Mr. Bungle
Mr. Bungle
I remember the first time my brother and I listened to the Mr. Bungle CD together. He started dancing around the room like a pornographic zombie clown. (You'd have to see the dance to realize just how apt that description really is.) It's also the best description that I can offer of Mr. Bungle's music: it is, without doubt, pornographic zombie clown music. I don't think that Mike Patton would really disagree with the characterization. (See also: the cover art and the enthusiastically-banned video for "Travolta", a... um, tribute... to John Travolta.) Is it art? Is it a freak show? Yes!
Luther Wright and the Wrongs
Rebuild the Wall
Parody is an odd musical world to inhabit. Weird Al has made a career out of it. The classic Dr. Demento Radio Hour coasted on it for years. Hayseed Dixie make a living doing bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs; Dread Zeppelin had a good go of it doing reggae covers of Led Zeppelin songs with the added panache of an Elvis impersonator on lead vocals. It's an odd space because you really can't ever transcend the source of the parody. You're always defined in the shadow of the original, and you have to have fun with that. You have to mock and pay tribute at the same time, which is a difficult line to walk.
Luther Wright and the Wrongs don't so much much walk that line as teeter drunkenly down it. Rebuild the Wall is a start-to-finish cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall, done in a bluegrass/country style. Like Hayseed Dixie, they've taken a simple gag and stretched it out beyond all reason and sense. If nothing else, you have to admire the attention to detail. Not only have they covered every song on the original album, but they've faithfully spliced in appropriate sound effects to retell the story in a country-western vein. Buzz bombs have been replaced by galloping hooves; distressed moans have become distressed moos.
Does it hang together? Yes -- Rebuild the Wall is relentlessly coherent. Does it have listening longevity? Not really. It's a fine joke, but once you've got the punchline, there's not much to bring you back for more. Because, like other parodies, it just can't transcend the source material, and ultimately it can't be more than a footnote -- which may be all it was intended to be in the first place.
Crooked Fingers
Dignity and Shame
If my web site (or is it a blog now? I think the kids are calling it a blog these days) were to be believed, I've listened to nothing but Crooked Fingers' Dignity and Shame for the last two years. Records are apparently different than books this way. I tend to read books serially -- that is, one at a time, start to finish. I'm not usually one of those people who has a whole stack of books that I'm reading all at once. And when I finish a book, it goes on the stack until I've written something about it. And while there is always a backlog, eventually I sit down and knock a couple off the stack.
Of course, records don't work that way. And the more digitally-dependent I become, the less they work that way. Gone are the days when I would endlessly flip a cassette on the school bus until I had the album memorized. Now it goes into a digital shuffle of thousands of other albums: a playlist 60 days long and growing. Other folks have already adequately lamented the death of the album, and how we're returning to the days of 45s, except that the 45s are now called MP3s. It's not quite true in my case; I still buy albums, but they invariably get dissected into their constituent parts and tossed into the Great Shuffle. Which means (among other things) that I hardly ever review albums any more.
But if I did, I would be obliged to point out that Dignity and Shame is a good one. Eric Bachmann has certainly had some musical changes over the years. I remember seeing him first at the Black Cat in the Archers of Loaf days when he was a tower of a young man awash in a sea of electric guitars. And then again at Lounge Ax in Chicago a couple of years later, sombre and solo with only a guitar and an digital delay pedal. And then once more at the old OttoBar in Baltimore with Crooked Fingers, for an acoustic set complete with cello and banjo. Dignity and Shame sets out in the full band direction again, going further beyond the mariachi horns of Red Devil Dawn into full-on orchestrated rock. Not the awash-in-electric-guitars sort of rock of the Archers, but a studio-produced sort of rock awash in mature songwriting and textured instrumentation and the trademark Bachmann gravelly vocals. And I guess maturity ain't always a bad thing.
"I would change for you, but babe, that doesn't mean I'm gonna be a better man..." -- Crooked Fingers
Various Artists
20 Years of Dischord
It's hard for me to imagine my musical upbringing without Washington-D.C.-based Dischord Records. While I was too young to know about or appreciate Minor Threat in their heyday, I was exactly the sort of kid who had Fugazi and Dag Nasty lyrics scrawled on my bedroom walls. I also vividly remember sweet-talking my underaged self into the Mercury Lounge in New York City in 1996 to have the opportunity to have Lungfish destroy my hearing for several days following. And when I finally moved to Washington DC a couple of years later, Q and not U were just starting to make the local rounds. I got to see them and the likes of Faraquet in the following years, usually as openers for The Dismemberment Plan.
