Rediscover: C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)

if the Confederacy had won, there's wouldn't be a spectrumculture.com. so be thankful.

Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.

"What if?" is perhaps the most common, if largely pointless and entirely speculative, question raised about the American Civil War (or, for those stuck in an antebellum mindset, "The War of Northern Aggression"). Despite its inherent absurdity, this question's bastard offspring - the alternative history genre - remains popular, as people of a certain persuasion will never tire of fantasized accounts of how Lee's rout of them foul Yankees at Gettysburg reshaped the course of American history for the better.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America begins with this familiar premise of a victorious Johnny Reb army but presents the aftermath in a far different light. Directed by Kevin Willmott, this 2004 mockumentary depicts America as a slave-owning and homogeneous Christian nation of the worst kind, its citizens convinced of their racial superiority and its government dominated by leaders singularly dedicated to maintaining the segregationist status quo. Cynical without being preachy and never prone to bouts of self-righteous proselytizing, C.S.A. is alternative history that is humorous, sobering and provocative.

C.S.A. is presented as a British Broadcasting Service documentary finally being aired on American television after a couple years of censorship; hinting at the prevalence of American xenophobia, the network warns that the documentary "is of foreign origin" and "may be unsuitable for children and servants." The film is presented from three different and usually contrasting perspectives. In his objective and detached tone, the British narrator actually advances the central theme of how racial prejudices become ingrained in a given society. Historian Sherman Hoyle, portrayed with just the right amount of exaggerated Southern mannerisms by Rupert Pate, advances the official party line and offers a window into how the Confederacy's legacy has been sanitized and white-washed for mass consumption. University of Montreal professor Patricia Johnson, convincingly played by Evamarii Johnson, is essentially the voice of dissent, her calm and matter-of-fact demeanor exposing the many social injustices that followed in the wake of the Union's surrender in 1864.

Willmott subtly inverts and reshapes the country's history based on actual events. In this way, the Great Depression is ended not by an increase in manufacturing brought on by World War II, but instead by a revived slave trade, while December 7, 1941 is marked by an American attack against Japan as part of the nation's "divinely ordained quest for world domination." Willmott mixes actual reel footage with doctored or invented footage to telling effect. Abraham Lincoln is shown as a frail and defeated old man in 1905, as the historian Hoyle describes the former president as a "lonely and bitter man...almost entirely forgotten by history." Viewers are shown clips of Adolf Hitler's visit to the Confederate States in 1935; the narrator later notes that the country opposed Hitler's eradication of the Jews, instead favoring their enslavement. Demonstrating a sardonic and pessimistic humor of the darkest kind, Willmott suggests that the Confederacy's brand of racial superiority was closely mirrored by that of Hitler's. Willmott's alternative world is also notable for what it excludes: there is no Civil Rights movement or cultural advancements to speak of, the obvious implication being that the systematic persecution of minority groups would have been inevitable had the South actually won the Civil War.

Equally suggestive are the commercials and PSAs that offer glimpses into contemporary Confederate life. Slavery drives the economy in various ways, with most of the products, services and advertisements being presented ironically with a nostalgic quaintness. Several commercials focus on the trappings of fine American living: a spot for Confederate Family Insurance, its logo a dignified image of Jefferson Davis, features a pretty wife, wide-eyed daughter and smiling slave, while viewers are later reminded to tune into the next episode of American Homes and Plantations. Others are more low brow: Sambo Motor Oil is the best way to keep your authentic "Dukes of Hazzard"-model General Lee running, while a law enforcement reality program called Runaway is accompanied by a bluegrass variation of Cops' well-known theme music. Astonishingly, not all these products are as far-fetched or exaggerated as one would think. As the movie closes, it's noted that Darkie Toothpaste and the Coon Chicken Inn actually existed; in the latter case, the restaurant's entrance was that of a wide-grinning train porter.

C.S.A. isn't just a study piece for academics, as this challenging gem is thoroughly compelling and manages to avoid becoming pedantic or dogmatic. It's a film about consolidation of power and how a country's history is framed by the victors. Regardless of whatever euphemisms Southern sympathizers have used over the years to justify the Confederacy's motives - "states rights," "Southern independence" - Willmott suggests this mythologizing has masked one of the defining features of the Civil War-era South: the institutionalized belief of Caucasian superiority and its possible impacts. Whether this forecasted vision of America is accurate - indeed, it presumes that the Confederacy had a realistic chance of winning the war and ignores the fact that slavery was already in decline as the war started - is irrelevant and of course impossible to prove or disprove; in his exaggerated depiction of a country segmented along racial lines, Willmott simply follows the Confederate philosophy to its logical conclusion. With a blend of satire and social commentary, C.S.A. ultimately concludes that America would have been a far less progressive, tolerant and culturally relevant nation had the South prevailed.

Vic Chesnutt: At the Cut

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If as a culture we prefer to keep our mortality at a safe and comfortable distance, such an approach has never found its way into Vic Chesnutt's music. The musician whom Michael Stipe rushed into a recording studio for fear of Chesnutt's songs never getting recorded has now been plugging along for more than 20 years, reminding us of our ultimate demise with a mixture of humor, pathos, derision and sympathy. Amid all the bizarre weirdos, tragic figures and other conflicted characters that populate Chesnutt's songs, death has been among the most frequent themes in his music. In most cases these meditations on the Great Beyond have been accompanied by the musician's darkly cynical humor, whether it's in the starkly arranged suicide lament of "Florida," the ancestral invocations of "Aunt Avis" or the poor, "coldest cadaver in the state," who meets an icy and altogether unpleasant end in "Mr. Reilly."

Chesnutt again stares down death throughout much of At the Cut. The suicide fantasy of "When The Bottom Fell Out" can be interpreted either literally or metaphorically; minimally arranged with just Chesnutt on acoustic guitar, its narrator describing himself hurling toward the earth, sardonically quoting Woody Guthrie on the way down ("So long/ It's been good to know ye"), eventually crashing into "that verdant grass." "Flirted With You All My Life," an alternately strong-willed and cowering address to death, is impossible not to view as autobiographical, with references to both Chesnutt's own suicide attempts ("I flirted with you all my life/ Even kissed you once or twice") and a friend's suicide (perhaps the poet John Seawright or Steve Buczko, who "hit those nails on the head" in "Florida"). The song is ultimately ambivalent; though the singer realizes that he's not ready to die, the last image we're left with is of Chesnutt's "cancer sick" mother reduced to begging for death to come.

A sense of remembrance ties several songs together. Though these tracks stop short of consolation, they nevertheless imply that there's some comfort to be found in such fleeting memories. Chesnutt offers a somewhat uncharacteristically straightforward vocal approach on the delicate "Concord Country Jubilee" as he recalls a series of childhood events and images - scraped knees, homemade ice cream and an adolescent kiss - that take place within the innocent atmosphere of a county fair. Chesnutt's grandmother, a frequent figure in the musician's songs, makes an appearance in the sparsely arranged and truly heartbreaking "Granny," in which Chesnutt recalls snippets of phrases and mundane everyday details from his beloved grandmother. The song speaks to the sense of loss that is felt throughout the album as well as the tight bond that unites family members across different generations. When Chesnutt quotes his grandmother - "You are the light of my life/ And the beat of my heart-" it's both tender and troubling, the type of simple phrase from a loved one that we all carry in our minds and remember with both affection and a sometimes unshakable sadness.

Musically, At the Cut recalls both Chesnutt's folk leanings as well as the jagged edges that dominated North Start Deserter. In some ways this isn't surprising, as the singer sometimes carries songs with him for years before they land on an album (some fans may recognize "Coward," "When The Bottom Fell Out" and "Granny" from various live recordings). Regardless, the album is better balanced than Deserter, which sometimes sounded overly abrasive just for the hell of it. Deserter collaborators, including members of A Silver Mt. Zion, Guy Picciotto from Fugazi and producer Howard Bilerman again give the album muscle: after a tentative beginning, "Coward" explodes with an imposing wall of noise and severe strings that cut and stab, "Philip Guston (with Clark Coolidge)" finds Chesnutt snarling his vocals over a flood of guitars and the hacking-the-shit-out-of-a-tree tale of "Chinaberry Tree" is suitably aggressive and tense. A flood of images cascades over squalls of guitars and piercing strings in "It Is What It Is," which in many ways sounds like an updated version of the atheist declarations of "Speed Racer:" "I'm not a pagan/ I don't worship anything/ Not gods that don't exist/ Nor the sun which is oblivious/... And I don't need stone altars/ To help me hedge my bet/ Against the looming blackness."

This assertion is perhaps At the Cut's most singular vow of defiance in an album littered with conflicting emotions. Mortality and memories flood its songs in an unnerving mix of hope and despair, determination and defeat, and Chesnutt's self-described tendency towards being "painfully nostalgic" takes on a more urgent tone throughout the album. Though a few songs never quite emerge from these dark shadows - the falsetto singing of "We Hovered With Short Wings" deadens one of Chesnutt's more poetic efforts, while "Chain" is the record's least memorable track - this release contains an affecting and moving set of songs that mostly plays to Chesnutt's strengths as a musician and lyricist. While its inclusions offer numerous parallels to Chesnutt's back catalog, rarely have his songs sounded so unflinching. When it comes to songs about dying and the past Vic Chesnutt has never bullshitted. Judging from this album, it's clear he doesn't plan to start that anytime soon.

Damon & Naomi: The Sub Pop Years

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The Sub Pop Years will try the patience of even the most enthusiastic and sympathetic Damon & Naomi fan. At 15 tracks and over 70 minutes, it paradoxically showcases everything great about the duo's blend of understated arrangements and hazy atmospherics, while also exposing the group's tendency to hit on a formula and repeat it well past the point of decency. The result is a steady, if largely underwhelming and predictable compilation that serves as a passable introduction to the duo for the uninitiated but offers nothing for long-time fans wanting to view the duo's body of work from a new perspective.

