into the microphone. The Greek chorus implores him, "Return the call to home." The singer tells us, "The worst of us are a long drawn out confession / The best of us are geniuses of compression"--an ironic statement at the end of a record that so constantly defies the efficiencies of pop music.

There's a less charitable interpretation, of course. You could say (and many have) that this is a bunch of half-finished studio jams that the band couldn't be bothered to hammer into proper songs; that the mid-album "rock break" is simply a hedge aimed at getting something on the radio to shift more units; that U2 are out of ideas, so they've made an album that sounds like nothing. This is not going to be one of their best-selling or best-loved albums. At the end of the day, most people like hooks better than atmosphere; most prefer pop to prog rock; and most will take "Beautiful Day" over "If You Wear That Velvet Dress." But if you're interested in hearing something different, challenging, and deeper in a 30-year-old band's catalog, you're not likely to do better than this.

It's pretty obvious where I stand on this direction for the band. Taking nothing away from the genius in a great single or arena-rock anthem, this is a far more mature, sophisticated, and personal statement than we've ever heard from this band. It demands close attention and repeated listening; it requires you to form a relationship with it. But if you're willing to give that, it's immensely rewarding. You'll be discovering new things in it for a long time, and the songs will stay with you.

The Knux, Remind Me in 3 Days...

2009-03-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

For a little while on their debut album, Remind Me in 3 Days..., Krispy Kream and Rah Al Millio of the Knux sound like they might deliver on the considerable buzz surrounding them. Things kick off pretty strongly with "The List," which fuses a clanky drum machine groove with Van Halenesque guitars and an endearingly self-deprecating account of being blocked out of the VIP room. Krispy comes on a lot like Blackalicious MC Gift of Gab, with a sharp, brainy/funky flow; Al lends a bit more of a vocal edge to the second verse.

This pair of brothers, transplanted from New Orleans to L.A., program their own beats and play their own guitars. Their album is also refreshingly light on sutured-on R&B choruses by outside singers; more often they take the opportunity to indulge in a little funk-rock vamping of their own. Swiping lyrical quotes from A Tribe Called Quest, Wreckz-n-Effect, and Bell Biv Devoe, among others, the Knux recall sounds from the early '90s, when hip-hop was a little rougher around the edges, and wore its DJ culture roots on its sleeve. They let the stitches show on these tracks, and even treat us to some old-school scratching. Their basic formula of lo-fi beats, new wave keyboards, and big rock guitars looks like a winner. For a while it's thrilling.

But over the course of 17 tracks and 64 minutes, I get frustrated with them for not taking it anywhere. They start with a great groove, but never really elevate themselves out of it; 45 minutes in, it's become a rut. The second half of the album, in particular, seems devoid of new ideas. The brothers sink to callous sexism and monotone production in "Parking Lot," and the album hits its nadir in "Playboys," a rote, artless send-up of the party life.

In fact, a big part of why the music remains static is that the lyrics go nowhere. Song after song heaps sardonic derision on the clubs, the posses, the VIP rooms, the drug dealers, and of course, the ho's--which begs the question, if the Knux are so disdainful of the L.A. scene, then why have they devoted a whole album's worth of songs to it?

The best moments on Remind Me in 3 Days... almost invariably come when they drop the too-cool-for-school attitude and get some of the songs' dirt on themselves: the smoldering tension and fuzzed-out guitar in "Roxxanne"; the slow drive and meditative lyrical turn on "Shine Again"; the throbbing beat and harrowing drug trip of "The Train," in which they appropriate Lil Wayne's strung-out, cursive vocal delivery to powerful effect. The album finishes strong, too, with a hard rock sugar rush on "Lights Camera Action."

On songs like that, the Knux have something to offer, and the album seems worth making. Too often, though, they serve up unfinished songs, sketches of musical ideas. Too much of their debut is spent repeating a formula that would have worked much better as a launching pad for something much more dynamic and interesting.

Common, Universal Mind Control

2009-02-23T17:15:00.001-06:00

Ah, Common... One of the brightest of an increasingly large number of lights on the Chicago hip-hop scene. A fiercely creative and ridiculously charismatic artist, he has done our city proud--rapper, actor, activist, snappy dresser. An early booster of Barack Obama, he stands now at the forefront of a surging movement in hip-hop towards pride and social responsibility. He's earned a tremendous amount of goodwill both locally and nationwide. So when his new album gets reviews as generally lousy as Universal Mind Control has, you have to assume that something is deeply wrong with it.

Common's last so-so reception came in response to 2002's detour into psychedelic rock, Electric Circus--which I actually liked quite a bit. After finding a winning groove with Kanye West at the boards on 2005's Be, and refining it on 2007's Finding Forever, here he leaves it behind at takes off for points... well, points fairly well-known, to be honest. He's got the Neptunes on production this time, and it's as much their album as his. This is Common making an open play for the mainstream, with big beats, swizzly funk, and boastful, sex-saturated lyrics.

We've seen Common affect poses like this before. One of the joys of Finding Forever was how he would play characters in the songs, allowing him to take on voices more callous, dangerous, and humorous than we were used to hearing from him. And even before then, he's certainly never been shy about his libido or ego. The difference here can be summed up by a couplet from the dirty south-flavored "Announcement": "I still love her, she be needin' my dick / When it come to hip-hop it's just me and my bitch." This is mundane braggadocio, a toss-off that sounds like the product not of a careless character, but a careless songwriter. When Common raps lines like these, he's not convincing; at times he barely sounds interested.

Much more engaging are the beats, which deliver gratifying kicks of dancefloor funk. The title tracks starts things off with stylishly tinny electronics; "Inhale" layers a smooth wash of R&B over copious scratching and sampling; and "Gladiator" pounds the hell out of your speakers with heavy beats, heavy keyboards, and jazzy horns threatening to come unhinged. The always great Martina Topley-Bird lends her slithery vocals to "Everywhere," relegating Common to a cameo appearance. While a lot of reviewers have singled out "Sex 4 Suga" for derision, I actually think it's the record's most successful piece: with staccato beats, funky synthesizers, and cell-phone sound effects in the background, Common kicks back and finds a laconic, stoned groove to deliver his dirty love poem. It's one of the few glimpses this album offers of his powerful vocal magnetism.

The album's downside bottoms out two-thirds of the way through with "Changes," a sore thumb of a side trip into his more familiar lyrical territory, lauding the era of Obama. But the generic R&B instrumental track turns the whole thing syrupy, and coming right after the hard-hitting "Gladiator," it sounds anemic. Elsewhere, "Punch Drunk Love" is weighed down by one of Kanye West's weaker vocal turns in recent memory; and "Make My Day" wastes a Cee-Lo guest spot by unimaginatively reverse-engineering a generic Gnarls Barkley groove.

I do enjoy this album. It's quick, concise, and generally good fun. But after its 38 minutes are up, you might find yourself struggling to remember much about what you heard in that time. I don't think this musical direction is necessarily a mistake for Common; there's nothing wrong with making a party album. The real problem here is how careless he seems to have been in its execution.

Bruce Springsteen, Working On a Dream

2009-02-14T18:11:00.000-06:00

With Working On a Dream, his fifth album (and fourth number one) since 2000, Bruce Springsteen officially makes the '00s his most prolific decade. This, following the fallow '90s, during which he virtually disappeared from the pop radar. Since his 1999 reunion with the E Street Band, Springsteen has clearly found a new sense of both urgency and possibility in his music. In particular, in the 2002 9/11 elegy The Rising, 2007's Magic, and now this new album, a natural trilogy seems to form, in which the Boss negotiates a new place for the E Street Band alongside his more mature and introspective songwriting, and traces America's progress through one of its most troubled decades.

Plenty has been written measuring these recent albums against those of Springsteen's '70s and early '80s heyday--and to a certain extent that's unavoidable. But given the volume and breadth of his work this decade, I think it's fair at this point to consider the "aughts" albums on their own merits, as a significant body of work in and of themselves. I'm going to try to do that here, with some exceptions...

To take the most striking feature first, Working On a Dream is the most musically adventurous thing Bruce has done with the modern E Street Band. Like Magic, it is melodically generous, and Springsteen's vocals haven't sounded this good in many years. Sixties pop influences are all over the record--lush piano and organ parts, harmony-happy backing vocals, jangly guitars. The variety and versatility here are thoroughly welcome, and somewhat overdue.

As gratifying as the nine-man wall of sound can be, its dynamics are limited. On The Rising and Magic, producer Brendan O'Brien focused on making the band sound as big and loud as possible. At times--epic hymns like "The Rising," hard-rockers like "Radio Nowhere"--that's just what the doctor ordered. On "The Rising," in particular, the huge-band sound lends the song an air of community and solidarity. But on the classic E Street albums (uh-oh, here I go...), often times the cool thing was how such a large band could sound as lean and fierce as a four-man combo. There was a lot of space in those old arrangements, and there's been little of that coming out of E Street 2000. The cumulative effect can leave songs with a heavy, trudging sound.

On the new album, finally, Springsteen and O'Brien open things up. On "Life Itself," a desperate tension is carried by monotone guitar figures and muted but insistent drums. There's no big moment of release when the whole band comes roaring in; just the singer pleading to his lover, "I can't make it without you." The title track finds bassist Garry Tallent, for the first time in ages, driving the song, limbering up the anthem with a classic R&B swing. On set-closer "The Last Carnival," a eulogy for the band's late organist Danny Federici, the arrangement is simple, spare, and quietly devastating, Springsteen singing almost in nursery rhyme, "Sundown, sundown/They're taking all the tents down/Where have you gone my handsome Billy?" Most critically, each of these songs carves out a distinct musical identity, rather than simply painting everything with the same, bright red brush.

Turns like that make room for the occasional epic. The opening track, "Outlaw Pete," stretches to eight minutes, riding dramatic violins through the wild west and straight off a cliff, carving out a spaghetti-western opera. "Kingdom of Days" plays bittersweet drama to the hilt, ruminating on, and ultimately rejoicing in, the transience of life and love. Sequenced amid a more dynamic set, these songs work as the exclamation points they should be. We've got peaks and valleys, rather than just peaks.

This is the closest that Bruce has come this decade to reproducing the live E Street Band in the studio. On the 1999 reunion tour, it was stunning how radically the band reworked longtime favorites: "The River" turned to a bluesy, after-hours confession; the sad "Mansion on the Hill" grew more complex with a brighter, almost tropical flavor; and "If I Should Fall Behind" evolved from a simple ditty to a stirring affirmation of love and friendship. That live band was nimble, versatile, and hungry even on their victory lap. If these songs don't quite achieve those heights, they at least reach for them.

If there's a fault in Working On a Dream, surprisingly it's in the lyrics. Springsteen is a peerless songwriter, and in recent years he has reached a new pinnacle. But compared to the quiet devastation of The Rising and the anger and regret of Magic, many of these songs feel strangely slight. Maybe that's not entirely fair: here he shifts his focus away from the public sphere and towards his characters' intimate lives. In many ways this album revisits the thematic territory of 1992's Lucky Town, seeking contentment in love and family, striving to make second and third chances pay off. "Kingdom of Days" is a powerful realization of these themes, as are the exuberant "My Lucky Day" and the hard-bitten "What Love Can Do." But, quite the opposite of other recent albums, here it's the music that sells the sentiment.

A couple songs are a bit suspect. The chorus of "Surprise, Surprise" goes, "Surprise, surprise, surprise. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Surprise, surprise, come on open your eyes." If you're feeling generous, you can call it McCartneyesque and he gets away with it (it is growing on me). More problematic is the bombastically sappy "Queen of the Supermarket," a love song to a checkout girl that is probably tongue-in-cheek, but misfires in any case. With lines like, "A dream awaits in aisle number two," it comes off like the Killers at their most cornpone, or the soundtrack to a fantasy sequence in The Big Lebowski.

But I can forgive an isolated misstep. And even if it's a bit rough around the edges, this is still in many ways the most satisfying Bruce Springsteen album of this decade; it's certainly the most musically pleasing. What I like best about it is that he and the E Street Band seem to once again be comfortable in the studio together. Max Weinberg is a great drummer; Roy Bittan is a deft and subtle keyboardist; Nils Lofgren is a dextrous guitarist. O'Brien finally lets these extraordinary musicians be a band, rather than bricks in a wall of sound.

Coming at the close of the decade, Working On a Dream feels like some kind of ending or conclusion--the completion of a statement. We might expect Springsteen to go back into hibernation for a while, although by all accounts he is, if anything, more motivated than ever to continue producing. He is on a late- (mid-?) career roll, so if the new stuff keeps coming, I'm excited to see where it takes him.

Grammy potshots

2009-02-09T10:16:00.001-06:00

1.) I wonder if anyone's ever done a study to see how many years they've just given the Album of the Year award to the oldest artist.

2.) That said, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss were pretty damn good on stage. Maybe I ought to give that album a listen.

3.) It seemed like for the crowd of crusty record-industry executives, Neil Diamond was by far the biggest attraction of the night.

4.) If Christian Lander ever decides to do a spin-off blog for "Stuff Black People Like," Justin Timberlake should be the first entry.

5.) U2 have sold me on "Get On Your Boots." That performance was awesome.

6.) Bob Dylan is schilling for Pepsi now? Victoria's Secret made sense--it goes with his whole dirty-old-man thing--but I never thought I'd see this.

7.) Radiohead alone would have made the show worth watching. And I think Thom Yorke might now be married to Gwyneth Paltrow.

8.) The speech by the president of the RIAA is always sad and awkward, but this one was worthy of Michael Scott. Dude: Just getting up on stage and meekly whimpering, "Yes we can" does not make you cool.

9.) Was it really necessary to start playing Plant and Krauss off the stage after 90 seconds? They'd won the big prize, and it was the end of the show.

10.) M.I.A.'s baby hasn't even been born yet, but is already demonstrably cooler than all the other kids.

11.) It's a sign of how wrong our world has gone that Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl are playing the Grammys, and John Lennon and Kurt Cobain are dead.

12.) No offense to Paul. He was actually pretty good.

13.) Coldplay wins Song of the Year for "Viva la Vida": Suck it, Joe Satriani.

Ticketmaster asks you to be gentle with them. Real or Onion?

2009-02-08T14:08:00.000-06:00

Sadly, real.

Ticketmaster is in full damage-control mode in the wake of a big nasty uproar over their online sales of tickets for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's upcoming tour. For those catching up, a number of fans hopped on ticketmaster.com as soon as tickets went on sale, but when they searched for the best seats were redirected to Ticketmaster's recently acquired "secondary" ticketing company, TicketsNow, where those "sold-out" plum seats were offered at several times face value--even though face-value tickets, albeit for lower-rate seats, were still available.

Understandably, this pissed pretty much everyone off, including the Boss's camp and the New Jersey Attorney General. As I've mentioned before, the collusion between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow seems on its face to be brazenly unlawful. How the acquisition was ever even allowed to occur is beyond me, but I've been wondering why somebody--like a state attorney general--doesn't get all up in their business. It looks like that's now happening.

I don't pretend to understand the legal complexities surrounding this situation, but Ticketmaster is sufficiently nervous about their footing that they've set aside their usual, Christian Bale-like attitude towards the public and made a lengthy and public apology (reproduced on Bruce's site and discussed at Billboard and elsewhere). Moreover, they're offering to refund the difference between face value and the "secondary market" price to any fans who "inadvertently purchased tickets in the resale marketplace believing in error they were purchasing from the initial on-sale." The make-good operates on the honor system, and Ticketmaster asks, "Please don't abuse this good-faith gesture."

So I would like to take this opportunity to urge everyone: Yes. Please do not take advantage of Ticketmaster, a company that has treated fans, artists, venues, and competitors with such a deep and abiding respect over the years. A company that would never dream of taking advantage of you by virtue of its effective monopoly. That has never been known to charge an extraneous cent. That 50% service charge is just their cost of doing business--imposing themselves in between entertainment venues and customers isn't cheap. In an era of widespread, simple e-commerce, it takes a lot of money and effort to make a ticket-printing company seem necessary. Would you rob them of that? Just think about what would happen if Ticketmaster weren't here: distributors would have to compete in an open marketplace--doesn't that sound mean and nasty?

It's time to come together now. Come on. Let's save Ticketmaster.

Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion

2009-02-06T19:07:00.000-06:00

I may not be the best person to ask about Animal Collective's new album, in that I'm not really a fan or follower of the band. I'm not quite ready to join in the universal acclaim the album has received, although I do like it. It just seems to me that late January might be a bit premature for online debates over whether this is the best album of the year. I've been listening to this CD for a few weeks now, so maybe, for the non-Kool-Aid-drinking, I will attempt to get a handle on the music and/or the hullaballoo.

First, to get it out of the way: it's good. At times, very good. It's airy, atmospheric, intricate, and often very pretty. Vocalists Avey Tare and Panda Bear are adept at playing their voices as part of the psychedelic swirl of (mostly electronic) instrumentation. Many of the album's best moments come when one or both of them kick it up a notch midway through, allowing an impressive musical collage to build from chaos before taking control with a chant or chorus. A good example is "My Girls," which develops from a rather amorphous state into a hard-pounding singalong. "Summertime Clothes" offers another variation, running a low, bubbly drone for the first couple minutes, then taking on a brighter key for the chorus. The always busy background smooths the transitions, lending the compositions an organic feel. They sound like spontaneous jams, even if it seems clear that they're much more carefully constructed than that. Alone, neither of the two singers is all that unique, but most of the time they work in harmony, creating a truly lush and gorgeous sound.

The only debate around this album seems to be (to paraphrase Stephen Colbert), Great album, or greatest album? That might be a bit of irrational exuberance. One point I would make is that, while there isn't a lot out there that sounds quite like this--in particular the vocal approach--there are some clear precedents. One precursor, to me, is particularly obvious: for the first 30 - 120 seconds, most of these songs sound almost exactly like the Orb in the mid-to-late '90s. If you've heard Orbus Terrarum or Orblivion, then you've heard this kind of thing before. And I might emphasize that those are not the Orb's best albums. Again, Animal Collective do take it somewhere new with the vocals--and in fact I prefer Merriweather Post Pavilion to a lot of what the Orb has done--but the originality of this sound is somewhat overstated.

I also had some initial skepticism over the lyrics, many of which are a bit too hippie-dippy for my taste. And if that weren't enough to turn me off to lines like "I don't mean to seem like I care about material things, like social status," as a writer and occasional teacher I'm annoyed that they refer to social status as a "material thing." What else, guys? Are you "literally blown away" by that pumpin' groove?

Sorry.

Anyway, I had to give it a few spins, but the album has won me over. It is, most of the time, a delight. If you're at all interested in new and/or hip music, you should hear it, if for no other reason than that it's what everyone's talking about.

Secretly Great: Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me"

2009-01-30T15:27:00.004-06:00

About a year ago, I promised to one day explain why I think that "Pour Some Sugar On Me" is a truly, genuinely brilliant song. That day has come.

I'm thinking of making this a recurring feature, so it's worth explaining what I mean by "secretly great." I do not mean "ironically great." When a bunch of hipsters get together at a party and someone puts "You Shook Me All Night Long" on the stereo, and they're all like, "Aw, hell yeah!" and get up and dance and make devil horns, they are enjoying the song ironically: they like it because they feel that they're better than the song, and it's terribly amusing to see people with such discerning tastes bouncing about to such coarse fare. I do not enjoy "Pour Some Sugar On Me" ironically. I merely enjoy it.

I also do not mean "guilty pleasure." I don't believe in guilty pleasures, except where actual guilt is warranted. For instance: you should feel guilty for cheating on your spouse; for charging a night at the bar to your employer; for robbing the elderly to pay for narcotics. You should not feel guilty for grooving on a Def Leppard song. Honestly, no one gives a shit. Get over yourself.

What I mean by "secretly great" is a song that we've all heard a hundred million times, and maybe we like it, but most of us like it just because it's familiar and pleasant, maybe even iconic; maybe it reminds us of happy times. But beneath that superficial layer of enjoyment, this is something that is seriously great, a work of unique brilliance and accomplishment that deserves recognition. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" is one such work.

Bono has told a story of being schooled by Def Leppard. Somewhere in the pre-Achtung Baby era, U2 were riding in a limo. When they got in, the driver had "Pour Some Sugar On Me" pumping on the stereo. When the driver realized who was in the car, he switched the Leppard off, and put on "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (or something like that). The band were embarrassed to realize how lame and weak their song sounded on the phat speakers, in comparison to Def Leppard. The central point, then, is this: "Pour Some Sugar On Me" sounds fucking awesome.

More to the point, there's nothing else that sounds quite like it--and that goes double for 1987, when it first came out. It's based in familiar territory: late-'80s pop-metal from the production factory of Mutt Lange. Stuff like this was Lange's specialty back in the days before he married Shania Twain. The song bears many familiar hallmarks of his work: a slick, glossy sound with no rough edges; big, booming drums, either electronic or synthetically enhanced; heavily processed, echo-laden vocals; and synthesizers and sound effects filling in every little space left open by the other instruments. What's unique about this song is how it takes these overused clichés and completely subverts the genre expectations that they invite. This isn't hair metal; it's hip-hop.

Check out Joe Elliott's vocal phrasings in the verses: far from the typical, showy cock-rock approach, he affects almost a monotone. The simple couplets are a percussive element much more than a melodic one: Love is like a bomb/Baby come and get it on/Livin' like a lover/with a radar phone. It's not rap, but it borrows heavily from the rhythmic style of '80s MCs like Kool Moe Dee, Rakim, and LL Cool J. He takes it even further in the middle break (You got the peaches, I got the cream, etc.), where the syllable-swapping between lead and backing vocals vividly recalls Run-DMC. You didn't hear vocals like this in hard rock in 1987. AC/DC's Brian Johnson delivered a heavy kick, but his approach was rooted firmly in the blues.

The drum sound, as I mentioned, is textbook Lange, but the beat itself comes out of Rick Rubin's playbook for early Def Jam (which, in turn, drew heavily on '70s metal). Also copped from Rubin is the arrangement: the first verse is carried almost entirely by the drums (with the assistance of some of those wanky sound effects). What little guitar is in the mix serves only to punctuate the drum beats. The heavy processing lends the guitars an almost sampled effect.

So it's a cock-rock/hip-hop hybrid--Aerosmith and Run-DMC did break that ground several years ahead of Def Leppard with "Walk This Way." But "Pour Some Sugar On Me" not only refines that formula; at regular intervals it blows it apart. As a service to hard-rock listeners who might be uncomfortable with MC Elliott, the bridge (Take a bottle/Shake it up) takes a turn back towards the familiar: the guitar takes over as lead instrument, and Elliott returns to a more conventional rock singing style. Then the chorus pays the whole thing off with the best of both worlds: heavy beats, rockin' guitars, and a big-rock refrain with a touch of rap call-and-response (Pour some sugar on me/In the name of love).

The effect is that in just under five minutes, Def Leppard and Mutt Lange blow the barriers between pop genres open wide, creating a song that radio fans, hard rockers, and even hip-hop heads could groove on--a party classic for everyone. Lange's production usually leaves me cold. It's so calculated, deliberate, even contrived, that often times it undermines (or overwhelms) the songs themselves. But "Pour Some Sugar On Me" is an unqualified triumph, a vindication of sorts. In this one case, the calculation yields a song that succeeds in being exactly what it wants to be: a sugar rush that will kick your ass.