Now that I've been living in the mountains for a few years (and haven't seen a DC show in nearly as long), it felt just a little bit strange as I found myself pulling up to the Dischord house in Arlington to deliver a letter-press from my neck of the hills back to Washington. During all the time that I had lived in Arlington, less than a mile from the Dischord house, I never once had reason to stop in. Now here I was, punk-turned-hillbilly, delivering 150 pounds of lead and iron to the house where some of my earliest musical influences were born, so that they could hand-print flyers to coax a new generation of kids to come out and see bands that I have never heard. After a fair bit of grunting, cursing, and finger-smashing, we'd moved the letterpress into the Dischord basement. The guys at the label wanted to compensate me somehow for my trouble. Did I want a CD or something?
Thing was, I didn't even know what Dischord was doing these days. Too long in the mountains. "Do you guys have any sort of comp with the current bands on it?"
And so I found myself the proud owner of 20 Years of Dischord, the Dischord Records 20th anniversary box set. As it happens, not only did I not know about fantastic bands that Dischord currently has signed, but I also didn't know about fantastic bands from Dischord's past that I had missed along the way. This compilation is knock-out good, with too many great tracks for any of them to particularly stand out. I do know that I need to track down some albums by Circus Lupus and Smart Went Crazy. I also need to make sure that I don't get so caught up in old-time music as to forget what else is out there.
A big thanks to the guys and gals at Dischord for the complimentary compilation, and a double-big thanks for making such a great comp in the first place.
Forest Fires Collective
Forest Fires Collective
A little self-reference is a dangerous thing, particularly where art is concerned. In the visual arts, I suppose things really didn't come to a head in this regard until the Modernist age. I mean, to some extent, art has always been about art. But it also used to be representative of something in the world -- nature, politics, religion, the human condition, something. Then it became more and more about the artist, and then about the object, and then mostly about art itself. Of course, I'm generalizing here -- there is obviously still a great deal of art about the world and things in it. But (as I found out while living and working in the New York "art world" a few years ago), there's also quite a lot of it that's only about itself.
And so it's interesting to me how hip-hop seems to have been that way from the start. Was hip-hop ever really about anything other than hip-hop? I leave the answer in the capable hands of the Sugar Hill Gang, from the 1979 "Rapper's Delight":
I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
To the hip hip hop, a you don't stop
The rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
Thus began twenty-five years of rappers rapping about how well they rap. Riveting stuff, that. But you know what? They're still doing it, most of them with all the creativity of Def Leppard singing about a girl they'd like to have sex with. "What? You like girls? Yeah, sing about that some more. Man, I never get tired of songs about thighs."
All of which makes it that much more of a treat when somebody actually tries something novel -- which is what Forest Fires Collective does so well. Sure, there's some of the standard hip-hop doper-than-thou posturing, but it's mostly buried underneath rhymes about squirrels, nuts, and Smokey the Bear, overtop of beats that are, well -- squirrely. For the most part, the novelty and sharp lyrical wit of the FFC make up for the somewhat frivolous content. At which point the pundits will quickly point out that expecting hip-hop to be about anything is missing the point. It's supposed to be all about the style. I'll sympathize with that to a point, in much the same way that I'll sympathize with a good-looking stupid girl. Nice to spend casual time with, but nothing you'd want to invest a lot of your life in. Combine smart content with stunning style, and now you're talking commitment. Which is what FFC pull off when they're at their best.
The Skillet Lickers
Old-Time Fiddle Tunes and Songs from North Georgia
Now that I'm back in the good ol' Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I've of course been playing old-time music again. Lots of it. Nearly every night, in fact. (This week, I took Sunday night off. I've jammed with people every other night.) And, having traipsed about Ireland for a bit participating in sessions there, I've got a bit more perspective on what I do and don't like about jams in this part of the mountains.
What I do like, of course, is the music. I heard some really terrific Irish music while I was traveling -- much more energetic and aggressive than the watered-down parlor facsimile of Irish music that we tend to hear around here -- but it still couldn't quite stack up to the energy of a good old-time string jam. I also like the fact that people here dance, which was something that I only saw at one of the sessions that I went to in Ireland (and only one person, at that). A good driving jam with good dancing is a pretty transcendent experience.
