Sometimes an album inspires our most romantic and sentimental of sides. It makes a gray cloudy February sky sunny, makes crows sounds like melodious songbirds of love and makes a love-struck fool completely insufferable to anyone who crosses his merry path. It makes a man sit through that goddamn awful The Notebook for the eighth time and spend grotesque sums of money on dinner and drinks. It makes the object of his affection realize that at the end of the night, she's pretty much gonna have to give it up.
Liar is not that album. Released in 1992 by the Touch & Go label, The Jesus Lizard's third album stands as their best, a manic and deranged tromp through life's seediest back pages, mental insecurities, physical depravities, and psychopathic tendencies. It contains all the hallmarks that separate the band from all those industrial two-bit hack impersonators who would follow in their wake: David Yow's tortured and barely-understandable vocals, Duane Denison's jagged and pointed guitar work, and David Sims and Mac McNeilly's headache-inducing rhythmic backing. Though it lacks some of Goat's grime, sludge and sleaze, it straddles the line most effectively between the band's somewhat inaccessible early sound and the stylistic "progress" shown on their later Capitol releases. Though the makeup of Liar certainly isn't to everyone's liking - those who offend easily or like their music smooth, optimistic and incidental should stay the hell away - it is the band's most enduring work and also the best starting point for anyone with a passing interest in The Jesus Lizard.
The instrumentals on Liar leave no room for subtle textures or gray areas. Most songs are blasted out in relentless spurts and abrupt stops, the album's 10 songs crammed into 35 minutes of twitching agitation. Denison's guitar is unflinching and persistent, while the bass and drums pile on top and underneath to form something that's oddly noisy and melodic in a perverse way. Coupled with Yow's various shouts, yelps and screams the effect of this onslaught on the listener is disarming, especially on songs like "Boilermaker," "Puss" and "The Art of Self-Defense." Yet it's the arrangements' control and precision that separate it from that horrific glut of 1990s industrial/noise-rock albums that were vomited from countless dorm room speakers not so long ago. There are no wasted or extraneous notes here, a lack of such deviation suggesting that there was little room given for improvisation as the album was recorded. With the exception of the nearly six-minute "Zachariah," the album's tempo never really changes. An unforgiving and explosive machine-like efficiency dominates the album, but never does it sound manufactured, artificial or overly produced. There's also an interesting and slightly disparate contrast at play throughout the album, as Yow's unhinged and meandering vocals threaten to suffocate the band's pin-point but abrasive arrangements, most notably on "Gladiator."
What Yow does on Liar cannot be termed singing; it's a brutal massacre of anything even remotely soothing or comforting. A lot of cute metaphors that music journalists love to use have attempted to describe Yow's vocals over the years, most likely because they defy easy categorization. Easy descriptions aside- Yow as some type of street-corner religious madman or simply a stark raving lunatic - the vocals are about as subtle as tire iron upside the head. They're frequently incomprehensible, due to producer Steve Albini's now ubiquitous technique of burying them in the mix as well as Yow's determination to howl for a half hour like he's on borrowed time or hauling a corpse into the woods. The album starts with a grunt on "Boilermaker" and devolves from there, with Yow spitting out sounds that sometimes roughly approximate English.
So what happens in these songs? Though a lyrics sheet is needed to fully make sense of what Yow is ranting about, enough words and phrases bleed through to realize that all sort of nasty shit's going down. Fingernails are torn off, sexual perversions are equally indulged and suppressed, drug and alcohol fueled-paranoia runs rampant, murder and suicide tear ass across the album, and the bodies keep piling up. Yet for all this mindless violence, the lyrics frequently show a truly strange and unsettling poetic rhythm and cadence, particularly on "Boilermaker" and the ambiguous murder/suicide graphically described in "Rope." The lyrics compliment the band's instrumentation and make obvious what Yow's garbled wails imply.
Now with The Jesus Lizard reformed and back to touring and recording new music, it's a good time to pound through their back catalog, even the late Capitol releases. Of course this album isn't for everyone; if its often graphic subject matter doesn't turn people away, its punishing sound likely will. Though a case could be made for its predecessor Goat, Liar is more focused in its musical approach and more jarring in its lyrical content. While other noise-rock bands have since been tossed into the shitbin of history as well as countless record store bargain bins, Liar is still required listening for music fans with even a passing interest in 1990s indie.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
The Courtesy Tier: Map and a Marker
tell yourself: I will visit spectrumculture.com at least once a day.
In this current indie landscape where countless bands seem intent on churning out inaccessible albums in the name of experimentation, The Courtesy Tier's straightforward blues/garage rock hybrid sounds out of place. Of course there are still plenty of indie bands who understand that muddying the water just to make it look deep doesn't always work, and that sometimes lyrical and musical directness and a lack of bullshit frills is the best approach. Still - to these aging 31-year old ears at least - too often modern albums fail because they try to accomplish too much, with too many studio tricks, synths, layers, reverbs, bells, whistles, cocks and weenies thrown into the mix. If I sound like a Luddite, so be it, but it's hard to argue that such studio and software program excesses haven't hindered more albums than they've helped.
Although it won't spawn any new musical genres, The Courtesy Tier's Map and a Marker succeeds because of its direct and organic approach. Its five songs pulse with ringing guitars, insistent drums, soaring lead vocals and occasional background harmonies. A Brooklyn-based duo consisting of Omer Leibovitz (guitar/vocals) and Layton Weedeman (drums/vocals), the band approaches each track quite similarly, reducing the songs to their most basic elements. From opener "Buddy Casey" to closer "While I'm Gone," the songs' momentum never really lets up. There are few wasted notes and no extraneous filler here; even the sometimes-lengthy instrumental breaks found on most songs (especially "Friend") do not sound overindulgent in the least.
The mix is likewise punchy and vibrant; in a welcome break from the incoherent sludge that too often comes across this reviewer's ears, the vocals are up front and entirely audible. Leibovitz's voice is strong and fits in nicely with the songs' arrangements, avoiding those ticks and histrionics that tend to invite parody and well-deserved derision from indie fans. While not remarkable, the lyrics avoid gut-wrenching poetics and are solid enough, with "Cold" heavy with fatalistic undertones and "While I'm Gone" ambiguous in its narrator's intentions (why does the narrator keep advising someone to not leave the porch light on?). Map and a Marker sounds labored over and crafted but not excessively so; the duo's instrumental proficiency is apparent throughout but never makes the songs feel clinical or predictable.
At a shade over 20 minutes, Map and a Marker is brief, but as an EP it offers a great introduction to The Courtesy Tier. Though the duo's style is not revolutionary and other bands mine similar musical territory - I can already see the inevitable comparisons to The Black Keys - the songs here are both unpretentious and uniformly excellent, with an economy of playing that bypasses fluff in favor of substance. While there's always pause for praising a band too much based only on an EP, Map and a Marker shows a band playing to its strengths and foregoing those studio embellishments in favor of something immediate and direct.
by Eric Dennis
In this current indie landscape where countless bands seem intent on churning out inaccessible albums in the name of experimentation, The Courtesy Tier's straightforward blues/garage rock hybrid sounds out of place. Of course there are still plenty of indie bands who understand that muddying the water just to make it look deep doesn't always work, and that sometimes lyrical and musical directness and a lack of bullshit frills is the best approach. Still - to these aging 31-year old ears at least - too often modern albums fail because they try to accomplish too much, with too many studio tricks, synths, layers, reverbs, bells, whistles, cocks and weenies thrown into the mix. If I sound like a Luddite, so be it, but it's hard to argue that such studio and software program excesses haven't hindered more albums than they've helped.
Although it won't spawn any new musical genres, The Courtesy Tier's Map and a Marker succeeds because of its direct and organic approach. Its five songs pulse with ringing guitars, insistent drums, soaring lead vocals and occasional background harmonies. A Brooklyn-based duo consisting of Omer Leibovitz (guitar/vocals) and Layton Weedeman (drums/vocals), the band approaches each track quite similarly, reducing the songs to their most basic elements. From opener "Buddy Casey" to closer "While I'm Gone," the songs' momentum never really lets up. There are few wasted notes and no extraneous filler here; even the sometimes-lengthy instrumental breaks found on most songs (especially "Friend") do not sound overindulgent in the least.
The mix is likewise punchy and vibrant; in a welcome break from the incoherent sludge that too often comes across this reviewer's ears, the vocals are up front and entirely audible. Leibovitz's voice is strong and fits in nicely with the songs' arrangements, avoiding those ticks and histrionics that tend to invite parody and well-deserved derision from indie fans. While not remarkable, the lyrics avoid gut-wrenching poetics and are solid enough, with "Cold" heavy with fatalistic undertones and "While I'm Gone" ambiguous in its narrator's intentions (why does the narrator keep advising someone to not leave the porch light on?). Map and a Marker sounds labored over and crafted but not excessively so; the duo's instrumental proficiency is apparent throughout but never makes the songs feel clinical or predictable.
At a shade over 20 minutes, Map and a Marker is brief, but as an EP it offers a great introduction to The Courtesy Tier. Though the duo's style is not revolutionary and other bands mine similar musical territory - I can already see the inevitable comparisons to The Black Keys - the songs here are both unpretentious and uniformly excellent, with an economy of playing that bypasses fluff in favor of substance. While there's always pause for praising a band too much based only on an EP, Map and a Marker shows a band playing to its strengths and foregoing those studio embellishments in favor of something immediate and direct.
by Eric Dennis
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Revisit: Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island
go to spectrumculture.com
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
It's understandable why so many music fans and critics think Neutral Milk Hotel's impact on indie music starts and ends with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Simply put, Aeroplane is still one of music's defining aural documents, one of those few albums where all the gushing, awe and open-jawed wonder seem entirely appropriate and somehow insufficient. Ten years on from its initial release, it's still hard to put its beauty and heartbreak, promise and despair, specter of death and promise of rebirth, into perspective. Perhaps to Jeff Mangum's discomfort, the album continues to inspire a borderline psychotic devotion among indie fans; it's the type of album that can reduce even the most cynical and callous bastard to an emotional and quivering wreck.
Yet many of the themes and musical concepts that define Aeroplane were first explored, with often darker and bleaker tones, on debut album On Avery Island. Though the album bears the Neutral Milk Hotel moniker, in many ways this is misleading, as future band members Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes and Scott Spillane weren't involved. The album's main driving forces were Mangum, who played drums, guitar, keyboards and a small army of various other instruments, and Robert Schneider, who played bass and organ as well as crafted the album's horn arrangements. Released in 1996, just a short time before Aeroplane would unexpectedly saddle Mangum with a huge fucking albatross around his neck for life, the album's lo-fi experimentation has aged remarkably well and can now be seen as an intriguing and tantalizing first step toward the style and substance perfected on Aeroplane.
Indeed, the groundwork for the often disparate musical styles blended to such devastating effect on Aeroplane can be found on this debut effort. It alternates between moments of straightforward folksiness stripped bare and sections of wailing horns, loops, fuzz and other hallmarks of lo-fi. "A Baby For Pree" features nothing more than Mangum and an acoustic guitar, while the hazy "Three Peaches" augments this guitar with understated drones and ghostly background vocals. Other songs veer wildly in the opposite direction; fuzz and horns run wild on "Song Against Sex" and "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone," both of which wouldn't sound out of place on Aeroplane. Other songs exist somewhere in between these extremes. The acoustic foundations of both "Naomi" and "Where You'll Find Me Now" are propelled along by drums and keyboards, each song precariously dangling somewhere between traditional folk and obtuse experimentation. On Avery Island maintains a delicate balance between these often contradictory elements; if Aeroplane managed to walk that tight rope perfectly - and inspire a rabid fan base in the process - here the results are more jagged and fractured but no less fascinating. There is little breathing room throughout On Avery Island, its avalanche of instrumentation thrown together into a dizzying whole.
While Aeroplane at least implies that there's light to cut through the darkness, On Avery Island is startling for its overall somber mood. While many of the one-word lyrical obsessions that would define Aeroplane are present - childhood, sex, death - On Avery Island deals heavily in darkness and despair. Though one must tread lightly when examining Mangum's lyrics, some patterns do emerge. Images equal parts haunting and surreal are often thrown together uneasily; the nightmare soundscape of opener "Song Against Sex" is especially jarring, invoking everything from a hanging dead man from whom fishes fly out from his hands to an apocalyptic vision of fire engulfing the trees. Similar horrors recur throughout the album, most notably on "A Baby For Pree," which features Mangum's most tender singing and a horrific central image of a woman swimming in her babies on a bathroom floor.
Nearly every song carries with it a sense of finality, usually in the form of death creeping in or someone wandering in isolation. While listeners could find bits of comfort in Aeroplane's lyrical textures, here the songs have very little hint of that; close the lid and shovel the dirt on top. The narrator in "You've Passed" is fatalistic in the first degree, an unnamed woman's death bringing on a bout of regret and brooding that doesn't seem likely to end anytime soon: "But now I should have told you/ When your eyes were alive and awake/ Always in life we all must make this mistake/ And so I go it alone." "April 8" in many ways sounds like the song's companion piece, its narrator taking stock of his life and having very little to show for it: "Always a lonely widow/ Half awake and sleeping on my feet/ I'm of age but have no children/ No quarter phone booth calls to home/ Just late-night television/ Inside my bedroom all alone." While the album isn't completely morose, with both "Someone Is Waiting" and "Three Peaches" offering a sense of devotion and even romantic sentimentality, in most respects its songs are pensive and lacking Aeroplane's implied determination in the face of despair, however buried or muddled that might have been.
Though On Avery Island will likely always be overshadowed by the album that followed it, it still remains a key piece of the Neutral Milk Hotel story. Musically and lyrically it laid the foundations for what would be more fully refined and realized on Aeroplane. While its concepts are smaller - there's little along the lines of Anne Frank connecting these songs - it is in many cases equally emotional and creative. A small window of hope exists in Aeroplane, and the listener is free to determine whether that window is opening or closing. In On Avery Island it's impossible to shake the feeling that this window is slammed shut and probably won't ever open again.
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
It's understandable why so many music fans and critics think Neutral Milk Hotel's impact on indie music starts and ends with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Simply put, Aeroplane is still one of music's defining aural documents, one of those few albums where all the gushing, awe and open-jawed wonder seem entirely appropriate and somehow insufficient. Ten years on from its initial release, it's still hard to put its beauty and heartbreak, promise and despair, specter of death and promise of rebirth, into perspective. Perhaps to Jeff Mangum's discomfort, the album continues to inspire a borderline psychotic devotion among indie fans; it's the type of album that can reduce even the most cynical and callous bastard to an emotional and quivering wreck.
Yet many of the themes and musical concepts that define Aeroplane were first explored, with often darker and bleaker tones, on debut album On Avery Island. Though the album bears the Neutral Milk Hotel moniker, in many ways this is misleading, as future band members Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes and Scott Spillane weren't involved. The album's main driving forces were Mangum, who played drums, guitar, keyboards and a small army of various other instruments, and Robert Schneider, who played bass and organ as well as crafted the album's horn arrangements. Released in 1996, just a short time before Aeroplane would unexpectedly saddle Mangum with a huge fucking albatross around his neck for life, the album's lo-fi experimentation has aged remarkably well and can now be seen as an intriguing and tantalizing first step toward the style and substance perfected on Aeroplane.
Indeed, the groundwork for the often disparate musical styles blended to such devastating effect on Aeroplane can be found on this debut effort. It alternates between moments of straightforward folksiness stripped bare and sections of wailing horns, loops, fuzz and other hallmarks of lo-fi. "A Baby For Pree" features nothing more than Mangum and an acoustic guitar, while the hazy "Three Peaches" augments this guitar with understated drones and ghostly background vocals. Other songs veer wildly in the opposite direction; fuzz and horns run wild on "Song Against Sex" and "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone," both of which wouldn't sound out of place on Aeroplane. Other songs exist somewhere in between these extremes. The acoustic foundations of both "Naomi" and "Where You'll Find Me Now" are propelled along by drums and keyboards, each song precariously dangling somewhere between traditional folk and obtuse experimentation. On Avery Island maintains a delicate balance between these often contradictory elements; if Aeroplane managed to walk that tight rope perfectly - and inspire a rabid fan base in the process - here the results are more jagged and fractured but no less fascinating. There is little breathing room throughout On Avery Island, its avalanche of instrumentation thrown together into a dizzying whole.
While Aeroplane at least implies that there's light to cut through the darkness, On Avery Island is startling for its overall somber mood. While many of the one-word lyrical obsessions that would define Aeroplane are present - childhood, sex, death - On Avery Island deals heavily in darkness and despair. Though one must tread lightly when examining Mangum's lyrics, some patterns do emerge. Images equal parts haunting and surreal are often thrown together uneasily; the nightmare soundscape of opener "Song Against Sex" is especially jarring, invoking everything from a hanging dead man from whom fishes fly out from his hands to an apocalyptic vision of fire engulfing the trees. Similar horrors recur throughout the album, most notably on "A Baby For Pree," which features Mangum's most tender singing and a horrific central image of a woman swimming in her babies on a bathroom floor.
Nearly every song carries with it a sense of finality, usually in the form of death creeping in or someone wandering in isolation. While listeners could find bits of comfort in Aeroplane's lyrical textures, here the songs have very little hint of that; close the lid and shovel the dirt on top. The narrator in "You've Passed" is fatalistic in the first degree, an unnamed woman's death bringing on a bout of regret and brooding that doesn't seem likely to end anytime soon: "But now I should have told you/ When your eyes were alive and awake/ Always in life we all must make this mistake/ And so I go it alone." "April 8" in many ways sounds like the song's companion piece, its narrator taking stock of his life and having very little to show for it: "Always a lonely widow/ Half awake and sleeping on my feet/ I'm of age but have no children/ No quarter phone booth calls to home/ Just late-night television/ Inside my bedroom all alone." While the album isn't completely morose, with both "Someone Is Waiting" and "Three Peaches" offering a sense of devotion and even romantic sentimentality, in most respects its songs are pensive and lacking Aeroplane's implied determination in the face of despair, however buried or muddled that might have been.
Though On Avery Island will likely always be overshadowed by the album that followed it, it still remains a key piece of the Neutral Milk Hotel story. Musically and lyrically it laid the foundations for what would be more fully refined and realized on Aeroplane. While its concepts are smaller - there's little along the lines of Anne Frank connecting these songs - it is in many cases equally emotional and creative. A small window of hope exists in Aeroplane, and the listener is free to determine whether that window is opening or closing. In On Avery Island it's impossible to shake the feeling that this window is slammed shut and probably won't ever open again.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Concert Review: Lucero/Titus Andronicus
Off Broadway, St. Louis, MO, 4/9/09
Go to spectrumculture.com
It's all fun and games until two chicks get into a fight and even the band onstage comments about it. Such was the atmosphere as Lucero slogged through their headlining set at Off Broadway on a rainy Thursday night in St. Louis. Playing to a capacity crowd that consisted of an odd mix of obvious Lucero fans (trucker hats on heads and Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys clutched to hands) and indie kids looking like drowned hoody-wearing rats, the band definitely delighted its hardcore contingent of dedicated fans, cat fights be damned.
Yet the veteran band was completely upstaged by opening act Titus Andronicus, a band that hails from Glen Rock, New Jersey and has been receiving a borderline-psychotic amount of critical praise for their debut album The Airing Of Grievances. Playing St. Louis for the second time in just a few months (the band opened for Los Campesinos! in February), the band tore through most of the album in a manically aggressive and wonderfully ear-numbing 40-minute set. Though Grievances is far from polished - its lo-fi production at times recalls bands like Galaxie 500 and Neutral Milk Hotel - it does contain catchy and insistent melodies amid all the fracas and righteous outrage. The band's performance went one step further, bludgeoning any hints of subtlety with a few guitars, drums, keyboards and an occasional harmonica.