At its best, The Sub Pop Years confirms that Damon & Naomi's greatest strength has always been their ability to craft melodies, accentuating them with layered instrumental accents and ethereal vocals. Drawing from material from the band's four Sub Pop efforts - The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, Playback Singers, Damon & Naomi with Ghost and Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian - nearly every song is expertly arranged and executed. The best tracks here - "Forgot to Get High," "In the Sun" and "How Long" - unfold deliberately, maintaining their dreamy dispositions without resorting to needless embellishments or clutter. This compilation is at least a reminder that the two are masters of utilizing music to create moods and convey tones.

Despite these charms, the release is ultimately a disappointment that's plagued with many of the shortcomings that listeners have come to expect from such compilations. The band's first (and some would argue, most consistent) post-Galaxie 500 effort, More Sad Hits, is excluded, as it was released prior to the band joining the Sub Pop stable. The result is an incomplete overview: neophytes looking for a good starting point will miss one key piece of the puzzle, while long-time fans will likewise have little incentive to purchase the album, as there are no outtakes, b-sides, alternate versions or even botched cover songs to whet such appetites.

The track order is equally perplexing and doesn't appear to follow any appreciable or recognizable pattern, with the songs sequenced randomly. Though the duo will never be accused of experimenting wildly with new styles - in hindsight, the overdubs and other embellishments of with Ghost weren't a dramatic departure for the band - they have made some minimal stylistic changes throughout the years, and a chronological running order might have made this evolution, however slight, more apparent.

There's also plenty to quibble about regarding the songs chosen: nine of the 15 tracks are drawn from with Ghost and Siren, which haven't aged particularly well and still border on being tediously monotonous. Most of the selections are cut from a very similar cloth - falsetto vocals, gentle arrangements, simple and inoffensive flourishes - and quickly become repetitive. Ultimately, The Sub Pop Years reaffirms that Damon & Naomi have always been best served in small doses. Though the duo hasn't exactly remained musically static since Galaxie 500 disbanded, such shifts have been via small, careful steps and not giant leaps. Such an approach is reliable and safe but makes for an unsurprising and mostly inessential retrospective. With nothing new included on this release - surely there's some worthy material in a vault somewhere - and a heavy emphasis on the band's less enthralling records, casual fans will get only part of the story, while lifers will have already heard it all before.

Brown Recluse [sings]: The Soft Skin EP

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As music fans, many of us tend to approach the EP with all the disdain and loathing usually reserved for a contagious disease or a crazy uncle, and in many cases for good reason. Numerous EPs have been executed poorly and were rightly met with a critical and commercial thud, these releases often being little more than a rushed and hurried document of a young band blindly groping in the dark and getting nowhere. Though there are exceptions, too often it's hard to shake the feeling that an EP offers nothing more than a band's scraps, droppings and rancid leftovers.

The Soft Skin EP, a concise and infectious piece of indie pop from (currently) five-piece band Brown Recluse [sings], shows that this stigma doesn't always apply. If one of the goals of an EP is to spark interest in a band and whet a listener's appetite for a full-length album, The Soft Skin is a success. Though it's difficult to get too amped up about this EP due to its length - its 4 songs barely break the 11-minute mark - it does enough to confirm the band knows how to present its stylistic strengths on record.

It's likely that The Soft Skin will be most listeners' first introduction to the band. Though Brown Recluse [sings] eventually received a proper but belated label release for their 2006 EP, Black Sunday, their previous efforts were self-released in extremely limited quantities. For those unfamiliar with the band, this new EP is a worthwhile starting point. The band's bouncy and dreamy arrangements recall Os Mutantes and especially Belle & Sebastian; the latter band's influence finds its way both into Timothy Meskers' vocals and the songs' frequent use of horns. Each song is insidiously catchy, though in a good way; both opener "Rotten Tangerines" and closer "Contour and Context" display hints of country rhythm liberally mixed with horns, while "Night Train" offers a nice blend of keyboards, horns and backing vocals and "Rainy Saturday" rolls along with a quirky vocal and musical cadence. Meskers' vocals are occasionally deceptive, as sometimes the song's sentiments - "the pressures of the working world" hang ominously in "Rainy Saturday," for example - sharply contrast with the songs' upbeat arrangements.

The question now is whether Brown Recluse [sings] can sustain its style over the course of an album without sounding repetitive or derivative. This EP is certainly promising; there are no sour notes and the self-indulgent pretentiousness that plagues countless indie acts is entirely absent here. While the band's sound and approach aren't revolutionary or even very experimental, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Soft Skin might just be a tiny little taste when listeners want a great big gulp, but the band's latest EP is solid and surprising enough to both separate Brown Recluse [sings] from the hordes of like-minded bands and suggest that they have potential to spare.

Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

by Barney Hoskyns

Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits


Rating: 2.0/5.0

Broadway Books


That's right: another fucking Tom Waits biography. Despite (or perhaps because of) Waits' consistent refusal to sanction an authorized overview of his life and work, in recent years we've been subjected to a steady piss stream of disappointing studies of the musician that relied heavily on previously published material. Separate entries by Jay S. Jacobs and Patrick Humphries glaringly revealed all the pitfalls in examining Waits, offering few insights into either the artist or his albums. Both books were largely inessential; any reader with an internet connection and a functioning frontal lobe could have simply read the interviews that formed the basis of both books.

Barney Hoskyns' Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits does little to deny that another Waits biography is wholly unnecessary. Although Hoskyns managed to wrangle fresh quotes from a few Waits associates like Bones Howe and Ralph Carney - both of whom have an axe to grind about perceived slights from Waits - Waits and his inner circle clammed up and denied access for Hoskyns. Thus the majority of the information here will be redundant to anyone familiar with Waits' work and the various half-truths, fabrications, total bullshit tales and rare bouts of genuine sincerity with which he peppers his interviews and concerts. Despite its ambitious reach - it's exhaustively researched and runs 500 pages in length - Lowside too often reads like little more than a flat and generic rehash of Waits' life and music.

First the good stuff. For those unfamiliar with Waits this book is a decent starting point, as it covers the musician's career in painstaking detail and is up to date as of the recent Glitter and Doom tour. Like almost everything Hoskyns has written (his Across the Great Divide: The Band and America is indispensable), the book is well composed and carefully crafted, with a readable style that is never tedious or plodding. To Hoskyns' credit, he offers a balanced and impartial portrait of the musician, despite apparent attempts from Waits' camp to discourage various artists and producers from contributing to the book (the author even goes to the trouble of documenting such cases in an appendix). If Hoskyns' felt slighted or pissed off by such roadblocks, it never comes through in his writing, and in fact, his portrayal of Waits is largely sympathetic and flattering.

Despite these charms, Lowside is ultimately underwhelming and exhibits the same flaws as every other Waits biography. Foremost is its reliance on Waits' old interviews. Since the typical Waits interview, with its tall tales and bizarre metaphors, is akin to negotiating a minefield of lies, it's a dicey proposition to use such interviews so extensively. Of course Hoskyns isn't to blame here, though it begs the question of whether another Waits biography is even worth the author's or reader's effort.

Other shortcomings are less forgivable. Too much time is spent debating the closely guarded persona of Tom Waits, with Hoskyns coming precariously close to armchair psychology in trying to analyze Waits the person vs. Waits the persona. The book is also excessively long. With an approach that only the most dedicated fan will likely appreciate, Hoskyns offers a song-by-song interpretation of virtually every Waits tune, with page after page dedicated to this analysis chock full of the usual buzzwords used to describe Waits' songs. Many of Hoskyns' conclusions and assumptions are debatable; worse, he periodically makes the classic critic's mistake of taking too much license when analyzing the songs, frequently going outside the songs' boundaries or viewing them in entirely biographical terms. In this way, Hoskyns describes "Ruby's Arms" as a "gesture of concern" for former flame Rickie Lee Jones and short-changes the geographically ambiguous "Hoist That Rag" as little more than an example of "anti-Rumsfeld rage," with no evidence offered to support such conclusions.

Though Hoskyns is usually rightly skeptical of much of what Waits has said in interviews and concert performances over the years, he sometimes accepts some of the Waits lore as pure fact. Did the Ox-Bow Incident story, recounted in hilarious detail in Waits' 1999 "VH-1 Storytellers" set, actually happen? Was the "Mr. Sticha" name-checked in "What's He Building?" actually a neighbor of Waits? Though Hoskyns' bullshit radar is usually attuned - he does a nice job of including quotes from Waits that seem sincere and honest - these stories are presented as fact without any skepticism. And, last but not least, the author misidentifies the surreal country-nightmare Missouri town of Branson as "Branford."

Certainly Hoskyns was dealt a difficult hand, as Waits and many people he's worked with declined to contribute to the book. That Waits is interested in maintaining a sense of privacy and managing his public persona is well known by now. One can't help but think the artist takes a perverse pleasure as writers and fans alike trip over themselves trying to understand him. Lowside of the Road is a good introduction to Waits for the uninitiated, though hardcore fans - and really, with Waits is there any other kind? - will likely be disappointed with this biography. Despite Hoskyns' best efforts, Waits remains elusive. One can't help but think this is exactly what the musician wants.

Drive-By Truckers: The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008)

A vault-clearing project is, by definition, at a disadvantage before its content even reaches a listener's ears. Usually consisting of sundry and substandard outtakes best suited for the guillotine, drunken "interpretations" of other artists' work and other abominations, such releases tend to offer little more than an artist or band turning their unwanted children loose, quite literally, at the listener's expense. Of course there will always be notable exceptions - the first Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, the more-recent Tom Waits Orphans set - but too often these releases simply remind listeners why such songs were originally relegated to the dustbin of a band's history.