That said, there was at least one thing that I found at the Irish sessions I went to that is sorely lacking at most old-time jams I've seen. In those sessions, the direction of the session was very much a community effort. Everyone took turns picking tunes -- my old-time American self included. The piper would lead a set, the fiddler would lead a set, the accordion player would lead another set. Even the novice musicians were explicitly offered the chance to lead sets of tunes (which they usually politely declined). If there were singers around, the tunes would stop every so often so that somebody could sing a ballad. There was very much a sense of the music not being owned or run by one person, but something that everyone had a hand in.
Contrast this with the Alpha Fiddler syndrome of nearly every old-time jam I've ever attended. In most old-time sessions, there is the One True Fiddler -- the Old Silverback Gorilla to whom everyone else defers. The Alpha Fiddler picks the tunes; if there's any singing, the Alpha Fiddler usually sings the tunes. If anyone else leads a tune, it's with the Alpha Fiddler's permission. There may be a very real sense of community in the jam, but there is nearly always the One True Fiddler who stands just a notch or two above everyone else. And it bothers me, even when that Alpha Fiddler happens to be me. Which isn't to say that I never give in to Alpha Fiddler temptation -- I certainly do. But I'd be perfectly happy to play behind a good melodic banjo player given the chance. And I'd certainly be happy to have the guitarists sing some ballads to give the dancers a break every few tunes. So I think I'm going to embark on a conscious experiment -- to use my own Alpha Fiddler powers for good, not evil. We'll see if it throws too many sessions into disarray, but I suspect it will just make some of them a lot more fun.
OK, but about The Skillet Lickers -- a good case of Alpha Fiddler syndrome if ever there was one. One some albums, the band name appears as "Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers". Gid Tanner being of course the Alpha Fiddler, and The Skillet Lickers being his Skillet Lickers. Sure, people also know of the legendary guitar playing of Riley Puckett, but you'll never see an album of "Riley Puckett and His Skillet Lickers". Don't get me wrong -- Gid Tanner is a great fiddler -- one of the best -- but that ain't all there is. Without those sweet guitar runs, these tunes wouldn't fly nearly so well. The Skillet Lickers -- the band The Skillet Lickers -- are knock-out phenomenal. Too good to fit within one man's reputation.
It's my last weekend in my home -- indeed, my last weekend with a home until at least July. All of my belongings are now in storage, with the exception of those I'll be taking traveling with me. As my last musical offering on this side of the ocean, I present Old Man Kelly's Tunes I Have Known, a handful of old-time tunes and songs that I've been recording for my grandfather. They're no great shakes either musically or technically, but they do give folks like my grandfather a pretty good idea of the type of music that I've been making of late.
On Tuesday, the fearless feline and I will be off for a week in North Carolina, after which I will go through the heart-rending exercise of leaving him behind to travel north to visit family. And then it's off to Dublin on April 13 for a couple of months of open-ended adventuring.
N.W.A.
N.W.A And The Posse
I guess it would be safe to say that I was a weird kid. (And I guess it would also be safe to remove the past tense from the previous statement.) There are lots of reasons for that to be the case, but one of them is definitely that I got pretty hooked on West-Coast gangsta rap at the age of 12. It seems pretty improbable now. I was a farm kid in Pennsylvania, and about as gangsta as a Care Bear. And the year was 1989, well before hip-hop was anywhere near the mainstream phenomenon that it is now. Dr. Dre was still a fresh-faced lad and devoted member of N.W.A., Vanilla Ice hadn't yet brought commercial hip-hip onto the Billboard charts, and there weren't legions of trailer park kids cruising around with 400 watts of bass booming out of their Ford Mustangs.
Nonetheless, I discovered and loved N.W.A. Not surprisingly, my source was television. Not that network television was willing to go anywhere near N.W.A. (or most other hip-hop) in 1989, but that never stopped little ol' TV-40. Far, far from the boardrooms of network television, TV-40 was living in its own independent, low-wattage corner of the air waves. It was independent network television at its most bizarre. During prime time, they were fairly likely to be broadcasting gambling events like dog racing or Jai-Alai from somewhere in Florida. At night, it was usually public-domain horror films from the 1940s. But somewhere in all that, they carried a few music video programs. One of them -- which ran, as I recall, in the middle of the afternoon on some weekday during the summer -- was all hip-hop videos. Never in my young life had I seen such a thing. They played videos by the likes of Kid & Play, Three Times Dope, Heavy D, MC Lyte, De La Soul, Kwame, and, oddly enough, N.W.A. I distinctly remember seeing a video for "Straight Outta Compton." How they can possibly have aired it without the FCC putting a boot up their ass can only have had to do with the fact that their viewing audience was probably as meager as their broadcast wattage. (Side note: I got into "alternative" music -- back when that meant something -- the same way. They used to broadcast a program called Noise Bazaar out of Kenosha, Wisconsin at midnight on Saturdays. It was both noisy and bizarre. In retrospect, it baffles me that bands like Poop Shovel, Daisy Chainsaw, and Skinny Puppy even made music videos.)