The Morse Music Guide to Bruce Springsteen

2009-01-23T14:37:00.000-06:00

The Boss has a new album coming out on Tuesday, and I'll review it before long. In the mean time, a new album by an established artist is often the occasion for a capsule review of their whole catalog--as Greg Kot has recently done with Springsteen on his Turn It Up blog at the Tribune. Kot is, for my money, just about the best rock writer out there, and I've long felt that he "gets" Springsteen (i.e., mostly agrees with me). But of course, he spends a lot of time with the haterade-drinking (though still semi-lovable) Jim DeRogatis, which can warp one's opinions. So, here's my somewhat expanded tour through one of the richest catalogs in music, organized by relevance to the newcomer.

The essential

Born to Run (1975): A ground-breaking record by any measure--a grandiose rock opera of the streets. At times it's orchestral (the nine-minute "Jungleland"), at times ragged and raw ("Backstreets," still one of the most furious pieces of music ever recorded), and often both, as on the epic title track and "Thunder Road." Out of vogue for many years, the Born to Run style is back on the scene these days, courtesy of the Arcade Fire, the Hold Steady, and the Killers, whose "When You Were Young" was a very thinly disguised remake of "Born to Run."

Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978): Staking out the lyrical territory that would define his career, Springsteen brings a harder, more desperate edge to these songs of broken dreams and life at the end of the rope. "The Promised Land" tempers it with a little optimism, but only after "Adam Raised a Cain" condemns humanity to perpetual suffering beyond its control.

The River (1980): This double album offers a mix of Darkness-style social commentary and bar-rock toss-offs that seems, at first, extremely odd and jarring. Give it some time, though, and you'll hear The River as a fully fleshed-out tour through every corner of the world of Springsteen's songs. There's hope, despair, determination, love, anguish, and lots of fear--but it's all offered in celebration. Featuring the E Street Band at their loosest, this may be the definitive Springsteen album.

Nebraska (1982): A sharp turn away from the juke-joint glory of The River, this album is a concise set of starkly rendered, minimalist acoustic songs recorded onto 4-track tape in Bruce's home. Originally intending to go into the studio and re-record the songs with the band, Springsteen wisely chose to simply release the demos. This collection of noirish tales and murder ballads has managed to remain hip with almost every generation of songwriters that has followed.

Worth hearing

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973): To many (including me), every bit as essential as Born to Run--and a bit wilder and looser, to boot--but as Bruce's most eccentric album, it doesn't have the same mass appeal. Still, these funky, jazzy, unpredictable romps show the early E Street Band in all their glory.

Born in the U.S.A. (1984): For many casual fans, this might as well be Springsteen's only album, though its reputation among die-hards and critics is spottier. An open overture to pop audiences, it lacks the musical and thematic coherence of Bruce's best albums, but song for song it more than holds its own. A road-trip classic, featuring greatest hits like "Dancing in the Dark," "Glory Days," and "I'm on Fire."

Tunnel of Love (1987): A contemplative turn towards the personal, this album finds Bruce (largely sans the E Streeters) examining the intimate, inner workings of marriage. While the production is slick (and a little dated), the fear, insecurity, and self-doubt that infuse these songs are darkly compelling.

The Rising (2002): This post-9/11 comeback is bruising, emotional, and muscular, even if it runs a bit long. New producer Brendan O'Brien's wall-of-sound approach sacrifices individual instruments in the interest of sonic bigness--yet with a few exceptions these are intensely lonely and personal songs, examining loss and rebirth from the inside. Not perfect, but it includes some of Springsteen's most powerful songs, most notably the bittersweet but ultimately inspiring title track.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006): Bruce gathers a dozen or so friends and fellow musicians in his home, and jams out exuberant versions of American folk and protest songs. Often overlooked, this is a great entry point for those with eclectic musical tastes. Actually, I'd probably recommend the subsequent Live in Dublin set even more highly: it features most of the songs from the original album, in most cases performed even better, along with some thrillingly radical reworkings of Springsteen's own songs.

Magic (2007): I don't know if I'd still name this as my favorite album of '07, but it is Bruce's most accessible, musically generous album in years. More concise and focused than The Rising, it's also lighter on its feet. There are albums you should buy first, but pretty much every song here is a winner.

For fans only

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1973): The not-yet-Boss's debut is fascinating in how different it is from the rest of his catalog. Here, the young would-be star wears his Dylan worship on his sleeve, with a collection of relatively stripped-down singer/songwriter rock that shows moments of inspiration but mostly hints at greater things to come.

Human Touch (1992): Abandoning the E Street Band was not an intrinsically bad idea, but replacing them with less interesting sound-alikes wasted the opportunity. For the first time we have a substantial number of forgettable songs Still, the ones that stick do so powerfully, deconstructing the conventional notions of masculinity that Bruce had long stood for in many minds.

Lucky Town (1992): The happier companion to Human Touch is also musically rougher and more consistently satisfying--but after a while it starts to feel a bit smug. Nonetheless, the inclusion of the raggedly powerful "Living Proof" is enough on its own to justify the album.

The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995): A return to Nebraska's acoustic approach, but with cleaner production and a greater emphasis of lyrics over tunes. I have a great personal fondness for this one, but it's hard to get into, and harder still to sing along with.

Devils and Dust (2005): Actually a very good album, this features some of Springsteen's most harrowing songs--the lost lover of "Reno," the defeated star of "The Hitter"--but it's decidedly low-key, concluding a trilogy of sorts with Nebraska and Tom Joad. It surpasses the latter, even if it can't transcend the former.

So, there you have it. In a couple weeks, we'll see how the new Working on a Dream stacks up against its predecessors.

Best-of-a-rama '08

2009-01-09T16:32:00.003-06:00

If you're like me, then you are fascinated by year-end best-of lists. (Also if you're like me, then you have a series recording for Cash Cab on your DVR.) I don't know what it is, exactly. I think a big part of it is that a person's best-of-the-year list can be seen as sort of a neat little capsule summary of their tastes. You can troll websites, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in search of your long-lost musical soulmate. Or you can just find out what you've completely missed out on this year. In any case, Metacritic does something awesome each year, which is to collect best-of lists from all over the place and line 'em all up for our consumption.

It seems that as audiences grow more diverse, marketing becomes more niche-driven, and the serious music press expands its coverage over an ever wider range of indie and self-releases, the notion of a general critical consensus has become pretty obsolete. Hence, the Top 30 list that heads the Metacritic article is a bit deceptive: if an album was only reviewed in a few places, but very positively, it shoots straight to the top, ahead of releases that garnered more attention across the board.

Still, looking at the collected, individual Top 10 lists, some trends are apparent. Among the most frequently appearing artists are Portishead, TV on the Radio, and the Hold Steady (yay!); Nick Cave and Lil Wayne (I can see it); Santogold (whatever); and Vampire Weekend (sigh). Clearly, I missed the boat on Fleet Foxes, but have since mended my shameful ways. I was quite pleasantly surprised to see Erykah Badu show up on so many of the lists: her album was one of my favorites of the year, but I had the (apparently mistaken) impression that it had dropped without making much of a sound. M83, Frightened Rabbit, Kanye West, and Coldplay also made a few appearances each. Not a single mention of my number-one pick, David Byrne and Brian Eno (though it did make #10 on my man Greg Kot's list, which was not included on Metacritic).

All of which goes to show... nothing much, as far as I can tell. But I'm obsessed with these stupid lists anyway.

We're in a perennial dry period now, at the beginning of the year, when I am broke and not much is coming out. But I'll try to come up with something to write about soon...

Airing of Grievances

2008-12-23T14:51:00.000-06:00

In recognition of Festivus, I will now enumerate the ways in which music has disappointed me over the past year:

Vampire Weekend: I honestly don't hate their album; I haven't listened to it in a long time, but there are some nice, head-bopping parts. But nowhere else this year was the critical hype so drastically out of proportion with the music's merit. The lyrics are frightfully vacuous; the playing is adequate, but nothing special; the rhythmic tricks are sophomoric; and the whole thing sits under a glaze of grating irony. Why would a bunch of smug, shallow hipsters rate so highly in indie-rock circles? Hmm, it boggles the mind...

The Smashing Pumpkins: And I should enclose that in quotation marks, since this version has no more claim to the name than Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin's previous band, Zwan--which was, incidentally, better than Pumpkins v2. Last year's "comeback" album was a let-down, and they haven't helped themselves any this year--a lackluster EP, a couple lame singles desperately tied in with Guitar Hero, a gig at a casino, a "20th anniversary" commemmorating, apparently, the first time Corgan and Chamberlin played with those other two people who aren't in the band anymore; and a head-scratching onstage rant that was apparently a rehearsed part of some weird-ass concept concert that no one really understood they were watching. The real pisser is that I actually thought Zwan and Corgan's solo album were pretty good; by far the worst thing he's done since breaking up the Pumpkins is rehashing the Pumpkins.

Artificial loudness: If you cut off the louder parts of all the instruments, then turn the whole business up to eleven, all we get to hear is super-amplified crap. Taking less sound and making it louder just makes it sound worse. Mastering engineers have been doing this for a while, but it seems to have reached new and frightening levels this year. Almost every new CD I bought was compressed to some extent. I have a volume knob, and I know what it's for. A good CD should present a full dynamic range of sound. It should go from zero to sixty; this business is thirty masquerading as eighty.

The RIAA: The recording industry is in decline because it's lost the artificial sales boost of everyone re-buying their old albums on CD; because people no longer want to pay $15.99 for a CD with one good song on it; because radio is dead and can no longer break new artists; because there's just a lot more of everything else competing for entertainment dollars; and because a business model that lives or dies based on the performance of a half-dozen or so superstar releases that you pump millions and millions of dollars into marketing turns out to not be that smart. And who do they think their two biggest enemies are? Apple, the company that finally found a way to make money off of Internet downloads; and their own consumers, whom they are attempting to sue into submission. How's that working out for them?

Live Nation, Ticketmaster, et al.: And for the past few years, the lone success story in music has been the concert industry, because people are still willing to pay for live music. But as these huge conglomerates take total control, prices go up, fees go up, and stunningly, people are going to fewer concerts. In fact, for the past few years, although concerts have been making more money, they've been selling fewer tickets. Yeah, that ought to work out well in the long term.

Stub Hub, et al.: If there's anything worse than Ticketmaster's fees, it's the huge bucks that the "secondary" ticket market makes for doing absolutely nothing other than hoarding tickets. Buying seats in bulk and selling them at a huge markup used to be called "scalping," and it used to be illegal. What the hell happened? And now some of these companies are partnering up with primary-market ticket retailers and performers, a form of collusion that, again, is supposed to be illegal.

Myself: Here it is, two days before Christmas, I have tons of stuff to do, and what am I doing? Sitting here and complaining about service fees and audio mastering. What is wrong with me?

So, there are the grievances. I'm about to take off on vacation for a bit. If all of this bellyaching has you looking for something positive, Ben at Transatlantica just recently did his Best of '08 show, and you can see the playlist on his blog. Cheers!

Best albums of 2008

2008-12-20T14:57:00.000-06:00

Like all nerds, my truest joy lies in compiling lists of the things that I like, with favorite albums of the year being the highlight. I'm not a professional music critic, I don't hear a large amount of new music in any given year (this year it was 30-some new albums), and I don't fancy myself a talent scout; but I do try to seek out the best and most interesting stuff, and I spend a lot of time listening to what I do pick up.

With that in mind, the list. I heard a lot of excellent music this year; the top ten are basically a matter of what connected with me the most. They're all personal favorites, but I'd recommend them to anyone who likes music and is reasonably open-minded.

1.) David Byrne & Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. I'm a huge Talking Heads fan, so David Byrne is a perennial favorite. But my love for this album has little to do with nostalgia. Everything That Happens is a joyous experience to hear: the intricate compositions, the weird but irresistible hooks, the generosity of the melodies and the drive of the rhythms. More even than that, though, Byrne quite unexpectedly expresses a stirring love of humanity, and an optimism amid trouble and uncertainty that make this album, for me, the definitive soundtrack to the year that America elected Barack Obama.

2.) M83, Saturdays = Youth. This, on the other hand, is the most overtly nostalgic album I've heard in a long time. But Anthony Gonzalez pulls off the rare trick of not just aping the trappings of a bygone era, but evoking the world in our minds that the synth-driven dream pop of the '80s, the Brat Pack movies, those kids on the album cover inhabit. It connects to everyone's inner teenager in a way that's neither ironic nor condescending. And I could listen to the drums-and-keyboard intro to "Kim & Jessie" forever.

3.) The Hold Steady, Stay Positive. I don't know why I never reviewed this one, since it is quintessential Chris-bait: E Street Band-style rock and roll, backing Craig Finn's lyrical narratives of the down and out, the wasted, the addicted, the people who hung around the party too long and have nothing good to do now that it's over. Its characters harbor an unhealthy love for Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, and have grown up to live out its desperate fury in their own lives.

4.) Coldplay, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. If you think you're too cool for Coldplay, then I call you a sucker, because you're missing one of the most electrifying albums of the year. Each song on this disc sounds nothing like the one before it, yet somehow it hangs together as a whole. The first song is called "Life in Technicolor," and that's exactly what this lush, richly textured music sounds like.

5.) TV on the Radio, Dear Science. TVotR are that rare band that create a whole world with their music. It's surreal and scary and noisy, but with Dear Science a little light starts to shine in. Plus, the beats pick up and the grooves get funkier. This album breaks some barriers for the band--among other things, it's easily the catchiest and most listenable thing they've done. The level of craftsmanship here has actually led me to see their earlier work in a new light. This is one of the best bands of the decade.

6.) Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War). Another fiercely unique album. New Amerykah tosses elements of hip-hop, R&B, and '70s funk and soul into the blender and produces something stunning and new: a neon-lit, impressionist painting of a singer, a community, a country in turmoil. Badu, who made her name evoking vintage styles, has become one of the most forward-looking artists in music.

7.) Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak. I don't like to rank something that's just come out very recently, because I have no real perspective on it. But I found 808s arresting from the very first note. Chilly but beautiful, personal yet universal, it finds the rarely modest West taken down a few pegs by life, and wrestling with uncertainty like never before. Kanye's best songs have always betrayed a certain inner conflict; here, every single robotic, precision-timed beat oozes it. This music is efficient, even spartan, and overwhelmingly electronic; but rarely has so much humanity been wrung from such cold circuitry.

8.) Daniel Lanois, Here Is What Is. The opposite of 808s & Heartbreak in about every way imaginable: Lanois' opus is warm, cavernous, and deeply spiritual. This music evokes a geography--moonlit canyons, mountain streams, starlit desert. It's an album that rewards your full attention. Listen to it in the dark, directly in front of and between the speakers. Let those slender steel guitar notes float through the room. It's transporting; it's transcendent.

9.) Frightened Rabbit, The Midnight Organ Fight. Some of the most melodically satisfying and emotionally cathartic music I've heard in ages. This Scottish trio's paeans to love, loss, and mortality grab you from the beginning and pull you along as they take flight. You could write a whole movie just to build to a climax that uses "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms" or "My Backwards Walk." Far from sappy, the lyrics show a strange obsession with physical decay, dysfunction, and disease. How many bands can get a listener so caught up singing about heads rolling off?

10.) Portishead, Third. Not a lot of easy hooks here; in fact, certain parts of Portishead's long-awaited comeback sound like they have to have been mixing errors. This is a band that started with what we'd think of as "music," threw it on the floor and broke it, then made an album out of the oddly reassembled, half-busted parts. Portishead's genius is in taking such firm and confident command of chaos and noise.

...And there are a few "honorable mentions," entries that may be every bit as good as the top ten, but for whatever reason got slightly edged out.

Nine Inch Nails proved to still be vital and deadly with The Slip. R.E.M.'s Accelerate has worn very well on me; this summer, I put it in my car like gas. With Feed the Animals, Girl Talk basically repeats the formula of his previous album, but it sounds so good, all you can do is say thank you and more please. Jenny Lewis makes a strong case for being one of the best voices and sharpest songwriters in rock and roll on Acid Tongue. The Raveonettes achieve more fuzzed-out glory with Lust Lust Lust, which is also probably my favorite title of the year. And Paul Westerberg's weird, single-track hodgepodge of home recordings, 49:00, is riveting listening, affirming that you could toss out the whole Replacements catalog and still call him one of the best songwriters alive.

If there's a person of the year, it'd have to be Brian Eno, whose influence is all over this list. He's the composing half of Everything That Happens, co-producer of Viva la Vida, and narrator, for lack of a better term, of Here Is What Is. More of his handiwork is on the way in a few months with U2's new album, and who knows what else? Thirty-plus years in the business, and he's still a powerful musical force.

Stay tuned: On Festivus (Dec. 23rd), we hold our second annual Airing of Grievances.

The Killers, Day & Age

2008-12-16T12:28:00.000-06:00

Despite the fact that they have yet to make a really good album, I can't help loving the Killers. They're pretty much the rock singles band of the decade. When they sit down and focus on writing good songs, rather than filling spaces in a grand design for a Born to Run-like opera, there's really no one better. Their eventual greatest hits compilation will be essential listening. And while the new Day & Age still fails to be as good an album as they want it to be, it offers some more entries for the best-of.

You've almost certainly heard Exhibit A: the groovin' eighties pop delight "Human," which is basically irresistible. My wife's initial reaction to the song and its grammatically odd chorus was, and I quote, "What the fuck?" But she admits it has slowly won her over. I have no idea what it's supposed to be about, but if you bop your head enough you'll find that such thoughts no longer trouble you.

Almost as good is the next track, "Spaceman," whose meaning is similarly nebulous, but which has this fantastic, New Orderish six-string bass hook that cuts off all further contemplation. Before I get too much farther, I should mention that New Order are a good comparison for the Killers: at their best, both bands' songs are transcendent, and a big part of what they transcend is the lyrics, which are airy at best, embarrassing at worst.

The Killers' first release, Hot Fuss (2004), started out with a string of five terrific songs, then quickly dropped off into a second half of decent but generic material. With 2006's Sam's Town, they suddenly wanted to be the sum of Bruce Springsteen, U2, and Queen. Their formula for achieving that goal consisted largely of abolishing hooks and having vocalist Brandon Flowers sing off-key a lot. Where it failed, it did so spectacularly, which was a shame because it did include another handful of pop gems like "When You Were Young" and "Read My Mind."

Day & Age maintains some of its predecessor's unearned grandiosity, but shows a relieving reorientation back towards hooks and choruses. As a result, it's probably the Killers' most consistently good album. The only major misstep is the Broadwayesque closing track, "Goodnight, Travel Well," which takes forever to lead us nowhere. Much of the rest is enjoyably bouncy and eclectic. Where Sam's Town was ponderous, the new disc is whimsical. Extra points to the band for building songs around disco grooves, goofy backing-vocal intros, and calypso references, which does a pretty good job of keeping Flowers from singing about things like God and love and death. Or at least if he is singing about those things, we can't tell.

I sound condescending here, because it's the path of least resistance, but listen: the perfect single is nothing to belittle. A lot of rock and roll is about instant gratification, and crafting a satisfying three-minute song that people can listen to over and over again and not get tired of is a rare skill. These guys do it better than most. I think they're still wrestling with whether that's enough--but it's clearly where their hearts are, and where their inspiration lies.

Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006

2008-12-12T22:52:00.000-06:00

A couple of years ago, a reviewer wrote about Tom Waits's Orphans collection, "What Tom Waits calls leftovers, most artists would call a career." That goes at least double for Bob Dylan. You could toss out his entire main catalog and look only at the now eight-volume official "Bootleg" series, and still make a strong case that he's the greatest artist of the rock era. Yet a remarkable collection like "Bootleg" #8, Tell Tale Signs, serves mainly to put a fine point on the argument, even though it's fully capable of carrying the heavy weight for the past twenty years of his career.

This two-disc set traces an alternate path through the years when Dylan, after a period in the wilderness of irrelevance, hunkered down and reconstituted his recording career from what most considered pretty unpromising ashes. It focuses mainly on outtakes and alternate takes from Oh Mercy, his 1989 comeback and first collaboration with Daniel Lanois, 1997's Lanois-produced Time Out of Mind, 2001's rough and dirty Love and Theft, and 2006's swinging Modern Times, along with some of his soundtrack work from that era. There are also a couple tracks from his traditional-covers period of the early '90s, and at least a glancing nod at 1990's widely panned Under the Red Sky, with an earlier version of that album's "Born in Time."

A good half of these 27 tracks are alternate versions of songs we've already heard--but don't let that fool you. This sounds like a new album. An acoustic "Most of the Time" sounds almost breezy--a dramatic departure from the funereal tone of the original. An early take of "Someday Baby" comes across more philosophical than angry--though it's nicely subverted by a line like "I don't mean to brag, but I'll wring your neck." We get two versions of "Dignity," which don't even sound like the same song, and also two of Dylan's best song of the past two decades, "Mississippi." A live performance of "High Water (For Charley Patton)" offers a complete reworking of the song, from banjo-driven folk to hard-rocking blues. Most intriguing to me is "Dreamin' of You," a Time Out of Mind outtake whose lyrics appear to have eventually morphed into the slow lament "Standing in the Doorway." Here, though, they've got some swagger and sneer, and the musical track is jaunty, even danceable. It's almost inconceivable that any other artist would not consider the song done, yet Dylan threw it out and turned it into something else entirely.

Among the soundtrack pieces, "Huck's Tune" is a classic kiss-off in a long line leading back to "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." "Series of Dreams" captures the essential rhythmic pulse of the Oh Mercy sessions better almost than anything that actually made the album. "32-20 Blues" and "Cocaine Blues" both feature Dylan in classic hardscrabble character. And "'Cross the Green Mountain," the final track, is a haunting, epic ballad of war, ruin, treachery, and an angry God. The narrator seeks nobility amid the ashes of defeat, almost whispering in conclusion, "We loved each other more than we ever dared to tell."

Where the proper albums that grew from these sessions were focused and tight, Tell Tale Signs is loose and sprawling. Rather than maintaining a dense atmosphere, it strikes out in all directions, revealing something of how the artist's process works. Starting with Oh Mercy, and kicking into high gear with Love and Theft, he clearly found a rich groove, and it's yielded arguably the best work of his career; but this collection suggests that his musical interests are still wide-ranging and eclectic.

The fact that any one of these tracks stands up with the best of the album material is a testament to the discipline Dylan has come to command in the studio, the seriousness with which he now treats the recording of an album--something which, back in the day, was almost an afterthought to him. It also speaks volumes that the man can create so much great music, and then just sit on it for ten or twenty years.

Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak

2008-12-07T22:45:00.000-06:00

Kanye West has had a bad year. Although he's ridiculously rich, internationally famous, and critically beloved, he's taken some hits on the personal side, having broken up with his fiancée and suffered the unexpected death of his mother. Being an artist whose favorite subject has always been himself, he has unsurprisingly made an album about his pain. That, however, is about the only unsurprising thing about 808s & Heartbreak--a dramatic departure in style, tone, and substance, which has already become highly controversial among his fans. I think it's hands-down the best work he's done, and I'll attempt to explain why.