Several songs featured keyboards more prominently than their album counterparts from Grievances. This approach started with opening song "Upon Viewing Brueghel's 'Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus'" and was repeated on both "My Time Outside The Womb" and "Joset Of Nazareth's Blues," with lead vocalist Patrick Stickles a bundle of twitches and spasms as he pounded away on his keyboards or guitar. Other songs were built around more pronounced backing vocals, especially on "No Future Part Two: The Days After No Future," where Stickles' vocals approximated something between howling and barking. The band closed with album opener "Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ," its few lines of lyrics seemingly spat out quickly so that the band could explode one more time. But enough of these dry bullshit technical details; simply put, the band must be seen live to be truly appreciated. On this particular night Titus Andronicus alternated between moments of bottled-up tension and release that the album approximates, especially on "No Future." It was an unpredictable mixture of seemingly choreographed moments - some well-timed jumps and guitar-faces-of-pain on both "Titus Andronicus" and "Titus Andronicus Forever," for example - and moments where it looked like the band could go off the rails at any point. It was a tightrope walk between sloppiness and precision from a band whose live show here was like a jack-booted kick upside the head. And that's a good thing.
After a brief break Lucero took the stage, still looking like the motley collection of tattooed badasses you've either been warned about or aspire to become. From the onset it was obvious the vibe had changed; whereas Titus Andronicus was likely largely unknown to at least some of those in attendance and played accordingly, Lucero essentially acted as the master of ceremonies for a massive community sing-along. The band and its blend of punk-country has always inspired a fanatical (wait...dedicated) following, so perhaps this was to be expected. All the trademarks of the standard Lucero show were present: raised and pumping fists, Ben Nichols' countrified and scratchy-voiced drawl, tons of requests from the audience, at least one intoxicated moron repeatedly muscling people out of his way in the pit, and big fat anthemic guitar riffs. Still the band's set lacked passion and energy, with the exception of the pre-fight entertainment of "Nights Like These" and a driving version of "Sixteen." The band as a whole remained largely stationary for most of the night, which made them seem even more sedate after Titus Andronicus' furious performance. Though the jacked-up crowd clearly enjoyed itself, too often it felt like Lucero was simply preaching to the converted, where both audience and musicians were simply going through the motions of what they are each expected to do in such an environment.
Certainly the lousy sound didn't help Lucero's case either. Though the mix was far from perfect for Titus Andronicus, it still fit the band's aesthetic and the lyrics were about as intelligible as they are on Grievances. Take that for what it's worth. Nichols' vocals remained buried in the murk for much of the night, a disappointment since much of what makes albums like Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers and Tennessee worthwhile are the singer's ragged yet emotive vocals. If you didn't know the words going in, you sure as hell weren't going to learn them now. The cult of Lucero likely went home happy, but for those who don't quite get what the fuss and singular dedication from fans is all about, it's doubtful that this performance convinced them.
Lucero always bring a workmanlike professionalism to their shows; they've been touring relentlessly for years and know the ropes. Yet sometimes such an approach is overshadowed by a band that's rough around the edges and isn't note-perfect. Lucero's legion of fans may have had an enjoyable time Thursday night, but Titus Andronicus delivered a performance that showed why so many music fans and critics are going batshit crazy for them.
Go to spectrumculture.com
It's all fun and games until two chicks get into a fight and even the band onstage comments about it. Such was the atmosphere as Lucero slogged through their headlining set at Off Broadway on a rainy Thursday night in St. Louis. Playing to a capacity crowd that consisted of an odd mix of obvious Lucero fans (trucker hats on heads and Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys clutched to hands) and indie kids looking like drowned hoody-wearing rats, the band definitely delighted its hardcore contingent of dedicated fans, cat fights be damned.
Yet the veteran band was completely upstaged by opening act Titus Andronicus, a band that hails from Glen Rock, New Jersey and has been receiving a borderline-psychotic amount of critical praise for their debut album The Airing Of Grievances. Playing St. Louis for the second time in just a few months (the band opened for Los Campesinos! in February), the band tore through most of the album in a manically aggressive and wonderfully ear-numbing 40-minute set. Though Grievances is far from polished - its lo-fi production at times recalls bands like Galaxie 500 and Neutral Milk Hotel - it does contain catchy and insistent melodies amid all the fracas and righteous outrage. The band's performance went one step further, bludgeoning any hints of subtlety with a few guitars, drums, keyboards and an occasional harmonica.
Several songs featured keyboards more prominently than their album counterparts from Grievances. This approach started with opening song "Upon Viewing Brueghel's 'Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus'" and was repeated on both "My Time Outside The Womb" and "Joset Of Nazareth's Blues," with lead vocalist Patrick Stickles a bundle of twitches and spasms as he pounded away on his keyboards or guitar. Other songs were built around more pronounced backing vocals, especially on "No Future Part Two: The Days After No Future," where Stickles' vocals approximated something between howling and barking. The band closed with album opener "Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ," its few lines of lyrics seemingly spat out quickly so that the band could explode one more time. But enough of these dry bullshit technical details; simply put, the band must be seen live to be truly appreciated. On this particular night Titus Andronicus alternated between moments of bottled-up tension and release that the album approximates, especially on "No Future." It was an unpredictable mixture of seemingly choreographed moments - some well-timed jumps and guitar-faces-of-pain on both "Titus Andronicus" and "Titus Andronicus Forever," for example - and moments where it looked like the band could go off the rails at any point. It was a tightrope walk between sloppiness and precision from a band whose live show here was like a jack-booted kick upside the head. And that's a good thing.
After a brief break Lucero took the stage, still looking like the motley collection of tattooed badasses you've either been warned about or aspire to become. From the onset it was obvious the vibe had changed; whereas Titus Andronicus was likely largely unknown to at least some of those in attendance and played accordingly, Lucero essentially acted as the master of ceremonies for a massive community sing-along. The band and its blend of punk-country has always inspired a fanatical (wait...dedicated) following, so perhaps this was to be expected. All the trademarks of the standard Lucero show were present: raised and pumping fists, Ben Nichols' countrified and scratchy-voiced drawl, tons of requests from the audience, at least one intoxicated moron repeatedly muscling people out of his way in the pit, and big fat anthemic guitar riffs. Still the band's set lacked passion and energy, with the exception of the pre-fight entertainment of "Nights Like These" and a driving version of "Sixteen." The band as a whole remained largely stationary for most of the night, which made them seem even more sedate after Titus Andronicus' furious performance. Though the jacked-up crowd clearly enjoyed itself, too often it felt like Lucero was simply preaching to the converted, where both audience and musicians were simply going through the motions of what they are each expected to do in such an environment.
Certainly the lousy sound didn't help Lucero's case either. Though the mix was far from perfect for Titus Andronicus, it still fit the band's aesthetic and the lyrics were about as intelligible as they are on Grievances. Take that for what it's worth. Nichols' vocals remained buried in the murk for much of the night, a disappointment since much of what makes albums like Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers and Tennessee worthwhile are the singer's ragged yet emotive vocals. If you didn't know the words going in, you sure as hell weren't going to learn them now. The cult of Lucero likely went home happy, but for those who don't quite get what the fuss and singular dedication from fans is all about, it's doubtful that this performance convinced them.
Lucero always bring a workmanlike professionalism to their shows; they've been touring relentlessly for years and know the ropes. Yet sometimes such an approach is overshadowed by a band that's rough around the edges and isn't note-perfect. Lucero's legion of fans may have had an enjoyable time Thursday night, but Titus Andronicus delivered a performance that showed why so many music fans and critics are going batshit crazy for them.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Saddest Songs Ever
Go to http://spectrumculture.com/2009/05/now-aint-the-time-for-your-tears-the-saddest-music-in-the-world.html for the complete article. Do it now. Look both ways before crossing the street.
In the meantime, here's my entry. Enjoy.
Nothing quite cuts through the sunny disposition of an eternal optimist like a depressing song. Forget all the joy, happiness, peace, harmony and the rest of that shit that music inspires in listeners; those emotions are easy. When a song can make listeners sob softly or catatonically stare at their shoes and ponder life's utter bleakness, that's when a song is truly special. Whether it's Richard Thompson telling a small child that there's nothing at the end of the rainbow or Tom Waits asking us to hang down our heads for sorrow, we all have songs that affect us in a certain way. So grab the tissues and open up those tear ducts as Spectrum Culture's staff presents their choices for most depressing song ever.
Okkervil River- "Savannah Smiles"
from The Stage Names (2007)
"Savannah Smiles" takes as its subject Shannon Wilsey, a porno actress who traded under the stage name Savannah. By 1994, after appearing in hundreds of skin flicks, she was dead at the age of 23, shooting herself in the head hours after an automobile accident left her with a broken noise and facial lacerations. Wilsey's was a short and tragic life - her parents divorced when she was two years old, she had a miscarriage before turning 18, and large amounts of her porno dollars went to support her drug habit - and, all cynicism aside, consisted of the type of stuff ripe for lyrical interpretation.
In Okkervil River's The Stage Names, an album whose inherent despair and sadness are largely offset by up-tempo and precise instrumentation, "Savannah Smiles" is its bleakest and most heartbreaking track, sung from the point of view of Wilsey's father struggling to come to terms with the contrast of the daughter he thought he knew and the adult she's becoming. In an album where somehow even a song about the suicide of poet John Berryman carries a tone of liberation, maybe even optimism, there's none of that here. Singer Will Sheff assumes the father's persona and sings in a world-weary and utterly defeated voice as he tries to reconcile the "baby doll" he knew with her far-different adult version. The father accidentally discovers his daughter's diary - why he's rooting around in her room at midnight and how he "didn't know what it might be until it was open" are never explained - only to immediately regret his decision after reading only one page. We never find out what the father read, but it's clearly nothing good: "Talk about your big mistakes/ Hey Shan, nice going" is all he can muster as he's left staring at photos of his daughter when she was eight years old. There are, of course, "no tears in her eyes" in those pictures.
Sheff's vocal approach and lyrics are enough to turn anyone into a sobbing wreck; even the fall sky is gray and the song on the radio offers no comfort, for chrissakes. What's equally devastating is the song's arrangement. Occasional guitar strums, strings, xylophone and what sounds like a ticking clock are subtly blended together to haunting effect. Unlike many of Okkervil River's other songs, "Savannah Smiles" has no major musical highs or crushing lows; it just counts the days away slowly as the distance between the girl a father knew and the adult she is becomes greater and greater. Where portions of Black Sheep Boy could be faulted for being melodramatic, here the song's restraint actually heightens its impact.
Certainly Okkervil River has recorded its fair share of ultra-depressing songs; "A Stone" and "Song Of Our So-Called Friend" immediately come to mind. Hell, Black Sheep Boy should have been packaged with a case of tissues so listeners could dry their tears as they listened to it. Still, with its pitiable narrator, tired vocals and mournful arrangement, it's one of the darkest and most hopeless songs from this, or any, decade. -
In the meantime, here's my entry. Enjoy.
Nothing quite cuts through the sunny disposition of an eternal optimist like a depressing song. Forget all the joy, happiness, peace, harmony and the rest of that shit that music inspires in listeners; those emotions are easy. When a song can make listeners sob softly or catatonically stare at their shoes and ponder life's utter bleakness, that's when a song is truly special. Whether it's Richard Thompson telling a small child that there's nothing at the end of the rainbow or Tom Waits asking us to hang down our heads for sorrow, we all have songs that affect us in a certain way. So grab the tissues and open up those tear ducts as Spectrum Culture's staff presents their choices for most depressing song ever.
Okkervil River- "Savannah Smiles"
from The Stage Names (2007)
"Savannah Smiles" takes as its subject Shannon Wilsey, a porno actress who traded under the stage name Savannah. By 1994, after appearing in hundreds of skin flicks, she was dead at the age of 23, shooting herself in the head hours after an automobile accident left her with a broken noise and facial lacerations. Wilsey's was a short and tragic life - her parents divorced when she was two years old, she had a miscarriage before turning 18, and large amounts of her porno dollars went to support her drug habit - and, all cynicism aside, consisted of the type of stuff ripe for lyrical interpretation.
In Okkervil River's The Stage Names, an album whose inherent despair and sadness are largely offset by up-tempo and precise instrumentation, "Savannah Smiles" is its bleakest and most heartbreaking track, sung from the point of view of Wilsey's father struggling to come to terms with the contrast of the daughter he thought he knew and the adult she's becoming. In an album where somehow even a song about the suicide of poet John Berryman carries a tone of liberation, maybe even optimism, there's none of that here. Singer Will Sheff assumes the father's persona and sings in a world-weary and utterly defeated voice as he tries to reconcile the "baby doll" he knew with her far-different adult version. The father accidentally discovers his daughter's diary - why he's rooting around in her room at midnight and how he "didn't know what it might be until it was open" are never explained - only to immediately regret his decision after reading only one page. We never find out what the father read, but it's clearly nothing good: "Talk about your big mistakes/ Hey Shan, nice going" is all he can muster as he's left staring at photos of his daughter when she was eight years old. There are, of course, "no tears in her eyes" in those pictures.
Sheff's vocal approach and lyrics are enough to turn anyone into a sobbing wreck; even the fall sky is gray and the song on the radio offers no comfort, for chrissakes. What's equally devastating is the song's arrangement. Occasional guitar strums, strings, xylophone and what sounds like a ticking clock are subtly blended together to haunting effect. Unlike many of Okkervil River's other songs, "Savannah Smiles" has no major musical highs or crushing lows; it just counts the days away slowly as the distance between the girl a father knew and the adult she is becomes greater and greater. Where portions of Black Sheep Boy could be faulted for being melodramatic, here the song's restraint actually heightens its impact.
Certainly Okkervil River has recorded its fair share of ultra-depressing songs; "A Stone" and "Song Of Our So-Called Friend" immediately come to mind. Hell, Black Sheep Boy should have been packaged with a case of tissues so listeners could dry their tears as they listened to it. Still, with its pitiable narrator, tired vocals and mournful arrangement, it's one of the darkest and most hopeless songs from this, or any, decade. -
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Revisit: Warren Zevon: Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy
your girlfriend has been spending all her time at spectrumculture.com. shouldn't you also?
It's perhaps morbidly appropriate that it took the news of Warren Zevon's cancer diagnosis in 2002 to re-introduce the musician to the general music public. For a brief period, it looked like Zevon was finally going to be afforded the mainstream attention he briefly flirted with early in his career. A high profile VH1 documentary chronicled his battle against cancer as well as the making of final album The Wind, including cameos from top tier musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Emmylou Harris and, um, Billy Bob Thornton; various critics who had written Zevon off years ago weaseled up to the bar to sing his praises one more time; Bob Dylan even "covered" "Mutineer," "Boom Boom Mancini" and "Lawyers, Guns and Money" as standard entries in his concert setlists throughout 2003.
Now five years removed from his death, Zevon's place as one of music's more innovative and uncompromising artists is secure. An artist who straddled the line between cult favorite and household name, the popular yet somewhat stereotypical image of Zevon that still persists to this day is that of an unhinged artist with a strong nihilistic streak and hardass persona, albeit with a mordant sense of humor; writing songs about cattle dying of brucellosis and giving albums thinly veiled titles like My Ride's Here will have that effect on your image. Though his later work was spotty at best, his two 1970s albums - 1976's self-titled effort and 1978's Excitable Boy - have aged remarkably well and include all the hallmarks that make Zevon's music still so intriguing. In many ways these two albums laid out the template Zevon would follow throughout his career, mixing hell-raising songs about drunkards, sex hounds, random acts of brutality, and other wholesome characters and activities, with too frequently overlooked piano-based pseudo ballads.
Certainly this image of Zevon as a death-fixated lunatic recklessly careening headfirst into oblivion is largely attributable to these two releases; if the songs left any doubt about Zevon's own volatility, Crystal Zevon's recently-published oral history took care of that. Several tracks are as manic as Zevon's accepted persona, with jagged guitars, keyboards, percussion, and synthesizers used to stir up a holy racket behind Zevon's vocals. The macho posturing and boastful promiscuity of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" go hand-in-hand with the narrator cozying up to a railroad track and waiting in vain for the train to do its worst." "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" shares a similar sentiment, the narrator's addled brain and body fueled by "heartbreak motor oil," "Bombay gin" and unspecified medication; a .38 Special is substituted for the railroad tracks in this case. Both songs are unapologetically seedy; the listener can practically smell the mixture of booze and skank.
The albums' violence and fatalistic overtones are heightened by the trademark dark humor that Zevon utilized for much of his career. This is especially true of "Excitable Boy" and "Werewolves of London," where Zevon somehow successfully tells stories about psychopathic butchers with a twisted brand of comedy. The bouncy piano-based arrangements and howling vocals of both tracks - tap your feet as that cage made of bones is built - set both songs as musical pulp fictions and show that neither song is meant to be taken too seriously. Of course Zevon's villains are the worst kind of evil; the Excitable Boy bites a movie usher's leg, shows he's not much of a prom date by killing Little Susie, and worst of all, spills pot roast all over himself, while the Werewolf is a debonair, piña colada-drinking, slyly ruthless killer. It's musical dark comedy at its best; the near-gospel backing vocals on "Excitable Boy" drip with cheesiness, and it's impossible not to laugh when Zevon deadpans how a "little old lady got mutilated late last night" in "Werewolves."
Yet there's a subtlety and warmth to these albums that is all too often overlooked. Though it's a stretch to lump Zevon into that glut of sensitive singer-songwriters from the 1970s - slumming around with an uber-wussy Jackson Browne doesn't make Zevon guilty by association - several songs are striking for the raw emotions they convey. "Hasten Down the Wind" is a borderline saccharine ode to a relationship in shambles, saved by David Lindley's slide guitar and Zevon's near-falsetto singing. "Accidentally Like a Martyr" follows a similar arc on Excitable Boy, offering a combination of regret, confusion, and loneliness under a sunless sky. The debauched lifestyle referenced, if not wholly endorsed, throughout both albums is flipped around on "Carmelita" and "Desperados Under the Eaves." "Carmelita, built around Zevon's electric piano and flamenco-styled guitars from Waddy Wachtel and Lindley, is a primarily bleak depiction of a heroin junkie on the ropes, his typewriter pawned for more dope and his methadone fix cut off by the county. "Desperados" is similarly oppressive, with a pissed off sun and trees "like crucified thieves" to match; its narrator "still waking up in the morning with shaking hands" is presumably in the grips of chemical detox. Though these songs contain some very dry humor, all are predominantly dark and stand in sharp contrast to the albums' more raucous moments.
All of this ignores the frequently topical nature of both Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy. Indeed, a thesis could be written on the socio-political themes of the revenge tale masterfully laid out in "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." And this isn't to suggest that Zevon should be seen as a broken-hearted balladeer. The musician's enduring legacy will likely remain tied to his better known and harder-edged songs. After all, we like our musical heroes reckless and borderline insane, traits that Zevon had in spades both on record and in his life; with Zevon it was a lot of masculine boasting and Bacchus-like drinking. Still, there's a wider range of emotions on these albums that goes far beyond this popular legacy. Though even the albums' quieter moments contain heavy doses of fatalism, they offer a different perspective on Warren Zevon in both the 1970s and throughout his career.
It's perhaps morbidly appropriate that it took the news of Warren Zevon's cancer diagnosis in 2002 to re-introduce the musician to the general music public. For a brief period, it looked like Zevon was finally going to be afforded the mainstream attention he briefly flirted with early in his career. A high profile VH1 documentary chronicled his battle against cancer as well as the making of final album The Wind, including cameos from top tier musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Emmylou Harris and, um, Billy Bob Thornton; various critics who had written Zevon off years ago weaseled up to the bar to sing his praises one more time; Bob Dylan even "covered" "Mutineer," "Boom Boom Mancini" and "Lawyers, Guns and Money" as standard entries in his concert setlists throughout 2003.