Drive-By Truckers mostly manages to avoid this stigma throughout The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008). Featuring select recordings from the band's post-Southern Rock Opera period, with a slight emphasis on the Dirty South era, the album is consistently strong and cohesive, often sounding more like a proper studio album than a collection of discarded refuse. Perhaps this is to be expected, as the band spent time in the studio pounding the songs into shape, instead of leaving them in various states of undress and foisting the scraps onto the public. Likely to appeal to both those familiar with the group as well as fans who stopped listening after Southern Rock Opera or The Dirty South, this release shows the band occasionally wandering outside its comfort zone, showcasing the fine qualities that separate DBT from its less innovative country-rock brethren.

While no artist will likely ever match Dylan for bizarre and inscrutable album omissions - think "Blind Willie McTell" and go from there - one has to wonder why several of the stronger tracks here didn't appear on one of the band's previous releases. Opener "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" takes the country music icon's 1999 automobile crash as its starting point and finds the Truckers at their raucous best: Patterson Hood's drawled vocals, a driving rhythm and a few testosterone-laden guitars. It's a road song from a band whose catalog is dotted with them, its images whirling by in a blur. An alternate take of "Goode's Field Road" is likewise muscular and aggressive, actually surpassing the cut included on Brighter Than Creation's Dark. "Uncle Frank," with its perpetually beaten-down hero, whose life ends in suicide, is similarly reworked to devastating effect. The album also suggests that the band is equally adept at interpreting other artists' songs. Looking past its tortuously sincere Southern mythologizing, the rendition of Tom Petty's "Rebels" could actually pass for a DBT original. The Warren Zevon songs "Play It All Night Long" and "Ain't That Pretty At All" are cross-bred with bastardized lyrics but stay true to both songs' manic intensity, paying tribute to the deceased musician, while album-closing "Like a Rolling Stone" doesn't massacre the Dylan classic like countless other versions.

Yet, it's when the volume is turned down where The Fine Print's best moments occur. Sung by Jason Isbell in his best wounded voice and utilizing only sparse instrumentation, "TVA" is a beautifully moving track that traces a family's history against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the economic and cultural changes brought about by the FDR's New Deal. Far bleaker in tone but equally reserved in execution, the band's cover of Tom T. Hall's 1971 soldier's lament "Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)" is impossible not to view in contemporary terms. Though the song and its lyrics won't ever be accused of being subtle, the interpretation here retains a certain poignancy and relevance for modern listeners.

Other songs, like the Santa-slaying sex and murder fantasy of "Mrs. Claus' Kimono," the somewhat tedious "The Great Car Dealer War" and the plodding "When the Well Runs Dry," are curiosity pieces at best and far from essential. Even if Drive-By Truckers' unique blend of Southern hypocrisies and dignity can become repetitive at times - "a bunch of sharecroppers against the world" indeed - The Fine Print is about as good as a compilation album can be. Those looking for the Southern desperation and dignity that have made the band's name will find plenty of that here, but other songs break from these confines and prove that the band, despite its popular image, does not always operate within the boundaries of the South's conflicted past. One wonders what other gems are still safely tucked away inside that vault.

The Beatles Playlist

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"I Saw Her Standing There" from Please Please Me (1963)

In retrospect, it would be difficult to find a more appropriate opening song for the Beatles' debut album. Beginning with a boisterous count-in from McCartney, "I Saw Her Standing There" in many ways established the musical and thematic template that the Beatles would repeat throughout their first several records. Unapologetically upbeat and youthful, it's a short burst of 1960s pop perfection, just catchy enough to work and exuberantly naïve enough without being laughable.

Its musical blueprint has since become the stuff of Beatles legend: McCartney's energetic, urgent, gotta-have-her-now singing; Lennon's backing vocals and steady rhythm guitar; Harrison's confident lead guitar. Callous Beatles fans can even cut Ringo a break: regardless of his shortcomings as a drummer, the song wouldn't have been complete with anyone else manning the skins. Handclaps added an element of fun to the mix, and still today the song is infectiously punchy and sounds like four young dudes having a blast in a recording studio. In many ways the song defined the band's early style ; though there would of course be variations along the way, in retrospect it contains all the key aspects of what makes the band's "pop" period still sound fresh and relevant today.

The song's characters - the unabashedly romantic male and the flawless object of his affection -- would likewise be oft-repeated throughout the Beatles' early catalog. The narrator is indeed hopelessly smitten: in classic true love fashion, the attraction here is physical, as he doesn't know a single thing about the girl other than "the way she looked was way beyond compare" and that "before too long I fell in love with her." Allegedly written when Lennon and McCartney were still in high school, it's hard not to attribute this open-wondered naïveté to the two musicians' young age.

Lennon reportedly scoffed at some of McCartney's early lyrics - perhaps an early sign of tensions that would later contribute to the band's undoing - but the result was nevertheless a rousing and appropriate introduction to the Beatles and the studio sound they'd perfect throughout the early 1960s. As music fans we tend to mythologize a band's "firsts," and while this is sometimes problematic - if the Beatles had crapped out early as just another also-ran beat band, the song probably wouldn't have the standing it does now - one would be hard-pressed to find a better opening studio statement for the band. Though "I Saw Her Standing There" was relegated as the b-side to "I Want to Hold Your Hand," it's about as perfect an opening track as you'll find, and one that perfectly encapsulates the Beatles' early style.

"Eleanor Rigby" from Revolver (1966)
One of the Beatles' best songs is one on which none of the members played any instruments. "Eleanor Rigby" featured a double string quartet, with McCartney singing lead, Lennon and Harrison providing harmony vocals and Ringo doing Christ knows what (to be fair, the drummer is credited with coming up with at least one key lyric for the song). By now all the clichés about the song's place in the Beatles' legacy have been repeated enough and only need quick mention here: the song continued the band's transition from straightforward pop songs to a more experimental style that began with Rubber Soul and explored themes that were absent from their previous records. It's also notable for being one of the songs whose authorship is in dispute: Lennon claimed that he wrote most of the lyrics, while McCartney and friend Pete Shotton (who is said to be present when the song was written) were willing to credit Lennon with little more than half a line or so.

Those are the types of dry details that have become part of the Beatles' story with the benefit of hindsight; still, they don't do much for conveying how affecting and bleak the song remains. An unflinching tale about the parallels between a lonely church worker whose death goes unnoticed and the priest who conducts her funeral and writes "words of a sermon that no one will hear," the song sounds both as relevant and as out of step with today's mainstream music as it did when it was originally released. Certainly part of the song's emotional impact is due to its mournful string arrangement - unlike anything the band had recorded up to this point, it can still tug at the emotions of even the most callous cynic. While McCartney's vocals drip with a sense of resignation and defeat, what's most stirring is the song's universal sentiments: we can all relate to the isolation that defines these characters' lives and the battles against futility they wage. While most of the Beatles' pre-Rubber Soul songs have aged well and are still enjoyable today, for many fans it's the band's evolution into more complex songs like "Eleanor Rigby" that better defines the Beatles' impact and legacy, even if it did contribute to the group being labeled a "studio band."

Though "Eleanor Rigby" wasn't the first "serious" Beatles song, it was the most explicitly nihilistic. The romantic optimism that defined some of the band's previous songs is a world away here: Eleanor is buried "along with her name," while Father McKenzie does little more than wipe the dirt off his hands as he leaves the woman's funeral. It's a telling gesture in a song that offers no easy answers or even the faintest hints of consolation.

Jurassic Park

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A frequent complaint about Jurassic Park upon its release in 1993 was that it lacked - snobby critic's complaint here - character development and that it was purely a special effects bonanza. Certainly nearly every single character came ready-made as a sort of assembly line product: the wealthy proprietor whose grandiose vision is matched only by his cluelessness, the eternally optimistic graduate student and her grizzled, cynical teacher and a pair of adorable, ever-irascible and eternally annoying kids who too often manage muck things up. To some extent the Spielberg-directed movie has never quite shaken that stigma. This is understandable as Jurassic Park is in many ways your typical big-budget Hollywood blockbuster: there are countless near-catastrophes and epic moments, individual acts of both selfishness and sacrifice, a soundtrack as epic as John Hammond's park, several awe-inspiring computer-generated effects that dazzle the eyes while the mind takes a siesta and, um, one poor guy facing death by dinosaur while on the crapper.

But dig a little deeper (get it?) and what becomes as striking as any visual is the film's foreboding tone. The characters' follies and flaws are instantly familiar to modern audiences: at least one character's hubris leads to the destruction of what he holds most dear, while Ian Malcom's protests against the "rape of the natural world" are predictably ignored. Far more than just a mesmerizing special effects how-to manual, Jurassic Park contains universal environmental themes that extend beyond the limits of a mainstream film: the devastating results when naive intentions and corporate greed collide, humanity's desire to connect with and understand the past and man's pursuit of technology and how best to use it

1977: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Blank Generation

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Richard Hell's timing was always just a little bit off. Throughout punk's 1970s heyday he found himself on the cusp of something monumental; several times he was long gone by the time these key moments actually occurred. Most famously, his days with Television ended in 1975 after he was either sacked from or quit the band over disagreements with Tom Verlaine. A short while later the band released the landmark Marquee Moon while Hell was attempting a new project after leaving the Heartbreakers in 1976, a doomed collaboration with former New York Dolls Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders from which Hell eventually jumped ship.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that project, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, never managed to emerge from the long shadow cast by Marquee Moon or other key 1977 albums. The band's Blank Generation is still in some ways overlooked when albums from that mythical year are discussed, though it's aged far better than either Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols or the laughably naïve proselytizing and macho posturing of The Clash's self-titled debut. It's far more layered and complex than much of its punk brethren (and if you wanted to argue that it's not even a punk album, I wouldn't disagree), with Robert Quine and Ivan Julian's guitars sounding both abrasive and textured on songs like "New Pleasure" and "Down at the Rock and Roll Club." Of course the musical dexterity of Marquee Moon has by now put to rest the incorrect stereotype that punk bands couldn't play their instruments, but Blank Generation doesn't trail too far behind. The music is often matched by Hell's wit and lyricism, whether it's the double entendre and Hell's sneering vocals of "Love Comes In Spurts," the suspicion and paranoia of "Betrayal Takes Two," or the ambiguous sentiment of the album's title track.