First of all, you have to give Kanye credit for never making the same record twice. From the soul-inflected The College Dropout to the near-symphonic Late Registration, around that hard left turn towards French techno on Graduation, he has never been content to keep selling a winning formula. If previously, though, his current musical fascination seemed to drive the songwriting, it seems clear that in this case the stylistic choices were born out of the lyrical needs. Or, to put it more simply: Kanye doesn't just get depressed; he gets Depeche Mode.

The title pretty much says it all: miserable lyrics and '80s grooves. Kanye finds his soundtrack in synth pop, goth, and post-punk, circa 1980 - 83--darkly minimalist, icily pretty, electronic but primitive. A big clue as to what he's been listening to: the closing track, "Coldest Winter," is a credited rewrite of the early Tears for Fears track "Memories Fade," from a little album called The Hurting, which I imagine he just saw in the record store and picked up for the title alone. 808s takes a lot of musical cues from that album, actually. The first track, "Say You Will" sounds straight out of Black Celebration-era Depeche Mode; elsewhere we hear shades of Yaz, early Ministry, the Human League, the Thompson Twins, Erasure at their darker moments. There is a striking amount of open space in this music, where thin synthesizer notes drop and fade, electronic drum beats strike with martial precision, and Kanye's heavily auto-tuned voice stands out starkly, almost unaccompanied.

Oh, yeah: as you might have heard, there's auto-tuner on this album. The only rapping is done by the occasional guest star (Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne); otherwise, Kanye sings. And in all but a few spots, he sings through the currently ubiquitous auto-tuner processor, rendering his less-than-stellar vocals pitch-perfect, and producing a funky robotic effect. The auto-tuner is massively overexposed these days, but the use of it on this album is very clever, appropriate, and even artful. On the one hand, it's kind of a necessity, if Kanye's going to sing the whole album: he's just not a strong singer, technically. On the other hand, he takes that weakness and plays it right into the musical and lyrical themes of the album. He goes full-on robot on us, striking a monotone style even before processing, so that when, on "Welcome to Heartbreak," he drones, "My friend showed me pictures of his kids / And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs," the effect is chilling: he sings about feeling inhuman, and that's how he sounds.

On other songs, not having to worry so much about being on key allows him to really open up in terms of emotional expression. His desperation on "Say You Will," sad contemplation on "Street Lights," fury on "Love Lockdown"--these are powerful and often harrowing performances, conveying a depth of feeling eons beyond the simple gloating and sniping prevalent in his earlier work. There's one point, at the end of the lover's put-down song "RoboCop," where he drops the vocal effects and just sings to us plain, in his unprocessed and imperfect voice, with a faux-string section playing the hook behind him. "You're just a spoiled little L.A. girl," he croons. "Just an L.A. girl." It's a simple line, a cynical kiss-off, but set up in this way it comes off as unexpectedly vulnerable, soft, even naive, revealing much more about the singer than the subject. There are a lot of fantastic vocalists who could never touch a moment like that.

The thrust of the auto-tuner, the retro beats, the synth-drenched music, is to create a sonic landscape that matches the lyrics, in which the surface is perfect to a fault, not a note out of place, serving only to accentuate the deep trouble beneath it. Over and over on this album, we hear Kanye lament the cold comfort of his material success against the emptiness he feels inside. At the end of "Coldest Winter," he laments, "Goodbye, my friend / I won't ever love again," and it's hard to imagine money, sex, cars, or champagne healing that wound.

At its best moments--and there are a lot of them--this album achieves an arctic sort of beauty: think Björk's Homogenic, Radiohead's Kid A. Kanye also manages to infuse the naked, riveting emotionality of Blood on the Tracks, Rumours, or Beck's Sea Change. It either transcends or completely sidesteps hip-hop; it defies easy classification; and it is bound to frustrate a large segment of his audience. But these are his best songs, his best lyrics, even his best vocals, and this is his best album. And I'm ready to call him one of the best musicians of his time.

R.I.P., Chicago radio

2008-12-05T11:38:00.000-06:00

At about a quarter to nine this morning, 30-year Chicago radio veteran Steve Dahl somewhat casually let slip that he was broadcasting his last show on WJMK Jack FM. As documented by Phil Rosenthal in the Tribune, this makes him the latest--and, for my money, hardest-hitting--casualty of Arbitron's new ratings-taking system, which none less than our president-elect has spoken out against. It comes a couple weeks after B96's Eddie and JoBo got their walking papers, and a little more than a year after Jack's parent, CBS Radio, shut down Steve's longtime home, WCKG, and replaced the FM talk station with "Fresh FM" (or, as the Stever calls it, "the Douche"). That move took Dahl's onetime partner Garry Meier off the air, among others. (CBS must not plan to ever have anyone sign a contract with them again.)

Now, I never could quite fathom why Eddie and JoBo were still making millions of dollars broadcasting to teenagers, when I was listening to them in junior high, twenty years ago. I have no idea what kind of show they'd been running lately; last I tuned in it was No-Panties Thursday and parodies of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam songs. But they were sort of a local institution, nonetheless.

The worst part of the purge is to look at who's left on the air: We've got Eric and Kathy searching tirelessly for new flavors of vanilla. Jonathon Brandmeier is proving that you don't need to have had a single new idea since 1989 to do a daily show--plus I see he has a new TV show airing at 1 a.m. on Sundays (because the fans of Johnny B. On the Loose demanded it). And of all people, freaking Mancow now once again has a show. We'll see how long any of them last, but it would appear for the moment that suck is the new black. We are damn lucky in Chicago to have a single decent rock station, WXRT. And given that it's one of the last of its kind left in the country, I fear for it.

You can fault Arbitron, I guess, for rolling out their new system before it's been fully accredited, but all indications are that it does accurately report what people are listening to, minute by minute. What it can't do is measure the impact of what they hear. If the majority of people use the radio as background music, then yes, inoffensive, office-friendly, kid-friendly music will score the highest ratings. But are any of those stations destination programming? Do listeners pay any attention to what they're hearing, let alone to the advertising? Are they even in the room to hear it?

Shows like Steve's get listeners involved: you call in, you vote in the web poll, you stay in your car an extra minute after parking to hear the end of the bit. And I'll tell you this: when Steve and his newsman/bluesman Buzz Kilman started eating Taco Bell on the air every day, I made a lot more runs for the border. Aren't listeners like that more valuable to advertisers than the ones who use the radio as a noise-generating appliance to help them concentrate at work? Arbitron's new portable people meters report exactly what's on people's radios; the old diary system required people to be able to tell you what they were listening to. If you're an advertiser, do you want to know what's playing on the radio in the other room while someone's changing the baby's diaper, or do you want to know what people are listening to?

Anyway, my gut tells me that the Stever will be back on the air, somewhere else on the dial--maybe AM. Jack was never a good fit, and he does have a large and loyal fan base. Let the record show that he went out with class and dignity, delivering a damn funny show and exhibiting little bitterness towards CBS, which apparently measured thirty years of success against a couple bad ratings months and decided to pull the plug. Let the record also show that when Steve and Buzz are not on the air, Jack is basically Eddie Money's Greatest Hits on an endless loop. A lot of people's mornings are about to get a lot lamer.

Guns N' Roses, Chinese Democracy

2008-12-02T11:09:00.000-06:00

A seminal moment in my rock and roll fandom came on September 17th, 1991, when after school, at the age of fifteen, two friends and I rode our bikes over to the Flip Side Outlet at Lincoln Village shopping center to buy cassette copies of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II on the day they were released. How seminal? Well, that same day I also picked up Sgt. Pepper. As the Beatles illuminated rock and roll's history to me, Guns N' Roses, in my mind, were the present at its most immediate, vital, and thrilling. I mentioned I was fifteen, right?

If you had come from the future and told the fifteen-year-old me that I would be thirty-freaking-two before Axl and the gang (well, actually just Axl) put out another album, I don't know if I would've been able to go on. And that's part of what makes it difficult to review Chinese Democracy. If you care about this album, it's probably because you have some memory like mine, of a bike trip to the Flip Side; or hearing Appetite for Destruction blasting out of your older brother's room; or your girlfriend loaning you the single for "Don't Cry." Or maybe you're fascinated by the story of the rock star going into seclusion for fourteen years, firing everyone else in the band, recording the same songs over and over, getting dreadlocks, and by all appearances completely losing his marbles. In any case, what I'm saying is (as Axl might have warned us around, say, '95): I apologize, but this may take a while.

Incidentally, the other thing that makes the album hard to review is that Chuck Klosterman has already done it with great insight and wit in the Onion's AV Club.

Setting aside all that nostalgia and mythology, when reviewing an album I try to ask myself three basic questions: 1.) What is it trying to do? 2.) How well does it do it? 3.) Is it worth doing? To answer the first question, with Chinese Democracy Axl Rose is clearly trying to do everything. He's trying to make something that sounds like it took seventeen years to make. He's trying to make a definitive musical statement not just for his band (whom he has fired and replaced several times over), not just for himself, but quite possibly for all of music. This is, of course, ridiculous, but let me offer a couple mitigating factors.

First, I have to believe that somewhere in the inner reaches of his psyche, Axl does realize that it's ridiculous. And second, it's easy to forget that the guy actually is--or certainly was, last we heard--a major talent. He's not going to make the greatest album of all time, but it's interesting to see him try. And try he does: Klosterman observes that Axl seems to want each song to do everything that Guns N' Roses is capable of doing. There are, in fact, multiple songs on this album that feature chainsawing hard-rock guitars, hip-hop beats, treacly piano interludes, and an orchestra. No shit--like three or four songs. And elsewhere we can find flamenco guitar, industrial noise, vocal choirs--you name it. Almost every song tops five minutes, and the track-by-track credits are an epic unto themselves. It is not unusual to find five guitarists and two drummers credited for a single song.

How well does he do it? Well, here's the surprise: he does it pretty well, actually, all things considered. I didn't expect to be saying this, but I kind of dig this album. When Axl and his army of collaborators get into their groove, they rock hard. Songs like the title track, "Shackler's Revenge," "Better," and "Scraped" are just as bad-ass as anything on Use Your Illusion, if not more so. The guitars swing between old-school GN'R crunch and soloing and a more abrasive, industrial approach (Axl has absorbed a lot of Trent Reznor's crew). The drums pack a mean bite, and the soft/loud, funky/heavy dichotomy between the loops and the live drums is well-played. And Axl's voice--which I'd assumed would be the most glaring casualty of the passing years--sounds as good as ever. In fact, it sounds even better. We still get plenty of the "Welcome to the Jungle" scream, but he's also become a much more comfortable and emotive singer in the middle and lower parts of his range.

That's pretty important here, because with unprecedented layers of sound swirling around every single track, we need something to connect with, to pull us into the compositions and make them about something more than just musical fussiness. Axl is still mostly singing about heartbreak and alienation, but he does it well, and I believe he's sincere. Insane and paranoid, clearly, but sincere. And sometimes those vocals are about all you have to hang onto. As often as the intricate compositions dazzle, they also can leave you cold. By the time you've listened to all 72 minutes of Chinese Democracy, it's clear that an entire album of epics isn't the best idea. After the ninth or tenth one, "epic" starts to lose its meaning and impact, and things start to drag around the 50-minute mark. Even on the bloated Illusion albums, cinematic tracks like "Coma," "November Rain," and "Estranged" achieved their climactic effect by way of careful sequencing in the context of the rest of the songs. But there are no simple songs, no palette-cleansers, to be found here. Every song morphs into at least two or three different things before it finishes. It's hard to hum a seven-part suite, and that's a problem, because rock music is supposed to stick with you, get into your head and follow you around.

Yet almost in spite of itself, a lot of Chinese Democracy does follow me around, and I do find myself humming some of those seven-part suites--though not necessarily in order, and sometimes I can't remember which hooks go with which songs. For years I've thought that when Izzy Stradlin' left GN'R, the songwriting was bound to go with him. But Axl is, in fact, a great songwriter in his own right. Izzy would have no patience for this elaborate revue, but it's hard to deny that Axl pulls it off better than almost anyone else could. One thing you can definitely say about this CD is that it does have everything. Rhythm, melody, noise, hooks, rockers, ballads, love, hate--it's pretty much all there. As difficult as it would be to love all of it, it's kind of impossible not to like some of it. The song that's been growing on me most is the closing number, "Prostitute," which alternates between a mellow, contemplative tunefulness and dire, end-of-the-world rocking, finally taking us out on a genuinely pretty, almost conciliatory melody.

The last question--was it worth doing all this--seems kind of unimportant in this case. He did it, and not many other artists have in a long time. This sort of grandiose hard-rock spectacle is long out of fashion. Truthfully, it went out just a month or two after I rode my bike to the Flip Side, when Nirvana dropped "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on us. Rock and roll is essentially a simple form of music, not inherently suited to grand gestures. But there is a strain that goes in that direction, and Axl Rose is one of the few rock composers equal to the task. Where he goes wrong--as on insufferable operas like "Street of Dreams" and "This I Love"--it's because his ego and his love of Queen and Elton John have gotten the better of him, not because the idea was bad in the first place.

I remember taking those Illusion tapes home, listening to them, calling up my friend John to compare notes. We both agreed, it was so much more mature than anything GN'R had done before. Yes, I would still say that Use Your Illusion stands as an excellent example of what a fifteen-year-old might think of as "more mature." By which I mean that although it was often juvenile, it was ambitious, the work of a band desperate to break out of any narrow identity they'd been saddled with, even by their own doing. Chinese Democracy is that to the nth degree. I don't know that it's any more mature than what came before it; but the determination, audible on every track, to break through and do something new, something exciting, something that will blow people's minds, is compelling. Even in the moments where Axl fails--and there are plenty--it's hard to hold it against him. He hasn't made the greatest album of all time, but you can't say he isn't trying.

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, Cardinology

2008-11-23T23:14:00.000-06:00

Over the course of his career, Ryan Adams has developed a reputation that includes words like "erratic" and "inconsistent" as often as "gifted" and "electrifying." Somewhere in between would be the double-edged "prolific." And on the occasion of the guy's tenth solo album in nine years, it's worth asking if we really need any more Ryan Adams right now. His greatest work of the decade will undoubtedly end up being his voicemail to Jim DeRogatis; still, there's very little redundancy to be found among his first half-dozen or so albums. Past that point, he hooked up with the Cardinals, his first regular backing band since Whiskeytown. They've brought a consistently great level of playing to his more recent work, and with them he's developed an appealing signature sound. At the same time, though, either age, sobriety, or the confines of a steady line-up have made this once volatile artist increasingly predictable.

Last year's Easy Tiger was probably the least interesting album of Adams's career--an admirably concise but generic collection of midtempo country-rock tunes, all but giftwrapped for radio. The new Cardinology is a bit more ragged around the edges, in both good and bad ways. The first half is pretty gripping and dynamic. In particular, there's a stretch of three really great songs: the single "Fix It," a jagged, '70s-rock take on a country tune; the hard rocking booty-shaker "Magick"; and "Cobwebs," which revisits the melodic gloom of the underrated Love Is Hell album. Here we get some of those strained, gravelly vocals that Adams was all about a few years ago, some less fussy songwriting, and a more adventurous sound from the band. We're back to Ryan-as-drama-queen, which if you're still listening to him at this point, you must like at least a little bit.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the album feels a bit more rote. "Let Us Down Easy," "Natural Ghost," "Sink Ships," and "Like Yesterday" could be outtakes from Easy Tiger. On many songs, instead of the drama queen we get Ryan-as-vagabond-philosopher, singing all about "we" and "us." We were born into a light, he tells us--whatever that means. By most accounts, Adams did a lot of crazy shit in his twenties, but that doesn't mean he can tell us the meaning of life. He may be bored with plumbing his own depths for the heartbreak, longing, and self-loathing, but he's also a very gifted storyteller when he focuses in close on details, bringing out the lyricism in regular people's lives and struggles. There's not enough of that here.

The worst part, though, comes with the closing track, "Stop," where he gives us five and a half minutes of AA-speak. If he'd just played the song at a meeting, I'm sure it wouldn't have left a dry eye in the house; hearing it on an album, you just feel kind of awkward witnessing such sappiness (sample lyrics: "Look around... there's so many of us... you are not alone... ever").

It's hard to look at Cardinology as a whole and figure out what exactly Adams wanted it to be. Half promising, half generic, a sliver of embarrassing. It sounds, in that first half, like he's starting to get restless again, to bristle at the stylistic constraints he's placed on himself. Up until he formed the Cardinals, he hadn't done two albums in a row in the same style; with this one, he's up to about three and a half. Of course, if he goes off and does something different, he'll be called erratic and inconsistent again; but he might also inspire us to once again call him electrifying.

The Cure, 4:13 Dream

2008-11-16T22:35:00.000-06:00

The Cure, while easy to stereotype, are not actually one of those bands that's made the same album over and over again for twenty or thirty years. In fact, the great thing about them in their heyday was their stylistic elasticity: the full-on goth dirge that was Pornography; the oddball pop of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; the psychedelic symphonies of Disintegration. Since 1992's Wish, though, they've been slowly morphing into a brand. A new Cure album aims now to deliver a certain familiar sound--a re-creation of what Robert Smith thinks you best remember the band as sounding like. It's been quite a while since we've heard any new ideas from him. And while many of the songs on the new 4:13 Dream sound a bit fresher and leaner than other recent output, they still stick to the tried-and-true formulas.

The opening cut, "Underneath the Stars," mimics the hazy, dreamlike quality of "Plainsong." First single "The Only One" works on the same trickly-guitar template as "Just Like Heaven" and "High." "It's Over" recalls the breathless fury of "Disintegration" and "Shiver and Shake." But in each case, hearing the new song mostly just makes you want to change discs and hear the older, better one. This band could no longer create a pleasant surprise like "Close to Me," "Six Different Ways," "Lullaby," or "Birdmad Girl." They could never invent a new sound as they once did on Seventeen Seconds. Smith's lyrics have grown more generic (or politely, "universal"), and the rest of the band plays exactly as you'd expect them to play.

Which is not to say that they aren't very talented musicians, or that Smith doesn't still have an instinct for great hooks. These songs are easy to like: after a decade and a half, Porl Thompson is back with the band, and his and Smith's wailing guitar work lends the music a renewed vitality. Smith seems to have regained a measure of control over the horrific yowl his voice had become on 2004's The Cure, and it's now once again an asset. The songs are by the numbers, but they feel a bit less labored and more natural than they have in a while. This is probably the Cure's best material since Wish--but it's not as good as anything before that.

So songwise, I'm inclined to give the album a qualified thumbs-up. But there's another, more serious problem with 4:13 Dream: it sounds like shit.

What has been done to this record is not new; in fact, it's all too common these days. But it is particularly egregious here, and the Cure are just going to have to take one for the recording industry as a whole. This CD is very loud. Without getting into a lot of technical stuff (which is explained well here), past a certain point, the only way to make a CD's average volume louder is to make most of it quieter--i.e., digitally reduce the difference between the loudest sounds and the quietest ones--so that you can turn everything up. If it's done judiciously, the record sounds louder, but not a whole lot worse to the untrained ear. If it's done carelessly or ham-fistedly, it fucks everything up. My ear is not very well-trained, but this is the most fucked-up record I've heard.

On some songs, every single drum beat is distorted and clipped off. Cymbal crashes--always the first to suffer from compression--turn into a garbled hiss. In general, the instruments all bleed together into a sort of digital soup. Musical passages that are meant to be melodic and soothing are instead grating and distorted. Worst of all, points that are clearly meant to be signature Cure moments of great musical drama--a sudden roar into full gear on all instruments--fall completely flat. The band is playing harder, but the music doesn't get any louder, because it's already as loud as it can get. Listen to "The Scream"--if you must--for the best/worst example of this effect. This is the first time I've ever winced at a recording. It sounds--at best--like you're hearing the music on a radio.

The Cure are a bunch of fifty-year-olds in goth makeup, singing silly teenage songs about love and suicide. The main thing they still have to offer is musical intricacy; that has been obliterated here. I can't begin to imagine why such a notorious perfectionist as Robert Smith would allow his music to be presented in this way.

Despite that, as I get used to the album, some of the songs have started to win me over anyway. But I have a lot of affection for the Cure, and tend to like even their bad music. I really can't recommend this album to anyone who isn't a die-hard--and a forgiving one at that.

This Week in This Week

2008-11-14T21:41:00.000-06:00

With the help of a 40%-off coupon and some Borders Bucks, the other night I went and re-bought George Harrison's All Things Must Pass for $10, which at long last restores all of the CDs that were stolen from my car outside of a restaurant six and a half years ago. I really like the album, but never bought a new copy because it's a 2-disc set, so it's always at least $20. That heinous crime also deprived me of Bjork's Vespertine, Orbital's In Sides, the Strokes' Is This It, and one of the discs of the Police box set, among others.

The big fall release season is here, with lots of stuff coming out. I'll probably write up the Cure's new album this weekend, and Ryan Adams soon after. I'll definitely weigh in on Kanye West, when 808s and Heartbreak comes out. If their SNL appearance is any indication, the Killers have finally completed their inevitable transformation into Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I, for one, am excited as hell. And (sigh), I don't see how I can not check out Chinese Democracy when it comes out--if for no other reason than to help stave off Best Buy's impending bankruptcy. Also to find out what $13 million sounds like. It's like the musical equivalent of Waterworld.

Is it weird that I really want to know what Prince has to say about Barack Obama being elected? It's just that I think it'd probably be something cryptic and crazy, involving slaves and Jehovah and his recording contract. Actually, it's kind of fun to imagine Barack solemnly intoning Prince lyrics in front of a rapt audience. "You don't have to be rich... to be my girl. You don't have to be cool... to rule my world." I wonder if that's how he practices his gravitas?

TV on the Radio, Dear Science

2008-11-09T19:05:00.000-06:00

Around the time TV on the Radio's last album, Return to Cookie Mountain (2006), came out, the word "overrated" started to dominate my opinion of the band. The album was good, but the effusive praise it was earning seemed out of proportion. As near as I could tell, they were still using the same bag of tricks they'd developed on their first album, and the tracklisting was padded with a few numbers that were hard to tell apart. As soon as the Brooklyn-based collective's new disc, Dear Science, came out, its Metacritic score shot straight for the sky, and I aimed my expectations downward. This time, though, it turns out that I boringly agree with everyone else: Dear Science is great.

The band's familiar industrial-funk approach is still intact, but they've refined it in a couple of key ways. First, the noise has been scaled back. Cookie Mountain was, if nothing else, a glorious sonic assault, with a noisescape that was a cross between Skinny Puppy and Public Enemy (El-P's remix of "Hours" fit right in). On the new album, lead instrumentalist David Andrew Sitek leaves some open space in the music, allowing a clearer focus on beats, vocals, and topline melody. On its last two albums, TVotR has had a very distinctive rhythmic approach that's a little thicker and slower than rock or hip-hop. Here, the funk takes over, with lots of danceable beats. The melodies are simpler, and often carried by a single instrument instead of a morass of hyperdistorted guitar, keyboards, and horns. The guitar work on this album is a particular pleasure.

Overall, it's a move away from experimentalism and towards pop songcraft, with a stylistic focus on funk and hip-hop. One last noticeable departure is that the tone has brightened. Cookie Mountain and 2004's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes seemed like soundtracks to the apocolypse. On Dear Science, with the pop hooks come a bit of whimsy, some playfulness, and signs of optimism. At one point, vocalist Tunde Adebimpe even begins singing about an "age of miracles." "Stork & Owl" plays Adebimpe's vocal interplay with bandmate Kyp Malone as high melodrama, and "Family Tree"--perhaps the album's most surprising song--is unabashedly pretty, with lush strings underscoring a major-key piano melody.