Now five years removed from his death, Zevon's place as one of music's more innovative and uncompromising artists is secure. An artist who straddled the line between cult favorite and household name, the popular yet somewhat stereotypical image of Zevon that still persists to this day is that of an unhinged artist with a strong nihilistic streak and hardass persona, albeit with a mordant sense of humor; writing songs about cattle dying of brucellosis and giving albums thinly veiled titles like My Ride's Here will have that effect on your image. Though his later work was spotty at best, his two 1970s albums - 1976's self-titled effort and 1978's Excitable Boy - have aged remarkably well and include all the hallmarks that make Zevon's music still so intriguing. In many ways these two albums laid out the template Zevon would follow throughout his career, mixing hell-raising songs about drunkards, sex hounds, random acts of brutality, and other wholesome characters and activities, with too frequently overlooked piano-based pseudo ballads.
Certainly this image of Zevon as a death-fixated lunatic recklessly careening headfirst into oblivion is largely attributable to these two releases; if the songs left any doubt about Zevon's own volatility, Crystal Zevon's recently-published oral history took care of that. Several tracks are as manic as Zevon's accepted persona, with jagged guitars, keyboards, percussion, and synthesizers used to stir up a holy racket behind Zevon's vocals. The macho posturing and boastful promiscuity of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" go hand-in-hand with the narrator cozying up to a railroad track and waiting in vain for the train to do its worst." "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" shares a similar sentiment, the narrator's addled brain and body fueled by "heartbreak motor oil," "Bombay gin" and unspecified medication; a .38 Special is substituted for the railroad tracks in this case. Both songs are unapologetically seedy; the listener can practically smell the mixture of booze and skank.
The albums' violence and fatalistic overtones are heightened by the trademark dark humor that Zevon utilized for much of his career. This is especially true of "Excitable Boy" and "Werewolves of London," where Zevon somehow successfully tells stories about psychopathic butchers with a twisted brand of comedy. The bouncy piano-based arrangements and howling vocals of both tracks - tap your feet as that cage made of bones is built - set both songs as musical pulp fictions and show that neither song is meant to be taken too seriously. Of course Zevon's villains are the worst kind of evil; the Excitable Boy bites a movie usher's leg, shows he's not much of a prom date by killing Little Susie, and worst of all, spills pot roast all over himself, while the Werewolf is a debonair, piña colada-drinking, slyly ruthless killer. It's musical dark comedy at its best; the near-gospel backing vocals on "Excitable Boy" drip with cheesiness, and it's impossible not to laugh when Zevon deadpans how a "little old lady got mutilated late last night" in "Werewolves."
Yet there's a subtlety and warmth to these albums that is all too often overlooked. Though it's a stretch to lump Zevon into that glut of sensitive singer-songwriters from the 1970s - slumming around with an uber-wussy Jackson Browne doesn't make Zevon guilty by association - several songs are striking for the raw emotions they convey. "Hasten Down the Wind" is a borderline saccharine ode to a relationship in shambles, saved by David Lindley's slide guitar and Zevon's near-falsetto singing. "Accidentally Like a Martyr" follows a similar arc on Excitable Boy, offering a combination of regret, confusion, and loneliness under a sunless sky. The debauched lifestyle referenced, if not wholly endorsed, throughout both albums is flipped around on "Carmelita" and "Desperados Under the Eaves." "Carmelita, built around Zevon's electric piano and flamenco-styled guitars from Waddy Wachtel and Lindley, is a primarily bleak depiction of a heroin junkie on the ropes, his typewriter pawned for more dope and his methadone fix cut off by the county. "Desperados" is similarly oppressive, with a pissed off sun and trees "like crucified thieves" to match; its narrator "still waking up in the morning with shaking hands" is presumably in the grips of chemical detox. Though these songs contain some very dry humor, all are predominantly dark and stand in sharp contrast to the albums' more raucous moments.
All of this ignores the frequently topical nature of both Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy. Indeed, a thesis could be written on the socio-political themes of the revenge tale masterfully laid out in "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." And this isn't to suggest that Zevon should be seen as a broken-hearted balladeer. The musician's enduring legacy will likely remain tied to his better known and harder-edged songs. After all, we like our musical heroes reckless and borderline insane, traits that Zevon had in spades both on record and in his life; with Zevon it was a lot of masculine boasting and Bacchus-like drinking. Still, there's a wider range of emotions on these albums that goes far beyond this popular legacy. Though even the albums' quieter moments contain heavy doses of fatalism, they offer a different perspective on Warren Zevon in both the 1970s and throughout his career.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Concert Review: Andrew Bird/Heartless Bastards
The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, 03/15/09
go to spectrumculture.com
It was an interesting study in musical contrasts at the Pageant Sunday night. Opening act Heartless Bastards specializes in something that can best be described as a thrillingly bastardized form of garage blues-rock. The band's music doesn't so much nudge listeners awake as grab them by the throats and thump them upside their heads. No points for subtlety here; lead vocalist Erika Wennerstrom substitutes soaring emotion and a booming voice in place of pitch-perfect delivery. The band's latest album The Mountain had all these qualities in spades, and showed some advances as the band occasionally opted for some folksiness with banjos and fiddles. All those seemingly endless comparisons to fellow Ohioans The Black Keys aside, Heartless Bastards is a damn good band in their own right, though Wennerstrom is the band's only constant member.
Headliner Andrew Bird's approach is markedly different. While his live show tends to be more free-form and unhinged than his albums, with an urgency to the songs that is largely absent from their studio counterparts, releases like The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Noble Beast are lyrically dense and musically layered, straddling that fine line between lyrical ambiguity and inaccessibility. His songs reveal themselves gradually over time; if Heartless Bastards' style is to jar listeners to attention via Wennerstrom's vocals and the band's onslaught, Bird often relies on understated melodies, loops, and all that damn whistling to make his point. Regarding what that point is - who the hell knows, with Bird himself admitting that he's not even sure what the songs mean.
Though the main similarities these two artists have in common are mostly limited to their record label - they're both currently part of the Fat Possum stable - the pairing made for a pretty solid, if disparate, few hours of music. Heartless Bastards took the stage at 8 pm sharp - it's a work night, folks - to polite but somewhat subdued applause from the capacity crowd. The band's plan of attack was direct and loud, with the Pageant's notoriously spotty sound quality (think of a thumping bass heard from the comfort of a toilet bowl) thankfully absent. With a heavy dose of songs from the new album, Heartless Bastards played tight and polished - perhaps a little too polished - with Wennerstrom pausing only briefly between songs to switch guitars or introduce the next number. The band nicely translated their love of volume to this live setting, with "Blue Day" grooving like a dusty blues track from a bygone era and "Sway" taking on murky, sinister undertones. Most songs were stretched out with lengthy instrumental jams that showed the band's garage rock roots, even if they've moved far beyond the claustrophobic quarters of the tiny Duck Room, where they played on their last stop in St. Louis. "The Mountain" benefited from a similar thrashing, with Wennerstrom's vocals complementing the band's racket and sounding like a cross between Lucinda Williams and Jim James (that's a compliment). An acoustic take of "So Quiet" offered a brief respite from the band's general clamor, before their set concluded with the ubiquitous big finish - dueling guitars full of fury and fire, manic drumming, and distorted faces of anguish from the band members. For the most part the usually chatty St. Louis crowd - nothing says sophistication like talking through an entire fucking concert, especially in the grips of a recession - was attentive, with the usual background hum of conversations little more than a hushed din.
If the band could be faulted for anything, it's that they were at times too precise and too exact to make any real connection with the audience. Part of this disconnect can be attributed to the Pageant's complete lack of aesthetics or atmosphere; despite being a mid-sized club, with its gigantic advertisers for the venue's corporate sponsors and non-existent décor, it's almost as cold and impersonal as any massive arena. Still, despite some dedicated head banging from a few of the pit's more manic members and St. Louis icon Beatle Bob shadowboxing with an invisible adversary, it was hard not to feel that the band's sound would be better suited to a sweaty, dingy, seedy basement concert room instead. While not revelatory, the band's set was strong and able to hold the attention of those ADD-addled concertgoers. Wennerstrom's voice in particular is an instrument in itself, brash without being bombastic and soulful without being overwrought.
After a relatively brief pause while the stage was stripped of all things Heartless Bastard, the pit warriors jockeyed for prime real estate (elbows up!), and one concertgoer regaled me with a story about how the often-truculent Jerry Lee Lewis several years ago called his friend "the spit in my mouth" before the verbal abuse really started, Andrew Bird opened the show solo, armed only with a violin, guitar, xylophone, and tons of loops. An opening instrumental that segued into "The Water Jet Cilice" - with the musician continuing his odd tradition of taking off his shoes - set the template for much of what followed, with Bird building the songs piece by piece by looping his instruments and alternating between violin and guitar. Backing band Martin Dosh, Mike Lewis and Jeremy Ylvisaker then joined for the main set, with songs like "Masterswarm," "Natural Disaster," "Effigy, "and "Souverian" performed more drawn out and atmospheric than they are on Noble Beast. Those who have seen Bird perform before are well aware of how he reworks his songs' textures and especially their vocal arrangements; it's this type of unique phrasing and near-improvisation that makes Bird such an engaging performer. Other songs were far less restrained, with a jagged version of "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left" accompanied by intense stage lights that made more than a few people - you guessed it - snap their heads to the left. "Fake Palindromes" was similarly twitchy and aggressive, a fitting closer to the main set before a too-short two-song encore.
While on paper Bird's songs lean toward the oblique, the distance that threatens to separate the performer from the audience is bridged by Bird's stage presence; it's simply too hard to look away. Part of Bird's sway over an audience stems from how these songs are literally built block by block on stage, along with a reserved and self-deprecating stage demeanor. His mannerisms are crafted without seeming overly choreographed or theatrical. Certainly part of this is the combined novelty of all those loops and all that whistling, but Bird often deviates from a song's structure, suggesting that his albums are merely blueprints that are more fully fleshed out in performance.
Of course some tightasses will mention that the show wasn't flawless; "Lull" had two false starts as Bird and Dosh couldn't get their loops to mesh, "Why?" took a while to get grounded and "Anonanimal" was a sludge of noise, but those are minor quibbles. And likely there are some fans clamoring for those pastoral days of 2003 when Bird played solo to a couple dozen people in the Duck Room and their primary reference point was that one of Bird's songs was actually a Galway Kinnell poem. As both a musician and performer Andrew Bird has far outgrown those boundaries. There are few musicians who have Bird's ability for lyrical and instrumental arrangements, and even fewer who can seamlessly reconstruct them in a live setting.
go to spectrumculture.com
It was an interesting study in musical contrasts at the Pageant Sunday night. Opening act Heartless Bastards specializes in something that can best be described as a thrillingly bastardized form of garage blues-rock. The band's music doesn't so much nudge listeners awake as grab them by the throats and thump them upside their heads. No points for subtlety here; lead vocalist Erika Wennerstrom substitutes soaring emotion and a booming voice in place of pitch-perfect delivery. The band's latest album The Mountain had all these qualities in spades, and showed some advances as the band occasionally opted for some folksiness with banjos and fiddles. All those seemingly endless comparisons to fellow Ohioans The Black Keys aside, Heartless Bastards is a damn good band in their own right, though Wennerstrom is the band's only constant member.
Headliner Andrew Bird's approach is markedly different. While his live show tends to be more free-form and unhinged than his albums, with an urgency to the songs that is largely absent from their studio counterparts, releases like The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Noble Beast are lyrically dense and musically layered, straddling that fine line between lyrical ambiguity and inaccessibility. His songs reveal themselves gradually over time; if Heartless Bastards' style is to jar listeners to attention via Wennerstrom's vocals and the band's onslaught, Bird often relies on understated melodies, loops, and all that damn whistling to make his point. Regarding what that point is - who the hell knows, with Bird himself admitting that he's not even sure what the songs mean.
Though the main similarities these two artists have in common are mostly limited to their record label - they're both currently part of the Fat Possum stable - the pairing made for a pretty solid, if disparate, few hours of music. Heartless Bastards took the stage at 8 pm sharp - it's a work night, folks - to polite but somewhat subdued applause from the capacity crowd. The band's plan of attack was direct and loud, with the Pageant's notoriously spotty sound quality (think of a thumping bass heard from the comfort of a toilet bowl) thankfully absent. With a heavy dose of songs from the new album, Heartless Bastards played tight and polished - perhaps a little too polished - with Wennerstrom pausing only briefly between songs to switch guitars or introduce the next number. The band nicely translated their love of volume to this live setting, with "Blue Day" grooving like a dusty blues track from a bygone era and "Sway" taking on murky, sinister undertones. Most songs were stretched out with lengthy instrumental jams that showed the band's garage rock roots, even if they've moved far beyond the claustrophobic quarters of the tiny Duck Room, where they played on their last stop in St. Louis. "The Mountain" benefited from a similar thrashing, with Wennerstrom's vocals complementing the band's racket and sounding like a cross between Lucinda Williams and Jim James (that's a compliment). An acoustic take of "So Quiet" offered a brief respite from the band's general clamor, before their set concluded with the ubiquitous big finish - dueling guitars full of fury and fire, manic drumming, and distorted faces of anguish from the band members. For the most part the usually chatty St. Louis crowd - nothing says sophistication like talking through an entire fucking concert, especially in the grips of a recession - was attentive, with the usual background hum of conversations little more than a hushed din.
If the band could be faulted for anything, it's that they were at times too precise and too exact to make any real connection with the audience. Part of this disconnect can be attributed to the Pageant's complete lack of aesthetics or atmosphere; despite being a mid-sized club, with its gigantic advertisers for the venue's corporate sponsors and non-existent décor, it's almost as cold and impersonal as any massive arena. Still, despite some dedicated head banging from a few of the pit's more manic members and St. Louis icon Beatle Bob shadowboxing with an invisible adversary, it was hard not to feel that the band's sound would be better suited to a sweaty, dingy, seedy basement concert room instead. While not revelatory, the band's set was strong and able to hold the attention of those ADD-addled concertgoers. Wennerstrom's voice in particular is an instrument in itself, brash without being bombastic and soulful without being overwrought.
After a relatively brief pause while the stage was stripped of all things Heartless Bastard, the pit warriors jockeyed for prime real estate (elbows up!), and one concertgoer regaled me with a story about how the often-truculent Jerry Lee Lewis several years ago called his friend "the spit in my mouth" before the verbal abuse really started, Andrew Bird opened the show solo, armed only with a violin, guitar, xylophone, and tons of loops. An opening instrumental that segued into "The Water Jet Cilice" - with the musician continuing his odd tradition of taking off his shoes - set the template for much of what followed, with Bird building the songs piece by piece by looping his instruments and alternating between violin and guitar. Backing band Martin Dosh, Mike Lewis and Jeremy Ylvisaker then joined for the main set, with songs like "Masterswarm," "Natural Disaster," "Effigy, "and "Souverian" performed more drawn out and atmospheric than they are on Noble Beast. Those who have seen Bird perform before are well aware of how he reworks his songs' textures and especially their vocal arrangements; it's this type of unique phrasing and near-improvisation that makes Bird such an engaging performer. Other songs were far less restrained, with a jagged version of "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left" accompanied by intense stage lights that made more than a few people - you guessed it - snap their heads to the left. "Fake Palindromes" was similarly twitchy and aggressive, a fitting closer to the main set before a too-short two-song encore.
While on paper Bird's songs lean toward the oblique, the distance that threatens to separate the performer from the audience is bridged by Bird's stage presence; it's simply too hard to look away. Part of Bird's sway over an audience stems from how these songs are literally built block by block on stage, along with a reserved and self-deprecating stage demeanor. His mannerisms are crafted without seeming overly choreographed or theatrical. Certainly part of this is the combined novelty of all those loops and all that whistling, but Bird often deviates from a song's structure, suggesting that his albums are merely blueprints that are more fully fleshed out in performance.
Of course some tightasses will mention that the show wasn't flawless; "Lull" had two false starts as Bird and Dosh couldn't get their loops to mesh, "Why?" took a while to get grounded and "Anonanimal" was a sludge of noise, but those are minor quibbles. And likely there are some fans clamoring for those pastoral days of 2003 when Bird played solo to a couple dozen people in the Duck Room and their primary reference point was that one of Bird's songs was actually a Galway Kinnell poem. As both a musician and performer Andrew Bird has far outgrown those boundaries. There are few musicians who have Bird's ability for lyrical and instrumental arrangements, and even fewer who can seamlessly reconstruct them in a live setting.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Alligators: Piggy & Cups
go to spectrumculture.com
Piggy & Cups is a deceptively simple indie pop album. While it certainly doesn't forge a bold new direction in musical genres, it doesn't pretend to either and incorporates influences without being overly derivative. Hailing from the Bremerton area of Seattle, the members of Alligators have been active locally in bands like Time To Fly, Map of June and Arper; if you say you've heard of any of them, you're either from Seattle or completely full of shit. The band's brand of music is primarily upbeat and shimmering, with careful harmonies mixed with arrangements that can sometimes insidiously get lodged in the listener's head. Though Piggy & Cups isn't a flawless album, it's got enough hooks and surprises to keep the listener's attention.
Nearly every band on the planet, from the shittiest garage-dwelling hacks to the most profound group hell bent on making a Big Statement, owes some sort of debt to the Beach Boys, and Alligators - Joshua Trembley, Bradley Pooler, Tyler Lewis, Daniel Lewis and Kristian Arper -
is no exception. To the band's credit they don't shy away from acknowledging this influence - it's right there on their press bio - and several songs benefit from Alligators' drawing from the band's pre-"Kokomo" heyday. The album's major charms lie in its intricate and studied harmonies. Opener "Where Does It Hide?" is perhaps the album's standout track, mixing - and here comes that dreaded phrase - jangly guitars, near-falsetto voices, and polished harmonies with synths and slightly distorted vocals. The vocal approach of "Mama, Stop" is eerily reminiscent of Brian Wilson and is augmented by more of those damn jangly guitars, hazy atmospherics and clean backing vocals. The lights are turned way down and the BIC lighters are raised high in the air on slow burners like "If You Want To" and "Three Fort Night," both of which blend simple guitar melodies with hushed vocals and understated background harmonies, offering a needed change of pace to the album's mostly balls-ahead approach.
Other songs suggest self-editing and restraint would have improved the final product. The vocal theatrics of a few songs sound like a slavish homage to Thom Yorke, particularly on "Original Fear" and "Snow Children," the latter of which could be a pretty decent outtake from OK Computer. Other songs are unceremoniously bludgeoned with overwrought, hair metal-shredding vocals that make Axl Rose's shrillest moments sound sedate by comparison. "Original Fear" is again a culprit, while "Why Aren't You Weeping (All In Your World)" cozies up with similar bombast. Were it not for these vocal histrionics, especially since much of the album is predicated on tight harmonies, both songs would fit in nicely with the album's stronger tracks.
Still Piggy & Cups is a satisfying album. Though its lyrics aren't exactly incidental - songs like "If You Want To" and "Way I" imply a sense of hope and commitment tempered with ruminations on mortality - the songs' harmonies and clever arrangements are the album's main selling points. There's plenty to like here, assuming listeners can look past the band's occasional vocal overindulgences.
Piggy & Cups is a deceptively simple indie pop album. While it certainly doesn't forge a bold new direction in musical genres, it doesn't pretend to either and incorporates influences without being overly derivative. Hailing from the Bremerton area of Seattle, the members of Alligators have been active locally in bands like Time To Fly, Map of June and Arper; if you say you've heard of any of them, you're either from Seattle or completely full of shit. The band's brand of music is primarily upbeat and shimmering, with careful harmonies mixed with arrangements that can sometimes insidiously get lodged in the listener's head. Though Piggy & Cups isn't a flawless album, it's got enough hooks and surprises to keep the listener's attention.