Though Hell's later musical efforts failed to match Blank Generation's brilliance, one near-flawless album is one more than most artists achieve. For me it's always been of the purest examples of an overlooked masterpiece that, unlike many other 1977 albums, doesn't sound hopelessly stuck in a particular genre or period. Though that long-ago tension between Verlaine and Hell will likely still cause some people to view Blank Generation as the bastard stepchild of what might have been, such an approach does a disservice to the album. Today it still sounds wonderfully out of step with most punk albums from either side of the Atlantic, an album that still continues to surprise decades after all of that Year Zero nonsense has been largely forgotten. - Eric Dennis

Revisit: Bob Dylan - Oh Mercy (1989)

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Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

Bob Dylan continues to ride a critical and commercial wave of adulation that shows no signs of receding. After a lean early 1990s with the underwhelming and inessential Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong and the earlier catastrophe that was Under the Red Sky, Dylan has since run off a string of albums that in many cases measure up nicely against his most revered older records. Starting with 1997's Time Out Of Mind and continuing through 2009's Together Through Life, all of Dylan's recent work has mostly met with widespread praise, breathless fawning and severe bouts of reviewer hyperbole. Though there were a few scattered voices of dissent that rightly pointed out some flaws with that 2009 effort, a new Dylan release is almost guaranteed to be accompanied by the well-worn clichés and plaudits of those in awe of his music. The man could probably belch on tape for 45 minutes and Uncut would hail it an instant classic.

If this story sounds familiar, it's because it's been repeated throughout Dylan's career: a string of either forgettable or downright awful albums is followed by a noticeably better release or two that leads to the predictable talk of a Dylan resurgence/comeback/reinvention. Yet often lost in this glut of critics tripping over themselves and each other to proclaim Dylan "back" is any consideration of how well or poorly these albums will age. Music criticism by necessity largely deals in the present, though this approach has its obvious shortcomings: critics who won't admit that time has soured their love and altered their opinions of certain albums are unadulterated liars.

Contemporary reviews of Oh Mercy were positive. Clinton Heylin considered some songs on par with Dylan's best work, the wonderfully acerbic Robert Christgau was mostly impressed, Anthony DeCurtis offered a lengthy and flattering review and other reviewers characterized it as Dylan's strongest release since Desire. The album landed on several of those myopic year-end best-of lists; in the type of knee-jerk reaction and lack of perspective Rolling Stone has become known for, the magazine ranked Oh Mercy as #44 on its list of the 100 best albums of the 1980s. Yes, you read that correctly; for more laughs, it's worth checking out the complete, dreary and wildly amusing list.

Though it's usually described as Dylan's best 1980s album, that's akin to saying the Big Mac is the best burger at McDonalds: there's simply not much good material with which to compare it. To state that the 1980s was a rough decade for Dylan is being diplomatic. Aside perhaps from Infidels and pieces of Oh Mercy, Dylan's output from the Reagan/Bush years reads like a laundry list of studio disasters characterized by dated production techniques and instantly forgettable tunes; we don't need to exhume the bodies here. This isn't to imply that Oh Mercy is a bad album; it's not. With the type of lyrical craftsmanship Dylan is still best known for, "Ring Them Bells," "Shooting Star" and "Man in the Long Black Coat" are stellar and sound as relevant today as they did when the record was first released. It's still a satisfying and worthwhile listen: Dylan's lyrics offer plenty of fodder for those insisting to over-analyze, misinterpret and dissect his words and thus rob them of their mystery and beauty, while Daniel Lanois' production in some ways foreshadowed the approach later used on Time Out of Mind.

Yet time has a way of taking the luster off a release, and Oh Mercy is no exception. Now 20 years since its release in 1989, the album hasn't aged particularly well. Lanois' swamp-murk production shoulders a large part of the blame; it fails nearly as often as it succeeds, with "Political World" and "Most of the Time" suffering from the producer's quirks and idiosyncrasies and sounding too manufactured for their own good. In addition, a metallic sheen detracts from a few other tracks, with Dylan's vocals sounding thin and tinny on "Everything Is Broken" and" "Disease of Conceit." There are simply too many production flaws to look past; though Oh Mercy never comes close to repeating the train wreck of 1980s production values called Empire Burlesque, the songs might have been better served if a layer or two of these studio embellishments had been stripped away. It's worth mentioning that sparse versions of these songs have circulated on bootleg for years - and, finally, on Sony's latest official Bootleg Series volume - and show a warmth and immediacy to these songs that the album largely lacks. Stripped of the clutter that hinders much of Oh Mercy, these largely acoustic versions offer a tantalizing glimpse into what Oh Mercy could have been.

It's difficult not to think that Bob Dylan's abysmal 1980s work lowered both fans' and critics' expectations to the point where anything that was even marginally decent would be hailed as a "return to form." It's a phenomenon that's been repeated throughout the years, most recently with R.E.M. and the massively overrated Accelerate. Of course, criticizing Dylan is a fool's task - like a hack writer taking pot shots at a Hemingway or Fitzgerald - and any career as lengthy as Dylan's will have its share of failed albums. Still, as the years pass and offer more opportunity to re-assess Dylan's catalog, it's impossible to shake the feeling that Oh Mercy, while the strongest thing the musician did in the 1980s, hasn't exactly withstood the test of time and instead sounds like an album whose sporadic successes and more-prevalent failures cannot be separated from its over-saturated production style.

The Antlers: Hospice

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The indie world loves a good backstory to an album's genesis. Jeff Mangum reads Anne Frank's diary and it becomes one of the key influences on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea; the deaths of several of the band's family members is felt throughout The Arcade Fire's Funeral, interpreted by many as a meditation on remembrance; Justin Vernon retreats to a Wisconsin cabin and creates For Emma, Forever Ago, one of the starkest and most moving records in recent years. Besides giving both fans and critics a convenient starting point in approaching such efforts, this framework lends these albums credibility and a sense of purpose.

Hospice, the remarkable debut full-length from Brooklyn-based trio The Antlers, similarly comes with its own history. Originally self-released and now re-issued by Frenchkiss Records, the album was written by vocalist Peter Silberman after two years of self-imposed isolation and tells the story of a doomed relationship between a hospital worker and a woman/child who eventually dies of cancer. Epic in scope and nearly flawless in execution, Hospice is a deeply emotional work that will likely be remembered as one of this decade's most fully realized albums and an intense set of songs that encompasses life's fleeting joys and giant tragedies in equal measure.

Though it's become a cliché to describe a singer's voice as an instrument, it's appropriate here. Falling somewhere between Win Butler and Jeff Buckley but sounding different on every track, Silberman's vocals change with each song's shifting dynamics as he bends his words and phrasing to fit the songs' spaces and squeeze emotions out of every line. "Sylvia" alternates between buried and inaudible vocals and the singer's desperate shouts, while the delivery of "Kettering" is cracked and clipped. In other places Silberman is perfectly audible: the up-front and vulnerable vocals of "Bear" and the acoustic closer "Epilogue" are stripped bare and sound disarming in their clarity.

The arrangements are likewise varied; though a thick wash of shoegaze, ambiance and fuzz is applied often, the album's stylistic foundation is difficult to pin down and impossible to stereotype. Though trace amounts of Arcade Fire arena-ready indie rock can be heard, the instrumentation is far more textured and complex. "Atrophy" lulls the listener in with a repeated keyboard melody and airy instrumentation eventually swallowed up by sounds resembling a whirling machine and breaking glass, before these fade into an acoustic guitar and Silberman's plaintive lament that the patient is "screaming, expiring, and I'm her only witness." No song is ever predictable or rests comfortably for long: "Bear" begins with a snippet of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and ends with a swirl of horns; the banjo that carries most of "Two" is eventually smothered by keyboards and a solid wall of sound; the gentle haze of "Wake" gives way to more swelling horns and white noise. Though Silberman will likely garner the bulk of the attention here, instrumentalists Michael Lerner and Darby Cicci deserve mention. Lerner's percussion propels the songs forward, most notably on "Sylvia," while Cicci's horns give the songs additional depth.

Silberman sings that there are "two ways to tell the story," and ultimately the listener is left to piece this tale together. At its core are two central characters whose fates are irreversibly linked: the woman/child dying of cancer and her self-described "eulogy singer." Beyond that, Hospice's specifics are open to interpretation. Certain events are mentioned, such as a quickie marriage ("Two silver rings on our fingers in a hurry"), either a birth or abortion ("There's a bear inside your stomach/ A cub's been kicking you for weeks/ And if this isn't all a dream/ Well then we'll cut him from beneath"), the unraveling of a frequently dysfunctional relationship and a childhood punctuated by nightmares and wrecked by an abusive father. Perspectives and timelines shift from song to song, a narrative of two lives that plays out in the couple's imaginations, memories, or both, with the sweep and power of a great novel. Silberman has a poet's eye and ear for evocative images and phrases: there are empty cancer ward beds, hospital machines that beep for the last time, "singing morphine alarms out of tune," someone waking up and finding "no breathing body" beside him.

Hospice shouldn't work as well as it does. Its recurring motif of mortality, set against the backdrop of an institutional cancer ward, is decidedly severe. What offsets the album's somber tone is an underlying sense of commitment, dedication and acceptance; "I'd happily take all those bullets inside you/ And put them inside of myself," the narrator vows at one point. These songs exist in a gray space between hopelessness and determination, where life is bleak but perhaps not permanently so. Though the man in Hospice struggles to come to terms with death and loneliness, hope is never entirely abandoned and his memories can be as comforting as they are disturbing. It's a staggering, nuanced and near-perfect record whose triumphs and tragedies are never trivial or melodramatic; an album of mourning that nevertheless allows flickers of promise to shine through.