There's still plenty of room for tension. Adebimpe pushes his vocals in some new directions, coming close to outright rap in his delivery on "Dancing Choose" and "Red Dress." "Shout Me Out" gives a pounding battery of a drumbeat, and the opening track "Halfway Home" approaches the wall of noise from their earlier recordings.

The best thing about this album is how nimbly it dances around between styles and moods. It conveys an almost giddy effect. For the first time, TV on the Radio sound like they're having fun in the studio. Whereas before, I got the sense that they were chained to a particular aesthetic approach, here they're unbound, and it pays off.

Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue

2008-11-03T13:50:00.000-06:00

Jenny Lewis's most recent album with her band Rilo Kiley, last year's Under the Black Light, offered up its share of '70s love, but glazed with a decidedly contemporary pop finish. For her second solo record, the former child actress said she wanted to make something that sounded "timeless," as if it could come from any decade. Really, Acid Tongue is a trek through the radio waves of the Me Decade more than anything else, but Lewis does capture the more timeless and enduring elements of that music, and ends up with something that transcends the fads of the moment.

The first thing that has to be said is that this is one of the better-sounding records to come out recently. Much of it was recorded live in the studio, and it works very well. The tracks are warm and spacious, the instruments clear, the grooves kickin'. More than a '70s record, it sounds ilke what a 2008 record should sound like: everything's well-mic'd and the drums are plenty loud, but the mix doesn't assault your ears with a huge fuzz of artificially amped-up noise. I'll talk some more about the evils of compression in a week or two, when I get to the Cure's new album (a preview: Ugh), but Acid Tongue is a terrific example of how letting the music sound natural can pay dividends.

Of course, sounding good should be a basic prerequisite for even releasing a record. What this album really has going for it is Jenny Lewis, whose clear and agile voice is both powerfully expressive and full of rock and roll swagger. She seizes confident control of each of these songs, lilting along the top of the opening track, "Black Sand," before bringing a snarl to the chorus. She channels Paul McCartney in the piano ballad "Godspeed," and trades wry verses with her buddy Elvis Costello on "Carpetbaggers." Her best vocal might be on the title track, a gorgeous weeper of a folk/country ballad that would do Neil Young proud. On the other hand, she's no slouch on the bruising, three-part romp "The Next Messiah," either.

Lewis likes a lot of dirt, grime, booze, lust, and road dust on her lyrics: the characters on this album rarely think beyond tomorrow night's party. These are songs about following the scent of immediate gratification, and all the wrecks it can lead you into. The album-closer, "Sing a Song for Them," serves as a kind of manifesto, running down a list of the blasted, addicted, bored, lust- and love-crazed, and others, imploring (apparently) herself, "If you sing a song, sing a song for them." You get a sense, though, that it's less out of a noble desire to give these people voice than that they're simply more fun to sing about.

There is lots of fun to be had on this album, but it's far from shallow. Lewis is proving to be one of the best singers and songwriters out there today, and her performance gives Acid Tongue real depth and heft.

Frightened Rabbit, The Midnight Organ Fight

2008-10-28T21:23:00.000-05:00

Good lord, have I really only written one post this whole month? Yeah, I've let this blog slip back on my priority list lately, but I do have reviews coming up soon for two very good new albums by Jenny Lewis and TV on the Radio, once I let them sink in just a bit more. In the mean time, I don't generally like to post reviews of albums for which I'm significantly late to the party and/or don't know much about the band--but on the other hand, Frightened Rabbit's The Midnight Organ Fight, which came out earlier this year and I picked up a month or so back, is a really, really great album. I think I can ramble about it for a couple paragraphs.

This is the second album from this Scottish group, and it's somewhat in the vein of the lush, elaborately arranged "orchestral pop" (or "prog folk," as I prefer to call it) that's coming out of just about everywhere on the indie-rock map these days. Really, though, while the sound is big, the approach is pretty simple: ringing, melodic guitar riffs, propulsive drums, heart-on-sleeve vocals.

In fact, singer Scott Hutchinson takes "heart on sleeve" to a whole new, and disturbingly literal, level. When he sings about his heart, he means a fist-sized muscle pumping blood through his body. When he sings about blood, it's not a metaphor for war or family or conviction; he's talking about fluid carrying oxygen to his brain. In fact, all of the imagery in these songs is intensely physical, and almost totally de-romanticized. This approach bears its greatest reward on "Head Rolls Off," the album's midpoint and one of its several masterpieces--a song that begins by declaring, "Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name." Hutchinson speculates on his own death in clear-eyed terms: his blood stops, his head rolls off. At the same time, though, he says, "when it's all gone, something carries on." When his head rolls off, "someone else's will turn." Ultimately, he declares that "while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to Earth"--not "the world," not "mankind"; this physical rock that we're standing on, that we've named Earth.

Elsewhere, on "The Twist," Hutchinson sings that "I need human heat," but on "Keep Yourself Warm," he warns that "it takes more than fucking someone you don't know to keep yourself warm": reducing ourselves to base physical needs doesn't work. This tension between embracing blunt carnality and trying to transcend it fuels most of the album. We've got lepers with their parts falling off; we've got arms and legs and heads and hearts and blood and bones. "My Backwards Walk," in which the singer desperately throws himself back into a bad romance, builds to an irresistibly pretty crescendo in which he repeats, "You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it" backed by keyboards and an uncharacteristic drum-machine beat.

Great songs are all over this disc, including the buoyant "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," the quasi-title track "Fast Blood," and the understated "Poke." It all culminuates in the second-to-last track, "Floating in the Forth," a determined trudge out of the depths that breaks out in the strangely triumphant line, "I think I'll save suicide for another year."

It all probably sounds a little odd, which it is. But really, all this crap I'm spooling out about the lyrics is just the bonus layer of a record that's exhilarating enough on a purely sonic level. Great tunes, great players, great singing. One of the best things I've heard in a long time.

James, Hey Ma

2008-10-09T13:51:00.001-05:00

I can't claim to be a particularly knowledgeable fan of James--the Manchester band responsible for radio hits like "Laid" and "Born of Frustration" in the early '90s--but their 1993 Laid album has been a perennial favorite of mine since I was in college. The follow-up to that was an "experimental" collection of outtakes, which I passed on. When their next "real" album came out, I picked it up in the store and looked at it many times, but always wound up putting it back. (In retrospect, was it wise to choose, for instance, Chumbawamba instead? Hey, back off.) Still, when I heard they were back after a considerable hiatus, I was interested enough to check out the new single.

That would be "Whiteboy," a ragged, brash, boisterous rocker that seems torn between celebrating slacker malaise and shattering it. Its wry, barbed lyrics are reminiscent of "Laid," the band's biggest U.S. single, but the thundering arrangement, built on drums, guitar, and trumpet, go one or two better. The song instantly grabs your attention, and middle-aged singer Tim Booth sounds as fired-up as a twenty-year-old as he spits out lines like, "My mum says I look like Yul Brynner / Too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear," the stoned protagonist trying to tune out his Mum's prattling: "She wants bling, she wants tats... self-esteem and her old body back." It's one of the best songs I've heard this year, and it sent me right out to Rolling Stones to pick up the album (that is, once it came out, months later).

The good news is, Hey Ma is pretty good; the bad news is that the other songs aren't as good as "Whiteboy." The album is a reunion of the septet that recorded 1992's Seven--the longest-absent member being Andy Diagram, whose trumpet was a signature element of that album's sound. This new one is basically a revival of Seven's epic, big-rock sweep: swirling guitars, booming drums, soaring vocal acrobatics punctuated by bursts of trumpet, all finished with an appealing, radio-ready gloss. Anthems like "Ring the Bells" and "Sound" would fit right in here.

And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. The opening track, "Bubbles," starts out slow and ambient--suggesting maybe a reprise of Laid's spareness--before building to an exhilarating chorus of "I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive." The title track, one of several politically tinged numbers, wrings a singalong chorus out of the line, "Hey ma, the boys in bodybags coming home in pieces"--which seems like kind of a weird thing to be pumping your fist to, but it sounds good. Elsewhere, "Oh My Heart" and "Boom Boom" similarly recapture the near-ecstatic energy of old. If British Sea Power can make their name by going all out, then hell, why shouldn't James remind everyone that they've been doing it for a couple decades?

There are misfires, of various degrees. The single "Waterfall," which I've been hearing on WXRT lately, serves up some new-age mishmash about the shallowness of material posessions (waterfalls are nice, guys, but I'm a lot more likely to find transcendence watching DVDs of Robotech with a bowl of ice cream--maybe that's just me), but the groove is irresistible and Booth's top-notch vocals sell it; taking the stuffing out of himself with lines like "My mirror's laughing at me, it says, 'Boy, are you getting old'" helps, too. Similarly, the histrionic ballad "Upside" is either redeemed or destroyed by Booth's heart-on-sleeve belting; it's hard to tell, but I do find myself singing the chorus while unloading the dishwasher.

The album does feature a couple quieter numbers: "Of Monsters, Heroes, & Men" revisits the meditative atmospherics of the Laid album, as does "Semaphore." Basically, it plays like a greatest-hits album. And fifteen years after the band's heyday, they're probably entitled to reprise their high points. "Whiteboy" points the way to something even better, if they decide to keep going rather than return to hibernation.

Playlists of the Dead: E. E. Cummings

2008-09-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894 - 1962), in addition to being a noted essayist and playwright, was one of the most famous avant-garde poets of the 1920s and '30s. Although he often worked in familiar, traditional forms, his playfulness with language and experimentation with grammar and sometimes even typography were the best-known features of his poetry. If you took honors English, they probably made you read him. Playlists of the Dead, returning from a considerable hiatus, presents his favorite songs.


Hel lo!     poetry like water but is if also enjoy
                   swirling music swimming
     ears in so joy ful
                                       hear,
                                                then.
some jams
                  so favored

1.) Guns N' Roses, "Welcome to the Jungle":


Rockhard swing hips make
uplip stick un    becoming
good  idea
      to
         ditch
             that
          look.
still hard to
                  front
on this one,
  youknowwhereyou
are?

2.) Depeche Mode, "Personal Jesus":


        synth and gui
                             tars
  but John nyCash couldn't
improve?
lookingfunny    weenieuroes
r       e            a            c          h     outand
touch faith

3.) Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Proud Mary":


big  Wheel round
                    turning ke
                                ep
on
also    like tina    turner
        thissongsing          sometimes
ike     too    much
i'm
so
so
rry
ba
by

4.) The Black Crowes, "She Talks to Angels":


                 bust
                 out
guitars time if acoustic
to bring
      it
     do
     wn
and please                  up
                        lighters
this we
         do is how

5.) Missy Elliot, "Work It":


ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup i
            now you re talking
                                            my
language
                             missy!
                     it
         work

6.) The Beatles, "I Am the Walrus":
I enjoy this song a lot. It is no less iconic in and of itself for its clear epitomizing of the Beatles' late-sixties period of psychedelic experimentation. Not three years on, they would be exploring blues and other roots sounds with equal fervor, but for a time this was the bright, shining peak of their studiocraft.

7.) Crash Test Dummies, "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm":


now be it from me far
           question aspersions or
  even to
still when         co ns id er ed
yet how       and as it            should
                  hasty
               mustn't
lessthenone
            some
shit
             is
just
             stupid.

8.) Falco, "Rock Me Amadeus":


                         say?
weakness
              pulsing synthing bump bump
                  have a
   what can i
rock mejust
                        rock me,
                        amadeus.

Jakob Dylan, Seeing Things

2008-09-10T21:52:00.000-05:00

The other day on the way home from work, my iPod happened to shuffle up "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," by a very young Bob Dylan. Even over the noise of the Subway, I couldn't help being captivated by that 22-year-old voice singing about all the things he's seen. It reminded me that I've been listening to some other folkish, acoustic music lately, and it happens to be Bob's son Jakob's new album, Seeing Things. And listening to Bob's timeworn classic, I couldn't help thinking, Yeah, Junior's just not this good. Which of course is the great unfairness of Jakob Dylan's career: he's probably the only songwriter in the world for whom it's actually held against him that he's not as good as Bob Dylan.

Mind you, he's done some things all on his own to earn our skepticism. The Wallflowers' mismatched cover of David Bowie's "Heroes" for that awful 1998 Godzilla movie comes to mind; and I seem to remember a Pepsi commercial or two somewhere along the way. I liked the Wallflowers enough to buy two of their albums, and each one has three or four songs that are still favorites of mine; a lot of the rest was decent but forgettable. Or maybe even good. The problem is that if you're Bob Dylan's son, a second-rate Tom Petty imitation just isn't going to satisfy expectations.

Is anything? My point would be, probably not. But speaking as someone who found the Wallflowers frustratingly promising, I think Seeing Things is very gratifying. It's very spare, very low-key--mostly just vocals, acoustic guitar, and subtle accents of bass, percussion, and other instruments. I've always admired Dylan's lyrics, in their better moments, and the songs on this record are more consistent and evocative than what I've heard from him before (they're also noticeably more like his dad's). What's surprising, on a record like this, is the melodies, the hooks. This is folk-rock that hasn't forgotten that you should be able to sing along with folk songs. It makes for a downright lovely exploration of some troubled times.

The knowingly tense "Evil Is Alive and Well" starts things off, and last week as I was watching the Republican National Convention on TV, this song ran constantly through my head (seriously, did you see that?). Next, in case you're unsure what the general thrust of this album is going to be, "Valley of the Low Sun" gives us a weary soldier lamenting, "We bow down and worship these bandits and cowboys unable to hold their own guns" to a disarmingly gorgeous melody. As he sings, "Whatever we've taken does feel like heaven, but baby we just look like hell," we're reminded that Dylan's voice--moreso than his father's, I might say--is an instrument of powerful empathy. Like Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young, this rock-star rich kid can truly channel other people's pain, experiences that he's never had. It's always been his greatest strength.

Only a few of the songs are overtly political; more often, like Father Bob, Jakob narrates in extended metaphor, or glances indirectly at events in the wider world while zeroing in on something closer to home. The best moment is probably "Will It Grow," the album's most fully fleshed-out song, in which a hard-fought struggle with the land mirrors a desperate love, the singer pledging, "My love is braver than you know." Elsewhere, the clever, swaggering "All Day and All Night" sounds a lot like one of his father's more recent songs, but the son does a pretty credible job of it. "Everybody Pays As They Go" is sweetly affecting, but I can't help thinking Bob would sing it with a little bit more sneer, a little bit more bite. But there we go again.

"Something Good This Way Comes" and "On Up the Mountain" provide a couple moments of optimism towards the end, and in fact "This End of the Telescope" closes things on a note of hardbitten determination, on the one hand recognizing that "time will divide us in gangs," but promising, "I'll reach you like nobody can." Again, Dylan's singing here is really remarkable in its empathy and emotion, and it absolutely sells these songs. If nothing else, he's picked up from his father the ability to convincingly sing about farmers and drifters.

Seeing Things is easily the best and most consistent thing I've heard from Jakob Dylan. I might venture to guess that it comes from the singer, nearing forty, recognizing that his brief time as a rock star is long over, so he might as well just make an album that pleases him, that does the things he does best, without trying to churn out a radio single. For the first time, I think, he's given us something that's worth taking note of, start to finish, simply on its own merits.

David Byrne & Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

2008-09-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

I'm so happy.

If you know me, you probably know I'm a huge Talking Heads and David Byrne fan. So, like most others who fit that description, I was ecstatic when word got out that Byrne was back together after 27 years with Brian Eno, his collaborator on three seminal Talking Heads albums as well as a two-man record of weird instrumentals. For those of us who care, their new project, available now as a download and/or CD preorder, has a lot to live up to. The result is not quite what you'd expect from this reunion, but it is fantastic.

After Eno produced three albums that transformed the Talking Heads' sound from minimalist art-punk to rhythmically frantic, African-tinged funk, he and Byrne concluded their partnership with 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which built ambient instrumental tracks in the general style of the Heads around random bits of sound picked up from the radio--talk show hosts, African singers, etc. The album was more influential and interesting than it was musically compelling--though it was that too, at times, and certainly it reflected an increasingly disjointed, paranoid, and noise-ridden world at the dawn of the Reagan era.

It seems like there would be no better time than the sunset (we dearly hope) of the Bush era to reprise those themes and musical ideas. But while we might expect to hear Sean Hannity's distorted voice ranting incoherently over industrial noise, what we get is almost exactly the opposite. Byrne and Eno's response to 2008 is hopeful, buoyant, and at times almost achingly sincere. Openly addressing a troubled and volatile time, the now 50-something pair seem to put it all in perspective, telling us that we'll get through, we have before, and we may end up better for it.

The album's title, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, is a declaration of possibility and potential, and those themes run throughout the album. Musically, we start with the plaintive, lush, acoustic guitar-driven "Home"; the tracks that follow take us through upbeat soul, disco-pop, a few helpings of Talking Heads-style funk, and a lot of gospel. Eno and his crew of musicians have built a sound on the tension between sunny, gorgeous melodies and nervous, edgy rhythms. Actually, as much as anything, it sounds like a progression of the work he did on Paul Simon's Surprise album a couple years ago.

Byrne handles the lyrics and vocals, and he has never sounded quite like this. Starting with his 2001 album Look Into the Eyeball, he's been gradually shedding his irony and turning into something of a crooner. On this album, his voice is full of warmth, his lyrics brimming with pathos, sounding more emotionally invested in what he's singing than I ever would've thought him capable of. There's still a lot of cleverness here, but it's delivered with joy rather than ironic detachment. The guy who once sang about flying over the heartland, swearing, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me to," now finally sounds at home and happy among the human race.

It's music that unabashedly aims for beauty, and achieves it in grand fashion. It's feel-good but soul-searching. And coming at a moment when America, at least, and by extension much of the rest of the world, seems poised on the brink of making a turn out of an awfully lousy streak and towards something better, it's pretty affecting. I wouldn't claim to stamp a political stance onto it, but I think its message could fairly be articulated as, "Yes we can."

Paul Westerberg, 49:00

2008-08-25T17:26:00.000-05:00

I realize that I've slacked off a bit on reviews while I've been moving, but the fact that this one is now basically obsolete is not my fault. Last month, Paul Westerberg released a new album called 49:00 as a 49-cent, single-track download on Amazon and, soon after, Tunecore. It's very, very good, and I'll get to that in a moment--but unfortunately, if you don't already have it, you can't go and get it right now. At the beginning of this month, it was quickly withdrawn from both sites for unspecified reasons. The prevailing rumor is that they got a cease-and-desist order from one or more of the artists whose songs are included in a mishmash of fragmented covers near the end. Which means it's entirely possible that David Cassidy has fucked things up for us all YET AGAIN.

You can now get a new track on Tunecore called "5:05," apparently a missing piece of 49:00, which is itself only 43:55. Oddly, "5:05" will cost you 99 cents, double the price of the previous 44 minutes.

Anyway, if you didn't get a chance to grab 49:00, it's a shame, because it's great. Like, really great. What would seem to be weaknesses--it's all on one long track, and the recordings are demo quality at best--are turned into surprising strengths, as the one-time Replacements frontman creates a musical collage out of what appears to have been a very fruitful period of writing and recording. There are twelve or thirteen complete or nearly complete songs on here, sutured together with bits and pieces of countless others. The result is trippy, punked-out, bad-ass, and at times emotionally wrenching.

The songs run the gamut of the styles you'd expect from Westerberg, but it rarely feels like he's repeating himself. One called (unofficially) "Out of My System" sounds like classic Replacements. "Devil Raised a Good Boy" is a rough, hard rocker in the vein of 2003's Come Feel Me Tremble. Many songs, like "Who You Gonna Marry" and "It'll Never Die," seem like a continuation of the jangly, jagged acoustic rock of 2004's Folker, but on this album noise plays a much bigger role. The overall effect is of Westerberg sitting at a mixing console with a bottle of Jack and some pills, twisting knobs around for the hell of it.

But that's clearly at least somewhat of a put-on, because there are times when the seemingly random clashes between songs are targeted like Scud missiles. Most memorably, midway through "Good Night Sweet Prince," an emotionally naked confrontation with mortality, the verse is punctuated by tinny blasts of noise from one or two other songs, playing into the left headphone and crowding the listener's head just as frantically as we imagine the singer's to be. It's sort of a Sgt. Pepper moment, and the comparison isn't entirely without merit. Just looking at the aesthetic, it's pretty similar between the two: elaborate but slapdash, ambitious but never fussy.

The chaos builds slowly over the course of the album. "Good Night Sweet Prince" sits about at the midway point, and the battle of noises there is a turning point. In the final ten minutes or so, order begins to break down much more violently. Bits and pieces of a lot of different covers warp in one ear and out another for a couple minutes, before a verse or two of the Partridge Family's "Hey I Think I Love You" asserts its unlikely dominance. The last song is a noisy, sloppy rock stomp with, apparently, a kid's voice shouting incoherently over it.

It's an album to listen to on headphones, and to enjoy repeated trips back through. There's a lot going on, but in the end the selling point isn't the chaos; it's Paul Westerberg's songs, which he shows here sound their best in the raw.

Did I mention that Amazon's MP3s are DRM-free? Shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of this...

The hard news

2008-08-13T21:38:00.003-05:00

If you're a Chicagoan, you might be interested to know that the Tribune has collected data on what's playing on various public figures' iPods--including Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., CTA president Ron Huberman, and the obligatory Barack Obama and John McCain. Among the revelations: Governor/Biggest Tool Ever Rod Blagojevich listens to a couple things other than Elvis, but not many; my former congressman Rahm Emmanuel's playlist is disturbingly similar to mine; and homeboys Kanye West and Wilco are big with the local politicos.

Also, U. of Chicago president Robert Zimmer claims not to own an iPod. I have it on good authority he's a fiend for the wax, and spins nothing but underground techno. I saw him on TV at a building dedication, and he was clearly tripping balls on X.

Black Kids, Partie Traumatic

2008-08-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

The Black Kids, whose demo EP I have conclusively proven to be better than the Goo Goo Dolls, are out with their debut album on some outlet of the Sony Corp. The Jacksonville, Florida quintet now have the muscle of one of the biggest corporations on the planet behind them, which may not be something that a melancholy party band really has any constructive use for. Listening to Partie Traumatic, you periodically get the sense that someone is trying to make them into the Killers; but on the other hand, that could be them trying to do that themselves. Anyway, the good news is that whatever they're doing works most of the time.

The album uses the four songs from the Wizard of Ahhhs EP as its foundation. "Hit the Heartbrakes" kicks things off yet again, and is the one old song that noticeably suffers from the glossier production: the knock-knock joke at the beginning was better off swallowed in reverb. Anchoring the middle are the darkly hormonal "Hurricane Jane," still a highlight; "I've Underestimated My Charm (Again)," my least favorite from the EP, which here blossoms into full, Ronettes-aping glory; and most importantly the irresistible single, "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You," which I imagine some Columbia talent scout listening to and scrambling to conceal his boner.