Nearly every band on the planet, from the shittiest garage-dwelling hacks to the most profound group hell bent on making a Big Statement, owes some sort of debt to the Beach Boys, and Alligators - Joshua Trembley, Bradley Pooler, Tyler Lewis, Daniel Lewis and Kristian Arper -
is no exception. To the band's credit they don't shy away from acknowledging this influence - it's right there on their press bio - and several songs benefit from Alligators' drawing from the band's pre-"Kokomo" heyday. The album's major charms lie in its intricate and studied harmonies. Opener "Where Does It Hide?" is perhaps the album's standout track, mixing - and here comes that dreaded phrase - jangly guitars, near-falsetto voices, and polished harmonies with synths and slightly distorted vocals. The vocal approach of "Mama, Stop" is eerily reminiscent of Brian Wilson and is augmented by more of those damn jangly guitars, hazy atmospherics and clean backing vocals. The lights are turned way down and the BIC lighters are raised high in the air on slow burners like "If You Want To" and "Three Fort Night," both of which blend simple guitar melodies with hushed vocals and understated background harmonies, offering a needed change of pace to the album's mostly balls-ahead approach.
Other songs suggest self-editing and restraint would have improved the final product. The vocal theatrics of a few songs sound like a slavish homage to Thom Yorke, particularly on "Original Fear" and "Snow Children," the latter of which could be a pretty decent outtake from OK Computer. Other songs are unceremoniously bludgeoned with overwrought, hair metal-shredding vocals that make Axl Rose's shrillest moments sound sedate by comparison. "Original Fear" is again a culprit, while "Why Aren't You Weeping (All In Your World)" cozies up with similar bombast. Were it not for these vocal histrionics, especially since much of the album is predicated on tight harmonies, both songs would fit in nicely with the album's stronger tracks.
Still Piggy & Cups is a satisfying album. Though its lyrics aren't exactly incidental - songs like "If You Want To" and "Way I" imply a sense of hope and commitment tempered with ruminations on mortality - the songs' harmonies and clever arrangements are the album's main selling points. There's plenty to like here, assuming listeners can look past the band's occasional vocal overindulgences.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Grand Duchy: Petit Fours
That big fucking shadow constantly trailing Frank Black is his Pixies legacy. As the bald-headed and shrieking frontman of that most fabled and celebrated of indie bands - bow, genuflect and offer a sacrifice in their honor - Black's post-Pixies efforts will likely always be weighed against that band's albums. Sure it's completely unfair and sets Black up for high expectations that are impossible to meet, but like other artists who have done their definitive work as part of a band before venturing out on a somewhat checkered solo career - Paul McCartney, Joe Strummer, Bob Mould, Ricky Martin - it goes with the territory.
Judged by any standards and setting legacies aside, Grand Duchy's Petits Fours is an entirely underwhelming and largely lifeless album. Trading under the Black Francis guise this time around, Francis is joined by his wife Violet Clark, guitars, drums and way too many synthesizers and various bleeps and blips. Points for experimentation simply aren't enough to save this album from being anything more than a curiosity piece at best.
Pixies fans who might be horrified to hear such a synth-heavy sound from Francis should abandon ship now. Indeed, nearly every song either starts with or features synths that sound ripped from the 1980s playbook; to the duo's credit, they do acknowledge that Clark is a fan of that decade's music. Still in this case that love translates into a pretty dull set of songs. Most songs adhere to the same basic pattern, with tracks like "Come On Over To My House," "Lovesick," and "Seeing Stars" all opening with synths that are eventually augmented (or put out of their misery) by guitars, drums and occasional keyboards. This pattern soon becomes both predictable and grating, with the album's scant nine songs and under 40-minute running time seeming much longer. On other songs this approach feels too tame, reserved, and precise; Clark's overly careful singing doesn't do "The Long Song" any favors, while Francis' patented screams on "Black Suit" aren't enough to offset the album's sheer repetitiveness. Less forgivable is the album's overall inaccessibility, with the listener left wondering whether the album is one big inside joke or Francis and Clark simply indulging their musical whims. Judging from the giggles on "Volcano!" or the too-clever humor of "Break the Angels," maybe it is. But we don't know, and the songs aren't interesting enough to make us want to find out.
This review shouldn't be construed as yet another reactionary Pixies fan wanting Francis to record Surfer Rosa Revisited. We can safely put those Pixies albums (not so fast, Trompe Le Monde) on the pedestal where they belong, periodically dust them off and go shit crazy for how great they really are, and them put them back. Taken at face value, without considering the history of the man whose name is associated with the album, Petits Fours sounds like little more than either a bizarre homage or pastiche to the glory days of 1980's synth, with guitars and drums thrown in almost as afterthoughts. Certainly Francis has created some excellent music in his post-Pixies career - I'm excluding those reunion shows that get belched out periodically of late - and it's always welcome to see a musician who's clearly not interested in reliving days of past glories. Yet that disregard for the past that served Francis well on standout album Teenager Of the Year and the underrated Honeycomb sinks Petits Fours. Perhaps best left to the completists out there, it's a bland album that, despite the best efforts of those involved, all too frequently sounds both overindulgent and inessential.
Judged by any standards and setting legacies aside, Grand Duchy's Petits Fours is an entirely underwhelming and largely lifeless album. Trading under the Black Francis guise this time around, Francis is joined by his wife Violet Clark, guitars, drums and way too many synthesizers and various bleeps and blips. Points for experimentation simply aren't enough to save this album from being anything more than a curiosity piece at best.
Pixies fans who might be horrified to hear such a synth-heavy sound from Francis should abandon ship now. Indeed, nearly every song either starts with or features synths that sound ripped from the 1980s playbook; to the duo's credit, they do acknowledge that Clark is a fan of that decade's music. Still in this case that love translates into a pretty dull set of songs. Most songs adhere to the same basic pattern, with tracks like "Come On Over To My House," "Lovesick," and "Seeing Stars" all opening with synths that are eventually augmented (or put out of their misery) by guitars, drums and occasional keyboards. This pattern soon becomes both predictable and grating, with the album's scant nine songs and under 40-minute running time seeming much longer. On other songs this approach feels too tame, reserved, and precise; Clark's overly careful singing doesn't do "The Long Song" any favors, while Francis' patented screams on "Black Suit" aren't enough to offset the album's sheer repetitiveness. Less forgivable is the album's overall inaccessibility, with the listener left wondering whether the album is one big inside joke or Francis and Clark simply indulging their musical whims. Judging from the giggles on "Volcano!" or the too-clever humor of "Break the Angels," maybe it is. But we don't know, and the songs aren't interesting enough to make us want to find out.
This review shouldn't be construed as yet another reactionary Pixies fan wanting Francis to record Surfer Rosa Revisited. We can safely put those Pixies albums (not so fast, Trompe Le Monde) on the pedestal where they belong, periodically dust them off and go shit crazy for how great they really are, and them put them back. Taken at face value, without considering the history of the man whose name is associated with the album, Petits Fours sounds like little more than either a bizarre homage or pastiche to the glory days of 1980's synth, with guitars and drums thrown in almost as afterthoughts. Certainly Francis has created some excellent music in his post-Pixies career - I'm excluding those reunion shows that get belched out periodically of late - and it's always welcome to see a musician who's clearly not interested in reliving days of past glories. Yet that disregard for the past that served Francis well on standout album Teenager Of the Year and the underrated Honeycomb sinks Petits Fours. Perhaps best left to the completists out there, it's a bland album that, despite the best efforts of those involved, all too frequently sounds both overindulgent and inessential.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Elvis Costello and the Imposters - Universal Lending Pavilion, Denver, CO, 7/16/03
go see the full article of best concerts of this decade at spectrumculture.com
I had a perfect view as Elvis Costello stormed off the stage, practically in mid-song. I also seem to recall him throwing down his guitar in either righteous frustration or rock star snit, but maybe that's just my memory messing with me. The crowd, living it up on a hot July night in Denver just a few moments before, became disconcertingly quiet. Even the Imposters - drummer Pete Thomas, keyboardist Steve Nieve, and bassist Davey Faragher - seemed momentarily stunned, leaving the stage as the house lights came on.
It was less than an hour into the show, and I began to feel like a bigger schmuck than Bruce Thomas. Having driven nearly 14 hours from St. Louis - including a lifetime spent driving across the hell on earth known as Kansas - it looked like another brutal trek across that depressing monotonous terrain was imminent. After several tense minutes of boos mixed with cheers mixed with more boos, Costello and the band returned and played one of the most aggressive, loud and supremely pissed off concerts I've ever seen.
Up to this point the show had been solid enough, with Costello and the band going through tight versions of then-recent songs like "I Hope You're Happy Now" and "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" as well as songs for the elders like "Radio Radio" and "Clubland." Yet after this brief delay the show devolved into a whole other beast. "Man Out Of Time" was played at triple speed, with an extended guitar workout during which Costello broke a guitar string but kept flailing away. "Less Than Zero" and "45" were given similar harsh treatments, with Costello and the band not even bothering to pause between songs. "Uncomplicated" featured that classic Costello snarl and was matched by the band's insistent playing; I still remember how Thomas' drums sounded like they were being played inside my skull. The Nick Lowe-penned closing song "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" brought everything to a raucous close; the Imposters have played that song repeatedly throughout this decade, but never has it sounded as raw and unhinged as it did this night.
Though the concert, and indeed the atmosphere in which it occurred, were far removed from Costello's late 1970s glory days, it remains one of the few shows I'd consider flawless. It was an exciting and unpredictable stomp through Costello's back catalog, with most songs played with a sense of purpose and conviction. Nearly every song sounded like it was being played live exactly the way it was meant to be played, making other versions (from that particular tour at least) seem polite and overly refined.
People go to concerts for a variety of reasons - the need to drink excessively and dance a moronic jig or two, a night away from those bastard kids at home, or as some sort of twisted fanboy obsession. But mostly it's because concertgoers want a night to remember; if transcendence is involved, so much the better. I'm still not sure why Costello stomped off the stage in Denver, and I don't really care. Regardless, what followed afterward was the best Costello and the Imposters concert I've seen - and I've seen enough of their shows to warrant psychological analysis - as well as the most thrilling concert I attended this decade.
I had a perfect view as Elvis Costello stormed off the stage, practically in mid-song. I also seem to recall him throwing down his guitar in either righteous frustration or rock star snit, but maybe that's just my memory messing with me. The crowd, living it up on a hot July night in Denver just a few moments before, became disconcertingly quiet. Even the Imposters - drummer Pete Thomas, keyboardist Steve Nieve, and bassist Davey Faragher - seemed momentarily stunned, leaving the stage as the house lights came on.
It was less than an hour into the show, and I began to feel like a bigger schmuck than Bruce Thomas. Having driven nearly 14 hours from St. Louis - including a lifetime spent driving across the hell on earth known as Kansas - it looked like another brutal trek across that depressing monotonous terrain was imminent. After several tense minutes of boos mixed with cheers mixed with more boos, Costello and the band returned and played one of the most aggressive, loud and supremely pissed off concerts I've ever seen.
Up to this point the show had been solid enough, with Costello and the band going through tight versions of then-recent songs like "I Hope You're Happy Now" and "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" as well as songs for the elders like "Radio Radio" and "Clubland." Yet after this brief delay the show devolved into a whole other beast. "Man Out Of Time" was played at triple speed, with an extended guitar workout during which Costello broke a guitar string but kept flailing away. "Less Than Zero" and "45" were given similar harsh treatments, with Costello and the band not even bothering to pause between songs. "Uncomplicated" featured that classic Costello snarl and was matched by the band's insistent playing; I still remember how Thomas' drums sounded like they were being played inside my skull. The Nick Lowe-penned closing song "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" brought everything to a raucous close; the Imposters have played that song repeatedly throughout this decade, but never has it sounded as raw and unhinged as it did this night.
Though the concert, and indeed the atmosphere in which it occurred, were far removed from Costello's late 1970s glory days, it remains one of the few shows I'd consider flawless. It was an exciting and unpredictable stomp through Costello's back catalog, with most songs played with a sense of purpose and conviction. Nearly every song sounded like it was being played live exactly the way it was meant to be played, making other versions (from that particular tour at least) seem polite and overly refined.
People go to concerts for a variety of reasons - the need to drink excessively and dance a moronic jig or two, a night away from those bastard kids at home, or as some sort of twisted fanboy obsession. But mostly it's because concertgoers want a night to remember; if transcendence is involved, so much the better. I'm still not sure why Costello stomped off the stage in Denver, and I don't really care. Regardless, what followed afterward was the best Costello and the Imposters concert I've seen - and I've seen enough of their shows to warrant psychological analysis - as well as the most thrilling concert I attended this decade.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
spectrumculture.com has good stuff you know.
It's tempting to view Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle as just another entry in that long line of breakup albums, with Bill Callahan sorting through the wreckage of his split from pixie harpist Joanna Newsom. Amid all the horse/river/bird imagery that recurs throughout the album, its songs certainly serve up heavy doses of looking back, with a mixture of regret, disappointment and rueful bemusement. Leave that two-bit analysis to the armchair psychologists out there; such an approach sells this album far too short.
Whatever its inspirations, Sometimes I Wish is a remarkably understated and textured album. As an artist Callahan has never seemed particularly interested in confining his style. The primary consistency in Callahan's albums is his speak/sing baritone voice; like fellow Drag City cohort Will Oldham, all other elements are negotiable. In his Smog and solo guises Callahan has explored lo, lo-fi, folk and pop, though the crimes committed on Rain On Lens still aren't forgivable. Previous effort Woke On A Whaleheart was fairly optimistic and contented - or at least as optimistic and contented as Callahan gets - so it should come as no surprise that Sometimes I Wish is primarily pensive and rife with mournful undertones.
Sometimes I Wish is unassuming and unimposing, a near-perfect blend of guitars, keyboards, strings, percussion and occasional horns that Whaleheart merely hinted at. These are the type of songs where the listener can't help but listen to with just a little bit more attention; the songs' emotions and intentions unfold slowly and reveal themselves more fully with repeated listens. With its sparse guitars, weary strings, hushed percussion and half spoken/half sung vocals, opening track "Jim Cain" sets the template for most of what follows. Name checking the fiction writer best known for The Postman Always Rings Twice, Callahan offers a depiction of someone brooding over the past with an eye to the present, equal parts resignation - "I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again" and disappointment - "Things didn't pan out as planned." "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" mines similar thematic territory, the song playing like a walk through the bleakness and dark comedy of someone's mind. Callahan lays on the equine imagery pretty thick, contrasting the song's somber image of someone haunted by a memory with a bouncy arrangement and humor, as the narrator's dream of his lyrical masterpiece is revealed to be little more than the nonsensical babble of the song's title. "Rococo Zephyr" is arranged beautifully, with acoustic guitar, keyboards, and strings used to devastating effect. Moments of joy are tempered and measured in the song; the woman who laid next to its narrator "like a branch from a tender willow tree" is presumably long gone, the narrator left with little more than a bittersweet moment of clarity: "I used to be sort of blind/ now I can sort of see."
Austin-based musician Brian Beattie provides string and horn arrangements that are as integral to the album's mood as Callahan's lyrics and vocals. Subtle strings and horns float throughout the gloom of "The Wind and The Dove," while "Too Many Birds," with its central image of a wandering and lost bird, features a string section that heightens the song's impact. "My Friend" and "All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast" up the album's intensity level via strings and guitars that stab through Callahan's growls, both songs building tension like a wave that crashes and then recedes slowly.
Still overall the album's vibe is one of disappointment, regret and restlessness. When Callahan sings that "it's time to put God away" in closing song "Faith/Void," it's hard not to view it as a summary of the conflicted emotions that preceded it, a sentiment of deep resignation or perhaps an optimistic acknowledgment that things haven't completely gone to shit. For an artist who has tended to jump genres with seemingly perverse glee, Sometimes I Wish is nearly flawless in its approach and execution.
It's tempting to view Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle as just another entry in that long line of breakup albums, with Bill Callahan sorting through the wreckage of his split from pixie harpist Joanna Newsom. Amid all the horse/river/bird imagery that recurs throughout the album, its songs certainly serve up heavy doses of looking back, with a mixture of regret, disappointment and rueful bemusement. Leave that two-bit analysis to the armchair psychologists out there; such an approach sells this album far too short.
Whatever its inspirations, Sometimes I Wish is a remarkably understated and textured album. As an artist Callahan has never seemed particularly interested in confining his style. The primary consistency in Callahan's albums is his speak/sing baritone voice; like fellow Drag City cohort Will Oldham, all other elements are negotiable. In his Smog and solo guises Callahan has explored lo, lo-fi, folk and pop, though the crimes committed on Rain On Lens still aren't forgivable. Previous effort Woke On A Whaleheart was fairly optimistic and contented - or at least as optimistic and contented as Callahan gets - so it should come as no surprise that Sometimes I Wish is primarily pensive and rife with mournful undertones.
Sometimes I Wish is unassuming and unimposing, a near-perfect blend of guitars, keyboards, strings, percussion and occasional horns that Whaleheart merely hinted at. These are the type of songs where the listener can't help but listen to with just a little bit more attention; the songs' emotions and intentions unfold slowly and reveal themselves more fully with repeated listens. With its sparse guitars, weary strings, hushed percussion and half spoken/half sung vocals, opening track "Jim Cain" sets the template for most of what follows. Name checking the fiction writer best known for The Postman Always Rings Twice, Callahan offers a depiction of someone brooding over the past with an eye to the present, equal parts resignation - "I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again" and disappointment - "Things didn't pan out as planned." "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" mines similar thematic territory, the song playing like a walk through the bleakness and dark comedy of someone's mind. Callahan lays on the equine imagery pretty thick, contrasting the song's somber image of someone haunted by a memory with a bouncy arrangement and humor, as the narrator's dream of his lyrical masterpiece is revealed to be little more than the nonsensical babble of the song's title. "Rococo Zephyr" is arranged beautifully, with acoustic guitar, keyboards, and strings used to devastating effect. Moments of joy are tempered and measured in the song; the woman who laid next to its narrator "like a branch from a tender willow tree" is presumably long gone, the narrator left with little more than a bittersweet moment of clarity: "I used to be sort of blind/ now I can sort of see."
Austin-based musician Brian Beattie provides string and horn arrangements that are as integral to the album's mood as Callahan's lyrics and vocals. Subtle strings and horns float throughout the gloom of "The Wind and The Dove," while "Too Many Birds," with its central image of a wandering and lost bird, features a string section that heightens the song's impact. "My Friend" and "All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast" up the album's intensity level via strings and guitars that stab through Callahan's growls, both songs building tension like a wave that crashes and then recedes slowly.
Still overall the album's vibe is one of disappointment, regret and restlessness. When Callahan sings that "it's time to put God away" in closing song "Faith/Void," it's hard not to view it as a summary of the conflicted emotions that preceded it, a sentiment of deep resignation or perhaps an optimistic acknowledgment that things haven't completely gone to shit. For an artist who has tended to jump genres with seemingly perverse glee, Sometimes I Wish is nearly flawless in its approach and execution.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Oh No Not Stereo: 003
go to spectrumculture.com
The press materials for the Los Angeles-based band Oh No Not Stereo note that the group's music has been featured on MTV shows like Paris Hilton's My New BFF, Bam's Unholy Union and Meet the Barkers, that their sophomore album 003 had production and mixing help from people who have worked with Live, Incubus and Fall Out Boy, and that their music would likely be favored by fans of groups like The All-American Rejects and Head Automatica.
A few songs into the album, it's difficult not to think that these biographical details were intended as warnings rather than praise. Simply put, the songs on 003 are blandly derivative and indistinguishable from that ever growing glut of punk-pop bands currently targeting the pre-pubescent and barely adolescent music market. The album's tracks play like by-rote assembly line pieces just looking for a little MTV or PlayStation love; indeed, it's not hard to imagine these songs playing as Bam Margera attempts another half-baked stunt or as background music blaring in the next Skate video game.