Heavy Hometown: Action Figures

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Action Figures is a disjointed and inconsistent work, its songs going in opposite directions that don't always mesh as a whole. The debut album from Midwestern-based trio Heavy Hometown, it undoubtedly covers a lot of musical terrain, though that terrain is somewhat sludgy and occasionally leaves shit all over your shoes. It's saddled with many of the negative connotations associated with a first album; chiefly, a lack of self-editing and a sense of fumbling in the dark, groping for a unique musical voice. Yet for all these faults, there are several truly memorable songs lurking amid the clumsiness. While a bit of self-editing would have resulted in a remarkable EP, what we're ultimately left with is a hit-and-miss first statement from a - cliché alert - promising young band.

The most immediate shortcoming to Action Figures is an inconsistency of style that too often suggests a band picking and choosing from a grab bag of previous eras and genres. Such homage is always a dicey proposition - rare is the album that follows this approach and doesn't sound like a slavish and watered-down pastiche of its forbears - and it kills more than a few tracks here. This most frequently occurs on the more abrasive tracks, which tend to sound like by-rote pastiches of shoegaze, drone and lo fi. Regardless of whether it's by coincidence or intention, "Strange Wave" and "Medicine," with their wall of fuzz and slightly buried and distorted vocals, sound like vintage Jesus and Mary Chain, while "My Ghost (Is The Most)" is reminiscent of a garage band who just got their hands on Nuggets for the first time. Of course it's a crap shoot when a critic tries to pin-point a band's influences, but the similarities here are pretty severe, with these songs sounding like a patchwork of various genres and artists.

Yet other tracks are downright stellar. The album roughly splits lead vocal duties between John Wood and Corey Barnes, and the two vocalists' contrasting styles - Wood's voice is fragile and cracked, while Barnes' is far smoother and deeper - make for some nice moments. Woods' weariness on opener "We Ate The Bug" suggests a vulnerability and detachment worthy of Jason Pierce, the song's sparse electric guitar-based arrangement setting a somber tone. "Haircut Chair" is likewise excellent, with Woods' wavering and shaky voice and his assertion that "{all of our dreams are on the ropes}" especially poignant. By contrast Barnes' singing leans toward something more traditional and straightforward. The country-sway of "Black Bikini" showcases his skills nicely, sounding a little bit like a cross between Jeff Tweedy and Curt Kirkwood. Barnes' voice likewise adds emotion and textures to these songs; "your eyes reflect on everything I do" he sings in a near-baritone on "No Bodies," a line that could be interpreted in any number of ways. The band is at its best when it forgoes drone and distortion in favor of these more subdued and introspective moments, where the instruments can breathe and each vocalist can bend and stretch the lyrics.

As debuts go, Action Figures is promising. Its strongest songs suggest a measured understanding of life's joys and disappointments, its imperfections and perfections - "I still love you Sara Ann/ For the good times and the bad" - and mostly offset the color-by-numbers approach that sounds too familiar and generic for its own good. There's an understated sense of both hope and sadness throughout the album, though sometimes the listener has to sort through some clutter to find such moments.

Blue Roses: Blue Roses

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Maybe certain albums should be tagged with a Caution: Intensely Serious and Introspective Folksinger Contained Within sticker. An image of an every(wo)man singer armed only with a guitar or with a piano whose keys just beg to be plinked and various sundry stringed instruments waiting patiently in the background could be used to warn listeners of what they can expect. Blue Roses, both the band name and debut album from British artist Laura Groves, offers all the best and worst of modern folk music: understated, carefully crafted melodies whose impact is deadened by an unfortunate excess of maudlin lyrics and overwrought vocals. Like much of the current crop of such performers, Blue Roses sounds firmly rooted in the female singer-songwriter tradition that stretches from Joni Mitchell to Joanna Newsom, with Groves reminiscent of such checkpoints without being redundant. Yet this release is ultimately underwhelming and too often plays like just another entry from that seemingly endless horde of sincere and self-serious musicians from both sides of the Atlantic.

Blue Roses' greatest strength lies in its arrangements; regardless of any vocal or lyrical flaws that plague the album, the songs themselves are arranged beautifully. Various instruments are interwoven nicely, giving the record depth and an almost baroque and ornate feel. "Greatest Thoughts" and "I Wish I..." both seamlessly meld piano with strings; the latter song's shifting tempos are likewise used to great effect. Groves' production abilities salvage parts of other songs as well; "I Am Leaving" mixes synths with the singer's voice layered as background vocals, while the stop-start arrangement and guitar strums of "Can't Sleep" work well together, with Groves' voice more restrained and controlled than it is for most of the album.

Vocals that never find that delicate balance between being unique and ear-piercingly grating have been the bane of many a musician and Groves is no exception. Her singing is often shrill as she flirts with some serious upper ranges, with vocals that are over dramatic and tough to take except in small doses. Groves also tries to cram a shitload of words into spaces too small to hold them, making some songs verbose and cluttered. All of this detracts from the songs' arrangements; Groves' jacked-up, avian vocal flights of fancy on "Cover Your Tracks" and "Doubtful Comforts" are too indulgent to ignore, overcooked and upfront in the mix. Despite having a voice that sounds as sweet as honey when her exertion is low - "Rebecca" is perhaps the best example of this - Groves is instead prone to applying a stranglehold to the high notes. Even the most intriguing melodies are eventually smothered by this approach, with the arrangements' organic nature and the vocals' chirping not sitting particularly well together.

Those who have little patience for music of the nakedly earnest and wounded variety will find plenty to gripe about here, as Groves' broken-heart-on-sleeve lyrics - "I wish that I could photograph my moods" and "Does anyone love me/ 'Cause I asked the deep sea/ But it wouldn't speak to me/ My darling I'm sorry" - are just so twee and tender. Blue Roses' instrumental structures and vocals simply don't work well together; although its songs aren't without their charms, such sincerity and a few expertly formed arrangements aren't enough to offset their shortcomings.

Tiny Vipers: Life on Earth

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Life on Earth is an album best listened to in a darkened room, with no distractions, bleating ring-toned cell phones, crying kids, guns, knives or pills nearby. It asks for a quiet setting and careful attention from the listener; overused clichés like "stark" and "brooding" only scratch the surface of how intense and unflinching the album is. Its 10 songs rarely move any faster than a slow, deliberate crawl, with minimal instrumentation accenting Jesy Fortino's wounded and imperfect voice. It's a difficult, unsettling release whose lyrics and arrangements dwell in dark and seemingly permanent shadows. Most songs here sound ready-made for a funeral or existential indie film.

In many respects this isn't surprising. Fortino's 2007 debut as Tiny Vipers, Hands Across the Void, was a challenging, largely morose piece of folk music that demanded similar patience from listeners. Its subject matter was decidedly heavy, with songs like "Shipwreck" and "On This Side" seeking to articulate, if not trying to understand, life's great mysteries. Life on Earth mostly adheres to this approach, its songs preoccupied with many of themes of its predecessor, most songs infused with images of people and places and the passing of time. A somber mood dominates the album; tracks like "Eyes Like Ours," "Development" and "Young God" hint at a restlessness and longing that is at times overwhelming for the listener. Fortino's flawed voice is remarkable despite (or perhaps because of) its imperfections, though it's likely that the vocal takes here won't stop the frequent comparisons to Chan Marshall. The singer's voice takes on a ghostly and chilling quality throughout, existing somewhere in a haze slightly above the songs' sparse arrangements. It's the type of voice that can reduce anyone to a quivering wreck of tears.

Yet ultimately Life on Earth feels too labored over and repetitive for its own good. With most songs adopting similar musical and vocal structures, they eventually blend together into what sounds like a single long piece with minor variations. Though "Time Takes," "Young God" and the title track attempt to change the pace, the album mostly plods along. While Fortino's vocals are certainly unique and expressive, her tendency to over-enunciate is sometimes distracting and likewise kills the songs from gaining any momentum. Despite the album's acoustic foundation, a lack of warmth and immediacy in the production makes its songs detached and clinical, with the listener occasionally feeling like an unwelcome observer to someone trying to keep her shit together. Although the emotions Fortino expresses throughout are undeniably heartfelt, the songs ironically take on the mechanical tone and texture of a museum artifact meant to be studied at a distance, under glass. Coupled with these flaws, the album's long running time - most songs extend well past the five-minute mark - eventually wears thin and feels both overindulgent and unnecessary, with even tracks like the three-minute "CM" built around instrumental passages that quickly become tedious.

Press material for Life on Earth points out that there's a current of hope running through these songs. It's a hard sell, as Fortino's vocals alone make these songs sound mostly hopeless. At its best, Fortino's voice is mesmerizing and can evoke moods and tones without the need for much instrumentation. Still the album suffers under the weight of its own aspirations and lengthy tracks. All the buzzwords used to describe Hands Across the Void still apply here, and while Life on Earth will likely have its supporters, it's an uneven album whose lyrical and vocal intensity is offset by its occasionally ponderous execution.

Foreign Born: Person To Person

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Few words in music criticism - save perhaps for jangly and Dylanesque - have been as overused as "anthemic." At what point it became a critic's prerequisite for any band with arena-ready fat guitar riffs, earnestly-thwacked drums that reverberate to the heavens, melodies that stick in the brain like ear worms and Something Really Important And Humorless To Say, I have no idea. Certainly there's no shortage of bands that fit this bill, whether it's indie objects of desire The Arcade Fire or fossilized but sorta-hanging-on relics like U2 or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. It's become a sloppy, cavalier term, carelessly applied to a band's style and consigning said band to a stereotype that's hard to shake but tempting to embrace.