From the beginning, it's been easy to hear the influence of the Cure and their postpunk brethren in the Black Kids' wistful guitar lines and washes of analog synthesizer. What comes fully into focus with this album is how much they also cop from Prince. It comes out most in singer Reggie Youngblood's vamping delivery and fixation on weirdly androgynous sexuality. For me, the tip-off was the way he pouts/sighs, "Shit," heading into the bridge of "I Wanna Be Your Limousine"; and "Look at Me (When I Rock Wichoo)" is practically a rewrite of "1999's" apocalyptic dance party. Like Prince, Youngblood has a lot to say about the problems that come with being irresistible to women. And like Prince, he sells it by pushing it way over the top. In fact, this album is kind of an educational listen, in that it illuminates the intersection of Prince and the Cure, reminding you that back in the 1999 era, the Purple One took more than a little influence from new wave.

The music may be all '80s, but the production is very 2008: bass and treble are pushed to the max, the drums sound huge, and there's not a trace of subtlety to be found. I keep my stereo's volume a couple clicks lower than usual for this disc. In the defense of producer Bernard Butler (of Suede), Partie Traumatic does generally sound pretty good. It's a thoughtful job of loudening, at least. And it may be that the Black Kids' simple guitar-keyboard-bass-drums arrangements don't require a lot of headspace and might just as well have their levels cranked so you can hear everything over the background noise on the highway or the train. Personally, I kind of miss the warmer, more diffused sound of the demos.

This band's great strength is their willingness to go balls-out on whatever--silliness, sentimentality, attitude, and always beat and melody. The music is great fun, and among the ten tracks are a decent-sized handful of genuinely great songs. It's about everything you could ask for in a debut album.

I don't love the way I move

2008-08-06T21:33:00.002-05:00

My ass has recently been kicked by moving, but I thought for the benefit of both of this blog's regular readers (okay, I'm rounding up) I'd mention that I haven't abandoned it. We're sort of settled in now, and I have some new things to review, including the new albums by Paul Westerberg and the Black Kids. I might or might not write up the reissues of U2's first three albums. And I've got a couple playlists of the dead to get up here, sooner or later. At the moment, I'm just happy that the internet service is working.

Beck, Modern Guilt

2008-07-29T13:24:00.000-05:00

With Modern Guilt, the word has been that Beck is taking on some new, more outward-looking lyrical themes. He's also partnered up with a new producer, the ridiculously successful Danger Mouse (Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz, The Grey Album). Given all that, you'd expect the album to sound like something of a departure, but basically, it's a Beck album.

Some reviews have made a lot of the fact that with these songs, Beck is addressing the larger concerns of the world almost for the first time: the environment, war, and most other things that R.E.M. sing about. This is true, but the difference is subtler than you might think. That's because he's still using his characteristic approach--fairly oblique lyrics that suggest a larger context more than spell it out. Even seemingly overt lines where he talks about "these ice caps melting down," I'm inclined to take as at least partly metaphorical. He's still mostly singing about the world inside his head; it's just that a little more of the outside world seems to be seeping in.

Musically, it's not dissimilar from his 2005 album, Guero: moody and downbeat, but still intensely rhythmic and funky. I'm not sure the collaboration with Danger Mouse works out to be much at all. Most of the songs sound like Beck; a couple sound like Gnarls Barkley; and one--the psychedelic trip "Chemtrails"--sounds a lot like the Flaming Lips. For the most part I don't really hear these two artists making any interesting reaction happen between their styles. That's not to say that I don't like the music: "Youthless" has a great beat, and "Soul of a Man" delivers Beck's classic low-end noisefest. And there's a kind of peculiar side trip into '90s trip-hop and jungle with "Walls" and "Replica," which I like a lot.

Danger Mouse does annoy me occasionally, like when he brings the same lo-fi, overly compressed beats and Cliff's-Notes sixties grooves that he uses with Gnarls to "Gamma Ray" and the title track. Beck's music has always been about a big, expansive sound with lots of headspace and nuance; on one of his albums, those radio-dance tricks just sound flat and tinny.

Modern Guilt is fundamentally a good album, and with Beck part of the fun has always been hearing the results when he runs down the occasional blind alley. Personally, I'm partial to warmer, more open records like Sea Change and The Information. But I like Beck a lot, and this album is a worthy, if minor, addition to his catalog.

(Nearly) free Paul Westerberg album

2008-07-24T19:49:00.004-05:00

...And just in time for it to be (nearly) news. In case you haven't heard already, Paul Westerberg has just released a new album, 49:00, as a single-track download from the Amazon MP3 store, for the princely sum of 49 cents. But beware! You have to buy it using the "Buy MP3 album with 1 click" button to get the sweet price. If you download it as a "song," the fatcats jack up the price to 89 cents. What's that I hear? Is it "Fight Back!" gearing up for a revival?

Swingin' summer sounds

2008-07-18T22:45:00.001-05:00

To me, summer is a big music time: driving with the windows open (because my AC is broken), chilling outside with a cocktail, taking the iPod out for a walk in the nice weather. It's a time when a good playlist or an ass-kicking mix CD is sorely needed. Luckily, by June the year in music is in full swing, as it were. There's plenty of good stuff around to throw on your stereo. So, with that in mind, here are a few selections, in semi-particular order, that are rocking my playlist right now.

1.) Black Kids, "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You": This breezy little new wave number is still the best new song I've heard so far this year, and that's just the demo. You can watch the video of the album version on their website. Their debut album, Partie Traumatic, is coming out later this month, and I have high hopes for it.

2.) M83, "Kim & Jessie": Staying on the retro tip, this one is the purest distillation of M83's eighties worship on Saturdays = Youth. Any ten-second snippet should be enough to win you over. One of the few songs I've fallen in love with just from the iTunes preview.

3.) Lupe Fiasco, "Hip-Hop Saved My Life": Lupe delivers some of his best and most poignant lyrics over an irresistible melody. The song is about making it in the biz against the odds, but it captures something essential that will connect with anyone who loves hip-hop.

4.) James, "Whiteboy": Did you get Laid and then never see them again? Shame on you! Okay, I kind of didn't pick up the last couple James albums, either; and then I guess they broke up for a while. But thanks to Ben and Transatlantica, I know that they're back with a new album. You can't get it in the U.S. until the fall, but the single's on iTunes (and presumably elsewhere) right now, and it's fantastic--clever, boisterous, and exuberant.

5.) Coldplay, "Lost!": News to no one, I'm sure, but sometimes there's a reason why hit songs are hits; and like much of Coldplay's new album, this song manages to turn a pretty unconventional arrangement into a pop gem.

6.) Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline": The advance single, such as it was, for NIN's latest free album. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's one of Trent Reznor's most addictive compositions, with all the classic elements: dance beat, great guitar riff, lyrics about control with a hint of S&M.

7.) Erykah Badu, "The Cell": New Amerykah Pt. 1 isn't exactly a singles record, but amid the general flow of that extraordinarily great album, "The Cell" stands out as the grooviest and most sing-alongable. Some of the coolest beats of the year.

8.) The Raveonettes, "Blush": It's also kind of hard to pick a standout on an album like Lust Lust Lust, which is basically a methodical series of variations on the same musical and lyrical ideas. I keep coming back to "Blush," though, for its truly stupendous chorus, which perfectly captures the raw emotional component, the sadness, even, in the album's titular urge.

9.) Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart": The new Death Cab album hasn't really captured my attention all that well, but I'm still a big fan of the lead-off single, all eight minutes of it. I'm not an especially big fan of extended jams, but the slow, simmering build-up of tension here is absolutely right for the song.

10.) British Sea Power, "Waving Flags": The first line is, "You are astronomical fans of alcohol." How did they know?? These guys are definitely in the "more is more" musical camp, from the "U2? Minimalist wankers!" division. When they make it work, it's ecstatic. On this song, they make it work really well.

Girl Talk, Feed the Animals

2008-07-09T19:16:00.000-05:00

Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, loves music. A beat, a tune, a voice--it doesn't take much more than that to turn him on. It can be Air or Aphex Twin or Neutral Milk Hotel; but it can also be Kelly Clarkson or the Carpenters. He has particular weaknesses, it seems, for hip-hop, '80s pop, and '90s alternative rock. The new Girl Talk album is a celebration of all of those, everything in between, and a lot besides.

Feed the Animals (which you can download for free right now) picks up right where 2006's breakthrough masterpiece Night Ripper left off, corralling (reportedly) over 300 samples into a continuous, 14-track dancefloor brainfuck. It kicks off with UGK rapping over "Gimme Some Lovin'" by the Spencer Davis Group, and before the first track is over Pete Townshend, Sinead O'Connor, T.I., Lil Wayne, Temple of the Dog, Twisted Sister, and a couple dozen others have been through the blender. This continues for the next 45 minutes or so.

As before, there are easy moments of crowd-service novelties, like Jay-Z rapping over Radiohead, Busta Rhymes over the Police, Lil Wayne over the Chili Peppers, and so on. And as before, you aren't required to have a single thought in your head while you're enjoying this album: it's musical crack, pure concentrated beats and hooks. But also as before, there are a million different things going on in the interplay between the bits and pieces. Their combination is anything but random, and the DJ, while he may show the spirit of a teenage prankster, is one of the sharpest minds in music.

Gillis is the Mozart of the remix, and at times on Feed the Animals he's operating on half a dozen different levels. His favorite thing is to play hard against soft, bad-ass rap lyrics that seem oddly vulnerable when mixed with pop melancholy: he knows right where to deploy that Fleetwood Mac to maximum effect. Like all dance music, Girl Talk's plays to the hormones, so another important trick is the way he sloshes those up against each other: lust against loss, love against aggression, yearning against anger against pure cockiness. Along with everything else, this music is an emotional roller coaster. It's also funny as hell: clever editing gives us, "I wish that I had Jessie's girl" / "But I'd rather get some head."

The samples throw out a Zoo TV-like mishmash of subliminal messages--some of which are clearly intended, some of which can't have been. In one passage, M.I.A. chants a wordless chorus against a repeating loop of hip-hop sexism (no accident the M.I.A. song is "Boyz") before the tough guy gets bumped aside by the guitars of the Cranberries' "Dreams"--a weird and complicated moment of girl power. Elsewhere Gillis first finds the rage in Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" by interspersing a guitar blast from Nine Inch Nails' "Wish," followed by frustrated sexuality when a "Work it, work it" chant loops over the chorus. When Nu Shooz's new wave hit "I Can't Wait" works its way into Missy Elliott's "Work It," we see--or at least think we do--a strange shared lineage revealed between the two. A hopeless dork like me can't help wondering if it was intentional that Gillis mixed together Nirvana's "Lithium" and Salt-n-Pepa's "Push It"--the former produced by Butch Vig, the latter famously sampled by Vig in his band Garbage's song of the same name. Okay, probably not intentional--but one of the many pleasures in listening to this album is that you hear new things like this, think about the music you're hearing a little differently, each time.

There's a distinct ebb and flow over the course of the album. It works as a musical performance, not simply a 45-minute collection of neat tricks. Appropriately enough, Gillis closes with a variety of beats and raps anchored by the piano, guitar, and "whoah-oh-oh-oh"s of Journey's power ballad "Faithfully," reminding us that holding up that lighter is not that different from putting your hands in the air and waving them around like you just don't care. It's all about loving the music.

Aimee Mann, @#%&*! Smilers

2008-07-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

After listening to Aimee Mann's new album, @#%&*! Smilers, you're likely to end up singing lines to yourself like "You love me like a dollar bill / You roll me up and trade me in," because you can't get the song out of your head. In the more recent, part of her career, Mann has become a master of delivering accusations, laments, and warnings wrapped up in irresistible choruses. That's not her only trick, though: in a broader sense, she's staked out her territory in the vast field of unfulfilled people, of lives coming up short.

Her last couple of albums have shown an increasingly tight focus. The Forgotten Arm (2005) was a concept album which, to be honest, I ignored. Before that, though, we had 2002's Lost in Space, a dark cycle of songs about compulsion and addiction. Smilers is a little bit broader in scope, and more bittersweet than hopeless. To me, it conveys the mood of the very end of the summer and beginning of fall: events have transpired, the season is turning, possibilities are closing themselves off, and the characters in these songs are looking back and wishing they'd done more with the time. A typical example is the singer of "31 Today," who seeks easy comfort in "fumbling around" with "some guy I knew," lamenting, "I thought my life would be different by now."

These songs live in the same dusty barrooms, empty streets, and one-bedroom apartments Paul Simon sketched in the seventies and early eighties in songs like "Still Crazy After All These Years," "Slip Slidin' Away," "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," and "Hearts and Bones." Mann sets the scene memorably in "The Great Beyond": "a street in a town where winning isn't sweet / and every win is the beginning of defeat." Her characters sit by themselves in the dark at the barstool, on the sofa, in a car on the highway. The light that comes in is from streetlights, the TV, or the low evening sun.

But there is some light, some freedom, to be found: in "Looking for Nothing," a group of friends at a carnival all come out for the worse, except for the narrator, who insists, "I ain't looking for nothing / Just spend the money I made / I ain't looking for nothing today." In not looking back or ahead, she seems to find some enjoyment in the moment--shedding light, maybe, on the mistake made by most of the other characters.

I'm probably making this sound dreary, which is a disservice to the music. As I said, Mann's talent is making this stuff catchy and fun to listen to. As always, she's generous with melody and swelling choruses. New wave synthesizers color a number of the songs--most effectively in "31 Today" and the single "Freeway." They help brighten the music and actually make Smilers a pretty good summer soundtrack; at the same time, the retro, nostalgic sound subtly highlights the lyrical theme of looking backward.

It's refreshing to see an artist 25 years into her career who shows no sign of running out of fresh ideas. She's fully invested in every one of the stories she tells here, and her empathy for the sad, misguided characters running around her album helps to make these songs compelling and maybe even enlightening.

Coldplay, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

2008-06-27T00:03:00.000-05:00

Coldplay's last album, 2005's X&Y, in addition to selling better than anything other than Mariah Carey that year, was the occasion for one of the biggest good-ol'-fashioned critical pile-ons in years. The main rap was that it prized musical "bigness" over distinctive songwriting. It's a point that Chris Martin himself seems to more or less agree with these days, and the band's willingness to learn from its mistakes is commendable. Their new, huge album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, is easily their most inventive and adventurous. It's also the best and freshest thing they've done since their 2000 debut, Parachutes.

Mind you, Viva has zilch in common with Parachutes, musically. Coldplay have long since left behind the spare, acoustic arrangements and intimate vocals of their early days. They're an arena rock band now, and whether you like that or not, at least give them props for throwing themselves into it whole-heartedly. Personally, I've never had a problem with it: it's good that there's someone out there carrying the flag for rock and roll in the pop world. If we can't get teenagers listening to Coldplay, how are they ever going to find their way to Radiohead, Pink Floyd, or the Beatles? X&Y's songs might have blended into each other after a while, but they made a powerful sound, and a lot of people noticed. On the new album, Coldplay try to blow those people's minds a little bit.

To help them do it, they brought on board Brian Eno, a man who at the very least keeps things unpredictable in the studio. As many, many other people have pointed out, this is not an Achtung Baby-scale reinvention. This is Coldplay using their signature musical elements--the piano, the voice, the bombast--as a point of departure, guiding us in a rather friendly way towards new sounds and song structures. The transition is gentle rather than jarring. But if the band haven't dismantled and reassembled their sound from scratch, neither are they timid. This is all recognizable as Coldplay, but no two songs sound much the same, and almost none would fit in on any of their previous albums. If there's a unifying musical concept, it's that anything goes.

The lead-off track, "Life in Technicolor," a trancey instrumental, bleeds into the stately, gothic "Cemeteries of London"; then the tempo picks up for "Lost!," an unlikely anthem built on a tribal-sounding drum pattern and classic Eno organ chords. The middle part of the album, though, is where things get really interesting. A trio of conceptual suites begins with "42," which swings from familiar Coldplay piano balladry into the sort of martial ambience heard on Eno's collaborations with David Bowie, before finally bursting out into a prog-rock chorus. "Lovers in Japan" prays open-heartedly for world peace over a generous melody, then basks in the mellow "Reign of Love," with which it shares a CD track. Next, the surprisingly vampy "Yes" bumps up against "Chinese Sleep Chant," in which Martin's vocals are almost completely overrun by the guitars. At about this point, we could do with a pop single, and the bouncy, orchestral title track obliges. After that, it's the dourly political "Violet Hill," the wistful "Strawberry Swing," and "Death and All His Friends," which is basically a Pink Floyd song.

I have to say that the first time through this disc was a real treat, as each new song opened up a completely different dimension of the album's, and the band's, sound. Coldplay's music has always been enjoyable; here it's genuinely exciting. There's a kinetic energy carrying through this album. The songs are nimble and light on their feet, and under Eno's guidance they create a three-dimensional headspace that few contemporary records bother with.

No, Coldplay are not U2--who for most of their career have fundamentally been an artsy band playing chicken with the mainstream; and lyrically, Martin has only made it about to the level of Sting on a decent day (better than "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da," but a bit short of "All This Time"). But give Coldplay credit: they're an avowed pop band trying to push the mainstream in intriguing and unexpected directions. More importantly, their record sounds great, and so far is getting better with repeated listening.

More free love with Girl Talk

2008-06-20T13:01:00.003-05:00

My year suddenly just got a little bit better: Gregg Gillis has put his new Girl Talk album, Feed the Animals, up for download! It's a tiered, name-your-price deal that splits the difference between Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Basically, you can have it for free if you want, and you can also pre-order a CD if you want.

Girl Talk's last album, Night Ripper, is always a perfect reminder to me of why I love music. If you love music, you should go download Feed the Animals right now.

Playlists of the Dead: Jonas Salk

2008-06-13T19:26:00.000-05:00

Jonas Edward Salk (1914 - 1995) was a biologist who in the 1950s developed the first widely used vaccine against the polio virus. He continued active research, including some early attempts to vaccinate against HIV, until his retirement in 1985. His retirement years, he is quick to point out, coincided with the rise of hardcore hip-hop. He joins us today for the latest installment of Playlists of the Dead.

Holla one time, y'all, J-Sizzle is in the house. You know I never even registered a patent for my vaccine? I had some mad accomplishments in my day, but I never really took time to enjoy the returns on my efforts--by which I mean, as my old mentor Basil O'Connor put it, bitches and riches. I guess it's a little late now, but that don't mean I can't put some haters in their place. Call me old school, I guess, but I just happen to believe that these sucker MCs need to be taken down a peg.

1.) LL Cool J, "I'm Bad": Is you, L? Is you really? Because let me tell you, I know a little something about "bad." As in, "6,000 deaths and 27,000 people paralyzed in 1916." Polio was a hard core gangsta, and who put him down? J 2 tha S, that's right. You call yourself "Jack the Ripper"? Motherfucker, Jack the Ripper ain't shit to polio.

2.) Kanye West, "Stronger": 'Ye says, "That that don't kill me can only make me stronger." Well, you know one thing that won't kill you, Kanye? Polio. That's right. Who did that, bitch? That's what I thought.

3.) Ice-T, "New Jack Hustler": Ice, when you say, "All I love is my dope and dead presidents," don't even front like the dope ain't the Salk Vaccine and the dead president ain't Franklin D. "My Ass Is Paralyzed from Polio" Roosevelt. I know you been schooled in history and were like, "Damn, why couldn't J-dawg have dropped that killa vaccine a little sooner?" It was the thirties, G. I was in high school just tryin' to bust a nut. Pour some liquor for my dog FDR.

4.) Jay-Z, "99 Problems": Hov, if you're counting a viral infection of your central nervous system, then you missed the 411. You got ninety-eight problems, son. Or if it's ninety-nine, then poliomyelitis ain't one.

5.) Tone Loc, "Funky Cold Medina": Respect. On the real, this cut is straight up, yo. I won't even front.

6.) OutKast, "The Way You Move": A'ight, a'ight, it's pretty tight: "I love the waaay you mooove." But yo, how do you know your girl even could move if not for my killed-virus vaccine that eradicated polio. Oh, what's that? You been listening to that hater Albert Sabin? Hell naw, his vaccine ain't shit. Don't believe nothing from that little piss-pants.

I got a bunch more wack MCs I could take down, but y'all get the idea. SALK VACCINE IN THE CLUB! SALK VACCINE IN THE CLUB!

Nine Inch Nails, The Slip

2008-06-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

Now that Trent Reznor has fulfilled his obligation to Universal Music, he seems to be celebrating by releasing a ton of new music directly to fans, on his own terms. Like Prince before him, his "emancipation" has brought on a wave of new releases. In a notable difference from Prince, though, Reznor's been giving out the new tunes for free or not much more. Also, unlike the Purple One's string of mid-'90s releases, this stuff is actually worth paying for.

If the instrumental noodling of Ghosts I-IV didn't interest you, you might be glad to hear that The Slip, which you can download completely for free from Nine Inch Nails' website, is a rock album that more or less splits the difference between the electro-minimalism of Year Zero and the big beats and guitars of With Teeth. It's catchy, concise, and aggressive--in other words, perfect summer fodder for a NIN fan's car stereo.

If that sounds like a fairly modest artistic ambition coming from the band that last time out brought us a multimedia sci-fi industrial rock opera, maybe it is. But The Slip does what it does very well. Lyrically, most of the songs mine the same addiction/recovery territory as With Teeth, though they take a more direct approach. Where the predecessor reveled in self-loathing, the new album lays bare the addict's desperation. In "1,000,000" he wakes up on the floor, holds a gun in his mouth. The first single, "Discipline," pleads, "I need your help... Once I start I cannot stop myself." The album ends with "Demon Seed," a series of repeated mantras that form a struggle: "I am trying to behave myself" versus "I will... destroy everything I can."

Which brings me to an interesting point. Although The Slip breaks no new musical ground, it does demonstrate an interesting trend of the past few years: Trent Reznor has actually become a pretty good lyricist. Ever since the days of "Gray would be the color if I had a heart" and "My moral standing is lying down," his lyrics have been generally written off as amped-up teenage poetry. But Pretty Hate Machine was written by a guy in his early twenties, and he has been getting steadily better over the almost two decades since. With Teeth was a big step forward, taking a wiser, more adult perspective on the old struggles and angst. These new songs, like "Discipline" and the lonely and subdued "Echoplex," thoughtfully express a complicated set of problems, needs, and fears. After years of shouting and screaming for control and isolation, now Reznor finds that being left alone and claiming sole power over himself is no good for him: he needs help, he needs friends, and he needs someone to keep him in line. Otherwise, he slips back into self-destruction. This stuff definitely operates on a different level from the old screaming slaves and marching pigs.

Have I mentioned that the album is free? And that actually you get a lot of cool stuff with your download--like a PDF booklet, unique artwork for each song, and complete lyrics in the metadata? If you like Nine Inch Nails or are at all interested in their music, there's no reason on earth not to go download this album.

Portishead, Third

2008-06-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

By now many, many glowing and insightful reviews have been written of the new Portishead album, almost all of them by people with more of an investment in the band than me. I don't feel that there's much I can add, but it is worth mentioning that Third is fantastic, one of the best things I've heard this year, and well worth your fourteen bucks.

Well, call that last point a maybe, because it's definitely not for everyone. It's noisy and abrasive, and spends as much time frustrating your expectations as it does rewarding them. There are points where it sounds like you must be hearing a mastering glitch, and it seems to test the limits of my car's speakers. Seriously--parts of it sound like absolute shit on there.