Yet the album lacks guts and, worst of all, even the faintest hint of heart, emotion or righteous outrage; the press materials' boasting of the band's DIY aesthetic is more like a punch line than anything of real substance. 003 sports some of the most incidental music that has come across these ears in a long time, with an endless shitstorm of predictably crunchy guitars, gigantic hooks, fatass bloated riffs and reedy vocals filled with whine. With a sameness of sound that courses through the album's 50-minute running time, songs like "Let's Get It Started," "Get Over It" and "Hurricanes" congeal together into a single blob. Being charitable, a few songs might work individually as either a single or as part of a compilation album (maybe Now That's What I Call Mediocre Music Vol. 1). "A World of Your Own" features strings - strings! - and briefly suggests that the band could break from the album's narrow confines. But as an album, the songs fail miserably, with far too much repetition and slavish adherence to pop tones that become dated as soon as they leave the listener's ears.
So what are the songs about? It really doesn't matter. The rage and angst expressed in the lyrics usually sounds both hollow and benignly nonthreatening, a clichéd collection of sanitized punk sentiments mostly reminiscent of tortured freshman college poetry. "Shot Down By the Man" is about (wait for it) being shot down by the man and that most hallowed act of defiance: "No one believes anything you say/ You're never right/ The only thing that's left to do/ That means anything at all/ Middle finger in the air." Other songs read like a checklist of stereotypical rock images: cars offer salvation, Friday nights are wild and unhinged, men boast with machismo, women break hearts and...hey! Wake up - the album's not over yet.
Maybe it's a generational gap my 1990s indie ears cannot bridge. Given the current popularity of bands similar to Oh No Not Stereo, it's easy to see plenty of suburban kiddies getting dropped off at concert venues by their parents to see the band live. But for anyone over the age of 16 the album will likely be vacuous and empty, a sort of fourth-generation punk-pop that will leave most listeners wanting to go back to the primary source material. 003 is an also-ran wreck of an album in a musical genre that largely places style over substance, and in which the only thing that differentiates one band from another is its name.
The press materials for the Los Angeles-based band Oh No Not Stereo note that the group's music has been featured on MTV shows like Paris Hilton's My New BFF, Bam's Unholy Union and Meet the Barkers, that their sophomore album 003 had production and mixing help from people who have worked with Live, Incubus and Fall Out Boy, and that their music would likely be favored by fans of groups like The All-American Rejects and Head Automatica.
A few songs into the album, it's difficult not to think that these biographical details were intended as warnings rather than praise. Simply put, the songs on 003 are blandly derivative and indistinguishable from that ever growing glut of punk-pop bands currently targeting the pre-pubescent and barely adolescent music market. The album's tracks play like by-rote assembly line pieces just looking for a little MTV or PlayStation love; indeed, it's not hard to imagine these songs playing as Bam Margera attempts another half-baked stunt or as background music blaring in the next Skate video game.
Yet the album lacks guts and, worst of all, even the faintest hint of heart, emotion or righteous outrage; the press materials' boasting of the band's DIY aesthetic is more like a punch line than anything of real substance. 003 sports some of the most incidental music that has come across these ears in a long time, with an endless shitstorm of predictably crunchy guitars, gigantic hooks, fatass bloated riffs and reedy vocals filled with whine. With a sameness of sound that courses through the album's 50-minute running time, songs like "Let's Get It Started," "Get Over It" and "Hurricanes" congeal together into a single blob. Being charitable, a few songs might work individually as either a single or as part of a compilation album (maybe Now That's What I Call Mediocre Music Vol. 1). "A World of Your Own" features strings - strings! - and briefly suggests that the band could break from the album's narrow confines. But as an album, the songs fail miserably, with far too much repetition and slavish adherence to pop tones that become dated as soon as they leave the listener's ears.
So what are the songs about? It really doesn't matter. The rage and angst expressed in the lyrics usually sounds both hollow and benignly nonthreatening, a clichéd collection of sanitized punk sentiments mostly reminiscent of tortured freshman college poetry. "Shot Down By the Man" is about (wait for it) being shot down by the man and that most hallowed act of defiance: "No one believes anything you say/ You're never right/ The only thing that's left to do/ That means anything at all/ Middle finger in the air." Other songs read like a checklist of stereotypical rock images: cars offer salvation, Friday nights are wild and unhinged, men boast with machismo, women break hearts and...hey! Wake up - the album's not over yet.
Maybe it's a generational gap my 1990s indie ears cannot bridge. Given the current popularity of bands similar to Oh No Not Stereo, it's easy to see plenty of suburban kiddies getting dropped off at concert venues by their parents to see the band live. But for anyone over the age of 16 the album will likely be vacuous and empty, a sort of fourth-generation punk-pop that will leave most listeners wanting to go back to the primary source material. 003 is an also-ran wreck of an album in a musical genre that largely places style over substance, and in which the only thing that differentiates one band from another is its name.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Revisit: Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. go to spectrumculture.com for more.
In these depressingly shitty economic times, where executives pay themselves and their cronies massive bonuses and then solicit the government for grotesque sums of money for their failing companies, where the lowly workaday peons that make up the bulk of America's population see their home values plummet and employment status grow ever more precarious, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads sounds as startlingly relevant as ever. Originally released in 1940 as the Great Depression had not yet ended - it would take a war to do that - Guthrie's concept album chronicles the hardships and injustices wrought by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Guthrie's depictions of those most affected, those migrant workers who slowly shuffled west to a California spoken about in mystical tones and would be saddled with the derogatory "Okie," are sympathetic, humorous, sobering and, ultimately, defiant and optimistic. Its music is deceptively simple, featuring little more than Guthrie's voice set against strums of the machine that he claimed killed Fascists; for better or worse, the approach utilized here and throughout much of Guthrie's catalog still influences generations of earnest folksingers. Yet under this simplicity lies one of music's most coherent, focused and endearing concept albums.
Dust Bowl Ballads marked Guthrie's first commercial recording and, even when judged against his extensive recorded output, remains his finest effort. Recorded in just two separate sessions in 1940, it's since been released in various formats. RCA Victor Records, with the type of hatchet job insight that major labels still follow today, would eventually issue 11 of these songs, with "Dust Bowl Blues" and the key "Pretty Boy Floyd" excluded because of length. A mid 1960s LP version included these two omitted tracks and offered a new running order. The currently available CD version is likely the most complete view we'll get, containing yet again a different running order as well as an alternate version of "Talking Dust Bowl Blues."
Filled with allusions to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that would effectively shape Guthrie's worldview for much of his life, the album mixes a loose chronological narrative with the singer's experiences as he traveled around the country chronicling the effects of the Depression. Guthrie mythologizes these Dust Bowl refugees as he rails against the profiteers of migrants' labor. Certainly the common depiction of Guthrie as an intensely serious, humorless, firebrand proletariat folkie who dealt only in absolutes is at least partly attributable to Dust Bowl Ballads; it's clear who the heroes and villains are throughout the album. The album contains doses of bleakness and despair, with a righteous accusatory finger pointed at the grossly wealthy and their authoritarian abuses of power that often defined Guthrie's oeuvre. The central image of "The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)" is that of a family huddled in a shack as the children cry, the migrants' naïvely optimistic view of California as a "garden of Eden" is shattered amid the disillusionment of "Do Re Mi," and the dead man walking in "Dust Pneumonia Blues" isn't long for this world. The narrators of "Dust Bowl Blues" and "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" have suffered countless indignities; in the latter song the narrator describes his rootless existence and matter-of-factly mentions how he's been harassed by the cops, had his house taken from him by a rich man, and lost his wife in the dust storm. In these simple songs Guthrie paints a dark portrait of both the Dust Bowl and its affect on those hardest hit by it, as well as strictly adheres to the social awareness usually associated with folk music.
Still Dust Bowl Ballads is equally optimistic, a fact that was too frequently lost on all those earnest folksingers of the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps this is where Steinbeck's influence on Guthrie is most apparent; the folksinger mimicked Steinbeck's sympathetic and heartfelt depiction of the Joads' uniquely American character and set it to music. The album's despair is often tempered with both humor and defiance, with Guthrie's migrants displaying an internal strength and determination to not succumb to life's hardships. Sometimes this comfort comes from tales of near-mystical heroes; in "Pretty Boy Floyd," the bank robber is transformed from a petty criminal into a Robin Hood figure who gives his loot to the poor. Other times this optimism stems from a strong sense of self-identity and pride, especially in "Blowin' Down This Road" and "Dust Bowl Refugee," where Guthrie's subjects maintain dignity in the face of poverty, hunger and unemployment. Guthrie's characters are mentally strong, at times almost unbelievably so. The subject of "Dust Can't Kill Me," whose alternately had his baby and family die in the dust storm, landlord take his home and then destroy it over with a tractor, crops rot and furniture sold off at the local pawn shop, somehow boasts of his own invulnerability at sharing a similar fate. It's an uplifting snapshot of the will to live and the album's most singular moment of defiance (or, perhaps, hubris).
If Dust Bowl Ballads can be faulted for anything, it does, like much of Guthrie's catalog, offer few shades of gray in terms of heroes and villains. Its migrant masses are all heroic and its outlaws are simply misunderstood vigilante philanthropists, while cops and unscrupulous capitalists stand firmly with their feet on the necks of these masses. Seventy years after its first release, there's a poignancy to the album that still resonates with contemporary listeners. Given the album's minimal arrangements and Guthrie's often deadpan delivery, coupled with its stark cover of a dilapidated and abandoned shack and subject matter chronicling a dark chapter in this country's history, it's tempting to view the album as mournful and exceedingly dark. Yet the album breathes with determination and defiance, with Guthrie's characters rarely succumbing to their horrible lot in life. In times like these, Guthrie's wandering Okies and their troubles don't seem so remote or irrelevant.
In these depressingly shitty economic times, where executives pay themselves and their cronies massive bonuses and then solicit the government for grotesque sums of money for their failing companies, where the lowly workaday peons that make up the bulk of America's population see their home values plummet and employment status grow ever more precarious, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads sounds as startlingly relevant as ever. Originally released in 1940 as the Great Depression had not yet ended - it would take a war to do that - Guthrie's concept album chronicles the hardships and injustices wrought by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Guthrie's depictions of those most affected, those migrant workers who slowly shuffled west to a California spoken about in mystical tones and would be saddled with the derogatory "Okie," are sympathetic, humorous, sobering and, ultimately, defiant and optimistic. Its music is deceptively simple, featuring little more than Guthrie's voice set against strums of the machine that he claimed killed Fascists; for better or worse, the approach utilized here and throughout much of Guthrie's catalog still influences generations of earnest folksingers. Yet under this simplicity lies one of music's most coherent, focused and endearing concept albums.
Dust Bowl Ballads marked Guthrie's first commercial recording and, even when judged against his extensive recorded output, remains his finest effort. Recorded in just two separate sessions in 1940, it's since been released in various formats. RCA Victor Records, with the type of hatchet job insight that major labels still follow today, would eventually issue 11 of these songs, with "Dust Bowl Blues" and the key "Pretty Boy Floyd" excluded because of length. A mid 1960s LP version included these two omitted tracks and offered a new running order. The currently available CD version is likely the most complete view we'll get, containing yet again a different running order as well as an alternate version of "Talking Dust Bowl Blues."
Filled with allusions to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that would effectively shape Guthrie's worldview for much of his life, the album mixes a loose chronological narrative with the singer's experiences as he traveled around the country chronicling the effects of the Depression. Guthrie mythologizes these Dust Bowl refugees as he rails against the profiteers of migrants' labor. Certainly the common depiction of Guthrie as an intensely serious, humorless, firebrand proletariat folkie who dealt only in absolutes is at least partly attributable to Dust Bowl Ballads; it's clear who the heroes and villains are throughout the album. The album contains doses of bleakness and despair, with a righteous accusatory finger pointed at the grossly wealthy and their authoritarian abuses of power that often defined Guthrie's oeuvre. The central image of "The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)" is that of a family huddled in a shack as the children cry, the migrants' naïvely optimistic view of California as a "garden of Eden" is shattered amid the disillusionment of "Do Re Mi," and the dead man walking in "Dust Pneumonia Blues" isn't long for this world. The narrators of "Dust Bowl Blues" and "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" have suffered countless indignities; in the latter song the narrator describes his rootless existence and matter-of-factly mentions how he's been harassed by the cops, had his house taken from him by a rich man, and lost his wife in the dust storm. In these simple songs Guthrie paints a dark portrait of both the Dust Bowl and its affect on those hardest hit by it, as well as strictly adheres to the social awareness usually associated with folk music.
Still Dust Bowl Ballads is equally optimistic, a fact that was too frequently lost on all those earnest folksingers of the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps this is where Steinbeck's influence on Guthrie is most apparent; the folksinger mimicked Steinbeck's sympathetic and heartfelt depiction of the Joads' uniquely American character and set it to music. The album's despair is often tempered with both humor and defiance, with Guthrie's migrants displaying an internal strength and determination to not succumb to life's hardships. Sometimes this comfort comes from tales of near-mystical heroes; in "Pretty Boy Floyd," the bank robber is transformed from a petty criminal into a Robin Hood figure who gives his loot to the poor. Other times this optimism stems from a strong sense of self-identity and pride, especially in "Blowin' Down This Road" and "Dust Bowl Refugee," where Guthrie's subjects maintain dignity in the face of poverty, hunger and unemployment. Guthrie's characters are mentally strong, at times almost unbelievably so. The subject of "Dust Can't Kill Me," whose alternately had his baby and family die in the dust storm, landlord take his home and then destroy it over with a tractor, crops rot and furniture sold off at the local pawn shop, somehow boasts of his own invulnerability at sharing a similar fate. It's an uplifting snapshot of the will to live and the album's most singular moment of defiance (or, perhaps, hubris).
If Dust Bowl Ballads can be faulted for anything, it does, like much of Guthrie's catalog, offer few shades of gray in terms of heroes and villains. Its migrant masses are all heroic and its outlaws are simply misunderstood vigilante philanthropists, while cops and unscrupulous capitalists stand firmly with their feet on the necks of these masses. Seventy years after its first release, there's a poignancy to the album that still resonates with contemporary listeners. Given the album's minimal arrangements and Guthrie's often deadpan delivery, coupled with its stark cover of a dilapidated and abandoned shack and subject matter chronicling a dark chapter in this country's history, it's tempting to view the album as mournful and exceedingly dark. Yet the album breathes with determination and defiance, with Guthrie's characters rarely succumbing to their horrible lot in life. In times like these, Guthrie's wandering Okies and their troubles don't seem so remote or irrelevant.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Concert Review: Future Clouds & Radar
go to spectrumculture.com
In a city that has only the faintest hint of a music scene with a functioning pulse - though locals still like to boast that the blues originated in St. Louis - and very few quirky concert venues, Off Broadway is one of this town's more unique and reliable places to see a show. It gives off a cool and comfortable vibe, like a neighborhood bar that cross-dresses in concert venue clothes. Pictures of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson giving that most famous of salutes line its brick walls, a mounted antelope head rests above an old time cigarette machine in a venue that's exclusively non-smoking now, various miscellany from the Lemp brewery is scattered throughout, and the sinks in the men's bathroom are stained with a black liquid that, while hinting at something far more sinister, only adds to the charm. A few rows of folding chairs are included almost as an afterthought, while the upstairs section offers a perfect view of the stage below for those concertgoers who'd prefer to avoid the pit and the urchins that swarm there.
My brother and I arrived early enough to catch the tail end of Future Clouds & Radar's sound check. With plenty of time to kill after this minor invasion of band privacy, it was enjoyable just soaking in Off Broadway's aesthetic and engaging in conversation ranging from which artist has the most obnoxious fans (Dylan, and it's not debatable) to deep-seeded childhood fears of being sodomized by the Knights of Columbus (it never happened). As this talk deteriorated we expected people to filter as the show's start time grew closer, but no one really did. Even after second opening act The O's wrapped up, the place was far too empty.
Blame it on the fact that it was a Thursday and that there are few places on earth as miserable as St. Louis in February - if you don't like gray punctuated with occasional bursts of lighter gray, leave now - but the show was, and this is being generous, sparsely attended. Yet those who stayed away missed their chance to see a band that, if there's any justice in the music world, will eventually outgrow the confines of such venues. Drawing heavily from their truly underrated and death-heavy 2008 album Peoria, Future Clouds & Radar played an energetic set that emphasized tight arrangements over the instrumental meanderings and studio effects of both Peoria and their self-titled debut album. Sure, lead singer Robert Harrison sounds eerily like that other band that had a Harrison in it, but in a live setting this similarity was far less pronounced. The atmospheric "Epcot View" featured nice harmonies and emphasized keyboards more than its album version, while "18 Months" was chaotic and heavy with distortion; one dancing fan, still clad in his suit and clutching his beer bottle like a life raft, punctuated with the latter song with some groin-splitting high kicks. Other songs more clearly revealed the melodies that are sometimes buried amid the studio tinkering, especially "Mummified," "The Mortal" and "Drugstore Bust."
Though Harrison may still be best known for his work with previous project Cotton Mather - at least judging from the applause that greeted Kon Tiki track and concert closer "Homefront Cameo" - Future Clouds & Radar seem to be flying under the, well, radar. The band's performance Thursday night was an intriguing showcase in how songs that incorporate studio enhancements and mix musical genres are translated in a live environment. Without exception the songs benefited from this focus, with the band playing a lively set of songs. For those in attendance it was every bit as good as the under appreciated Peoria, and, even better, allowed listeners to hear its songs in a different context. Still it's a shame more people didn't stop by to hear it, the gray St. Louis February be damned. One can't help but think that the "antipathy island" mentioned in "The Mortal" could serve as a fitting summation for the band's tour stop here.
In a city that has only the faintest hint of a music scene with a functioning pulse - though locals still like to boast that the blues originated in St. Louis - and very few quirky concert venues, Off Broadway is one of this town's more unique and reliable places to see a show. It gives off a cool and comfortable vibe, like a neighborhood bar that cross-dresses in concert venue clothes. Pictures of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson giving that most famous of salutes line its brick walls, a mounted antelope head rests above an old time cigarette machine in a venue that's exclusively non-smoking now, various miscellany from the Lemp brewery is scattered throughout, and the sinks in the men's bathroom are stained with a black liquid that, while hinting at something far more sinister, only adds to the charm. A few rows of folding chairs are included almost as an afterthought, while the upstairs section offers a perfect view of the stage below for those concertgoers who'd prefer to avoid the pit and the urchins that swarm there.
My brother and I arrived early enough to catch the tail end of Future Clouds & Radar's sound check. With plenty of time to kill after this minor invasion of band privacy, it was enjoyable just soaking in Off Broadway's aesthetic and engaging in conversation ranging from which artist has the most obnoxious fans (Dylan, and it's not debatable) to deep-seeded childhood fears of being sodomized by the Knights of Columbus (it never happened). As this talk deteriorated we expected people to filter as the show's start time grew closer, but no one really did. Even after second opening act The O's wrapped up, the place was far too empty.
Blame it on the fact that it was a Thursday and that there are few places on earth as miserable as St. Louis in February - if you don't like gray punctuated with occasional bursts of lighter gray, leave now - but the show was, and this is being generous, sparsely attended. Yet those who stayed away missed their chance to see a band that, if there's any justice in the music world, will eventually outgrow the confines of such venues. Drawing heavily from their truly underrated and death-heavy 2008 album Peoria, Future Clouds & Radar played an energetic set that emphasized tight arrangements over the instrumental meanderings and studio effects of both Peoria and their self-titled debut album. Sure, lead singer Robert Harrison sounds eerily like that other band that had a Harrison in it, but in a live setting this similarity was far less pronounced. The atmospheric "Epcot View" featured nice harmonies and emphasized keyboards more than its album version, while "18 Months" was chaotic and heavy with distortion; one dancing fan, still clad in his suit and clutching his beer bottle like a life raft, punctuated with the latter song with some groin-splitting high kicks. Other songs more clearly revealed the melodies that are sometimes buried amid the studio tinkering, especially "Mummified," "The Mortal" and "Drugstore Bust."