Reviews of Foreign Born's debut album On the Wing were quick to define the band in similar terms. In some ways this was understandable: songs like "Holy Splinter," "The Nights Tall" and "Union Hall" were musically booming and boisterous and thematically earnest and sincere, almost to a fault. Though at times the album was overindulgent and occasionally contained bloated or excessively derivative arrangements, the vocal delivery of Matt Popieluch was frequently enough to offset these shortcomings. The band also spent plenty of time standing on the shoulders of their ancestors throughout On the Wing; if Foreign Born didn't yet have the audience to support that album's big sound, their heart-on-sleeve approach was endearing and suggested only a bit of fine-tuning was needed before the band could be fitted for their Win Butler vests and Bono sunglasses and fully morph into an anthem-spewing behemoth.

Person To Person instead finds the band toning down the bombast in favor of something a bit more restrained, atmospheric and lyrically ambiguous, suggesting the band's style has more in common with the indie pop of The Shins than the anthem rock of Arcade Fire. This isn't to say the band has gone folkie; with the exception of slow burners "Lion's Share" and "Wait In This Chair," the songs here are punchy and vibrant, mirroring the catchy melodies of On the Wing. Yet the band's arena-sized impulses are nicely offset by their pop sensibilities, giving the album a degree of texture and movement that was lacking throughout On the Wing. "Blood Oranges" opens the album with a ringing guitar melody that is insidiously addictive. "That Old Sun," "Vacationing People" and "Can't Keep Time" all feature similarly solid melodies and spot-on background vocals, with Popieluch's vocal quirks sometimes reminiscent of James Mercer. The swampy blues stomp of "Winter Games" sounds a bit like the bastard child of Dylan's "Tombstone Blues;" the band's frantic and determined playing mostly offsets the song's apparent Dylan-aping.

Though all the songs are finely polished, in an album context too often a uniformity of sound creeps in, with the last few songs crawling along and killing the album's front-loaded momentum. "It Grew On You" is largely forgettable, while Popieluch's untreated vocals on "See Us Home" sound far too much like all the Beatles not named Ringo. "Lion's Share" is so - and here's that damn word - jangly that Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe could possibly claim ownership of it. That the song is stronger than anything the remnants of R.E.M. have done this decade is perhaps best left for another time.

Fans and critics wanting to peg Foreign Born as music's next anthem band should probably keep looking. Person To Person isn't a perfect album, but it does show the band augmenting its arena-ready sound with a few subtle shifts: insistent melodies, tight harmonies, tempo changes and lyrics that will allow listeners to form their own misguided interpretations. While not revelatory, these shifts should be enough to keep those half-baked comparisons to Arcade Fire and their anthemic brethren at bay.

Bowerbirds: Upper Air

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A listener could be forgiven for finding Bowerbirds' debut album Hymns for a Dark Horse just a bit too preachy and pedantic. Its heavy doses of environmental motifs and occasional sloganeering frequently detracted from the songs' subtle and lush arrangements. Sure we've all done our part to fuck up Mother Earth - Funkadelic already told us that - but the album's steady stream of National Geographic imagery was at times too obvious and humorless for its own good. Despite the band's best intentions, too often the album played like an insipid lecture about nature's startling beauty and its razor-thin fragility. And please remember to recycle.

Upper Air marks a subtle step forward for the band. While Bowerbirds again incorporate heartstring-grabbing melodies, the album branches out to encompass themes that were only hinted at throughout Dark Horse. The blend of folk and Americana first explored on that debut effort is further refined here, with Upper Air sounding a bit less lo-fi and more polished than its predecessor. Several songs begin with a simple acoustic guitar before other instruments are gently added; the guitar strum of opener "House of Diamonds" is eventually supported by understated keyboards and strings, while hushed piano lines are used to great effect on "Northern Lights." The instrumentation is interwoven wonderfully throughout, with Beth Tacular's accordion propelling "Teeth" and "Beneath Your Tree" along, at least as much as an accordion can propel anything. Phil Moore's vocals are similarly evocative; frequently reminiscent of Andrew Bird, he sings unobtrusively and gives the instrumentation room to breathe and sometimes wander. Moore's vocal takes here should eliminate any further comparisons to folkie weirdo Devendra Banhart; Moore's vocals are far more direct and contain none of Banhart's eccentricities or pretentions, and the album is better for it.

While the band hasn't entirely abandoned the lyrical obsessions of Dark Horse - the song titles and album artwork alone dispel any such thoughts - Upper Air comes across as more introspective and less tree-huggingly maudlin, with a focus on life's little dramas, disappointments and joys. A few songs could even be interpreted as unabashed love songs to an actual person and not a tree, rainbow or mountain stream. "Northern Lights" and "Ghost Life" are romantic without being dainty, a precarious balancing act the band successfully walks for most of the album. Though the album's tone is usually one of hope and contentment - "Chimes" is perhaps the best example - hints of mental distress surfaces in several songs, whether it's the "mind...wound so tightly" of "Bright Future" or Moore's assertion that "my conscience is an avalanche" in "Crooked Lust." The album likewise closes on a somber note, with the dirge-like "This Day" sounding both foreboding and funereal, a far cry from the measured optimism of most of the album's other songs.

Part of Bowerbirds' charm on Upper Air is that the band recalls various artists without sounding derivative, whether it's the Calexico-flavored opening to "Beneath Your Tree" or the vocal harmonies in "Bright Future," which wouldn't sound out of place on a Midlake or, if you're really, really desperate, CSNY album. The frequent comparisons to groups like Lavender Diamond and Vetiver are decent starting points, though Upper Air's songs are closer to the Americana of Iron and Wine or The Handsome Family, mostly minus that group's morbid sense of humor. Though it's tempting to view the songs on Upper Air as little more than odes to nature or as a continuation of Dark Horse, such an approach sells the album a little short. With crafted and textured arrangements that never sound tedious or over-produced, Upper Air finds the band moving beyond Dark Horse's confines in favor of something that is both musically and lyrically more complex and consistent.

Rediscover: Tom Lehrer - Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer

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Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.

There are actually some people who will feverishly argue that Tom Lehrer is the best musical satirist to ever walk this mortal coil. These people are, of course, completely right. Though musical comedy is often saddled with stigmas of imbecility, bad puns and obvious punch lines - thanks Weird Al and Stephen Lynch - Lehrer's brand of humor still challenges such notions. In one of music history's more bizarre careers, Lehrer relied on his fairly unspectacular voice and nondescript piano playing to create some of the most humorous, biting and caustic songs of this genre. While not as shocking or subversive they must have sounded back in the day, his first two 1950s studio albums - 1953's Songs by Tom Lehrer and 1959's More of Tom Lehrer - are still funny as hell and culturally relevant. Repackaged and reissued with extras as Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer in 1997, both albums are essential listening for fans of music comedy at its most observant, irreverent and politically incorrect.

Lehrer's back story doesn't read like the stereotypical music biography. Before the age of 20 he had graduated from Harvard with an MA in mathematics and began a teaching career that lasted far longer than his dalliances into the world of music. He worked as a researcher at Los Alamos and spent a few years in the Army in the 1950s, experiences that he'd later incorporate into some of his best songs. The story behind his first album offers more of the DIY aesthetic than countless punk bands in all their raging histrionics; after radio stations refused to play Lehrer's songs due to their perceived risqué subject matter, Lehrer sold the album on his own label around Harvard. Eventually record stores and mail order services picked up the album and its popularity spread.

Several of Lehrer's songs remain firmly rooted in the cultural and political atmosphere of the 1950s. The segregationist South is mocked in "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie," with Lehrer occasionally slipping into an exaggerated good ole boy honky accent as its narrator catalogs his homeland's virtues, at least as he sees them: corn pone, pellagra, poll taxes, medieval laws and "whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton." Homesick for that land of grits and boll weevils, the narrator looks back to a simpler time as Lehrer uses this fond longing to comically address racial prejudice: "I wanna talk with Southern gentlemen/ And put my white sheet on again/ I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years." The decade's nuclear dread is morbidly addressed in the jaunty "We Will All Go Together When We Go," where Lehrer envisions the mass destruction of humankind as universal bereavement/ An inspiring achievement." The song plays like a bastardized religious revivalist sing-along, with Lehrer ironically singing about communal "complete participation/ In that grand incineration" and summarizing its victims as "three billion hunks of well done steak." Lehrer could be as contemporary and topical as any folksinger, with his brand of humor conveying a message far better than any acoustic guitar-wielding folkie ever did - and without any preaching or overwrought philosophizing.

Like all singer-songwriters, Lehrer wrote his fair share of love songs, but these rarely contained puppy dogs and flowers. When they did, the dog was named Rover and got splattered by a Pontiac and the flower's thorns cut into the skin of an overly-enthusiastic masochist. There's nothing even faintly romantic or sentimental in a Tom Lehrer love song. The twittering-hearted couple of "In Old Mexico" has their trip south of the border derailed by wrecked bowels - "The mariachis would serenade/ And they would not shut up till they were paid/ We ate, we drank and we were merry/ And we got typhoid and dysentery" - while sexual indulgences are taken to an extreme in "The Masochism Tango." Set in that dance's tempo, the song's narrator begs his tormenter to dismember him, fracture his spine, give him a black eye, kick him and "bash in" his brain. Lehrer's incredibly skewed view of love is nowhere more apparent than in "When You Are Old and Gray." Like countless other such songs its sex-crazed and smooth-talking male begs his woman to give it up because they're both young and attractive. And, oh yeah, because, in the man's most heartfelt words: "Say you love and trust me/ For I know you'll disgust me/ When you're old and getting fat." What follows is a rhythmic and lighthearted piano romp in which Lehrer describes all the great things old age offers, including senility, impotence, sterility, expanded waistlines and pretty faces going to shit. Whether the man's heartless and fatalistic ploy helped seal the deal is never disclosed. The songs show Lehrer at his finest: the sentiments expressed are as nasty and cold as they come, but it's impossible not to laugh.