Anyway, I was really into N.W.A. by the time I started ninth grade. I used to listen to Straight Outta Compton many mornings on the bus on the way to school, staring out the window at sheep and silos, and I knew all the words. I could spit lyrics about oral sex before I knew that there was such a thing. I knew which gangs drove the '64 Impala, and who drove the '65s. I didn't talk, dress, or act like a "wigger". I was just a skinny kid in a plaid shirt with snaps, velcro sneakers, and tinted eyeglasses who happened to be able to recite every lyric on Fear of a Black Planet.
So yeah, I turned out kind of weird. I've been recording fiddle tunes lately. I may still re-mix them into hick-hop masterpieces. We'll see.
By the way -- Best Lyric from N.W.A. and the Posse, from the song "Fat Girl": "She had more chins than a Chinese phone book." Brilliant.
The Stanley Brothers
Angel Band: The Classic Mercury Recordings
Two years ago, I couldn't really have told you the difference between bluegrass and old-time music. Now, in my continuing quest to make sure that family doesn't understand anything I do, I can say that I have a distinct preference for the latter. I'm still not quite able to articulate exactly why. It may be because it's more approachable. During my tenure in southwest Virginia, I've learned to play the fiddle and banjo, and relearned some things that I used to know about the guitar but had forgotten. I've been playing the local old-time music a couple of nights a week on average, and it's easy to understand and easy to get into, like an old pair of pants or certain other metaphors that would be inappropriate for a family web site. On the other hand, I don't feel like I understand bluegrass music at all. I think I'm probably bothered by it for the same reason that I'm bothered by Yngwie Malmsteem. I don't really care how fast that guy can play the guitar. It just doesn't impress me. I think I respond the same way to most of the instrumental solos in bluegrass music. Whether you've got big fluffy hair or a cowboy hat, the more somebody tries to impress me, the less likely I am to be impressed.
Which brings us to the Stanley Brothers. Angel Band is definitely not Malmsteem-style bluegrass. It includes much of the Stanley Brothers' material while they were recording for Mercury Records in the mid-to-late 1950's. The instrumental breaks are, for the most part, tasteful and understated. But I still don't quite respond to the style of the thing. I guess it sounds too much like it was recorded in a Nashville studio somewhere, rather than on somebody's back porch. The pacing of the songs is just too calculated and too tidy. There's nothing in the music that gets my blood up the way that a good old-time string band can.
I will, however, admit that the vocal harmonies on some of the tunes set my hair on end. There's something about Ralph's hound-dog howling that completely spooks me, and I love it. Add that to the fact that those tracks that haunt me the most are the gospel tunes about dying performed by a fellow in the process of drinking himself to death, and there's a rough core here that's brilliantly heartbreaking. With a bit less production and a bit more raw energy, Angel Band could be a fairly great record. It stands out as one of my favorite bluegrass albums, but that may not be quite as high of a compliment as it seems.
Missy Elliot
Under Construction
One thing that seems to come along as part of the graduate school experience is poverty. Not the kind of back-breaking poverty where you're forced to sell yourself on the street or anything, but at least the type of poverty where debt mounts up through no fault of your own, unless the decision to get an education counts as a fault. Some people never quite get used to it, I guess. As for me, I'm less poor than when I was an undergrad, but much, much poorer than when I was employed. While I certainly never lived a very consumer lifestyle, I have had to make a few lifestyle adjustments. One of them has been to stop buying records. And that makes me very sad. (On the other hand, I borrow a lot more records than I ever used to, so I probably break about even as far as that goes.)
However, I had a breakdown a few weeks ago and bought a bunch of used records. The clerk batted nary an eyelash at the fact that I purchased Missy Elliot, The Beta Band, and Son Volt in the same fistful of used CDs. (I guess in a college town record store, there will always be someone with taste infinitely less discriminating than one's own.) The thing was, the Missy Elliot wasn't even a whim purchase. I actually went to the record store with the intention of looking for it. My teenaged sister is to blame for this. On our last family outing to New Jersey, she rode home with me, and we blasted Missy Elliot from my 150-watt Kenwoods in an effort to stay awake on the ride home. With that much bass in the small of my back, there wasn't much chance of falling asleep. It's like being beaten while you drive.