Though Harrison may still be best known for his work with previous project Cotton Mather - at least judging from the applause that greeted Kon Tiki track and concert closer "Homefront Cameo" - Future Clouds & Radar seem to be flying under the, well, radar. The band's performance Thursday night was an intriguing showcase in how songs that incorporate studio enhancements and mix musical genres are translated in a live environment. Without exception the songs benefited from this focus, with the band playing a lively set of songs. For those in attendance it was every bit as good as the under appreciated Peoria, and, even better, allowed listeners to hear its songs in a different context. Still it's a shame more people didn't stop by to hear it, the gray St. Louis February be damned. One can't help but think that the "antipathy island" mentioned in "The Mortal" could serve as a fitting summation for the band's tour stop here.
The Weight: The Weight Are Men
go to spectrumculture.com
The Weight Are Men sounds completely and hopelessly out of time and out of place. It's the type of generically feeble alt country/Americana hybrid that will send listeners scurrying for the comfort of vintage Uncle Tupelo to help wash the stale countrified taste out of their mouths. Its 10 songs play like a stereotypical laundry list of worn-out clichés and images. Lyin' women, cheatin' women, schemin' women, and the occasional good-hearted woman just waiting at home for her man litter these songs like so many stock characters. Men's hearts are stomped and shat upon and, somewhere I imagine, those men slobber into schooners filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon in shitty juke joints that reek of cigarette smoke and masculine desperation. And of course there's also hard drinkin' - lots of hard drinkin' - and please sir make it cheap whiskey.
A five-piece band fronted by Joseph Plunket on guitar and vocals twangy enough to make your Hee Haw-watching hoosier relatives insanely jealous, The Weight undeniably had ambitious goals with Are Men. The sound is big, bold and full of barroom stomp and holler, with its songs incorporating three-part harmonies, shredding guitar workouts, and macho group vocals. The album is primarily rowdy and boisterous; one can practically hear the shattered chairs and overturned tables as a drunkard is tossed ass-first through a saloon window. The production is suitably punchy, with songs like "Like Me Better," "Closer Than a Friend" and "A Day In the Sun" featuring Plunket's vocals up front in the mix and a heap of guitars, piano, drums, and harmonica thrown in underneath. Most of the album is unabashedly ballsy and macho; the beers in these songs likely come accompanied with a double shot of testosterone.
Perhaps more so than other music genres, alt country and Americana have always required a certain degree of suspension of disbelief; these genres are often rooted in long ago, far away times and places much removed from the people singing about them. When Jay Farrar sang that he was going where there was no Depression, it somehow sounded both relevant and heartfelt, a young kid reinterpreting an American standard and applying it to his contemporary times. What Uncle Tupelo knew is that if a band's going to play music that sounds like it's from a bygone dusty era, you'd damn well better make it convincing. If albums rooted in these genres are judged against such criteria, Are Men is a dismal failure. Its songs and sentiments are simply just not believable, and too often play like little more than a predictable and listless stroll through Americana's back pages. "Sunday Driver" offers played out motifs like a whiskey-swilling lonesome-hearted Georgia boy who's stuck in - where else - that big mean city of New York. The narrator of "A Day In the Sun" begs the operator to put him through to his girl, though no one in the Western world actually relies on phone operators anymore. "Hillbilly Highway" (no shit, that's the song's title) tells the sad-sack tale of a man who vows to return to his mountain town to fetch his beautiful Lilly. Apparently she's a basset hound. And so the album goes, a by-rote walkthrough of music clichés that never gets grounded or goes anywhere.
Certainly part of the album's flaws can be attributed to Plunket's vocal delivery, which can best be described as an extreme country drawl that makes Toby Keith sound like Frank Sinatra. While Plunket's earnestness isn't in doubt, his vocals and subjects are simply too exaggerated to resonate with the listener. Still Are Men's fatal flaw is more basic: we've heard all this before, and we've heard it before in better ways. We've already got Uncle Tupelo, Drive-By Truckers, Dave Alvin, Green on Red for those digging a bit deeper, and, if you're really, really desperate, The Bottle Rockets. Are Men offers a procession of booze, broken hearts, and big hooks steeped in Americana; unfortunately, it's doubtful many listeners will want to bother going there.
The Weight Are Men sounds completely and hopelessly out of time and out of place. It's the type of generically feeble alt country/Americana hybrid that will send listeners scurrying for the comfort of vintage Uncle Tupelo to help wash the stale countrified taste out of their mouths. Its 10 songs play like a stereotypical laundry list of worn-out clichés and images. Lyin' women, cheatin' women, schemin' women, and the occasional good-hearted woman just waiting at home for her man litter these songs like so many stock characters. Men's hearts are stomped and shat upon and, somewhere I imagine, those men slobber into schooners filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon in shitty juke joints that reek of cigarette smoke and masculine desperation. And of course there's also hard drinkin' - lots of hard drinkin' - and please sir make it cheap whiskey.
A five-piece band fronted by Joseph Plunket on guitar and vocals twangy enough to make your Hee Haw-watching hoosier relatives insanely jealous, The Weight undeniably had ambitious goals with Are Men. The sound is big, bold and full of barroom stomp and holler, with its songs incorporating three-part harmonies, shredding guitar workouts, and macho group vocals. The album is primarily rowdy and boisterous; one can practically hear the shattered chairs and overturned tables as a drunkard is tossed ass-first through a saloon window. The production is suitably punchy, with songs like "Like Me Better," "Closer Than a Friend" and "A Day In the Sun" featuring Plunket's vocals up front in the mix and a heap of guitars, piano, drums, and harmonica thrown in underneath. Most of the album is unabashedly ballsy and macho; the beers in these songs likely come accompanied with a double shot of testosterone.
Perhaps more so than other music genres, alt country and Americana have always required a certain degree of suspension of disbelief; these genres are often rooted in long ago, far away times and places much removed from the people singing about them. When Jay Farrar sang that he was going where there was no Depression, it somehow sounded both relevant and heartfelt, a young kid reinterpreting an American standard and applying it to his contemporary times. What Uncle Tupelo knew is that if a band's going to play music that sounds like it's from a bygone dusty era, you'd damn well better make it convincing. If albums rooted in these genres are judged against such criteria, Are Men is a dismal failure. Its songs and sentiments are simply just not believable, and too often play like little more than a predictable and listless stroll through Americana's back pages. "Sunday Driver" offers played out motifs like a whiskey-swilling lonesome-hearted Georgia boy who's stuck in - where else - that big mean city of New York. The narrator of "A Day In the Sun" begs the operator to put him through to his girl, though no one in the Western world actually relies on phone operators anymore. "Hillbilly Highway" (no shit, that's the song's title) tells the sad-sack tale of a man who vows to return to his mountain town to fetch his beautiful Lilly. Apparently she's a basset hound. And so the album goes, a by-rote walkthrough of music clichés that never gets grounded or goes anywhere.
Certainly part of the album's flaws can be attributed to Plunket's vocal delivery, which can best be described as an extreme country drawl that makes Toby Keith sound like Frank Sinatra. While Plunket's earnestness isn't in doubt, his vocals and subjects are simply too exaggerated to resonate with the listener. Still Are Men's fatal flaw is more basic: we've heard all this before, and we've heard it before in better ways. We've already got Uncle Tupelo, Drive-By Truckers, Dave Alvin, Green on Red for those digging a bit deeper, and, if you're really, really desperate, The Bottle Rockets. Are Men offers a procession of booze, broken hearts, and big hooks steeped in Americana; unfortunately, it's doubtful many listeners will want to bother going there.
Rediscover: Angus MacLise: Brain Damage in Oklahoma City
go to spectrumculture.com
Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.
As shadowy musical figures go, it's hard to top Angus MacLise. The first drummer in the Velvet Underground's earliest incarnation, the story goes he quit after learning that the band might get paid for a gig in 1965, viewing this as an act of selling out (one wonders how he'd react to the his own catalog finally being issued on CD in 1999 and 2000). Though the story might be apocryphal - over the years the band's members have mentioned that MacLise seemed to operate on his own time in his own world and have also implied that his days with the band were numbered as a result - it has contributed to the legendary depiction of the drummer that still persists among music history's most dedicated fringes. Though MacLise would later briefly play with the band in 1966 and also try to rejoin the group - the always laid back and never domineering Lou Reed refused this request - his time as a member of the Velvets was short.
In many ways MacLise's biography reads like the ultimate example of the wandering artistic spirit and speaks to the joys of a rootless, nomadic existence that still define the popular depiction of the 1960s counterculture. Indeed, MacLise managed to cram more into his 41 years of life than most people do with more time, alternately being described as a composer, percussionist, poet, mystic, shaman and calligrapher. He was well read, studying everything from Haitian drumming to Middle East percussion. He played with La Monte Young's now-celebrated Theater of Eternal Music, a collective that created avant garde music so unlistenable that it was, of course, highly influential; future artists would later temper this approach into something a bit more palatable. In his post-Velvets career he traveled extensively, before settling in Nepal. He'd eventually die in 1979 of tuberculosis.
But does MacLise's recorded output equal the stuff of legend that his life has become? Certainly his work, most of which went unreleased until 20 years after his death, has never had broad appeal and probably never will. To many people, it likely sounds like the type of racket that would be most effective in extricating a third-world dictator from an underground bunker. It's also not hard to imagine albums like The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Brain Damage in Oklahoma City and The Cloud Doctrine forming the soundtrack to a mentally deranged person's existence. Though MacLise's music is usually lumped into that big swirling mass known as psychedelia, it exists within that genre uneasily and only for lack of a better term. It's either the product of pure genius or a melody-challenged psychopath, with MacLise's songs incorporating chants, droning, electronic fuzz, tribal percussion, various stomps and yelps, and other mind-bending and ear-shredding traits. Even for fans of such music, it's not easy or particularly enjoyable listening; it's usually lo-fi and contains few hints of a reference point that makes even the most inaccessible music somewhat approachable. Spend a day with MacLise's albums and you'll likely feel like your brains have been mixed in a blender.
Brain Damage in Oklahoma City is perhaps MacLise's most representative release. Even so, for listeners not wired a certain way, the album borders on being nothing more than a mess of noise and nonsense, wandering and meandering with no real purpose except to try the listener's patience and mental health. And though even fans - excluding those whose brains were fried decades ago chasing the 1960s dream - would likely admit that it's not something that can be listened to often or as background music, it is worth hearing occasionally. Consisting of recordings the percussionist made between 1967-1970, it's also MacLise's most musically consistent and coherent effort, with its eight pieces (and 70 minute running time) taking the musician's drumming as its centerpiece. The album is bookended by two songs that feature MacLise playing cembalum, with opening song "Another Druid's Nest" also including chants and random thumps that recall Indian music. This chanting repeats on the manic "Haight Riot Mime," with MacLise this time pounding on bongos before the song abruptly cuts off, "Epiphany" augments hand drums with a hypnotic organ pattern, and the aptly titled "Drum Solo" consists of MacLise beating on barrel conga and bongos, again giving the song a primitive flavor.
The album's key tracks are also its most difficult. Clocking in at nearly 45 minutes, the two tracks that comprise "Dreamweapon Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police" are live ensemble works from 1968 that rely on improvisation in its most extreme form; no sane person would attempt to map out the songs' structures, shifts, or changes. Taken together they serve as a nice primer of MacLise's style or particular brand of torture - take your pick - as well as contain major avant garde elements that that still influence musicians today. The song ebbs and flows uneasily, with moments of calm used to steadily build tension, before it explodes and recedes again. Its most memorable parts are primarily chaotic, noisy, and aggressive; a sort of demented chanting rises and falls against MacLise's barrel conga and wife Hetty MacLise's tampura, while Tony Conrad's limp string and Henry Flynt's flute become increasingly abrasive as the song progresses. What it brings to mind is a traffic jam from hell or a set of schizophrenics turned loose in a musical instruments store. While the song sometimes tends to overindulge in its own experimentalism - one could argue that the song is too experimental for its own good, and that you've got to be stoned out of your gourd to really get it - it's a nice summation of MacLise's musical vision.
Setting aside the nagging fact that Brain Damage in Oklahoma City will always remain a cult favorite. Regardless of those cynics who argue that MacLise's music would have been relegated to the dustbin of history if it weren't for his involvement with the Velvets, it still remains one of the clearest examples of late 1960s experimental music. Though its content may not equal the long shadow cast by MacLise's legend, it offers a good opportunity to see MacLise as a musician and artist, not as a mystical figure best known for his extremely brief time with the Velvet Underground.
Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.
As shadowy musical figures go, it's hard to top Angus MacLise. The first drummer in the Velvet Underground's earliest incarnation, the story goes he quit after learning that the band might get paid for a gig in 1965, viewing this as an act of selling out (one wonders how he'd react to the his own catalog finally being issued on CD in 1999 and 2000). Though the story might be apocryphal - over the years the band's members have mentioned that MacLise seemed to operate on his own time in his own world and have also implied that his days with the band were numbered as a result - it has contributed to the legendary depiction of the drummer that still persists among music history's most dedicated fringes. Though MacLise would later briefly play with the band in 1966 and also try to rejoin the group - the always laid back and never domineering Lou Reed refused this request - his time as a member of the Velvets was short.
In many ways MacLise's biography reads like the ultimate example of the wandering artistic spirit and speaks to the joys of a rootless, nomadic existence that still define the popular depiction of the 1960s counterculture. Indeed, MacLise managed to cram more into his 41 years of life than most people do with more time, alternately being described as a composer, percussionist, poet, mystic, shaman and calligrapher. He was well read, studying everything from Haitian drumming to Middle East percussion. He played with La Monte Young's now-celebrated Theater of Eternal Music, a collective that created avant garde music so unlistenable that it was, of course, highly influential; future artists would later temper this approach into something a bit more palatable. In his post-Velvets career he traveled extensively, before settling in Nepal. He'd eventually die in 1979 of tuberculosis.
But does MacLise's recorded output equal the stuff of legend that his life has become? Certainly his work, most of which went unreleased until 20 years after his death, has never had broad appeal and probably never will. To many people, it likely sounds like the type of racket that would be most effective in extricating a third-world dictator from an underground bunker. It's also not hard to imagine albums like The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Brain Damage in Oklahoma City and The Cloud Doctrine forming the soundtrack to a mentally deranged person's existence. Though MacLise's music is usually lumped into that big swirling mass known as psychedelia, it exists within that genre uneasily and only for lack of a better term. It's either the product of pure genius or a melody-challenged psychopath, with MacLise's songs incorporating chants, droning, electronic fuzz, tribal percussion, various stomps and yelps, and other mind-bending and ear-shredding traits. Even for fans of such music, it's not easy or particularly enjoyable listening; it's usually lo-fi and contains few hints of a reference point that makes even the most inaccessible music somewhat approachable. Spend a day with MacLise's albums and you'll likely feel like your brains have been mixed in a blender.
Brain Damage in Oklahoma City is perhaps MacLise's most representative release. Even so, for listeners not wired a certain way, the album borders on being nothing more than a mess of noise and nonsense, wandering and meandering with no real purpose except to try the listener's patience and mental health. And though even fans - excluding those whose brains were fried decades ago chasing the 1960s dream - would likely admit that it's not something that can be listened to often or as background music, it is worth hearing occasionally. Consisting of recordings the percussionist made between 1967-1970, it's also MacLise's most musically consistent and coherent effort, with its eight pieces (and 70 minute running time) taking the musician's drumming as its centerpiece. The album is bookended by two songs that feature MacLise playing cembalum, with opening song "Another Druid's Nest" also including chants and random thumps that recall Indian music. This chanting repeats on the manic "Haight Riot Mime," with MacLise this time pounding on bongos before the song abruptly cuts off, "Epiphany" augments hand drums with a hypnotic organ pattern, and the aptly titled "Drum Solo" consists of MacLise beating on barrel conga and bongos, again giving the song a primitive flavor.
The album's key tracks are also its most difficult. Clocking in at nearly 45 minutes, the two tracks that comprise "Dreamweapon Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police" are live ensemble works from 1968 that rely on improvisation in its most extreme form; no sane person would attempt to map out the songs' structures, shifts, or changes. Taken together they serve as a nice primer of MacLise's style or particular brand of torture - take your pick - as well as contain major avant garde elements that that still influence musicians today. The song ebbs and flows uneasily, with moments of calm used to steadily build tension, before it explodes and recedes again. Its most memorable parts are primarily chaotic, noisy, and aggressive; a sort of demented chanting rises and falls against MacLise's barrel conga and wife Hetty MacLise's tampura, while Tony Conrad's limp string and Henry Flynt's flute become increasingly abrasive as the song progresses. What it brings to mind is a traffic jam from hell or a set of schizophrenics turned loose in a musical instruments store. While the song sometimes tends to overindulge in its own experimentalism - one could argue that the song is too experimental for its own good, and that you've got to be stoned out of your gourd to really get it - it's a nice summation of MacLise's musical vision.
Setting aside the nagging fact that Brain Damage in Oklahoma City will always remain a cult favorite. Regardless of those cynics who argue that MacLise's music would have been relegated to the dustbin of history if it weren't for his involvement with the Velvets, it still remains one of the clearest examples of late 1960s experimental music. Though its content may not equal the long shadow cast by MacLise's legend, it offers a good opportunity to see MacLise as a musician and artist, not as a mystical figure best known for his extremely brief time with the Velvet Underground.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Alternate Routes: A Sucker's Dream
spectrumculture.com. enough said.
After spending a weekend listening to A Sucker's Dream, I needed a few stiff drinks to wash the mainstream radio-friendly taste out of my mouth. The Alternate Routes' latest effort is unabashedly commercial, with a clean production that emphasizes fatass guitar riffs, crisp and up-front vocals, drums punchy enough to make Max Weinberg jealous and anthemic rhythms that beg to be played in front of a packed music club as a relief pitcher takes the mound. The band's style is balls-ahead rock n' roll with a faint hint of country and pop - and that's all in big capital letters - with little room for subtlety, nuance or experimentation. The album doesn't try to map out a new musical vision or strange new language; it's clear the band is more interested in working within the confines of existing styles than in trying to map out new ones.
For the most part this approach works; if you're in the mood for pure rock music with more than a hint of machismo and a twist of humor, you could do a lot worse than A Sucker's Dream. "To the Line" features both shredding guitars and shouted manly-man group vocals, while the title track punctuates this vocal approach with the album's biggest guitar riffs. These bursts of bombast are at least somewhat tempered with several sparse ballads. "Desdemona" includes Patty Griffin and is the album's most disarming and engaging track; built around an acoustic guitar melody and running nearly six minutes, this hushed and reserved song manages to stand out in the sea of decibels that characterizes most of the album. "Already November" takes a similar approach and is held together by a subdued guitar line, with lead singer Tim Warren's vocals occasionally reminiscent of Jeff Tweedy, John Hiatt, Jim James or, less charitably, Edwin McCain at his soulful worst.
Still there's something just a bit too AOR about A Sucker's Dream. While the album's press materials suggest that the band is aware of (and perhaps embraces) these tendencies, on several songs it gets the better of them. "Ain't No Secret" and "All that I See" are both heart-on-sleeve love songs, with overwrought musical and vocal arrangements primed for a television melodrama and with enough syrup to upset even the most cynical stomach. The sentiments expressed are just too close to what you've heard from countless buskers on the promenade or from that subculture of Devendra Banhart-lookalike musicians who frequent the quads across American universities. It's on these moments when the sheen is uber-polished and the lyrics are hopelessly romantic where the album loses the listener's interest.
A Sucker's Dream's experimental moments are rare; aside from the hazy and echoed vocal treatment on "The Future's Nothing New," it offers straightforward rock tunes, with the occasional ballad thrown in. While the songs sound organic and it's somewhat refreshing to see a band simply trying to rock with a mixture of humor, sympathy, hope and determination instead of attempting a grand musical statement and bombing miserably - hell, it's worked for The Hold Steady - the album is ultimately uneven and underwhelming. Too often it simply sounds like overly familiar music just looking for a home right of the dial.