Lehrer tossed plenty of his satirical jabs in the direction of cultural traditions and various institutions throughout these first two albums. In "Be Prepared" he upends the Boy Scouts' "solemn creed" by offering the boys helpful advice like not smoking joints in front of the Scoutmaster - "for he only will insist that they be shared" - and not pimping out their sisters unless they get a cut of the take. With similar panache, in "In Old Mexico" Lehrer uses his deadpan voice to great effect as he tersely reduces the tradition of bullfighting to nothing more than "a lone man facing single-handedly a half a ton of angry pot roast," with its narrator failing to see the beauty of such an event and instead shouting with glee every time a picador is gored.

Lehrer's time in academia likewise inspired some of the albums' best songs. Lehrer isn't much for academic nostalgia on these first two records; if anything, the past is almost always compromised by an individual's beer and Benzedrine-soaked faulty memory. Thus, he needles the college alma mater song in "Bright College Days," reducing the collegiate experience to little more than Chevrolet backseat sex, rampant cheating on papers and exams and incorrectly remembering athletic defeats as noble victories. The typical violent and macho college fight song is turned into a dainty ode to wussiness in "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," where the team is implored to win with a sense of decorum and a flair of sissy: "Let's try not to injure them/ But fight, fight, fight/ Let's not be rough though." Lehrer satirizes academics like himself in "Lobachevsky," where he adopts an exaggerated Russian accent, sets the song to a can-can melody, and tells the story of a mathematician whose mentor informs him of the best way to succeed in mathematics: "plagiarize." The mathematician applies this advice to his first book, which is soon purchased by a movie studio and turned into a film called The Eternal Triangle, "with Ingrid Bergman playing part of Hypotenuse." Slight subject matter with more than a hint of silliness to be sure, the songs offer a nice change of pace from Lehrer's topical songs.

Of course some of Lehrer's songs sound tame by 2009 standards, especially since he never uses those fancy four-letter words to make his point. Still many songs from these albums are as politically incorrect and borderline tasteless today as they were in the 1950s. Perhaps Lehrer's most infamous song, "I Got It From Agnes" is a lovely paean to venereal disease without actually calling it out by name, a frolicking piano line used to tell a curiously upbeat tale of how "it" was spread. Written years before the advent of HIV and AIDS, the song is now both grimly and uncomfortably humorous; in two consecutive lines, Lehrer manages to tie its spread to incest and bestiality: "Max got it from Edith, who gets it every spring/ She got it from her daddy who just gives her everything/ She then gave it to Daniel/ whose spaniel has it now..." If "Agnes" doesn't make modern listeners squirm, "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" likely will, the former song a heartwarming tale of a murderous necrophiliac who just can't let that special woman go, the latter a sprightly ditty about, well, poisoning pigeons in the park. Of course Lehrer isn't serious in this song - one hopes - but its humor is of the blackest kind and likely to offend those who can't accept it as comedy. "We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment/ Except for the few we take home to experiment/ My pulse will be quickenin'/ With each drop of strychnine/ We need to a pigeon/ It just takes a smidgen," Lehrer says in a forced rhyme scheme, its narrator growing excited as the birds drop. If you ever want to gauge someone's sense of humor, play them these three songs and see what type of reaction you get.

Lehrer essentially took topics that most people were uptight about and pointed out their inherent absurdities; put into a modern perspective, his lighthearted yet keenly observant approach to social commentary wouldn't be out of place on The Daily Show. In many ways no topic was safe from Lehrer's wit on his first two albums, with Lehrer singing about serious subjects without taking them too seriously. Sanctimonious folk music is lampooned in "Irish Ballad," with Lehrer sporting a truly heinous Irish accent as his macabre tale of a psychotic little girl unfolds; "Old Dope Peddler" plays like a loving if sarcastic tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit; "Elements" simply sets the names on the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song" and manages to suggest that it doesn't take much to appear educated; "Christmas Carol" anticipated that holiday's crass consumerism decades before such sentiments became in vogue. Though in recent years Lehrer has maintained that his songs amounted to little more than "titillating the converted," with only an average voice and decent piano skills he managed to humorously comment on nearly every mundane detail of life. His songs suggest that, despite the intervening years between the 1950s and today, certain aspects of the country haven't changed much - Lehrer's liars, cheaters, perverts, smut pushers and raging racists are still around - and that no aspect of life is off limits for being mocked or satirized.

Michael Jackson

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What will I remember most about Michael Jackson? It won't be moonwalks, his partial plunder of the Beatles' catalog, increasingly eccentric behavior, a sequined silver glove or messy legal proceedings. No, for me it will be Captain EO, the Coppola-directed and Lucas-produced 3-D film shown at Walt Disney's money-sucking theme parks from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. For a kid like myself in that Reagan/Bush decade, it was perhaps the first mindfuck I'd experienced, and in 3-D no less. Set in a futuristic industrial world of metal and decay, the story revolved around Jackson as Captain EO, a smooth-dancin' spaceman, and his ragtag bunch of circus freaks (a flying partner, a two-headed pilot and an elephantine helper who warped my dreams for many a night) who are delivering a gift to a wicked queen played by Angelica Huston (not a joke). Eventually, after many special effects that likely made parents feel the price of the park's admission was at least somewhat palatable, the crew escapes a lifetime of torture as EO sings the song "We Are Here To Change The World" to queen. After a bit more brou-ha-ha, magic spells, and Jackson fighting soldiers armed with whips, the queen is transformed into a hot babe, her planet morphs into a lush wonderland and the sniveling kids in the audience like myself immediately begged our parents to stand in the hours-long line again for another viewing of it.

Captain EO was the first 3-D film I can remember seeing, and though the specifics of it are hazy, I can still remember how bizarre and fascinating it was, even if I didn't quite get the story. Which seems an apt, if somewhat cynical, summation of Jackson's life. Michael Jackson entered the public consciousness in many different ways. I'm not ashamed to say that it took a theme park attraction in my case.

Tiny Masters of Today: Skeletons

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It's difficult to view Tiny Masters of Today as anything but a prepubescent neo-punk novelty act. Its sibling members Ivan and Ada are just so goddamn young, even by today's post-Britney-in-a-schoolgirl-outfit standards: Ivan is 15 and Ada is all of 13. To put that in perspective, Ivan was born the year Kurt Cobain offed himself, while Ada likely doesn't have any memory of George W. Bush's election in 2000 (if only the rest of us could say the same thing). They're still in public school in New York, for chrissakes. Despite their youthfulness, the band has already released two EPs and now two albums, while much-older garage bands the world over still flail away with a mixture of determination and desperation in mom's dingy basement.

Tiny Masters of Today has garnered some modest critical and commercial attention the old-fashioned way: through MySpace. A few homemade recordings posted on that massive testament to the reach and butt-puckering terrible power of the Internet made the band's bones and turned some media outlets and musicians into blubbering fools. Newsweek Magazine (yes, that Newsweek Magazine) offered up a brief but enamored profile of the band, while the little known Artrocker, in a cover story article filled with the type of masturbatory exaggeration the magazine will surely one day regret and wish to purge from their archives 1984-style, called the band (ahem) "the future of rock and roll." Novelty act or not, the band has likewise since received support from big-name musicians and indie artists alike. David Bowie tossed out the now-ubiquitous "genius" to describe the band's first single, though perhaps Bowie's checkered output over the last 30 years has lowered his standards when applying such a term. Debut album Bang Bang Boom Cake included contributions from Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers and a few members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs; B-52 Fred Schneider was even brought out of deep freeze to perform on the album.

Of course with any band who achieves "overnight success" - at least to some degree - the trick for any reviewer is to look past this hype at the band's actual content. Certainly Ivan's and Ada's ages will turn some narrow-minded reviewers off immediately; after all, how can a couple pre-teens connect with critics or listeners who are decades older than them? Though criticizing a couple kids so young feels akin to kicking a terrier in the spleen, the band's age shouldn't absolve them from criticism either. So what can one say of the band's latest album Skeletons? As an example of the oft-mentioned DIY aesthetic, it's passable: according to press material, the siblings wrote the album themselves and recorded most of the tracks at home with the Garageband computer program. Though additional recording and mixing were done later, the majority of the heavy lifting was apparently done by the two siblings. So we'll give them a few points for ingenuity.

Still, that's about as generous as I can be here. Skeletons is agonizingly repetitive and dull, a computer-generated album that favors software trickery over something - anything - worthwhile, meaningful, or, shit, even humorous. There's simply no soul or conviction here; it's imitation lo-fi music awash in technological overindulgence. Like a hooker going through the motions on a busy night, every song follows the same basic approach and is equally predictable and disappointing: heavily distorted vocals are used constantly, while software-created fragments of everything from hip-hop to punk, dub, electronica and disco suffocate the songs quickly. Every song consists of repeated lyrics and phrases - "Drop the Bomb" and "Big Stick" are the most egregious offenders - that are tinny as hell and layered slightly above a muddled and cluttered musical sludge that suggests the band relied on a checklist of 20th-century musical genres, deciding to implement pieces each one at the same time. Though some songs might work as innocuous background noise for a video game or as filler for one of MTV's mindless programs, in an album setting they become increasingly monotonous and mind-numbing.

Do I feel like a bastard for panning this album? In a way, yes. It's no great joy in trashing a couple of young teens' sophomore album. Assuming the band is serious and not just playing a joke on us - judging by the artists lining up to support them, they are serious - Skeletons suggests the band is long on hype and short on substance. Maybe there's a generation gap here - I still can't seem to get the humor of the bland and limp "Abercrombie Zombie" - but poor music transcends all ages. Give the band's members a free pass because of their age if you like, but be aware that Skeletons is a clinical and entirely lifeless album, an uninspired also-ran that will endear the band to very few listeners.