So I bought the album. And, on the whole, it's good. Good beats, clever lyrics. The only thing that nearly ruins the album is the insipid monologue between each track. RZA ruins his greatest hits album the same way. Why do producers let this happen? They must know when they're dealing with a talented musician who sounds like a complete doofus when you let them talk. So why let them? But otherwise, Under Construction is a good album. Missy take the whole misogynist thug thing and turns it on its head. But then she records a track with Jay-Z (a misogynist thug) about the "good old days" of hip hop before everybody was a thug. It's like inviting George Bush to speak about what a shame it is that we live in an increasingly militarized country.
On the whole, Missy's talent covers some unbelievably silly production decisions. But I guess as long as she's selling albums, the label stays happy. And let's face it: mainstream hip hop is all business and bottom line these days. Jay-Z can rap about what a shame that is all the way to the bank.
Jets To Brazil
Perfecting Loneliness
It seems like most of my record reviews run about the same way: I tell some irrelevant story, and then I assert that this album is not nearly as good as the band's last album, and then I try to come up with some witty ending, and tack on a semi-relevant image file stolen from somebody else's web site. And I'll have to admit that the temptation to do that here is strong. I'm not crazy about Perfecting Loneliness. I was (and am) pretty crazy about the band's first album, Orange Rhyming Dictionary. At this point, the indie rock purists will point out that even that pales in comparison to anything that Jawbreaker ever did. Eventually, we'll work our way back to wondering if Slint were nearly as good as their reputation.
However, I'm going to skip all that this time. The fact is, I ain't what I used to be, either. Or, at the very least, I ain't what I used to think I was. It's hard to stay creative in a static situation. This is probably one of the reasons that I've moved so much, changed jobs so much, and have a dismal time maintaining relationships. I think it's also the reason that most bands break up. Sometimes you get those fiery conflicts of personality, but more often, I think things just fade away and get stale. I'm not at all sure that a career is a good thing. Or a marriage. Or anything else that has the potential to create stasis. Naturally, it's not that deterministic. There are always ways to work around stasis, or ways to make the best of it. But sometimes, we just run out of ideas, and need to make a clean break of it in order to stay vital. And then you have to make the decision between stability and change for its own sake. Most people opt for stability. I'm probably a band hopper, and Perfecting Loneliness is the sort of album that would probably make me hop.
Ah, hell. There's the attempt at a witty ending. *Sigh*...
Cathy Fink
Banjo Haiku
Aside from the accordion, perhaps no instrument as gotten such a bum rap as the banjo. One seldom sees movies in which toothless hillbillies play the oboe. Nope, it's always banjo. I've never actually seen Deliverance, but get asked about it whenever I uncase my banjo in non-banjo-appreciating circles. So, once and for all: no, I will not play "Dueling Banjos" for you. For one, I don't play finger style. Secondly, there's only one of me, which makes the "dueling" part kind of difficult. I would, however, be happy to play "Soldier's Joy", "Poor Liza Jane", or "Old Joe Clark." Probably for hours at a time. Even once you ask me to stop.
Banjo Haiku is kind of nice, but then again, I'm just learning to play claw hammer banjo. An album of 24 solo banjo tunes is probably not everybody's idea of great music. Fair enough. But for those of us trying to pick up new tunes, this album is a Great Thing. Not only does the fact that it's solo claw hammer banjo make the tunes easy to pick out, but the tunings for each have also been thoughtfully provided in the liner notes. Fink plays the tunes quickly, but not so quickly that the notes become indistinct. She does some things that would probably be rhythmically odd if there were fiddle accompaniment, but since there isn't, it works fairly well. It's not the sort of album that I would necessarily listen to on a long car ride, but as a primer for learning tunes, Banjo Haiku is vastly useful.
I'll have to look for something similar once I get my accordion fixed.
Drive By Truckers
Southern Rock Opera
My assimilation into southern culture is coming along nicely. I'm playing unheard-of amounts of banjo, spending untold hours on my front porch with frosty beverage in hand, and talking progressively more slowly. Part of all of this was, no doubt, brought on by my introduction to the Drive By Truckers. Eddie gave me a CD with six songs from various albums, and I've been consuming additional material since then. Pizza Deliverance was especially taste-altering. So many songs about drinking on one album. Just as the Pogues changed my life years ago, the Truckers have done so now. There's just something about cursing while playing banjo that brings out the best in me.