After spending a weekend listening to A Sucker's Dream, I needed a few stiff drinks to wash the mainstream radio-friendly taste out of my mouth. The Alternate Routes' latest effort is unabashedly commercial, with a clean production that emphasizes fatass guitar riffs, crisp and up-front vocals, drums punchy enough to make Max Weinberg jealous and anthemic rhythms that beg to be played in front of a packed music club as a relief pitcher takes the mound. The band's style is balls-ahead rock n' roll with a faint hint of country and pop - and that's all in big capital letters - with little room for subtlety, nuance or experimentation. The album doesn't try to map out a new musical vision or strange new language; it's clear the band is more interested in working within the confines of existing styles than in trying to map out new ones.
For the most part this approach works; if you're in the mood for pure rock music with more than a hint of machismo and a twist of humor, you could do a lot worse than A Sucker's Dream. "To the Line" features both shredding guitars and shouted manly-man group vocals, while the title track punctuates this vocal approach with the album's biggest guitar riffs. These bursts of bombast are at least somewhat tempered with several sparse ballads. "Desdemona" includes Patty Griffin and is the album's most disarming and engaging track; built around an acoustic guitar melody and running nearly six minutes, this hushed and reserved song manages to stand out in the sea of decibels that characterizes most of the album. "Already November" takes a similar approach and is held together by a subdued guitar line, with lead singer Tim Warren's vocals occasionally reminiscent of Jeff Tweedy, John Hiatt, Jim James or, less charitably, Edwin McCain at his soulful worst.
Still there's something just a bit too AOR about A Sucker's Dream. While the album's press materials suggest that the band is aware of (and perhaps embraces) these tendencies, on several songs it gets the better of them. "Ain't No Secret" and "All that I See" are both heart-on-sleeve love songs, with overwrought musical and vocal arrangements primed for a television melodrama and with enough syrup to upset even the most cynical stomach. The sentiments expressed are just too close to what you've heard from countless buskers on the promenade or from that subculture of Devendra Banhart-lookalike musicians who frequent the quads across American universities. It's on these moments when the sheen is uber-polished and the lyrics are hopelessly romantic where the album loses the listener's interest.
A Sucker's Dream's experimental moments are rare; aside from the hazy and echoed vocal treatment on "The Future's Nothing New," it offers straightforward rock tunes, with the occasional ballad thrown in. While the songs sound organic and it's somewhat refreshing to see a band simply trying to rock with a mixture of humor, sympathy, hope and determination instead of attempting a grand musical statement and bombing miserably - hell, it's worked for The Hold Steady - the album is ultimately uneven and underwhelming. Too often it simply sounds like overly familiar music just looking for a home right of the dial.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Swan Lake: Enemy Mine
go to spectrumculture.com, read the reviews, do it everyday.
Enemy Mine shouldn't work as well as it does. The product of three musicians from three different bands with largely contrasting styles - Dan Bejar of Destroyer and sometimes The New Pornographers, Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, and Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes - it's a mostly abrasive and dizzying mess of an album. It plays like a veritable indie stew of various musical and lyrical concepts; its nine songs each veer off in their own direction before the listener can ever get grounded. It's a strategy the trio utilized to great effect on debut album Beast Moans, that release succeeding despite (or perhaps because of) each musician's instrumental and vocal eccentricities. Such experimentation and lack of cohesion are too often the hallmarks of a band who thinks their shit doesn't stink as they drown in shameless self-indulgence. Such failed efforts don't dot the indie landscape so much as litter it like stinking refuse, yet Enemy Mine almost flawlessly avoids these pitfalls.
Each musician takes the lead on three songs and provides backup on most of the others, with each man applying his vocal quirks and twitches to songs that are primarily dark and impressionistic. Upon first listen Mercer's vocals are the least accessible and most ragged, with a yelping, wrecked voice of oddly-enunciated syllables occasionally drenched in echo. Though his voice remains difficult even with multiple listens - a smooth crooner Mercer is not - an element of gothic theatricality that strangely holds the listener's attention emerges. Opening song "Spanish Gold, 2044" builds from throbbing percussion, jagged punctuations of guitar and keyboards and chanted background vocals that suggest all three musicians have been drinking from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' well of misery. The song also favors the lyrical ambiguity that surfaces throughout Enemy Mine, with clipped images and phrases - "I left this bullwhip by the nightstand/ Julliard was a thousand miles ago" -suggesting meanings without making anything obvious other than all sort of bad shit's about to go down. The ironically-titled "Peace" features none of that; it augments drums and guitar stabs with backing vocals from Behar and Krug as Mercer howls like a deranged rush-hour street corner preacher.
Krug's vocals are no less interesting. "Paper Lace" opens and ends with acoustic guitar and a subdued synth line, a welcome change of pace after the mania of "Spanish Gold, 2044." If Krug's vocals here are more restrained than what he shows in his Wolf Parade guise, "Settle On Your Skin" has all the hallmarks of that band's sound: driving rhythms moving at breakneck pace, fidgety and somewhat distorted vocals that imply that the microphone's about to be swallowed, and lyrics teeming with the fatigue and insomnia of someone about to go off the rails. Hushed backing vocals support Krug on the piano-driven "A Hand At Dusk;" the closest thing to a ballad the album offers; the song's romantic sickbed sentiment is both humorous and oddly devotional, with Krug singing, "It's getting old, I know, I know/ But I'll hold your hair back when you're sick."
Bejar mostly reins in the vocal exaggerations that have plagued Destroyer's albums to varying degrees ever since masterpiece City of Daughters. Though his vocals lack Mercer's recklessness or Krug's, um, Wolf Parade-essness, Bejar's disciplined low-key approach offers a nice counterpoint to the spasms from Mercer and Krug. While "Ballad Of A Swan Lake, Or, Daniel's Song," with its other-worldly setting and an arrangement that sounds like a cross between a circus song and a funeral march from hell, acts as Bejar's contribution to the album's experimental quality, it's the simplicity of "Heartswarm" that stands out. The album's most melodic song, it's framed by Bejar's direct vocals and an acoustic guitar accented by keyboards, a touch of fuzz, and Mercer's backing vocals. Besides containing Enemy Mine's best lyric - "Do my eyes deceive me/ Or is it truly springtime in Paris for that piece of shit?" - it makes the album's dramatic stylistic shifts most apparent.
Ultimately, Enemy Mine plays like a collaborative effort, and not just because of the album's recurring images of time, distance, death, fractured psyche and assorted acts of violence. Despite each vocalist's singular quirks, each of them leave their mark on each song, with contrasting styles that comfortably fit together when they really shouldn't. The album doesn't so much bend musical genres as it turns them on their heads, shakes their pockets out and kicks them hard in the groin. It's a swirling, disparate tramp through often difficult terrain, but the reward is an album that's both unpredictable and highly original.
Enemy Mine shouldn't work as well as it does. The product of three musicians from three different bands with largely contrasting styles - Dan Bejar of Destroyer and sometimes The New Pornographers, Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, and Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes - it's a mostly abrasive and dizzying mess of an album. It plays like a veritable indie stew of various musical and lyrical concepts; its nine songs each veer off in their own direction before the listener can ever get grounded. It's a strategy the trio utilized to great effect on debut album Beast Moans, that release succeeding despite (or perhaps because of) each musician's instrumental and vocal eccentricities. Such experimentation and lack of cohesion are too often the hallmarks of a band who thinks their shit doesn't stink as they drown in shameless self-indulgence. Such failed efforts don't dot the indie landscape so much as litter it like stinking refuse, yet Enemy Mine almost flawlessly avoids these pitfalls.
Each musician takes the lead on three songs and provides backup on most of the others, with each man applying his vocal quirks and twitches to songs that are primarily dark and impressionistic. Upon first listen Mercer's vocals are the least accessible and most ragged, with a yelping, wrecked voice of oddly-enunciated syllables occasionally drenched in echo. Though his voice remains difficult even with multiple listens - a smooth crooner Mercer is not - an element of gothic theatricality that strangely holds the listener's attention emerges. Opening song "Spanish Gold, 2044" builds from throbbing percussion, jagged punctuations of guitar and keyboards and chanted background vocals that suggest all three musicians have been drinking from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' well of misery. The song also favors the lyrical ambiguity that surfaces throughout Enemy Mine, with clipped images and phrases - "I left this bullwhip by the nightstand/ Julliard was a thousand miles ago" -suggesting meanings without making anything obvious other than all sort of bad shit's about to go down. The ironically-titled "Peace" features none of that; it augments drums and guitar stabs with backing vocals from Behar and Krug as Mercer howls like a deranged rush-hour street corner preacher.
Krug's vocals are no less interesting. "Paper Lace" opens and ends with acoustic guitar and a subdued synth line, a welcome change of pace after the mania of "Spanish Gold, 2044." If Krug's vocals here are more restrained than what he shows in his Wolf Parade guise, "Settle On Your Skin" has all the hallmarks of that band's sound: driving rhythms moving at breakneck pace, fidgety and somewhat distorted vocals that imply that the microphone's about to be swallowed, and lyrics teeming with the fatigue and insomnia of someone about to go off the rails. Hushed backing vocals support Krug on the piano-driven "A Hand At Dusk;" the closest thing to a ballad the album offers; the song's romantic sickbed sentiment is both humorous and oddly devotional, with Krug singing, "It's getting old, I know, I know/ But I'll hold your hair back when you're sick."
Bejar mostly reins in the vocal exaggerations that have plagued Destroyer's albums to varying degrees ever since masterpiece City of Daughters. Though his vocals lack Mercer's recklessness or Krug's, um, Wolf Parade-essness, Bejar's disciplined low-key approach offers a nice counterpoint to the spasms from Mercer and Krug. While "Ballad Of A Swan Lake, Or, Daniel's Song," with its other-worldly setting and an arrangement that sounds like a cross between a circus song and a funeral march from hell, acts as Bejar's contribution to the album's experimental quality, it's the simplicity of "Heartswarm" that stands out. The album's most melodic song, it's framed by Bejar's direct vocals and an acoustic guitar accented by keyboards, a touch of fuzz, and Mercer's backing vocals. Besides containing Enemy Mine's best lyric - "Do my eyes deceive me/ Or is it truly springtime in Paris for that piece of shit?" - it makes the album's dramatic stylistic shifts most apparent.
Ultimately, Enemy Mine plays like a collaborative effort, and not just because of the album's recurring images of time, distance, death, fractured psyche and assorted acts of violence. Despite each vocalist's singular quirks, each of them leave their mark on each song, with contrasting styles that comfortably fit together when they really shouldn't. The album doesn't so much bend musical genres as it turns them on their heads, shakes their pockets out and kicks them hard in the groin. It's a swirling, disparate tramp through often difficult terrain, but the reward is an album that's both unpredictable and highly original.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
(Don't) Revisit: Black Flag - Damaged
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. Go see more at spectrumculture.com
Few classic albums have aged as poorly as Black Flag's Damaged. Now over 25 years since its release, the album's impact on future generations of musicians has far surpassed the staying power of its actual content, giving the album a revered and slavishly worshiped status it might no longer deserve. While its balls-ahead musical arrangements and lyrical sentiments that covered everything from teenage alienation, angst, boredom and frustration to, well, that's about it, marked the high point of the band's career and perhaps hardcore itself, time has not been kind to the album. Though the emotions it expresses are certainly universal - especially in the world of music, where everyone from The Smiths to Bush have tackled these subjects - it now sounds hopelessly anchored to a specific era and genre.
By now Damaged's history can be recited chapter and verse by music's more deranged fringes, but a quick recap is in order:
1. Henry Rollins jumped on stage at one of the band's shows in New York and later fell ass-backwards into becoming the lead vocalist (think Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star).
2. Rollins, with coaching from primary lyricist and SST Records founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, recorded his vocals on top of the band's backing tracks.
3. After Unicorn Records refused to issue the album on grounds that it would really, really upset your parents, Ginn released the album on his SST label. Critics went wild with praise, the youth of America got their inner graffiti artist on and spray painted four parallel bars on everything from school notebooks to freeway underpasses, and the authorities and parentals went on red alert and braced for the downfall of Western civilization.
4. In keeping with the true hardcore and anarchic ethos, the band was for a time prevented from using the name "Black Flag" or their logo due to an unseemly legal squabble.
5. The album would later be credited with influencing bands like Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer. Thanks a lot guys.
This isn't to say that Damaged is a bad album; songs like "Rise Above," "Thirsty and Miserable" and "Life of Pain" still stand as some of the clearest and most concise examples of classic Los Angeles hardcore, with Rollins' vocals barked and yelped on top of the band's incessant and pounding sludge. "T.V. Party" even managed to inject some humor into all the misery and rage that coursed through the album's half hour. But that's exactly the problem; as hardcore's defining moment, the album now clearly reveals both the musical and thematic limitations of the genre that persist to this day in smelly garages and dingy concert cellars across the country. Perhaps even more so than early British punk, the West coast brand of hardcore espoused on Damaged by and large emphasized a singular musical and lyrical approach over innovation and variation.
And the album has that in spades, with most songs featuring Rollins' strained and muddy vocals against musical arrangements that, while full of adrenaline and righteous fury, are overly repetitive. In 2009, the album sounds like an artifact of a specific time preserved under glass, not an evolving classic that takes on new meanings or interpretations to later generations of listeners. The album's flaws are also largely early 1980s Los Angeles hardcore's flaws: an overly disciplined and dogmatic adherence to music played loud, fast, hard and severely pissed off, with little room for deviation or improvisation; it's telling that bands that went through their growing pains under the auspices of hardcore - most notably Husker Du, Meat Puppets and the Minutemen - did their best work once they moved past these confines.
Occasionally the fury and outrage beaten into the listener's skull in songs like "Police Story" and "Padded Story" are less than convincing and sound far less threatening to modern listeners; the anxiety the album caused to the powers that be in 1981 seems almost quaint now. This is an inevitable risk for any band that focuses on overt political and social disillusion and hypocrisy; it's the same reason the Clash couldn't convincingly perform "Career Opportunities" after the money rolled in and that Bruce Springsteen's "Mansion on the Hill" now rings hollow. It's a posture that's largely impossible to maintain over the years; regardless of how sincere most of Ginn's lyrics or Rollins' delivery are, such sentiments tend to be viewed with increased skepticism as the album gets dustier. Sometimes Damaged gives off an air of anger rather than actual genuine anger; it's worth mentioning that the album cover is itself an illusion, with the cracked mirror caused by a hammer and Rollins' bloody wrist little more than a combination of coffee and red ink.
That the five-man combination of Ginn/Rollins/Dukowski/Cadena/ROBO conjured up a genre-defining work with Damaged isn't in question. As the West coast hardcore's most recognizable example, it's a reflection of both that movement's best traits - a sense of musical and lyrical urgency mixed with social and political dissatisfaction - and its worst excesses, especially a tendency for sounding excessively dated and repetitive. Like Nirvana's Nevermind, its reputation, influence and long list of disciples have masked its shortcomings. As a key document of music history it's indispensable. As an album that still sounds relevant today, it's greatly flawed.
Few classic albums have aged as poorly as Black Flag's Damaged. Now over 25 years since its release, the album's impact on future generations of musicians has far surpassed the staying power of its actual content, giving the album a revered and slavishly worshiped status it might no longer deserve. While its balls-ahead musical arrangements and lyrical sentiments that covered everything from teenage alienation, angst, boredom and frustration to, well, that's about it, marked the high point of the band's career and perhaps hardcore itself, time has not been kind to the album. Though the emotions it expresses are certainly universal - especially in the world of music, where everyone from The Smiths to Bush have tackled these subjects - it now sounds hopelessly anchored to a specific era and genre.
By now Damaged's history can be recited chapter and verse by music's more deranged fringes, but a quick recap is in order:
1. Henry Rollins jumped on stage at one of the band's shows in New York and later fell ass-backwards into becoming the lead vocalist (think Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star).
2. Rollins, with coaching from primary lyricist and SST Records founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, recorded his vocals on top of the band's backing tracks.
3. After Unicorn Records refused to issue the album on grounds that it would really, really upset your parents, Ginn released the album on his SST label. Critics went wild with praise, the youth of America got their inner graffiti artist on and spray painted four parallel bars on everything from school notebooks to freeway underpasses, and the authorities and parentals went on red alert and braced for the downfall of Western civilization.
4. In keeping with the true hardcore and anarchic ethos, the band was for a time prevented from using the name "Black Flag" or their logo due to an unseemly legal squabble.
5. The album would later be credited with influencing bands like Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer. Thanks a lot guys.
This isn't to say that Damaged is a bad album; songs like "Rise Above," "Thirsty and Miserable" and "Life of Pain" still stand as some of the clearest and most concise examples of classic Los Angeles hardcore, with Rollins' vocals barked and yelped on top of the band's incessant and pounding sludge. "T.V. Party" even managed to inject some humor into all the misery and rage that coursed through the album's half hour. But that's exactly the problem; as hardcore's defining moment, the album now clearly reveals both the musical and thematic limitations of the genre that persist to this day in smelly garages and dingy concert cellars across the country. Perhaps even more so than early British punk, the West coast brand of hardcore espoused on Damaged by and large emphasized a singular musical and lyrical approach over innovation and variation.
And the album has that in spades, with most songs featuring Rollins' strained and muddy vocals against musical arrangements that, while full of adrenaline and righteous fury, are overly repetitive. In 2009, the album sounds like an artifact of a specific time preserved under glass, not an evolving classic that takes on new meanings or interpretations to later generations of listeners. The album's flaws are also largely early 1980s Los Angeles hardcore's flaws: an overly disciplined and dogmatic adherence to music played loud, fast, hard and severely pissed off, with little room for deviation or improvisation; it's telling that bands that went through their growing pains under the auspices of hardcore - most notably Husker Du, Meat Puppets and the Minutemen - did their best work once they moved past these confines.
Occasionally the fury and outrage beaten into the listener's skull in songs like "Police Story" and "Padded Story" are less than convincing and sound far less threatening to modern listeners; the anxiety the album caused to the powers that be in 1981 seems almost quaint now. This is an inevitable risk for any band that focuses on overt political and social disillusion and hypocrisy; it's the same reason the Clash couldn't convincingly perform "Career Opportunities" after the money rolled in and that Bruce Springsteen's "Mansion on the Hill" now rings hollow. It's a posture that's largely impossible to maintain over the years; regardless of how sincere most of Ginn's lyrics or Rollins' delivery are, such sentiments tend to be viewed with increased skepticism as the album gets dustier. Sometimes Damaged gives off an air of anger rather than actual genuine anger; it's worth mentioning that the album cover is itself an illusion, with the cracked mirror caused by a hammer and Rollins' bloody wrist little more than a combination of coffee and red ink.
That the five-man combination of Ginn/Rollins/Dukowski/Cadena/ROBO conjured up a genre-defining work with Damaged isn't in question. As the West coast hardcore's most recognizable example, it's a reflection of both that movement's best traits - a sense of musical and lyrical urgency mixed with social and political dissatisfaction - and its worst excesses, especially a tendency for sounding excessively dated and repetitive. Like Nirvana's Nevermind, its reputation, influence and long list of disciples have masked its shortcomings. As a key document of music history it's indispensable. As an album that still sounds relevant today, it's greatly flawed.
Handsome Furs: Face Control
Handsome Furs:
Face Control
March 10, 2009 10:35 AM
Handsome Furs
Face Control
Rating: 3.5
Label: Sub Pop
buy it at insound!
Ah, that cruel bitch known as the side project. Like the lure of the siren's song, it pulls musicians into its embrace, nuzzles them gently, whispers seductions into their ears and then systematically murders their hard-fought reputation. At its worst, the side project album often comes across as nothing more than an opportunity for artists to indulge their most inflated and overindulgent whims, outside the confines of their full-time band. Of course there are exceptions - Shearwater has gone from an Okkervil River offshoot to a unique and highly original group in its own right, thanks to recent album Rook - but far too often these side projects are ultimately disappointing and carry the stink of being little more than vanity releases.
Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner has so far mostly managed to avoid these pitfalls. Though his side gig known as Handsome Furs, its core consisting of Boeckner and poet-fiancée Alexei Perry, hasn't surpassed his work with those indie darlings, it hasn't hurt his credibility either or led to much fan backlash. Debut album Plague Park was executed well enough, with an emphasis on synthesizers, sparse arrangements, drum machines, and programmed beats. Despite its nine songs occasionally sounding redundant and plodding - monotony reared its ugly head perhaps a bit too much - it offered a nice divergence from Wolf Parade's more frenetic style.
These shortcomings are mostly absent on Face Control. Although the album's approach isn't a dramatic shift from Plague Park, it does add more instrumentation and, thank Christ, changes of pace to the mix. For the most part the songs are more musically varied than those from the debut album, with guitars, shifting tempos, and even a few instrumentals thrown in to complement (or offset, take your pick) the band's foundation of synths and programmed rhythms. The songs are more diverse and interesting than those from Plague Park; only the minimalism of "Legal Tender," "Nyet Spasiba" and "I'm Confused" is immediately reminiscent of that debut effort. "Evangeline" works in some jagged stabbing guitars on top of all those damn synthesizers, with Boeckner's yelping voice more restrained than it is in his Wolf Parade guise. Both "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" and "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything" are defined by their shifts in rhythm and tempo, with each song relying more on guitars than synths and drum machines. Though sometimes the songs blend together, only one track, the nearly six-minute "Officer of Hearts," is endlessly repetitive and seems much longer than its already ADD-challenging running time. The lyrics mine familiar subjects: the dehumanizing effects of technology, crass commercialism, isolation in an impersonal world, and a general feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction. "Every little thing has been bought and sold," Boeckner says in "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," which seems an appropriate summation of the album's lyrical approach.
For those few remaining people still interested in album aesthetics and packaging - and I know one of you is out there - the album cover is, well, appallingly bad. An open-mouthed foaming Doberman is set against a red background, with the band's name and album title along the top in a greenish color somewhat reminiscent of snot. Maybe there's some type of inside joke going on here, who knows; but if you're ever looking for an example of the content not matching the packaging, look no further. It's an early favorite for worst album cover of 2009.
Nevertheless, its music is what makes Face Control a worthy release and an improvement over Plague Park. Even better, Boeckner manages to survive this side project with his Wolf Parade reputation still intact.
Face Control
March 10, 2009 10:35 AM
Handsome Furs
Face Control
Rating: 3.5
Label: Sub Pop
buy it at insound!
Ah, that cruel bitch known as the side project. Like the lure of the siren's song, it pulls musicians into its embrace, nuzzles them gently, whispers seductions into their ears and then systematically murders their hard-fought reputation. At its worst, the side project album often comes across as nothing more than an opportunity for artists to indulge their most inflated and overindulgent whims, outside the confines of their full-time band. Of course there are exceptions - Shearwater has gone from an Okkervil River offshoot to a unique and highly original group in its own right, thanks to recent album Rook - but far too often these side projects are ultimately disappointing and carry the stink of being little more than vanity releases.
Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner has so far mostly managed to avoid these pitfalls. Though his side gig known as Handsome Furs, its core consisting of Boeckner and poet-fiancée Alexei Perry, hasn't surpassed his work with those indie darlings, it hasn't hurt his credibility either or led to much fan backlash. Debut album Plague Park was executed well enough, with an emphasis on synthesizers, sparse arrangements, drum machines, and programmed beats. Despite its nine songs occasionally sounding redundant and plodding - monotony reared its ugly head perhaps a bit too much - it offered a nice divergence from Wolf Parade's more frenetic style.
These shortcomings are mostly absent on Face Control. Although the album's approach isn't a dramatic shift from Plague Park, it does add more instrumentation and, thank Christ, changes of pace to the mix. For the most part the songs are more musically varied than those from the debut album, with guitars, shifting tempos, and even a few instrumentals thrown in to complement (or offset, take your pick) the band's foundation of synths and programmed rhythms. The songs are more diverse and interesting than those from Plague Park; only the minimalism of "Legal Tender," "Nyet Spasiba" and "I'm Confused" is immediately reminiscent of that debut effort. "Evangeline" works in some jagged stabbing guitars on top of all those damn synthesizers, with Boeckner's yelping voice more restrained than it is in his Wolf Parade guise. Both "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" and "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything" are defined by their shifts in rhythm and tempo, with each song relying more on guitars than synths and drum machines. Though sometimes the songs blend together, only one track, the nearly six-minute "Officer of Hearts," is endlessly repetitive and seems much longer than its already ADD-challenging running time. The lyrics mine familiar subjects: the dehumanizing effects of technology, crass commercialism, isolation in an impersonal world, and a general feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction. "Every little thing has been bought and sold," Boeckner says in "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," which seems an appropriate summation of the album's lyrical approach.
For those few remaining people still interested in album aesthetics and packaging - and I know one of you is out there - the album cover is, well, appallingly bad. An open-mouthed foaming Doberman is set against a red background, with the band's name and album title along the top in a greenish color somewhat reminiscent of snot. Maybe there's some type of inside joke going on here, who knows; but if you're ever looking for an example of the content not matching the packaging, look no further. It's an early favorite for worst album cover of 2009.
Nevertheless, its music is what makes Face Control a worthy release and an improvement over Plague Park. Even better, Boeckner manages to survive this side project with his Wolf Parade reputation still intact.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Elvis Perkins - Elvis Perkins In Dearland
Singer-songwriters with a folkie bent like Elvis Perkins walk a precarious line between finding new ways to reinterpret a quaint and staid musical genre and making listeners want to grab their guitars from their dexterous little fingers and smash them like Bluto Blutarsky. Add a penchant for aping Basement Tapes/John Wesley Harding-era Bob Dylan to the mix and you've got a potential recipe for a disaster of Donovan proportions. To Perkins' credit, he's mostly managed to avoid these pitfalls; debut album Ash Wednesday was an engaging if frequently dark effort that offered songs of both loneliness and implied promise; tracks like "Good Friday" and "While You Were Sleeping" existed in that gray area between utter desolation and the faintest glimmers of hope. Though it wasn't a flawless album - "It's a Sad World After All" flirted with exposing the worst traits of a musician armed only with a guitar and a heavy dose of sincerity - it was a solid initial effort.
Elvis Perkins In Dearland mines similar lyrical territory to that debut effort, but also marks a noticeable shift in both instrumentation and mood. Though the songs mostly remain rooted in an acoustic sensibility - most of them start with guitar or piano, and the harmonica is busted out on more than a few tracks - a small army of horns, strings and various squalls of sound are incorporated to give the album a more frenetic pace. Dearland sounds more like a cohesive band album than a singer-songwriter record with session musicians; bassist Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett and drummer Nicholas Kinsey provide nice assists that give that album a definite vibe and consistency.
There's an impressive range of musical styles to these tracks. Songs like "I Heard Your Voice In Dresden," "Chains, Chains, Chains" and "Doomsday" all incorporate horns reminiscent of a grand mariachi marching band, while "Hours Last Stand" veers in the opposite direction; built around a bluesy piano melody, Perkins practically croons the lyrics. Those who suffer nervous twitches at the first reedy puff of a harmonica would be best served to avoid this album, with songs like opener "Shampoo," "Hey" and morose closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" prominently featuring the poor man's harp. Other songs offer unexpected shifts in both style and instrumentation: the gently strummed guitar that opens "Send My Fond Regards to Lonelyville" is eventually swallowed up with more horns and harmonica, the song transformed from a dryly humorous folk ballad into something far more pounding and raucous. Only on the distorted vocals and strangled horns of "I'll Be Arriving" does this approach ever really fail; the song is entirely inaccessible and, with its unintelligible lyrics, essentially subverts the album's vocal approach and remains the album's weakest track.
Perkins occasionally crams a pile of words into some fairly small spaces. He doesn't quite walk a tightrope like Elvis Costello, but the songs are sometimes lyrically dense. Though it's difficult not to view these songs in light of Perkins' biography - he's the son of actor Anthony Perkins and 9/11 victim Berry Berenson - the album frequently dwells on farewells, ghostly voices, memories, and glimpses into the past, usually with a mixture of sadness and affection. Perkins' lyrics are subtle and nuanced; any sense of nostalgic contentment is tempered with an equal sense of loss. "I love you more in death/ Than I ever could in life," he sings in "1 2 3 Goodbye," a conflicted sentiment that surfaces throughout the album. Similarly, the stomp and bounce of both "Doomsday" and "Hey" is offset by a dark sense of humor, with Perkins mentioning in the latter song the "cemetery of the century/ But hey, what a starry day..." The stark piano and guitar arrangement of closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" fits the regretful lyrics; it's the album's darkest and perhaps most cynical moment, with Perkins looking back at a relationship that's permanently gone off the rails. These songs offer shades of various emotions and degrees of uncertainty; it's tempered and mature songwriting at its finest.
Though Elvis Perkins In Dearland contains trace amounts of singer-songwriter folksiness, it's nevertheless a stylistically diverse album. Its arrangements burst with musical ideas, with horns and strings adding both tempo and muscle to Perkins' quirky and textured songs. It's catchy without being too slick, emotional without being maudlin, and addictive as hell, a nearly perfect album that never becomes repetitive or predictable.
Elvis Perkins In Dearland mines similar lyrical territory to that debut effort, but also marks a noticeable shift in both instrumentation and mood. Though the songs mostly remain rooted in an acoustic sensibility - most of them start with guitar or piano, and the harmonica is busted out on more than a few tracks - a small army of horns, strings and various squalls of sound are incorporated to give the album a more frenetic pace. Dearland sounds more like a cohesive band album than a singer-songwriter record with session musicians; bassist Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett and drummer Nicholas Kinsey provide nice assists that give that album a definite vibe and consistency.
There's an impressive range of musical styles to these tracks. Songs like "I Heard Your Voice In Dresden," "Chains, Chains, Chains" and "Doomsday" all incorporate horns reminiscent of a grand mariachi marching band, while "Hours Last Stand" veers in the opposite direction; built around a bluesy piano melody, Perkins practically croons the lyrics. Those who suffer nervous twitches at the first reedy puff of a harmonica would be best served to avoid this album, with songs like opener "Shampoo," "Hey" and morose closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" prominently featuring the poor man's harp. Other songs offer unexpected shifts in both style and instrumentation: the gently strummed guitar that opens "Send My Fond Regards to Lonelyville" is eventually swallowed up with more horns and harmonica, the song transformed from a dryly humorous folk ballad into something far more pounding and raucous. Only on the distorted vocals and strangled horns of "I'll Be Arriving" does this approach ever really fail; the song is entirely inaccessible and, with its unintelligible lyrics, essentially subverts the album's vocal approach and remains the album's weakest track.
Perkins occasionally crams a pile of words into some fairly small spaces. He doesn't quite walk a tightrope like Elvis Costello, but the songs are sometimes lyrically dense. Though it's difficult not to view these songs in light of Perkins' biography - he's the son of actor Anthony Perkins and 9/11 victim Berry Berenson - the album frequently dwells on farewells, ghostly voices, memories, and glimpses into the past, usually with a mixture of sadness and affection. Perkins' lyrics are subtle and nuanced; any sense of nostalgic contentment is tempered with an equal sense of loss. "I love you more in death/ Than I ever could in life," he sings in "1 2 3 Goodbye," a conflicted sentiment that surfaces throughout the album. Similarly, the stomp and bounce of both "Doomsday" and "Hey" is offset by a dark sense of humor, with Perkins mentioning in the latter song the "cemetery of the century/ But hey, what a starry day..." The stark piano and guitar arrangement of closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" fits the regretful lyrics; it's the album's darkest and perhaps most cynical moment, with Perkins looking back at a relationship that's permanently gone off the rails. These songs offer shades of various emotions and degrees of uncertainty; it's tempered and mature songwriting at its finest.
Though Elvis Perkins In Dearland contains trace amounts of singer-songwriter folksiness, it's nevertheless a stylistically diverse album. Its arrangements burst with musical ideas, with horns and strings adding both tempo and muscle to Perkins' quirky and textured songs. It's catchy without being too slick, emotional without being maudlin, and addictive as hell, a nearly perfect album that never becomes repetitive or predictable.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
Go to spectrumculture.com and spend some time there. Ignore your kids for a while.
Neko Case's voice floats somewhere between indie pop and the fringes of country music. While it sometimes sounds ripped straight from the pages of the Official Singer-Songwriter Handbook, that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's an endearing directness and simplicity in her vocal approach, and if most indie fans are being honest, they would gladly take such traditional accessibility over the overwrought stylings of Sharon Jones or the bordering-on-self-parody mangled garbling of Lucinda Williams any day. Case's voice can be comforting or foreboding, lighthearted or caustic, its smoothness used to accentuate the melodies in her songs.
All of these characteristics are again present on Middle Cyclone, the follow-up to the musician's wildly celebrated Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. It's mostly a solid and steady release, with a few standout tracks that exhibit the confident and self-assured vocals and cryptic lyrics of its predecessor. Still, the final product is somewhat disappointing. Too often the album is far too studied and reserved, with a lack of spontaneity and an excessively clean production that make it both overlong and dully repetitive.
Middle Cyclone's best songs play to Case's strengths as a vocalist and arranger; invariably, these songs favor stripped-down arrangements over the shimmering borderline mainstream pop bombast that plagues other songs. The title track is perhaps the album's finest moment, featuring Case's gorgeous vocals set against a gentle guitar melody played by long-time backing band member Paul Rigby. "The Next Time You Say Forever" augments Case's vocals with two acoustic guitars and an understated cello from Calexico's Joey Burns, and offers sentiments that betray the song's passive and pastoral vibe: "The next times you say 'forever'/ I will punch you in your face." "Magpie To the Morning" rolls along with a countrified rhythm as Case's spoken word vocals transition into one of her more memorable vocal performances, this time supported by M. Ward on guitar and hushed backing vocals from Carolyn Mark, Lucy Wainwright-Roche, and Kelly Hogan.
Yet these aren't enough to compensate for Middle Cyclone's flaws. Too many songs sound forced, overly crafted, and too precious for their own good, with textured studio arrangements offering slickness and sheen where raw emotion and breathing room should be. "This Tornado Loves You," which includes no fewer than 12 participants, is the album's most egregious offender, a swirling miasma of backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, strings, drums, and keyboards that sacrifices spontaneity in favor of a saturated, radio-friendly treatment that suggests its players were given little wiggle room for improvisation or going off script. This clinical precision also plagues "The Pharaohs;" not even Garth Hudson on organ is enough to breathe some life into it. Other songs precariously border on sounding like - rip it off fast like a Band-aid - Tuesday night at your local coffeehouse where every singer-songwriter is armed only with a guitar and disconcerting amounts of folkie seriousness. The humor of "People Got a Lotta Nerve" - it's either about caged animals exacting their revenge on their captors, or something far less literal - is deadened both by its AOR leanings (Pieces of You-era Jewel unfortunately comes to mind) and Case's tendency to repeat words until it grates on the listener's nerves: "I'm a man-man-man-man-man-man-eater/ but still you're surprised-prised-prised when I eat you." Two cover songs are included and are curiosity pieces at best, with a saccharine and plodding take of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" suggesting it would have been best served as a b-side or free download.
Case's excellent songwriting and her ability to offer glimpses of a song's intentions without making them painfully obvious sometimes offset Middle Cyclone's weaker moments. While her vocal approach is usually straightforward, the lyrics are suggestive and evocative, with phrases and images - whether it's the "gunpowder eyes" of "Prison Girls" or the "diamond at the bottom of the drain" in "Magpie To the Morning" - keeping the listener's attention where the arrangements might cause it to wander. The lyrics mask some flaws but not all of them; Middle Cyclone is simply too meticulous and predictable to maintain any momentum. Its best moments exist when its songs are at their most vulnerable and unadorned. All too often, such subtlety is bypassed in favor of an army of instrumentation that, while expertly performed by a strong supporting cast, offers only technical expertise where warmth and emotion should be.
Neko Case's voice floats somewhere between indie pop and the fringes of country music. While it sometimes sounds ripped straight from the pages of the Official Singer-Songwriter Handbook, that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's an endearing directness and simplicity in her vocal approach, and if most indie fans are being honest, they would gladly take such traditional accessibility over the overwrought stylings of Sharon Jones or the bordering-on-self-parody mangled garbling of Lucinda Williams any day. Case's voice can be comforting or foreboding, lighthearted or caustic, its smoothness used to accentuate the melodies in her songs.
All of these characteristics are again present on Middle Cyclone, the follow-up to the musician's wildly celebrated Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. It's mostly a solid and steady release, with a few standout tracks that exhibit the confident and self-assured vocals and cryptic lyrics of its predecessor. Still, the final product is somewhat disappointing. Too often the album is far too studied and reserved, with a lack of spontaneity and an excessively clean production that make it both overlong and dully repetitive.
Middle Cyclone's best songs play to Case's strengths as a vocalist and arranger; invariably, these songs favor stripped-down arrangements over the shimmering borderline mainstream pop bombast that plagues other songs. The title track is perhaps the album's finest moment, featuring Case's gorgeous vocals set against a gentle guitar melody played by long-time backing band member Paul Rigby. "The Next Time You Say Forever" augments Case's vocals with two acoustic guitars and an understated cello from Calexico's Joey Burns, and offers sentiments that betray the song's passive and pastoral vibe: "The next times you say 'forever'/ I will punch you in your face." "Magpie To the Morning" rolls along with a countrified rhythm as Case's spoken word vocals transition into one of her more memorable vocal performances, this time supported by M. Ward on guitar and hushed backing vocals from Carolyn Mark, Lucy Wainwright-Roche, and Kelly Hogan.
Yet these aren't enough to compensate for Middle Cyclone's flaws. Too many songs sound forced, overly crafted, and too precious for their own good, with textured studio arrangements offering slickness and sheen where raw emotion and breathing room should be. "This Tornado Loves You," which includes no fewer than 12 participants, is the album's most egregious offender, a swirling miasma of backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, strings, drums, and keyboards that sacrifices spontaneity in favor of a saturated, radio-friendly treatment that suggests its players were given little wiggle room for improvisation or going off script. This clinical precision also plagues "The Pharaohs;" not even Garth Hudson on organ is enough to breathe some life into it. Other songs precariously border on sounding like - rip it off fast like a Band-aid - Tuesday night at your local coffeehouse where every singer-songwriter is armed only with a guitar and disconcerting amounts of folkie seriousness. The humor of "People Got a Lotta Nerve" - it's either about caged animals exacting their revenge on their captors, or something far less literal - is deadened both by its AOR leanings (Pieces of You-era Jewel unfortunately comes to mind) and Case's tendency to repeat words until it grates on the listener's nerves: "I'm a man-man-man-man-man-man-eater/ but still you're surprised-prised-prised when I eat you." Two cover songs are included and are curiosity pieces at best, with a saccharine and plodding take of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" suggesting it would have been best served as a b-side or free download.
Case's excellent songwriting and her ability to offer glimpses of a song's intentions without making them painfully obvious sometimes offset Middle Cyclone's weaker moments. While her vocal approach is usually straightforward, the lyrics are suggestive and evocative, with phrases and images - whether it's the "gunpowder eyes" of "Prison Girls" or the "diamond at the bottom of the drain" in "Magpie To the Morning" - keeping the listener's attention where the arrangements might cause it to wander. The lyrics mask some flaws but not all of them; Middle Cyclone is simply too meticulous and predictable to maintain any momentum. Its best moments exist when its songs are at their most vulnerable and unadorned. All too often, such subtlety is bypassed in favor of an army of instrumentation that, while expertly performed by a strong supporting cast, offers only technical expertise where warmth and emotion should be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)