The brilliance in this album is in how Portishead manage to sound so good by sounding bad. Third revels in noise and clatter, and offers one of rock and roll's first and most basic thrills: it sounds like something that nice people aren't supposed to enjoy.

There's more to it than that, of course: the music's dirtiness and ugliness are rather drastically counterpointed by the fragility and grace in Beth Gibbons's singing, and the powerful emotionality of her lyrics. The end result is a surreal trip through a truly unique group headspace. You'll be hard-pressed to find something else that sounds quite like this music. Which is probably for the best. A little of it goes a long way, and it's hard to imagine anyone topping what Portishead has done here.

Death Cab For Cutie, Narrow Stairs

2008-05-28T21:37:00.000-05:00

Lots of good stuff has come out recently, and I've been on vacation and neglecting all of it. Death Cab For Cutie seems like as good a place as any to start on the backlog. Of course, Narrow Stairs has already been talked to death. As you may have heard, it's a bit of a departure for the band, but all the same I'd say that it's unlikely to either alienate existing fans or entice many new ones.

Basically, the album follows certain aspects of Death Cab's sound a bit further down the road than we've been before. It's a darker turn following the pop-oriented Plans--which, you might recall, was itself no ray of sunshine. Certainly Ben Gibbard and co. have devoted plenty of disc space to ruminating on mortality and sketching lives of quiet disappointment. The main difference here is that, on the best songs, the darkness feels deeper and resonates more strongly. There are no open-hearted love songs on Narrow Stairs. When Gibbard expresses devotion, it's in the creepy "I Will Possess Your Heart," a pulsing, bottom-heavy descendant of "Every Breath You Take." Elsewhere, on "Grapevine Fires," the album's point of view is neatly summed up: "It's only a matter of time before we all burn."

If Gibbard seems willing to go further down dark corridors on some of these songs (more on the others in a minute), he's well accompanied by band arrangements that feel looser and less fussy than anything on their past couple of albums. "I Will Possess Your Heart" is, again, an easy example with its four-minute instrumental lead-in, but listen also to songs like "Long Division" and "No Sunlight," which show a new energy and muscularity in the band's playing. For once it sounds like Gibbard's getting off on the music, rather than the band just illustrating his lyrics.

That's the story on the best songs, which I would say make up about a third of the album. Then there are a few like "Talking Bird" and "Cath..." that are more or less standard Death Cab fare, for better or for worse. I like standard Death Cab fare, so I've got no problem with them. Sadly, the album is rounded out by a couple of stinkers that make you question the band's musical judgment. Titles like "Your New Twin Sized Bed" and "The Ice Is Getting Thinner" pretty much tell the whole story--literally. The songs are nothing but pointless belaborings of bad clichés. "You look so defeated lying there in your new twin sized bed" might work as a first line to a different song, if it was a really good one; but do we really need to hear three verses about the old queen that's out in the alley now, and how the box springs on the other side stayed like new all these years? I nearly just fell asleep typing that. On songs like these, Gibbard is every bit as cloying as he miraculously avoids being most of the time, even with that adenoidal voice and nice-guy romanticism. You really have to wonder how an accomplished, established songwriter could ever think these songs are anything but embarrassing.

But that's what skip buttons are for, I guess. Narrow Stairs's better moments outnumber its bad ones, and overall the songs show a confidence that pays off now and promises more interesting things to come.

The Roots, Rising Down

2008-05-19T22:34:00.000-05:00

A good way to cheer someone up is to say, "Hey, there's a new Roots album out." That's because the Roots are awesome, and anything they do is going to be good. Their new album, Rising Down, is good, but it's not one of the best things they've done. I can pay it the somewhat backhanded compliment of saying that where it fails is where the Roots are less in evidence--which is actually an alarmingly large portion of the album.

Musically, Rising Down is genuinely exciting. It takes the darker, harder sound that first appeared on 2006's Game Theory several steps further, incorporating some heavy, funky synth tones to beef up the sound, especially on the low end. Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson goes completely apeshit on the drums this time, and the collective effect is, in the classical sense, awesome. The sound of this record slams you up against the wall in the same way that Public Enemy's classic recordings do; also like those Bomb Squad productions, there are a lot of intricacies to discover on repeated listenings.

Lyrically, it takes off from some of Game Theory's more political moments and mines more deeply. The title is apparently a reference to William T. Vollmann's seven-volume treatise on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down (wisely, they keep the album to about 45 minutes). There's a powerful sense of urgency in the choruses, and lead MC Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter has never breathed fire like this before--again, I'm tempted to draw comparisons to Public Enemy and Chuck D.

So what's the problem? The next time you're at the store, take a look at the back of the CD case. Look carefully and you'll see the track listing. It's a little hard to spot because it's buried beneath the enormous list of guest rappers. They've got heavy hitters like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common; they've got their own prodigal Root, Malik B; and they've got their whole extended posse, including Dice Raw, Porn, Peedi Peedi, and a bunch of others. These people are all over the album, to the point that Black Thought is relegated to simply being the guest rapper with the most lines. The first rapper we hear on the album is Mos Def. In fact, only one full song is free of guest vocals--the incendiary "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)." Not coincidentally, it's probably the best cut.

Black Thought seems to take some flak from reviewers (I just like saying and typing his name), but I've always thought he was great. He's got style, flow, humor, and a sharp tongue, and he undeniably is the group's personality. Say what you want about the guy; he's magnetic. The fury with which he raps about "changin' my outfit" on Game Theory's "Here I Come"; the wordless chorus of The Tipping Point's "Don't Say Nuthin'"; lines like "my brain unstable and I'm just too handsome": he is as colossally entertaining as he is--now more than ever--absolute hellfire on the mic. But here, squeezed in between the endless parade of guests, he doesn't get to stamp that personality on these songs. Especially on the ones where he sits out the first verse, he ends up just playing off of a tone that someone else has already set. Why on earth the band would choose to shove their defining voice so far to the back is beyond me.

With the twin powers of Thought's and ?uestlove's unchained fury backed by the rest of the band's increasing funkiness and flexibility, Rising Down should be their best album; instead, it winds up not even sounding very much like the Roots for long stretches. The guest rappers aren't bad at all, but the album sounds a lot more like a The Roots Present... compilation than an actual Roots album. And if you are the Roots, why in God's name would you not want to act like it?

Daniel Lanois, Here Is What Is

2008-05-14T13:27:00.001-05:00

For my money, one of the greatest buried treasures in music is hiding in plain sight: the solo career of Daniel Lanois. Best known as the producer of career-defining albums for the likes of U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, he's also quietly released a handful of his own albums over the past twenty years. The newest is Here Is What Is.

Lanois albums tend to be atmospheric, sonically dense but not overwrought, lyrically spare, and possessed of a subtle edge, a dark undercurrent. They feature generous helpings of pedal steel guitar, and tell stories about people seeking redemption, reaching for beauty, pursuing love. Here Is What Is is basically all of those things, but much moreso than before. It has the sound of a definitive Lanois album, and that's clearly no accident.

This CD is the companion to a documentary film of the same name. I haven't seen it, but from what I understand the movie is basically the making of the album. Which makes the album, in a weird way, about the making of itself. These songs are so quintessential of the artist that the first time through you're tempted to see the whole thing as a rehash. But there's a totally different agenda to this album than any of its precursors. Lanois's previous solo releases have been essentially modest--collections of short stories, vignettes, and mood pieces, little windows into the musical world inside the artist's head. Here Is What Is has a clear sense of ambition: it poses fundamental questions about the nature and source of music, of beauty in general.

The album's 18 tracks are split about evenly between instrumentals and vocal pieces, between fully realized productions and what sometimes sound like improvisational sketches--music at various stages of construction. Here and there we get snippets of dialogue between Lanois and his longtime mentor, Brian Eno, which form a thematic skeleton for the music. Lanois tells Eno that he's trying to show "the source of the art, rather than everything that surrounds the art." A subtle tension develops between Eno's "anti-romantic" view that art comes entirely from within us and arises largely by chance, and Lanois's own belief that making music takes him to "a sacred place." Of course, this opposition suggests even bigger questions: Eno declares himself an atheist and says that there's nothing outside of us; Lanois responds that for him, "it's always praise."

Amid the philosophical debate, piano notes trickle by, a pedal steel guitar keens at the upper registers, at times overtaken by an avalanche of percussion. Lanois makes little effort to disguise the physical limitations of his voice, but he knows how to use it to the best effect. On songs like the insistently rhythmic "Duo Glide," he does little more than whisper in our ear, a voice calling from the edge of the dream world the music inhabits. The specter of mortality recurs throughout: "Where will I be," he asks, "when that old trumpet sounds?" And in his interpretation of a gospel standard, a grizzled voice reminds us, "This may be the last time you hear me sing," lending an urgency to the questions of beauty, faith, joy, and love.

Lanois and Eno pose the questions, but it's left to us to come to our own answers. The guide offered is the music--the process, the thing itself, and what it becomes in the listener's ears. Is art sacred or secular? Can we trace the origin of its meaning? Does beauty have a source? Playing his songs, Lanois says, Here is what is. Make of it what you will.

R.E.M.'s Up: an appreciation

2008-05-07T20:59:00.001-05:00

As usual, a new album by a favorite band has sent me back for a fresh trip through their old stuff. It's hard to pick a better band for this than R.E.M., who have, I think, about the most consistently great catalog in rock--certainly among acts with ten albums or more. Enough praises have been sung about Murmur, Document, and Automatic for the People to swell Michael Stipe's bulbous head to many times its natural size; but for me, the R.E.M. album that may have turned out to be the most meaningful is the little red-headed stepchild, 1998's Up.

This one is not without its loyal defenders, but overall it has a pretty bad name with critics and fans. It's easy to see why: having just lost Bill Berry, the band that said they'd never continue with less than all four members went back into the studio without a drummer. They took the opportunity to throw a bunch of new ingredients into their sound that they'd never used before, most notably liberal doses of synthesizers and electronic percussion and noise. The songs ranged from downbeat to turgid, and there were fifteen of them. Just about everything that seemed comfortably R.E.M.-ish was either absent or pushed far to the background. At that particular time in my life, though, nothing could have spoken to me more powerfully.

When Up came out in the fall of 1998, I was about six months out of college, living at home. After a several-month period in which my English degree had failed to win me gainful employment and my resources had dwindled to practically nil, I'd improbably landed a job in information technology for a largish corporation. I was working nine to five in a cubicle and making what seemed to me at the time like a lot of money. After four years in college-town bubble-world I was back in Chicago, a large place in which I was completely unimportant. My friends all had jobs and were starting careers. I had wanted to be a writer, to live an artistic lifestyle; instead I was tumbling headlong into yuppiedom. My adult life was starting to take shape, but I wasn't really sure what I wanted it to be, or if I had any control over it.

The rap on Up is that R.E.M. sound lost, in transition, in search of a viable way forward. They throw a bunch of new ideas at the wall just to see what sticks. That uncertainty, that tentativeness--which understandably turned many listeners off--hit me right where I lived. Having been forced out of being a four-piece rock combo, the band decided to throw everything up for grabs. They brought in electronics; they brought in session players; they played each other's instruments; they played each song in a completely different style--some organic and fully realized, some tinny and electronic, some barely demos. In interviews, they played up the sense of open possibility, but both the lyrics and the music betrayed the powerful anxiety that came along with that. If your music could be anything at all, then Jesus Christ--how are you ever going to figure out what you want it to be?

If my life, suddenly, looked like it could be anything at all--if in spite of any plan I might ever have made, I had the option of going with the program, putting in my hours, pocketing my money, and living comfortably doing something that I had very little interest in--then how on earth was I going to negotiate all those compromises and trade-offs? The search for identity and dignity in the face of a huge and disinterested world is compellingly articulated in songs like "Walk Unafraid" and "Falls to Climb." The peaceful, electronic drone of "Airportman," with the lazy drip-drop of its keyboard melody, was the sound of my autopilot mornings. The desperate desire of "You're in the Air"--that feeling of drowning--was something I knew well. The frustrated yearning of "Daysleeper"--the singer who "cried the other night... I can't even say why"--that was me.

Which is not to say that I was wading through endless oceans of angst this whole time. I was enjoying myself, and genuinely excited by the possibilities that adult life had opened up for me. But I was in an extremely uncertain space, often out of my depth. Up goes to some pretty dark, pretty desperate places, and if I hadn't necessarily been to all of them, I could see them around the corner. They were out there, among many possibilities. I could be a failure, like the melancholy drunk in "Sad Professor." I could be the pathetic, grating loser of "The Apologist," simpering around, preying on friends, trying to turn my shortcomings into catharsis.

The most powerful song to me on Up is "Hope." Over a nervous electronic beat and a kitchen sink full of random noise and melody, Stipe drones out a manifesto of desperation: "You want to trust the doctors." "You want to trust religion." "You want to climb the ladder / You want to go forever." "You're looking for salvation and you're looking for deliverance." Several times he repeats, "They're saying don't be frightened" or "You're thinking don't be frightened." He returns also to twin desires, "You want to go out Friday" and "You want to go forever." Making it one day to the next and living forever--both looking alternately like pipe dreams and tantalizingly close. That Stipe would choose to title this morass of confusion "Hope" made me look at the stakes of real life in a new way.

Up does offer a couple redemptive moments. The Brian Wilson homage "At My Most Beautiful" and the overpoweringly pretty "Why Not Smile" offer a purity of feeling, an open and unashamed heart, that at least partly answers the groundlessness of many of the other songs. And while "I'm Not Over You" comes out of a moment of loss, the bareness of the recording--just Stipe strumming his amateur best on an acoustic guitar and barely murmuring, broken-voiced, into the mic--is perhaps the warmest, most emotionally generous moment on the album.

The musical sound of Up is all over the place. It's striking that, in turning to electronics, the band completely sidestepped what would have been the obvious path--very much in vogue at the time--of replacing their rock drummer with danceable beats. The percussion on these songs is usually tinny, as are the synth tones. Rather than creating an artificially full sound, the electronics call attention to what's missing in Berry's wake, to accentuate the hollowness in the music. For the band, this album could not have been about anything other than Berry's departure. It had to be troubled; it had to be halfway; it had to be broken. Its triumph is in how R.E.M. took this reality into the studio--by all accounts with very little confidence left in their future as a band--and created such a compelling, evocative work. Very little about Up feels deliberate. It seems to almost purely reflect these three musicians relying on nothing but instinct and luck, and because of that it connected with me as the most intimate music I'd heard from them.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. I know more than a couple people around my age, who were going through similar things at the same time, for whom Up was an important, era-defining album. I'd like to think that time will be kinder to it than the short-term response. Many of the criticisms made of it are absolutely valid. Just about anything else the band has done is more fun to listen to. But for me, as much as I love the undisputed classics like Automatic and Murmur, I think that nothing this band has done will ever have quite the personal impact as this weird, desperate, broken little album.

How we all benefit from Trent Reznor's sobriety

2008-05-05T20:50:00.001-05:00

Of all the adjectives I might choose to describe Nine Inch Nails, I never would've expected that "prolific" would be one. But out of the blue, just a couple weeks after the retail release of the two-disc Ghosts I - IV, which was itself barely a year after Year Zero, which incidentally came less than two years after With Teeth, Trent Reznor has put yet another new album, The Slip, up as a completely free, no-strings-attached download on NIN's website. So add "generous" to the adjective list, too.

I'm not being snarky in saying that this shows how it pays to get off the heroin. I recall reading Mr. Reznor himself saying that once he got sober he found himself with a lot more time on his hands, and chose to fill it by recording a lot of music. I haven't listened to The Slip yet (reportedly it's more of a traditional NIN album with vocals and such, as opposed to the instrumental pieces on Ghosts), but the track record so far is pretty impressive, so I'm looking forward to it. At the risk of this turning into a fan site, I guess I'll review the thing sometime soon.

M83, Saturdays = Youth

2008-04-29T21:42:00.001-05:00

I'm not overly knowledgeable about M83, a French keyboard band consisting these days of one Anthony Gonzalez and whoever he feels like playing with. I read a couple reviews of Saturdays = Youth when it came out, which generally seemed to agree that the album sounded exactly like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie. This set off my "totally my bag" alert system, so I decided to check it out. And I can happily confirm that there are at least two or three songs on the disc that could be dropped seamlessly into The Breakfast Club without anyone noticing the difference. Take a second and look over there at the cover, for godsake.

To put it in the simplest terms, you're going to hear a lot of keyboard washes, melodic guitar riffs, breathy vocals, and echoed-up drums. Gonzalez's roots in more contemporary electronic music peek out occasionally, but for the most part serve as subtle background elements--some electronic ambience here, a less retro drum machine beat there. If you were listening to the radio in 1984 and remember the experience fondly, this is an hour of pure ear candy.

So musically, Saturdays = Youth is an overt homage to '80s dream pop and shoegaze; more broadly it's a celebration of (duh) youth. In the liner notes Gonzalez makes a point to thank "all the friends, music, movies, joints and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!" Given that it seems to be such a personal project to him, it might seem a bit odd that the twentysomething would choose such a wholesale appropriation of someone else's vision of teenage romance--in particular one that originates from a time when he was in preschool. But this music isn't about being a teenager so much as it is about ideas and mythologies about teenagers.

A useful distinction to make is that those '80s bands Gonzalez is copping from were singing to teenagers about the adult world that floated just slightly beyond their reach, while M83 is singing, it would seem, to people in their twenties and thirties about the teenage world that's slipped just past theirs. And in fact, as a grade schooler in the '80s, what I saw in brat pack movies and heard in songs on the radio created a mythology in my head of what being a teenager was going to be all about, as it obviously did for Gonzalez. (For instance, the "Graveyard Girl" wants nothing so much as "a sister like Molly Ringwald.") So this whole thing is about different sets of rose-colored glasses, their sights all converging on those endlessly romanticized years between fourteen and twenty. "Kim & Jessie" doesn't sound exactly like something by the Dream Academy; it sounds like the way we remember that music.

Gonzalez's accomplishment is more than having simply replicated a vintage style of music; it's that he's managed to summon, at least for me, the hyperreal teenage world that I imagined as a kid, measured real life against as a teen, and have been all mushy and nostalgic for ever since. Saturdays = Youth takes a shot, at least, at transcendence. A few times it hits; often it gets close; occasionally it misses. But there's such a charm to the earnestness of an album like this that even when it falls short of its mark you're inclined to be generous with it. The droning, 11-minute closer, "Midnight Souls Still Remain," is wholly unnecessary, but I imagine Gonzalez intending it as a soundtrack for going to sleep at the end of our long night in his dreamworld. "Skin of the Night" might repeat its chorus a few too many times, but you may as well just settle in, close your eyes, and see where your imagination takes you.

Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend

2008-04-26T11:49:00.001-05:00

To the credit of current "it" band Vampire Weekend, I'll say this: I like their album better when I'm listening to it than when I'm reading about it. The group deserves approximately none of the gushing praise that's been lavished upon them by blogs and critics, and when measuring them against it I end up saying to myself, "Really? This?" But still, I do catch myself humming their songs all the damn time.

This quartet of unabashedly preppy Columbia grads plays short, perky tunes about English grammar and life in Cape Cod over percussion that sometimes shows an African pop influence. That last element is the main aphrodisiac for the band's legion of boosters, with common reference points including Peter Gabriel, early Talking Heads, and Paul Simon's Graceland. All models worth emulating, but the influence, like everything else about this music, is very superficial.

In interviews, the band are actually a bit snarky about their would-be Western precursors. Apparently a couple years ago they started buying Afro-pop compilations at the record store, which no one in college has ever done before. The important thing here is that David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, and Paul Simon all have a solid understanding of rhythm, how it works musically and emotionally, how it can drive or counterpoint a melody or lyric, how it can evoke a musical and cultural subtext and completely change the context of a song. Vampire Weekend, on the other hand, use rhythm most often as a party trick, something to make a tune sound a little different, mainly for novelty value. The African influences are in no way intrinsic to the music; they're tacked on. The overall effect comes a lot closer to the mambo remix of Coldplay's "Clocks" that I keep hearing on the radio than to Remain in Light or anything out of the Caribbean.

Still, the rhythmic tricks are at the very least cute, and certainly not unpleasant. They work, as far as they go. The real deficit in this music is its almost frightening vacuousness. Singer Ezra Koenig's lyrics are filled with effete literary references and clever turns of phrase, but beneath all that they really aren't about a damn thing. The band's whole musical and lyrical approach is so tongue-in-cheek that they never put anything on the line. There's no emotion, no tension, no real insight, almost nothing that feels genuine; just relentless cleverness. If you translate the Honors English lyrics into plain language, this band is basically Sugar Ray. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but let's not kid ourselves about what league they're in.

And here I've gotten into slamming them, which is easy to do but not entirely their fault. I really think the hype is going to kill them. In fact, I half suspect that part of the reason rock snobs love them so much today is that they're so ripe for evisceration next year, when everyone inevitably decides to turn on them--which is where rock snobs derive their purest pleasure. But as I said before, when I put the album on it's hard not to enjoy it. It's perfect music to listen to while eating breakfast or washing dishes, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

I'll also say this for the album: it has a strong finish. The backbeat on "I Stand Corrected" is nothing new, but for once the rhythm serves to get us off rather than dazzle us with its fancy dancing. Combined with a solid bassline and some backwards guitars and/or keyboards, it makes for a pretty cool groove. "Walcott" is instantly catchy, and its longing to "get out of Cape Cod tonight" sounds like the most genuine expression on the album (though apparently it's really just an in-jokey reference to some goofy movie they made). And "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" sets up a compelling tension between the hard-slap rhythm and bass and the high, sing-songy vocals. As Koenig sings about temptation and corruption, the guitars, keyboards, and strings come in like a crushing tidal wave of opulence. It's both pretty and sinister, and suggests that if everyone crawls back out of Vampire Weekend's anus for a while, they might be able to come up with something good.

Now you see him, now you don't

2008-04-22T20:27:00.005-05:00

I wasn't going to post anything about this because I never particularly envisioned Morse Music as a place for rock and roll obituaries. But what the hell, I've been thinking about it so I might as well at least mark the fact that Danny Federici, keyboardist for the E Street Band, died last Thursday. I'm 31, so I didn't grow up and into middle age with Bruce and the boys like some people did. The fact that an E Street member has died for the first time doesn't exactly mark a change of era for me. It does get me thinking about the E Street Band, though, and what makes them special.

"Phantom Dan" Federici was one of two keyboardists in the E Street Band--a group whose membership ranged between seven and nine, counting Bruce. Their sound, even when it was lean, has always been big. They were assembled to play the grandiose rock and roll epics that were spinning out of Springsteen's head in the '70s--songs that required a couple guitars, a piano, a glockenspiel, a saxophone, some strings from time to time, the whole crew on backing vocals. Roy Bittan was the main man on the piano: that's him laying the foundations on "Thunder Road," "Backstreets," and "Racing in the Street."