Southern Rock Opera has been hailed by all sorts of sources as one of the greatest albums of 2002. It may be that, but... Pizza Deliverance it ain't. Don't get me wrong -- it's a great album, and there are some brilliant songs here. In particular, "The Three Great Alabama Icons" is one of the smartest songs I've heard in a long time. Short on rock and long on storytelling, Paterson Hood rambles on about the "duality of the Southern thing" in a way that is truly eye-opening for this Pennsylvania Yankee. When the rock on this album is at its best (i.e., "Let There Be Rock"), it's great. However, in staying true to the rock opera double-disc format, I can't help but feel that there's a fair amount of filler. There could have been one amazing album here, but instead there are two pretty-good albums. Which is still miles ahead of many of the other "greatest albums of 2002", but sub-par for the Drive By Truckers.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, some of my favorite lyrics on this album are by Cooley, not Paterson. While Cooley's vocals tend to be drowned beneath a sea of Marshall fuzz, the bits that surface make me laugh. "I got 350 heads on a 305 engine -- I get ten miles to the gallon; I ain't got no good intentions." My copy of the Trucker's newest album, Decoration Day, hasn't come in yet, but it's my hope that it abandons some of the "monster guitar" attitude of Southern Rock Opera, and returns to the solid songwriting that makes Pizza Deliverance the gem that it is.
Hank Williams
40 Greatest Hits
One of my more recent projects in life is to get an alt-country band off the ground. I answered an ad from a fellow looking for musicians, due primarily to the John Prine quote in his sig file ("Your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more.") Many e-mails and a few phone calls later, I'm now fronting an alt-country band. The catch, of course, is that I don't really know anything about alt-country. I'm not even sure that I know what alt-country is. My perception thus far is that it mostly involves southern kids who rebel against the southern "thing", move to the city for a few years to be punk rockers, and then eventually make peace with their roots and write songs about it.
As for me -- well, fuck it. I never really had the chance to have roots. I was a military brat, and I could just as easily be from California as from Pennsylvania. What kind of band this qualifies me to front, I don't exactly know. But, given my current lot, I've decided to do my homework. If I'm to participate in the southern "thing", then I might as well do it right. On Tuesday nights, I go to old-time slow jams, and spent two to four hours working on learning banjo tunes. A couple of other nights during the week, I practice with the band, and sing songs about whiskey and dirt bikes. The rest of the time, I've got my head in music. Not the quirky indie rock with which I've been identified at times, but front porch music. Doc Watson, Hank Williams, and Bill Monroe. And it's good. Good enough that I'd like to be able to claim it as my own. In the absence of having any genuine cultural identity (I've traversed from Irish folk to NYC punk to suburban indie rocker to alt-country songwriter, none with any more or less legitimacy than the others), I'm quite happy to adopt this one for a while.
As for Hank -- well, what can I say? He sings, he plays, he yodels. He soaks himself in whiskey, loves Jesus, and plays guitar, all at the same time. These are good things. Whatever world Hank is from, it's one that I'm willing to share for a while.
It's somewhat tempting to say that reunion albums are a Bad Thing -- so many bad reunion albums and bad reunion tours have been done. On the other hand: The Soft Boys. After nearly twenty years apart, the band reformed to tour on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the release of their brilliant but critically-ignored Underwater Moonlight. I don't think the plan was to make a reunion album; I think the plan was just to get together and play some old songs.
In the midst of that, Nextdoorland was born. It's an odd album, in that one would hardly notice that over twenty years had elapsed between Underwater Moonlight and it. It could be that Underwater Moonlight was ahead of its time, but it's more likely that The Soft Boys just have their own sound that isn't particularly bound to a particular chronologically-locatable style. Whether this album were released in 2002 or 1982, it would probably sound just as good and just as bad to most of the same people. And therein lies the oddity -- if someone were to tell me that this was actually an album of outtakes from the Underwater Moonlight sessions, I wouldn't have much difficulty in believing them.
So: If you're a Soft Boys or Hitchcock fan looking for surprises, you won't find them here. If you're a Soft Boys or Hitchcock fan looking for the same great songwriting that they've always had, then Nextdoorland is one more to add to the collection. And if you're new to the whole thing -- well, you've got over twenty years of great music on which to catch up. So get to it.
Sweep The Leg Johnny
Tomorrow We Will Run Faster
One of my household Christmas gifts this year was a fondue pot. Fondue is a funny thing. It's really nothing that you couldn't do with a regular pot on a gas stove, the catch being that you would have to crowd chairs around the stove in order to eat, and fondue picnics would be entirely out of the question. Anyway, we gave the fondue thing a try for New Year's Eve, and bought more cheese than should be legally permitted. And we melted it together with some other stuff, and came up with a thick cheese goop into which people could dip things.
Usually, I'm a Cheez Whiz sort of guy. Simple stuff. But every once and a while, something comes along that is complex without seeming like it's trying too hard to be complex. I can't tell good wine from swill, but I appreciate a tasty home-brewed beer. Given the choice between Cheez Whiz and Swiss fondue, I'd have to think about it. And given the choice between Sweep The Leg Johnny and straightforward three-chord punk, I'd have to think about it, too.
There is certainly no lack of complexity to the song writing. Long songs, lots of changes, punchy horns thrown in to change things up, all kinds of ebb and flow of tempo. All of that makes for an interesting album. But I'm not so convinced that it gets much beyond being interesting. There are few points at which I find myself tapping a toe or singing along. Plenty of points at which I say, "Hey, that's kind of tricky," but that's not usually why I want to put on a piece of music.
So I dunno. If you were one of those people who went nuts over "math rock", then Tomorrow We Will Run Faster might be just the album for you. If your favorite song is "I Wanna Be Sedated", you'll probably want to pass on this one. As for me, I have about another four pounds of cheese to consume before sundown.
Henry Mancini
Breakfast At Tiffany's
I actually don't like martinis. This statement may be heretical in certain circles, but I am standing by it. They taste kind of grainy, and when you add an olive, they taste kind of oily and grainy, like lubricated paint thinner. Not my bag. I'll take a nice gin and tonic over a martini any day, especially with a little lime twist and maybe some snack crackers with squooshy cheese. Yum.
However, none of this in any way deters my enjoyment of the soundtrack to Breakfast At Tiffany's. And really, how could it? Whether one is in a leisure suit tossing back gin and vermouth, or in a chicken suit scratching in the yard for the last can of PBR, this is a fantastic album. Lounge banjo? Got it. Need I say more?
The Dismemberment Plan
Change
The Dismemberment Plan, perennial DC favorites, have once again taken to the CD presses with the release of their latest album, Change. Folks who have followed the Plan's live shows will recognize many of the titles on this album, such as "Time Bomb" and "Face of the Earth", which have been been percolating in the Plan's repertoire for over a year, but only recently made it to an album. And it's a good album. Not one of the greatest records of all time (which is a distinction that their prior release, Emergency and I, does boast), but a good album nonetheless. The thing is, it's tidy. Which always makes me nervous.
A few years ago, I used to keep all of my socks and underwear in the same drawer. I didn't really pair things up, I just kind of let it all float together, and would try to get a matching pair of socks when I really needed one. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes the non-matching pair were a lot more interesting that either sock would have been on its own. Sometimes I just looked like a dork and would get my lunch thrown out of the window of the school bus as a result. The outcome was unpredictable.
What I'm trying to say is that The Dismemberment Plan have begun to fold their socks. They're nice socks. They're comfortable, they keep the feet warm, and they look smart. And they match, and seldom are very surprising. Which, I suppose, is the price of maturity. As long as they don't start ironing their underwear, too, The Plan should remain a worthy band for years to come.
Rilo Kiley
Take Offs And Landings
For a few weeks this summer, I was (along with everyone else with any imagination) scared shitless of flying. By nature of having a job and needing to do pesky things like pay my rent, a certain amount of air travel was nonetheless necessary. But all of the reason in the world couldn't keep me from a bit of white-knuckled grasping of the airplane armrests.
And then I saw Rilo Kiley open for Superchunk at the Black Cat, and it was all made clear for me. Here were two bands, both of whom had a suspicious number of songs about fear of flying on their most recent albums. And my over-active imagination raced yet again. Did Rilo Kiley know about the terrorist activity in America when they wrote Take Offs And Landings? Were the concert promoters involved in some sort of vast rock-and-roll conspiracy when they booked a song like "Out On The Wing" with a song like "Plane Crash In C"? It certainly is suggestive, wouldn't you say?
Oh, but about the album -- the phrase "absolutely fucking brilliant" is one that comes to mind. One would truly need to have a heart of stone to have a suicidal vendetta against a country that could produce a band as sweet as Rilo Kiley. I propose that rather then dropping bombs on future terrorist states, we instead drop cassette singles of "Pictures of Success". That should be enough to convince future terrorists not to blow up any more planes. Well, at least not until they made absolutely sure that no members of Rilo Kiley were on board.
As for me, I'm still walking everywhere from now on. Short of someone planting a sneaker bomb in my closet, I figure that's pretty safe. Unfortunately, I'm planning a summer vacation to New Mexico, so I need to get started. Ciao.