Federici specialized in the esoteric instruments like accordion, and in the more textural sounds of the Hammond organ. More often than not he provided the coloring rather than the lines. But in the artistry with which he approached that work, he may have defined the band's sound better than anyone. In a maximalist rock band, the guy adding the subtleties and shading can spell the difference between Sgt. Pepper and, oh, let's say Asia. One of my favorite Springsteen songs is "Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Bruce's unabashedly romantic lyrics and the expansive melody are one of the most perfect expressions of summer I've ever heard. But Danny Federici's turn on the accordion unquestionably makes the song. That lazy boardwalk tune is summer; it's everything the song is about. It's impossible to imagine the song without it. (In fact, on Bruce's website, you can check out some video of Danny making a surprise final appearance onstage with the band just a few weeks ago to play "Fourth of July, Asbury Park.")

And if the accordion has limited utility even in the biggest of rock bands, a good organ player never goes out of style. Bittan might set up "Racing in the Street" with his stately piano line, but it's Federici's closing Hammond lament that runs around in your head for hours after the song's over. It's that spooky whistling in "Wreck on the Highway" that won't let go. It's that organ grease that puts "Hungry Heart" over the top.

On Bruce's more recent "reunion" albums with the band, Brendan O'Brien's production has tended to take "big" to extremes, cranking the volume of everything up to the top, often at the expense of the separation between instruments that really showed off the intricacies of the band arrangements on earlier albums. Even so, O'Brien was clearly a Federici fan, and hangs major portions of songs like "You're Missing," "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)," and "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" on Phantom Dan's shoulders. The most classic E Street moments on those later albums are the ones where the organ and keyboards come out front to play.

I know virtually nothing about Danny Federici's personal life and history, save that he battled melanoma for the last three years of his life and kept playing with the band for as long as he possibly could. That makes me glad. I can't think of a much better way for a life to turn out than to be a part of something that you want to keep going right up until the end.

Playlists of the Dead: Calamity Jane

2008-04-19T16:41:00.000-05:00

Martha Jane Cannary (1852 - 1903) was a famed frontierswoman who claimed association, to varying degrees of credibility, with Wild Bill Hickok, Gen. George Custer, and others. As a frontierswoman, she was known for being able to outdrink and outcuss any man. Like most drunks, Jane enjoyed a rousing tune. She joins us to share her selections in our latest installment of Playlists of the Dead.

Calamity fuckin' Jane here, now get me a fuckin' drink and I'll teach y'all li'l boys and girls how to listen to some fuckin' music.

1.) Journey, "Any Way You Want It": First things fuckin' first--Jane Cannary likes real music with balls and a fuckin' cock. I don't listen to no fuckin' Say-leen Dee-fuckin'-on. These boys in Journey know what-for with their sangin' and their geetars and such, and don't you say fuckin' diff'rnt.

2.) Van Halen, "Running With the Devil": Now you may detect that you are pickin' up a kinda proclivity on the part of Calamity fuckin' Jane, and you're right. I'm a '70s and '80s kinda gal. I mean 1870s and '80s, but music's like whatchacall cyclical, it's all kinda the same. Anyway, the music ain't hurt by them tight chaps on mister David Lee Roth. Kinda makes a gal lonesome, know what I'm sayin'. BARTENDER! ROUND FUCKIN' THREE ALREADY! Chrissake.

3.) Whitesnake, "Here I Go Again": So Custer says, "Jane, we need to get these fuckin' maps to Fort fuckin' Laramie all the way up the goddamn river and none'a these cocksuckers is man enough to do it. Jane, will you swim that fuckin' river and save our sorry asses from these fuckin' Injuns?" So I says, "Here I go again, Gen'ral," that's what I fuckin' says. Down the only fuckin' road I ever fuckin' known. SIDDOWN, son, I ain't done tellin' my fuckin' story!

4.) White Lion, "When the Children Cry": This is like my part o' my playlist for sosh-- sush-- soshal 'sponsibility. Y'know, fer the kids. HEY YOU FUGGIN KIDS! STAY IN FUKKIN SCHOOL!

5.) The Scorpions, "Rock You Like a Hurricane": When I warnt yer to shtop pourin' my fuggin whisky I'll tell yer my own goddamn self! Read my lips: 'NO-THER FUC-KIN' DRANK, you FUC-KIN' COCK-SUCK-KER! Now lemme tell y'about the Scorpions cuz I seen my share out in the fuckin' desert. One time I wakes up under a wagon outside'a Deadwood with a half a roasted bird on my chest and flies circlin' every which way, and some ornery little critter comes up with his fuckin' tail out ready to stang Calamity Jane and I says, "HEY, HERE I AM YEW LITTLE FUCKIN' COCKSUCKIN' SCORPION! HERE I AM!" So's thass what this song makes me think on.

6.) Foreigner, "Cold As Ice": And there ain't no better cure fer fuggin hangover than water what's cold as fuggin ice, which fuckin' means I'M DONE WHEN I TELLS YER I'M FUGGIN DONE! Ain't no barkeep these days knows fer shit, an' if Wild Bill was here he'd show ya what-fer. But he ain't.

7.) Skid Row, "I Remember You": This one's fer mah Bill, shot down by that fuggin coward I fuggin chased all the way clear to Wyoming with a goddamn meat cleaver, don't say I fuggin didn't! My fuggin Bill, fuck fuck, I REMEMBER YEW BILL! Hold up, I jes' need t'go lie under that table fer a minute. Don't put no fuckin' shit music on...

8.) Styx, "Come Sail Away": ...

9.) Weird Al Yankovic, "Like a Surgeon": ...

10.) Elton John, "Tiny Dancer": ...

11.) Lenny Kravitz, "Dig In": ...

12.) Rihanna, "Umbrella": Whuhuwha? Hey! Do not wake a fuckin' lady when she's sleepin' off her fuckin' drink--HEY! WHO PUT THIS FUGGIN SHIT ON THE GODDAMN STEREO? Calamity Jane don't listen to no fuckin' bullshit about no fuckin' um-ber-ell-a! Outta my way, I gotta piss.

13.) The Carpenters, "Superstar": Hey, I said TURN THAT FUCKIN' SHIT OFF! To be fuckin' continued, soon's I find my goddamn pants! You best start runnin' now!

The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely

2008-04-14T12:44:00.003-05:00

Turns out I don't really have a lot to say about this album. It's alright, I guess, but it has yet to make much of an impression on me. I've said sometimes that no single person has done more for rock & roll in the '00s than Jack White, and I still think that may be true. But I wouldn't use Consolers of the Lonely to make that argument.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the Raconteurs haven't established a musical reason for existing. It's probably just a lark for White and Detroit buddy Brendan Benson to work together. That's all fine and good, but I'm not sure what the band is really about. Broken Boy Soldiers was good fun precisely because it felt like a toss-off: they played around with blues rock, power pop, even a touch of emo from time to time. It gave the impression of a bunch of guys jamming in their basement. It was modest and all over in about 40 minutes.

Consolers of the Lonely, on the other hand, is fourteen tracks long and runs close to an hour. Moreover, there's nothing on it that couldn't have been on the last album, or on a White Stripes album. Maybe another issue is that White's main project is so deceptively dynamic that playing in a five-piece actually makes him seem more constrained. It's true that at times the Raconteurs do go a little bit further in certain directions (particularly mainstream rock) than the White Stripes; but really, it isn't that hard to imagine the band that did "Blue Orchid" also producing "Steady, As She Goes." How does this band push White--or any of its members--to do anything that one or more of them aren't already doing better elsewhere?

The biggest pleasure the Raconteurs have to offer is the interplay between White and Benson. In particular, hearing them trade verses on the new song "Salute Your Solution" is lots of fun. And in fact, many of the best Raconteurs songs are the ones where Benson takes the lead. In the end, though, White already has one of the weirdest and most fascinating dynamics in music going with Meg, over in the White Stripes. Pity Benson for being the "other man" in that relationship.

The Raconteurs also cruise a long way on White's charisma--but over the course of fourteen pretty similar-sounding songs, that starts to wear thin. A leaner EP with maybe half of this material might have been a lot better. You can make your own, of course, via selective downloading. I'd recommend including "Consoler of the Lonely," "Salute Your Solution," "The Switch and the Spur," "Five on the Five," "Rich Kid Blues," and "Carolina Drama."

I should mention that shuffled in with the rest of my music library, just about every song on this album sounds pretty good on its own. The album wasn't pre-hyped at all, and apparently only took a few weeks out of everyone's schedule to make. So there's not much to complain about, really, even if there also isn't much to get excited over.

R.E.M., Accelerate

2008-04-08T12:52:00.001-05:00

As a general rule I'm not a big fan of "back to basics" albums. I don't need a favorite band of mine deciding that I'm dumber than I really am, that they know exactly what I want to hear, and that it's something I've already paid perfectly good money to hear before. I like when a band does something outside of their safety zone. I loved when the Smashing Pumpkins went all quiet and pretty on Adore; my favorite U2 albums are the dance-influenced ones from the '90s; I dug Depeche Mode rocking out on Songs of Faith and Devotion.

And I was a big fan of the risky, experimental albums R.E.M. did after losing Bill Berry. Up at times eclipsed even OK Computer in expressing pre-millennial neurosis, and Reveal was a gorgeous soundtrack for getting lost in summer. Around the Sun, admittedly, was flaccid and boring. But they'd never done that before, so at least it was something new. Their new album, Accelerate, is being hyped to the gills as a return to the classic, hard-rocking sound of albums like Life's Rich Pageant and Document. One of my favorite things about R.E.M. has always been their restlessness and constant stylistic progression. I'm not interested in seeing them look backward, which is what they're very consciously doing on this album.

That said, I can't stop listening to the thing. It may not break any new ground, but what it does very well is remind me of what an incredibly accomplished band R.E.M. is--even without their drummer, and even in retro mode. Peter Buck is a powerful guitarist, Michael Stipe's singing only gets more human and expressive over time, and Mike Mills embodies the band's signature sound, not just with his bass playing but even more so on keyboards and backing vox. With the help of the genuinely great ex-Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, on Accelerate they demonstrate that they can make a great record in their sleep.

It's true that as the band's "rock" albums go, this one is the least interesting. It lacks the youth and rawness of Life's Rich Pageant, the pop quirks of Document, and the kinkiness of Monster. In their place is some more of the righteous political anger over which Around the Sun so inappropriately drooped a tarp of midtempo schmaltz. It works much better here, backed by ferocious guitars and drums, but still occasionally takes on an annoying edge of preaching to the choir. If it were me, I'd rather know that the crowd was cheering because my song is good, rather than because they agree with my position on the Iraq war.

The high point both lyrically and musically is "Houston," a two-minute stomp that generates most of its considerable noise with dialed-up acoustic guitar and blasts of distorted organ, as with powerful urgency Stipe takes on the persona of a Hurricane Katrina victim looking hard for a light at the end of the tunnel. It's the least retro and most promising song on the album, suggesting that the band's creative fires still have some life in them.

Another standout is "Supernatural Superserious," basically an electrified remake of Reveal's should-have-been-hit single "Imitation of Life," but it works for all the same reasons--great pop hooks and compellingly vulnerable lyrics delivered in the second person. "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" recalls the drive of "Begin the Begin" and the ragged howl of "Just a Touch." "Man-Sized Wreath" snarls and sneers; "Sing for the Submarine" tosses up a laundry list of references to earlier songs, which dorks like me will enjoy; and "Horse to Water" rides its groove so hard it threatens to tumble over itself.

In other words, Accelerate is terrific fun to listen to. I don't know that I expect it to wear as well as the albums it tries to recall, but it's far from the stale, lifeless rehash that most bands would churn out at this stage in their career. These are good songs; occasionally even great. If it's not everything I might once have hoped for in a new R.E.M. album, it's only because I hold them to a very high standard.

Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

2008-04-06T14:22:00.001-05:00

Early in 2001 I picked up two albums from the previous year that it'd taken me a while to catch on to: D'Angelo's Voodoo and Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun. Both artists were associated with the burgeoning neo-soul movement, but on these records neither one seemed interested in being constrained by the rules of any particular genre. D'Angelo turned the rhythms up to eleven and let his vocals ride way back in the mix, sounding like rhythm guitar as often as anything else. Badu delivered relatively more conventional hooks, but what captivated me was when she'd wrap her voice around a yowling, funky number like "Penitentiary Philosophy."

Both albums wound up perennial favorites of mine, and I was pretty excited for the future of whatever you want to call the genre D'Angelo and Badu were working in. So I waited for what was next. And waited, and waited. Still waiting for D'Angelo. Somewhere in 2003, Badu came out with a rambling, 50-minute "EP" called Worldwide Underground that sounded to me like either a toss-off studio jam or the sound of an artist who'd lost interest in crafting songs. I hoped for the former and continued waiting. Five years later, we finally get an official follow-up to Mama's Gun.

New Amerykah Part One, the first of either two or three albums Badu plans to release this year, actually has more in common musically with Worldwide Underground than with Mama's Gun--there's a distinct electro-hip-hop feel to most of the tracks, with live instruments serving mostly as embellishment. And in fact the song structures tend more towards the looseness that bugged me so much on the EP. But this time around, she makes everything work. The new album brims with confidence, swagger, and inspiration. The force of the artist's vision, the endless surprises in the music, and the captivating effect of her voice are more than enough to carry a listener steadily along through a fairly bizarre musical journey.

The album begins somewhere in the middle ground between Isaac Hayes and Andrew Lloyd Weber, with the funk jam/drama skit "Amerykahn Promise," detours into the trip-hop drone of "The Healer," and throws listeners some red meat in the straightforward soul of "Me," before settling into its sweet spot. The middle tracks "My People," "Soldier," "The Cell," and "Twinkle" come to define the album as much as anything can, blending various shades of hip-hop, funk, soul, and experimental jam as a backdrop for Erykah's lyrical journey through ghetto life, class warfare, and political neglect. Maybe the bravest thing she does here is to cop a page from D'Angelo's playbook and treat her voice as just one instrument in the mix. As often as anything, her vocals take on the effect of a hypnotic chant, the singer falling beneath the music just as the people she sings about find their own voices overcome by poverty, addiction, and despair.

But this album is no downer. I mentioned the swagger, right? Almost every moment of despair is answered by a defiant statement of empowerment or hope. It all comes to a head at the end of the album. After the call to mobilization in "Master Teacher" and the dirge of "That Hump," the album concludes with "Telephone," a lament for the late J-Dilla that ultimately breaks out into a closing chorus of "Fly away to heaven, brother/Put in a word for me."

I'm not the first one to say that this album takes some listening to. The first time through it's intriguing but a bit opaque. I've listened a handful of times and I'm still hearing it a little differently each time through, and that may be its greatest strength. New Amerykah is exciting to listen to. It's the sound of a major artist following nothing but her own muse, and if you're feeling fatigued by boring, predictable music, I can think of no better tonic.

Smiling & stalking

2008-04-02T21:24:00.002-05:00

Starting today, I have a new, regular feature on Smile Politely, called Stalker Notebooks. How regular? Not quite sure yet. I'm hoping weekly, but we'll see. And no, I haven't been blowing off the blog to write for SP; I've been blowing off everything to lie around in misery and sickness. My advice: don't eat any food or let anyone breathe near you. But I do have some new CDs to review, and a couple stiffs have been waving their playlists in my face, so we'll get to all of that soon.

The least rock & roll day ever

2008-04-01T20:43:00.002-05:00

This morning as I was getting ready for work I watched R.E.M. on The Today Show. They played shortly after the weather report, while Al Roker and Meredith Viera danced--mainly by waving their fingers around. On the way home from work in the evening, I stopped by Target and bought some Listerine and R.E.M.'s new album. At home I listened to it while eating a Lean Cuisine flatbread sandwich for dinner.

This is what happens after you turn thirty.

The best hype is no hype? How postmodern.

2008-03-25T21:37:00.003-05:00

There's a new Raconteurs album out today. No one knew about it until a week ago, and it was only recorded in February. No advance single, no prerelease listening parties, no magazine covers, no advance hype at all. It did leak online, but only a few days before its official release.

I'm listening to it now, and so far I like what I'm hearing. Another thing I like is that I got to buy the new album by a pretty major band, take it home, pop it in, and have no idea what I was going to hear. There wasn't a huge marketing campaign molding my perceptions of what the album was going to be long before I even heard it; I get to just play the CD and hear it with fresh ears. It's like I'm able to capture some of the excitement I get from picking something up just because someone's told me, "It's really great."

Compare that to the presidential-caliber campaigns for new releases by bands like U2 (All That You Can't Leave Behind is their return to rock & roll), R.E.M. (Accelerate is their, uh, return to rock & roll), Bruce Springsteen (a regular on The Today Show and the cover of Time), the Smashing Pumpkins (how many different versions of the album?), even the White Stripes (the USB drives were very cute).

These are all favorite artists of mine, and I do like anticipating the new release, but there is something appealing about not being told what the album is all about in advance. With each of those artists' recent releases, much as I like them, there's been a certain moment of disappointment where I feel like they don't turn out to be quite what I've been led to believe they are. Often times they're better; so why put all that energy into pigeonholing them and selling them short?

This is the third recent album by a well-established artist to be released almost right after recording, without some record company making a big deal over it, and I like the trend. Of course, when it's just three bands then they don't need to drum up the fanfare themselves; everyone else does it for them because it's newsworthy. And it's true that lesser-known bands do this all the time; it's called "being a lesser-known band." But with big-timers doing it, it does reduce the overall volume of manufactured hype, or at least doesn't add to it. That's a good deed, right?

Anyway, I'll review the album soon, once I've listened to it and done all of this marvelous thinking for myself.

How hard it is for me to shake the disease

2008-03-23T20:39:00.003-05:00

I haven't forgotten about Morse Music; I've just been excruciatingly ill for a few days (well, only excruciating for one). I was damn near readying my own playlist of the dead; but I'll come up with something semi-coherent to say soon...

Playlists of the Dead: Stephen A. Douglas

2008-03-17T17:29:00.001-05:00

Stephen Arnold Douglas (1813 - 1861) was a U.S. Senator from Illinois and the Democratic candidate for president in 1860. In 1858 he engaged in a famous series of debates with Abraham Lincoln, his challenger for the Senate. While Douglas's party won the election, the debates propelled Lincoln to national fame, and he ultimately defeated Douglas in the 1860 presidential election. While advocating for his doctrine of popular sovereignty, Douglas enjoyed a jam now and then. He joins us for another installment of Playlists of the Dead.

God-fearing white men of these United States: just as it is morally inconceivable that we might allow the willy-nilly commingling of our race with the Negro, also is it reprehensible to imagine a musical collection absent these fine selections.

1.) The Cranberries, "Free to Decide": A minor hit for this '90s alt-pop group to be sure, yet it exemplifies the very most noble of democratic principles--that each one of our federal states is a sovereign entity, perfectly capable of deciding for itself whether to allow or forbid the practice of slavery within its borders. Unfortunately, the Cranberries are of the inferior Irish race, so I wouldn't be too quick to trust what they have to say on other matters.

2.) The Cure, "Why Can't I Be You?": I've heard it suggested that my selection of this alternative rock crossover hit might reflect something other than my abiding enthusiasm for '80s British postpunk; to wit, some imagined jealousy on my part towards my esteemed opponent Mr. Lincoln. Poppycock.

3.) Queen, "We Are the Champions": By "we," I assume they mean "Senator Stephen A. Douglas," and by "champion," I assume they mean "winner of the Senate seat at stake in the Lincoln-Douglas debates." That's right, I won. Okay, technically the Democratic party won a majority in the state legislature and then they appointed me Senator. And technically they didn't get quite as many votes as Mr. Lincoln's Republicans. You know who that didn't help one whit? Mr. Lincoln.

4.) The Rolling Stones, "Under My Thumb": Is that where you thought you had me, Lincoln, with your clever rhetoric? Well, who moseyed on back to his sweet Senate office with the leather sofa and the fetching young secretary, and who had nothing better to do for the next two years than figure out how to turn all of this against me?

5.) Nirvana, "All Apologies": Alright. So I turned out to be just slightly on the wrong side of history on this one lousy little issue, okay? I can admit that. Lincoln was no saint either. Give him a lectern for five minutes and he'll tell you all about how much he doesn't favor racial equality. But do you hear any carping on that? No, it's all "Great Emancipator" this and "Honest Abe" that.

6.) Green Day, "Longview": And another thing: the stovepipe hat? That was my look. Go back and compare your daguerrotypes--I was rocking that two years before Lincoln, and on me it looked hot. Let the beanpole be Ace of Base; I'm Abba, goddammit.

7.) Santana, "Smooth": Better-looking. Bigger muscles. Won the debates. Wore the stovepipe first. And whose ugly mug is on the currency? Christ, people, what the fuck does a guy have to do to get a goddamn statue?

8.) Alanis Morissette, "You Oughta Know": Hey Abe, sounds like some crazy shit happens at the theater. Why not go catch a show? Queer.

Another post you don't care about

2008-03-17T10:27:00.003-05:00

I posted a few weeks ago about how nobody cares about R.E.M. anymore. You probably didn't read that post, because you don't care about R.E.M. anymore. Well, in Sunday's Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot has an article making much the same point--although his actually has information and is written in a professional and interesting manner. Still, you probably won't read it, because you still don't care about R.E.M.

Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV

2008-03-13T12:49:00.003-05:00

So, Nine Inch Nails has a surprise new album out. To me, NIN's music is always worth discussing, and I will in a minute; but what may be of interest to non-fans is the way in which it's been released. Even moreso than what Radiohead did a couple months ago, I think this might point the way to a viable marketing model for new music in general.

Similarly to Radiohead, Trent Reznor finished work on a new record--a 36-track instrumental one, in this case--and almost immediately put it up for grabs on his website. He offers fans a few different options: You can download Ghosts I--the first nine tracks--for free, no strings attached, in high-quality (320kbps), DRM-free files. It's a complete movement of the larger work, perfectly enjoyable on its own. You can download the whole two hours' worth for five bucks. You can pre-order an illustrated double-CD package for ten bucks and download it immediately. And if you're one of those people who masturbate while listening to Fixed, you can spend $75 or $300 on either of two lavish box sets.

I took the ten-dollar option, and the only thing about the whole setup that seems slightly disingenuous to me is that if you order the CDs for $10, you're already partway through the transaction when the site informs you that you're also paying a $6.99 shipping and handling charge. I think $16.99 is still worth it, but it does feel uncomfortably like Ticketmaster.

Other than that, what's not to like? You choose your price point (based on how much black nail polish you wore in college), you can try it out for free, and in all cases you immediately get near-CD-quality digital files (actually, you can choose to get lossless-encoded files too), with which you can do whatever you want. For Reznor, the point of this is that he doesn't need a record company; but I don't see why an artist couldn't work with their label on a similar basis. They head off uncontrolled leaks and allow hardcore fans to get the music as soon as it's finished, they sell a bunch of CDs before they're even pressed, and there's no reason a conventional retail release can't follow. All this does is give people the option of paying for early access, instead of scouring bittorrent sites for leaked copies and possibly never paying for a CD. In the past few years, Trent Reznor has shown himself to be an artist who really does look out for his fans, and I think he's onto something here.