Les Savy Fav
Go Forth
It's been difficult for me to write a review for Go Forth. It's kind of like when your girlfriend asks you if you like her new shoes -- there really isn't much that you can say without getting into trouble. You might love them, you might hate them, or you might be completely indifferent, but no matter what response you offer, it's not quite going to capture the complexity of what you mean to say, just because you happen to be in love with the shoe's wearer, and so any attempt at objectivity is doomed to be swaddled in layers of context. Except that Les Savy Fav aren't technically my girlfriend, even though it sometimes feels like it.
All of which means to say that I've been obsessed by this band for a couple of years, so it's difficult for me to say how good this album is. If I don't like it, is it because my expectations have been set so high? If I love it, is it only because the album happens to be by my favorite band? You see the dilemma.
So, at the risk of having the new pair of shoes thrown in my face, I cautiously say that this album is pretty good. At times it's great. Except maybe not quite as great as The Cat and the Cobra. Except that The Cat and the Cobra is so good that it makes me cry myself to sleep every night. And sometimes Go Forth does, too. Songs like "Reprobate's Resume" and "Adopduction" make me think that I should cut my ears off and mail them to the band as some sort of offering. Except that I don't know if the band would want them. And it would make my girlfriend mad, because then she couldn't ask me about things like shoes. Not that she ever asks me about shoes, anyway. But some day she might.
*Sigh*...
Should you get this album? Yes, of course. Will you listen to it many times each day for several weeks? Yes, if your constitution is sturdy enough. Do I think those shoes make you look fat?
Sorry -- I'm a bit busy listening to Go Forth right now. Ask me again later.
Superchunk
Here's To Shutting Up
McViking? Obsessive? Certainly not! And yet... And yet... Every time I try to listen to a different CD, I somehow end up listening to Here's To Shutting Up. It's like the standard Scooby Doo chase scene, where Scoob and Shaggy are running away from the taffy-monster, and they escape into a dark closet, only to notice a third pair of eyes blinking at them in the dark, and it's the taffy-monster again -- Aargh! -- and they have to start running away again. This album is like that for me, except that instead of a taffy-monster, it's ten beautifully crafted pop songs that have been setting the background for my emotional train wreck of an autumn. And I can't seem to stop listening to them.
I'll admit that I didn't expect much from this album. Having heard some of these songs live prior the the album release, I was pretty disappointed by what I heard. I'm now prepared to chalk that up to an off night on the part of the band. These songs are brilliant, probably on par with those from the last two Superchunk albums, which were similarly brilliant. At the moment, I'm particularly obsessed with the album's third cut, "Phone Sex" (although if I have to read one more review that compares it to a country song, I'll slay someone. Whoever told these reviewers that lap steel = country music needs to be flogged.) And last night, I was stumbling through the streets of Carlisle, PA, mumbling the lyrics to "Florida's On Fire" to myself and anyone else within earshot. While this arguably does not constitute healthy behavior, it made me feel better for a couple of hours.
Now excuse me while I listen to something else for a bit.
Aargh! Taffy-monster!
Yo La Tengo
I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
Yo La Tengo is one of those bands that every music lover worth his or her salt is supposed to love, to mention in hushed, reverent tones immediately before glancing heavenward and whispering a quick "Thank You." And yet, somehow, in all of my years of throwing away countless dollars and countless hours of my dwindling life on crappy record after crappy record, I never bought a Yo La Tengo album. Like ships in the night, their amplifiers and my ears glided past one another, frequently in close proximity, but never actually making contact. Until now.
My decision to purchase I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One was one of those choices that we make in life without much thought given to the actual decision. The decision-making process went something like this: "Hmm, Yo La Tengo. What the hell." The album arrived by mail a few days later, and I sat down to give it a listen. At the beginning of track 2, "Moby Octopad", I soiled myself. After a quick change of clothes, I continued listening to the album, and got as far as track 3, "Sugarcube", when I soiled myself again. I repeated this process several times, and then just decided to wallow in my own feces long enough to listen to the rest of the album. I've been doing laundry every other day since then.
This album is that good.
"Moby Octopad" and many other songs on the album embody my single favorite musical function: pretty feedback. Not the kind of feedback that makes your eyes bug out and your head explode, but the kind of feedback that makes you smile and lick your ice cream cone happily while your ears bleed. Reference the end of The Pixies Alec Eiffel, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
In summary: Yo La Tengo. I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. Get it. And stock up on stain stick and fabric softener while you're out.
|
|
|
|