As for the album itself, Ghosts I-IV is a two-hour, four-part suite of ambient instrumentals. It shows a healthy Brian Eno influence, occasionally shades of Aphex Twin, and at one point sounds almost exactly like vintage Skinny Puppy. The composition is unmistakably Reznor's, though, bearing all of his signatures: weird, off-key fragments looping until they catch; liberal doses of random noise and found sound; atonal sound effects; chopped-up rhythms; and everything sloshing up against each other. As always, one of Reznor's greatest musical strengths is his ability to throw sounds at you that sound anywhere from warped to just plain wrong and make it absolutely convincing that he meant to do that. He has a genius for finding order in chaos, and the effect is the sense of a powerful conductor's hand bringing a huge array of disparate sounds into a unified chorus.

On Ghosts, the individual tracks are deliberately anonymous, titled only by number (e.g., track 24 is "24 Ghosts III"). In the classic ambient tradition, this music rewards, but doesn't demand, close attention. Reznor has described it as "a soundtrack for daydreams," and I might add "for David Lynch." But you get the idea. For the most part, the musical movement takes place across tracks, not within them. Each individual piece is generally short and realizes just one or two musical ideas; the dynamics unfold over a longer period of time as each movement, and the work as a whole, progresses.

One notable feature to this music is that, unlike almost all of NIN's catalog to date, its drama isn't emotional; it's atmospheric. More than emotions, Ghosts conveys a sense of place, time, and mood. In fact, NIN's 1999 double-album The Fragile often worked this way too; if Ghosts resembles anything Reznor's previously done, it's the instrumental pieces on that album.

I think it's pretty cool. You can enjoy it the first time through, and as you get more familiar with it you keep hearing new things. It's a far cry from "Head Like a Hole," but it does showcase a lot of the things that Trent Reznor does best. Apparently Ghosts is basically a recording of a few weeks' worth of jam sessions; it's just Reznor and a few friends having some fun in the studio. In light of that, it's an impressive testament to the guy's musical instincts, that he can come up with such fascinating music on the spur of the moment.

What I'm grooving on

2008-03-08T21:29:00.005-06:00

Not a lot of new music coming out in this early part of the year (although I probably will review that new NIN album soon), so I've been catching up on things I'd been meaning to buy for a while--with pretty good results, so far. I picked up Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight because I'd become obsessed with the song "Dreamworld," which sounds exactly like an outtake from Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. It's written and sung by the dude guitarist, rather than main vocalist Jenny Lewis, so I didn't really know how I'd like the rest of the album.

I guess that some Rilo Kiley fans aren't so wild about this one because it's a lot poppier than their other stuff. I never listened to them before, so that doesn't bug me at all; I think it's great. A lot of pop music is basically a vehicle for a groove or a beat or a Britney Spears video. But the other type includes stuff like Rumours, the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979," Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark"--songs with a little dirt on them along with the groove and melody, with real songcraft; they sound like memories. That's the kind of music that Under the Blacklight is. Their insurance policy, of course, is having a girl singer talking dirty. That never hurts.

I also finally picked up Tori Amos's latest album, American Doll Posse, after meaning to for the better part of a year. Yes, in the '90s I was one of those dorky college guys with no balls who loved Tori Amos's first couple albums; and I grew into a dorky, balless twentysomething who really dug the more experimental stuff she did on later albums. I kind of lost interest with Scarlet's Walk, because it seemed to be just an exercise in generic Toriness, pushing all of the tendencies of hers that I found least appealing (obtuse lyrics, strained whimsicality), so I didn't buy or even really notice the one that came after that.

Posse, though, doesn't disappoint. There's a lot of the "rock & roll" Tori on this one, which I've always liked. In recent years I think she's been at her best when she writes a pretty song, then throws some loud guitars and drums over it. It makes for a compelling tension. Actually, the album's all over the map, musically. It's 23 songs long and features her playing the parts of five different characters. Which all sounds like a terrible idea, but I would say that this time she lands pretty close to the Boys for Pele brand of self-indulgence: it's overwrought but it pays off. I've always had a fondness for beautiful messes (e.g., P.T. Anderson movies)--though actually Posse isn't even really a mess. The parts of the concept that don't quite fly mostly just fade into the background; they don't get in the way. It's made me a fan again.

I've also been listening to an awful lot of Depeche Mode, but I'll just keep that to myself for now.

Playlists of the Dead: Sen. Joseph McCarthy

2008-03-03T18:33:00.004-06:00

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908 - 1957) was a U.S. senator from Wisconsin and a leading crusader against the dread menace of communism. He is here to inaugurate our newest Morse Music feature: celebrity playlists compiled for your enjoyment by the deceased.

Joe McCarthy here. I had here in my hand a list of 205 fresh jams known to raise the roof on this mother, but in the interest of brevity I've cut it down to eight. Listen carefully, young people.

1.) Rockwell, "(I Always Feel Like) Somebody's Watching Me": And well you should, young man! This song reminds us that we all live under the watchful eyes of loyal Americans who are ever vigilant of traitors. I wish that Rockwell had been a little more explicit about this being a good thing, but I understand that he is primarily a pop artist and therefore wants to avoid being too polarizing. I've scoured the record shops for more by this bright young fellow, but come away empty-handed. I can only assume that the Marxists of show business have silenced him.

2.) Destiny's Child, "Say My Name": In this poignant ballad, known communist sympathizer Beyonce recognizes her folly and begs her lover to do the right thing and name names--namely, her name--so that she can be appropriately punished for her treason.

3.) R.E.M., "Exhuming McCarthy": I'm not entirely sure for what purpose they propose to exhume me, but I can only assume that it's meant in tribute. Perhaps they suspect I died of poisoning by Trotskyites rather than alcoholism-related hepatitis. Sing on, heroes!

4.) Snow, "Informer": Here is a courageous young man who understands the importance of exposing communist traitors so that they can stand trial for their crimes--even if they are your "bros" or your "home boys." I'm not much for the hip-hop, but I admire Snow's pluck. What's that? He's Canadian? Stalinist!

5.) Paula Abdul, "Straight Up": Here I speak in particular of the Junior Vasquez Electro-Breakbeat Mix, which features some of my all-time favorite lyrics: "Straight up now tell me--are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" I take a lot of flak for my support of Miss Abdul on account of her hosting the Pagan Idols program, but I would remind my overzealous colleagues of this: Say what you will about idols--they may be false gods, but at least they're gods.

6.) D'Angelo, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)": Everyone who knows me knows I love the slow jams. I can't tell you how many times my wife Jean and I did the nasty with this one pumping on the Victrola. Is it unamerican to have a freaky side? My friend Ed Hoover says no.

7.) Fergie, "Big Girls Don't Cry": This is what I said to that whining bitch Dorothy Kenyon. So I dragged you in front of the Tydings Committee and accused you of betraying your country--so what? The pinko New York Times wrote a nice little editorial on your behalf and got me off your back. You know what's "fergalicious"? A big, fat subpoena.

8.) Warrant: "I Saw Red": ...And by God you spoke up about it, didn't you? Good man, Jani Lane! And he wrote another song about cherry pie. What could be more American than that?

Well, I guess I should get back to the icy embrace of the grave, but before I go I just want to address a brief message to Mr. "Too Good For a Regular American English Name" Prince: We all know where your "little red corvette" is driving, mister--straight to the Kremlin, to sell out your country to the Soviets! This is why I favored obliterating Minnesota.

Word to your mother, loyal Americans!

The Raveonettes, Lust Lust Lust

2008-02-28T18:01:00.002-06:00

The Raveonettes are one of my pet bands: two Danish kids--Sune Rose Wagner (guitar, vocals, general mastermind) and Sharin Foo (bass, background vox)--in love with '50s and '60s American rock, reproducing it in twisted ways. I've loved them since their debut, Whip It On, and with 2005's spectacular Pretty in Black, I began to fervently evangelize on their behalf. Anything new from them makes it a good music year for me, so 2008 is off to a good start.

The Raveonettes' musical approach is pretty simple: take some sugary '50s-pop melodies and defile them with distortion overkill and dirty lyrics. Kind of like the Jesus and Mary Chain covering the Ronettes. 2002's Whip It On was heavy on the dark side of that, a quick, fast chunk of B-flat minor--literally, the whole disc was recorded in that key. The follow-up, Chain Gang of Love, served up the flip side in the brighter yet more subversive B-flat major (again, literally the whole album). Pretty in Black was a breakthrough in just about every way. They almost totally abandoned the distortion pedals, brought in some additional live musicians to fill out their sound, hooked up with '50s songwriter/producer Richard Goetherr, and created something at once beautiful and innocent and dark and deeply disturbing--the sort of music David Lynch could make a movie around.

Lust Lust Lust isn't much like that album at all; if anything it's an alternate path the band could've taken after its first two albums. Here they reclaim their signature sound, deepen it, and push it to some new extremes. The opening track, "Aly, Walk With Me," throws up such a wall of guitar fuzz that it put a weird, disturbed look on my cat's face the first time I listened to it. The songs alternate between goth and sunshine, but the noise rarely lets up. What's new here is that Wagner's guitar sound has gotten a lot bigger. In each song he starts with a sort of cavern of distortion, then slices into it with gorgeous, echoing melodies. Whip and Chain Gang were all about the drone; here the sound is much looser and more spacious.

Pretty in Black's twin peaks were the warped fuzz-disco of "Twilight" and the absolutely sincere pop of "Ode to LA"--the latter complete with a guest vocal by Ronnie Spector her own bad self. Nothing on Lust Lust Lust is as adventurous as the former or as ecstatic as the latter. But Wagner and Foo do throw in some new rhythmic tricks with their drum machines, dipping a little bit into hip-hop beats on a few songs. And the album-closing "The Beat Dies" sounds like "Ode to LA"'s fucked up older sister.

I would say that the two bonus tracks at the end don't do the album any favors. They sound very similar to a couple other songs on the album proper, which has the overall effect of making them all seem a bit generic. And on this album Wagner and Foo rely more consistently on androgynous co-lead vocals than ever before. A little of that goes a long way, and at times I miss the darker tones of Wagner's solo leads. But really, my quibbles are minor.

I have a feeling that if you asked Wagner and Foo they'd say that they aren't subverting old-time rock at all, that this is how Ricky Nelson and the Ronettes and the rest of them would have liked to sound; that all they're doing is bringing out the hormones and destructive impulses that drive anyone to plug in a guitar or microphone. I think a big part of what I love about them is that they see the Jesus and Mary Chain and Buddy Holly as doing much the same thing. Hard to argue with the results.

R.E.M. has a--oh, never mind

2008-02-24T22:01:00.002-06:00

I was going to write this lengthy post about R.E.M. and how no one seems to care about them anymore. But I got started writing it and then I thought, "Wait, no one cares about R.E.M. anymore; why am I writing this?"

But, if you are still interested in them, they do have a new album coming out, and it even has its own website. I still care about R.E.M. (having conveniently forgotten their last album), so I'm sure I'll review it when it comes out. Feel free to skip that post as well.

Lupe Fiasco, The Cool

2008-02-16T20:02:00.002-06:00

Lupe Fiasco focuses so heavily on the war between good and evil that he tends to neglect the more immediate battle of good songs versus filler. His debut album, Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor, was flawed but often great. His new one, The Cool, builds on its predecessor's strengths and exacerbates its weaknesses.

Luckily (and frustratingly) for us, the strengths alone are once again enough to make up a great album. Food and Liquor reached its peak with "Daydreamin'," a song whose epic musical track played perfectly off of Lupe's sharply barbed lyrics and vocal delivery--not to mention Jill Scott's background vocals--building to a fever pitch as clever as it was angry, explosive, and musically gorgeous.

Nothing on The Cool quite reaches that level of perfection, but quite a few more tracks get close. Midway through the album, the smoothly melodic "Hip-Hop Saved My Life" kicks off a seven-song stretch of increasingly deft and adventurous cuts. The music goes farther and farther out on a limb, which seems to push Lupe to take his lyrics and vocals to the outer edges, too. The beats start to warp, the atmosphere plummets into darkness, and Lupe just gets more and more confident as he raps about street life, lives gone out of control, violence, terrorism, and a struggle for identity. It culminates in the dark psychedelia of "Hello/Goodbye," a collaboration with Unkle that sounds like hip-hop being run through a diesel engine.

So the good news is that this disc has about half an hour of the year's best hip-hop. The bad news is that there's another forty minutes. Once again, Lupe falls prey to one of hip-hop's worst tendencies, which is to stuff your CD to the gills with less-than-great tunes just because you can. On Food and Liquor, most of the time-wasting was confined to the ridiculous, fifteen-minute closing track in which he thanked everyone from his manager to Tony Hawk. Again confusing the liner notes with the album, at one point on The Cool he takes time out to tell us the URL for his blog.

The real problem, though, is that this album is nineteen tracks long. Two of those are reserved for an extended (and useless) introduction. Much of the rest is not bad, but often forgettable and generally same-sounding. Songs like "Paris, Tokyo" and "Superstar" are enjoyable enough and grow on you with repeated listenings; "Gold Watch" approaches greatness. But Lupe once again starts his album with a couple of its weakest, most generic songs, and finishes the same way. If The Cool were five or six songs shorter, it would be a killer ride, start to finish.

Part of the bulk may be due to Lupe thinking that he's made a concept album. Rappers seem particularly inclined towards the Operation Mindcrime school of songwriting, and Lupe likes to think big, so I guess it was inevitable. The trouble is, of course, that you lose sight of basic songwriting and get caught up in your story concept, and before you know it you have Kadeem Hardison in zombie makeup in your CD booklet. (Yes, Lupe has turned Dwayne Wayne into an undead gangsta.) On a DVD that comes with the album, he helpfully tries to explain exactly what the concept of his concept album is; I still have no idea, and would just as soon keep it that way.

It's probably the case that hip-hop artists lard their albums so heavily on the assumption that most people will just toss the songs onto the iPods and listen to the ones they like on shuffle--so why not give the consumer nineteen items for his $12.99? I like to listen to whole albums, though, so I guess I'll just have to sit through the filler or make friends with my skip button. In the end, those brilliant songs in the middle are worth it.

Smile politely, mofo

2008-02-14T19:35:00.003-06:00

If you happen to live in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, or just want to read some insightful commentary, check out Smile Politely, an online magazine devoted to arts, culture, and entertainment in town. I know some of the people involved with it, and will not vouch for the character of any of them. The magazine features some pretty excellent coverage of the local music scene. Actually, the whole site is pretty damn impressive, and very, very pretty.

Bedeviled by god-awful songs

2008-02-13T18:33:00.003-06:00

As far as music goes, I don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" (someday I'll use this space to explain in detail why I think that the Def Leppard songs in my iTunes library are really, truly good); but I do believe in bad music, and lately my internal jukebox has been trying to piss me off. Why do so many bad songs have to be so damn catchy?

For instance, I've recently heard what I believe to be the very worst song ever: "Bubbly" by Colby Caillat, which is all over the place right now. I heard it in Borders one day, and it was stuck in my head for the next week. It seriously has to be the most flaccid, candy-assed piece of crap ever committed to CD. There is nothing more emasculating than to find yourself humming this tune while making breakfast. When I hear it, all I want is to see Corin Tucker and/or Ani DiFranco beat the living shit out of this singer.

Then last week my wife made me listen to the iTunes preview of "Glamorous" by Fergie--a song which she hated so much that when it came on the radio she couldn't tune away from it, so mesmerized was she by her loathing. This is really even worse for me, because I've only heard thirty seconds of the song, and that just loops over and over in my head: "The flouncy flouncy!" I hear there's a part where she talks about the Taco Bell drive-thru. That, I would be down with. But I haven't heard that part.

I don't like Fergie. I think she looks mannish.

Great. Now I have both songs stuck in my head. I need some Def Leppard, stat.

A mixmaster no more

2008-02-08T18:55:00.000-06:00

I can remember few possessions that brought me as much pleasure to own as my first iPod, back in aught-three. More than anything in my lifetime, it transformed and enhanced the ways in which I listen to music. But there was one unfortunate casualty of my iPodification. No, it wasn't the five hundred bucks; that was play money from my student loan (thanks to my repayment schedule, a tiny piece of that iPod will be with me until I'm fifty-three). It was my lifelong dedication to the art of mix tape and CD compilation.

Last week I went and dug out the mix CDs that I made between 2001 and 2003. I've been listening to them in the car, and it's made me nostalgic for the endless hours I used to sink into planning and executing a mix, followed by the satisfaction of hearing my perfectly sequenced selections.

Sometime early in high school, when everything I had was on cassette tape, I came up with the amazing idea of putting all the best songs I had onto one uber-tape, which would never leave my walkman. I think I had about twenty or thirty albums at the time, so it actually was possible to put all my favorite songs on a 90-minute tape. As my music-listening progressed (and as I started getting CDs, which made it much easier to skip to a particular song), I started making regular compilations--about one every two or three months--volumes in a series that I labeled... Okay, there's no way around this: I labeled them "Most Excellent Songs." In my defense, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was a current movie at the time. Well, maybe that doesn't really serve my defense, but I was fifteen and that was what I thought of as cool.

Anyway, the Most Excellent Songs series wound up spanning forty volumes and my entire high school and college careers. The tapes became more than just something to listen to while I was walking to class: they were an archive, each one a historical document of what music I was into at a given point in time. Oh, I still remember the classic Vol. 4, heralding a new era with Pearl Jam's "Alive" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" kicking off the mix; Vol. 24, which started with a quiet, acoustic Smashing Pumpkins song, "Stumbleine," and then roared into overdrive with Prince's guitar-drenched "Endorphinmachine." Going back to an old one could not only humble me with a reminder that I used to like Queensryche; it would also bring on a whole flood of memories from that time in my life.

By the time I was twenty-one and graduating college, it seemed like a long time to have held on to a Bill & Ted reference, so I ended the series at Vol. 40 (Wyclef Jean, Tricky, David Bowie). But I kept making tapes pretty regularly. I got into the habit of labeling them with favorite lines from songs that were on them. For instance, the case might be labeled, "Letting the days go by," with sides A and B of the tape saying respectively, "Let the water hold me down" and "Water flowing underground." I never put dates on any of these things. It was unnecessary: the music was all I needed to tell me when each one was made.

A few years down the line I bought a CD burner for the sole purpose of moving my mixosity into the digital age. The software I, um, paid for completely legally let me normalize the volume between tracks, create crossfades, and do other things I'd only dreamed about for so many years. This actually leads into a rather dark period in my life, where I got into editing wave files by hand and creating elaborate covers and inserts... we need not peer any further in that direction.

But anyway, from the time I was fourteen until I was twenty-seven, I had an uninterrupted record of exactly what songs I was into all along the way--a straight line from the Black Crowes, Guns n' Roses, and Yes, to U2, Nine Inch Nails, and the Cure, on through Orbital, DJ Shadow, and Underworld, then later the Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, Aimee Mann, Wilco, the White Stripes, the Roots, and on and on...

Until I got that iPod. And literally the very first day, as I was walking home from one of my MFA classes with the thing on shuffle, I realized that my mixes had been rendered obsolete. As rewarding as the archiving was, the most immediate purpose, the thing that always motivated and set me to work on a new mix, was the desire for a new bunch of songs to listen to on the go. And the iPod gave that to me on demand, different every time, for as long as I cared to keep listening. With that available, there just wasn't much to motivate me to put the hours (yes, I said hours) of work into putting together a mix CD that I probably would only listen to years later for nostalgic purposes.

Over four years later, I'm still not over how cool it is to be able to put my entire music collection--or any custom-designed subset of it--on shuffle. As I said, it has totally transformed how I listen to music. But going through the old mixes recently has made me miss having them. Listening to an old compilation, no matter how far off it may be from what I'm into now, I can't help but feel at least a brief swell of pride. Damn, man--putting "Sweet Child o' Mine" right there? Perfect.

The increasing unpleasantness of buying CDs

2008-02-05T12:57:00.000-06:00

I guess I'm a little weird, in that I still buy almost all of my music on CD. Partly it's because I have weird obsessive tendencies and I take enormous pleasure in organizing them. Also, due to other mental problems, I tend not to listen to music that I haven't paid for (gifts are strangely exempt from this, maybe because I've "spent" a gift on them). But mostly, as I've explained before, I just prefer CDs: they sound better than MP3s, and I like having something to hold in my hand. Which is why it's telling that one time recently, when I was holding a CD and thinking about buying it, the thought briefly crossed my mind, "Oh, wait--is this really going to be worth the pain in the neck?"

Yes, while the more public front of the recording industry's savage war on itself is the one where they're suing children and grandparents and attempting to extort major universities (or the one where they're trying to take down Apple, the only company in the past decade to open up a new revenue stream for them), all along the way they've also been quietly turning the process of buying, opening, and owning CDs into a pain in the ass.

I guess it starts with the price. Yes, you never have to pay full retail price for CDs anymore, but those high list prices make even the discounted prices at places like Best Buy too high for a marketplace where you can get something almost as good for free. About five years ago, Universal announced it was lowering the base price of all its CDs to, I think, $12.99, and the other labels were supposed to follow suit. I saw the "New Low Price!" sticker on about five albums, and then nothing more ever since. Add to that the audacity of continuing to ask $17.99 for albums like Sgt. Pepper and Led Zeppelin IV--both of which, I'm pretty sure, have recouped their recording costs by now.

If you decide to shell out the money, then once you get your CD home you have to steel your will and get out your tools to open the damn thing up. What's the deal with those factory seals they put across the top? No matter how slowly and carefully you peel them off, some of them will still leave a nasty plastic-crazy-glue residue on your jewel case, which eventually will accumulate a coat of dust, carpet fuzz, and pet hair. Open the case up and remove the disc, and you're likely to find the underside of a security tag staring at you from behind the plastic, blocking your view of the liner notes or whatever they decide to put underneath the disc. If you want to peel that off, you have to pry the back of the case apart and jam a fingernail underneath.

And that's if you're lucky. When I opened up my copy of OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I found that they'd stuck a big ugly security tag on the paper. And it was one of those threaded metallic ones that you can't remove without destroying the paper it's stuck to. So I'd just bought a CD package that was ruined--intentionally--at the factory.

And be careful taking the disc out: more and more frequently I'm getting CDs packaged in cardboard sleeves that look really great and open up in neat ways--but lots of them also have nasty sharp corners that make it difficult to get the disc out without scratching it.

I realize that I'm mostly just complaining about the packaging, but at this point, when you're buying a CD, isn't that really what you're paying for? I say they sound better, but really, if you've bought something remotely recent, it's probably been compressed up the wazoo, is ridiculously and indiscriminately loud, and sounds like shit. It seems to me like record companies are walking on very thin ice by putting more and more impediments in the way of our buying something that every day we have less reason to buy. If even I, who have weird voices in my head telling me to buy CDs, am starting to hesitate, then this is getting to be a real problem.

Have I just used my blog to rant incoherently about a pet peeve? I knew I had it in me!

One last bit of '07 business

2008-01-29T19:54:00.000-06:00

I had this mix CD that I had arranged in iTunes of my favorite songs of 2007, and I was going to send it out to all my friends as sort of a Christmas card. But it was Christmas, and I barely managed to get all my shopping done, let alone anything else, so the CD never happened.

So, I thought, why not make it an iMix? For the iTunes-inclined, you can see it here:

Unfortunately, my very favorite song of '07--LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends"--is an album-only track. The album is fantastic, and I can't recommend it highly enough; but if you're looking for a suitable substitute, I suggest "Someone Great," off the same album.

Although the first track happens to be my top choice, the songs are arranged for listening, not necessarily in any kind of hierarchical ranking.