Patterson Hood: Murdering Oscar (and other love songs)

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Patterson Hood's Murdering Oscar (and other love songs) will likely sound familiar to the legions of PBR-swillin', trucker-hat-wearin' Drive-By Trucker fans. Like Hood's work with DBT, its songs are deceptively simple, straightforward and full of rough edges: searing guitars wail and shred, understated strings and piano melodies add some tenderness and heartache to the fray, background harmonies offer texture and Hood sings in his usual scratchy, countrified drawl. Many of the lyrical obsessions of DBT's best work are here as well: kin (er, family), Southern culture and its various "quirks," mortality and aging, booze and no small number of men and women of questionable moral character.

Though Oscar contains a solid collection of songs, it likely won't convince non-believers who have never gotten on board with Hood or who haven't followed DBT since masterpiece Southern Rock Opera, and is best left to those deranged DBT fanatics living among us. In some ways Oscar has the feel of an odds-and-ends closet-clearing project. Essentially a mixture of songs originally penned by Hood in the early 1990s and more-recent songs, many of them were planned for release but were eventually shelved for various reasons. This isn't to say that the songs are glorified outtakes or b-sides; despite the years that separate some of these songs, the album is quite cohesive, both in sound and Hood's alternately humorous and dark lyrics.

Many of the songs trod familiar ground. "Pollyanna" is built around interweaving guitars and piano as it depicts the age-old story of a relationship in shambles, while the droning "Heavy and Hanging" was written in response to Kurt Cobain's suicide. A number of songs deal with domesticity. The old-timey guitar and strings of "Granddaddy" paint a picture of familial contentment; Hood notes that the song was written shortly before his daughter was born. It's not all New Morning bliss though; the wistful nostalgia of "Pride of the Yankees" is offset by a 9/11 reference and Hood's foreboding lament that "the sky is falling," while "Screwtopia" unfolds like a pissed-off satire of home life, its decidedly un-PC narrator clearly not having bought into feminism ("Keep you pregnant all the time.../ Keep you happy and sedated/ Who need to be liberated?"), and embracing the NRA's favorite amendment ("Son here's a loaded gun/ Try not to hurt no one").

Yet there are few "Holy Shit" moments here, no "Days Of Graduation" or "Plastic Flowers On The Highway" to make the listener take notice. It's reliable yeoman's work to be sure, but the album simply meets the listener's expectations and rarely exceeds them. There are also a few clunkers that are curiosity pieces at best; "She's a Little Randy" sports a few cringe-worthy lyrics, while "Walking Around Sense" sounds uncomfortably similar to early Uncle Tupelo-era Jeff Tweedy. As a document that traces Hood's development as a musician and songwriter, DBT fans most in need of psychiatric treatment and a heavy chaser of pills could spend countless hours analyzing these songs and how they tie in to Hood's previous work. Hood seems to realize this, as his detailed liner notes provide fans with a map, compass and a bit of spare change to help them along. Casual DBT fans - if such a thing even exists - will still find enough to like about Oscar, but it's not required listening by any means.

Dinosaur Jr.: Farm

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As reunions go, Dinosaur Jr. is one of the few bands that hasn't fucked its legacy like a pack of overzealous and craggy-faced necrophiliacs. It's easy to understand why the long-awaited band reunion has become its own punch line; despite the ludicrous sums of money big-name reunited bands have received and the touchy-feely warm fuzzies fans have experienced as their heroes plod through the back catalog of their glory days, few of these endeavors have enhanced said band's legacy. The list of offenders is long, with the fossilized remnants of the New York Dolls and The Stooges recently hitting the live circuit. True to the official reunion handbook, both acts have likewise released truly heinous studio efforts that killed whatever little mystique they still had. And the less said about that 1993 Velvet Underground reunion the better.

Most disconcerting is that a club that was previously largely the domain of such grandfather acts now counts a few indie bands among its members. Though the results haven't been entirely disastrous - while the jury is still out on My Bloody Valentine's resurgence, The Jesus and Mary Chain's rebirth was a surreal letdown and the Pixies' self-desecration that was "Bam Thwok" was abysmally awful - fans could be forgiven for finding such resurrections needless and pointlessly nostalgic.

Yet the classic Dinosaur Jr. lineup of J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph has managed to successfully dodge these landmines. Shows in 2005 were both commercially and critically well received, while 2007's Beyond was better than anyone expected, even if it did owe more to the more restrained style of the band's later major label releases than to the swirls of noise and distortion on landmark album You're Living All Over Me. It was, quite simply, an exception to the rule: no legacies were shattered and no studio atrocities were committed. It was a graceful and promising relaunch for one of music's most sorely missed bands.

For the most part, the Dinosaur Jr.'s latest album Farm continues this momentum, melding elements of the band's abrasive classic sound with the somewhat subdued vibe of Beyond. Most songs adhere to the template that has made the group objects of obsessive worship and shameless imitation throughout the music world: soaring guitar workouts, steady but somewhat muddled bass, insistent drums. Opener "Pieces," "I Want You To Know," and "I Don't Wanna Go There" all feature serious guitar muscle-flexing from Mascis, with Barlow and Murph's mid-tempo rhythm pushing the songs forward. The trio's studio chemistry is as good as ever, with each song playing to each member's strengths.

Mascis' vocals are what's most startling though, his paper-thin voice expressive without sounding overwrought. Indeed, with this delivery some songs sound as bleak as anything the band has done. A sense of regret and disappointment is implied in "Plans," "Ocean In The Way" and "Over It," with Mascis's vocals as mournful and evocative as they've ever been. It's not fair to flippantly brand these as wounded love songs, though some tracks could fall into such a category. "See You" and the nearly eight-minute "Said the People" find Mascis stretching out his vocals with a subtle country inflection, suggesting everything from vulnerability to bitterness. "I'm about to crack...didn't see you for a while," Mascis says in "See You," while "Said the People" plays like a slow-burning lament of "all the people who let me down."

There are a few flaws with Farm. At 61 minutes the album at times feels a bit too long, with those meaty guitar workouts sometimes a bit too overindulgent. Barlow's lead vocals on "Your Weather" and "Imagination Blind" are mechanical and wooden, with both songs feeling awkward and out of place. Still those shortcomings are minor. While the album is more mellow, pensive and controlled than the band's genre-defining early style, that's not a bad thing. Unlike other reunited bands, Dinosaur Jr. is likely not interested in digging up the bones of their past. Now with two solid recent albums to their credit, Dinosaur Jr. will likely be of the few such bands whose victory lap won't end with them hacking and wheezing as they approach the finish line.

End of the Aughts: Disappointments

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Lucinda Williams-Essence was saddled with heavy baggage from the start. As the follow up to Lucinda Williams' career-defining Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it had very little chance of surpassing its predecessor, at least in the minds of fans and critics who developed a borderline-obsessive devotion to that 1998 album. To Williams' credit, she didn't try to repeat Car Wheels' formula, instead abandoning that album's folk and country hybrid for Essence's atmospheric ballads. Though Williams didn't do her studio perfectionist/diva reputation any favors by taking nearly three years to release Essence, it was mostly worth the wait. It found Williams in a somber mood, with the mostly optimistic nostalgia and childhood memories of Car Wheels replaced by dark broodings about mortality and aging ("Bus To Baton Rouge"), loneliness ("Lonely Girls"), general sad shit ("Blue") and, of course, fucked up relationships ("Out Of Touch" and any other song you want to mention). A haze of regret and disappointment hung over most songs, with Williams' often-mangled vocals restrained, controlled and evocative of such moods. It remains Williams' darkest record to date; though Car Wheels still casts a long shadow over her entire career, Essence proves that the popular image of Williams as an alt.rock folkie is largely inaccurate.

It's also the last consistently good album Williams released this decade. Essence was followed in 2003 by the erratic and plodding World Without Tears, a meandering album that lacked much of the emotional resonance of the artist's previous work. Although Williams' unflinching lyrics were solid at times - especially in the used-like-a-cheap-whore laments of "Those Three Days" and "Minneapolis" - at least half the album was cluttered up by tedious vocals and bloated arrangements. "Righteously," "Sweet Side" and "Atonement" would have been best served relegated to the b-side shitbin, while "American Dream" and the title track were both preachy and pedantic.

And then the proverbial downward spiral really kicked in. The obligatory live album followed in 2005 with the dull Live @ The Fillmore; showing the complete lack of imagination we've come to expect from music labels, the release simply culled tracks from several different Fillmore shows, offering up bits and pieces instead of a complete show. The dual studio atrocities of West and Little Honey rounded out the decade and did nothing to offset this slipshod live product; taken together, they are underwhelming, self-indulgent and remarkably forgettable. West's songs were at least partially doomed by the album's lengthy running time - more than half its songs clocked in at over five minutes - though the stilted production did them no favors either. Little Honey was disturbingly lousy, with Williams offering up 13 mostly sappy odes to Love and that's with a big fat fucking capital L. It was everything fans thought Williams could never be: maudlin and melodramatic. The nausea countless listeners experienced wasn't due to a bad fish taco.

In interviews Williams has often bristled at such criticism, attributing the poor reception that greeted most of her albums this decade to a variety of reasons, commonly suggesting that fans and critics haven't given the albums a fair shake and simply want her to create Car Wheels on a Gravel Road Part II. It's a trite yet common complaint from musicians with lengthy careers - Dylan and Costello could pen on a book on this - but it's little more than a smokescreen. Few fans (or critics, for that matter) with an active interest in an artist's work want to hear mailed-in rehashes of that artist's masterwork. Of course there will always be musos stuck in a particular time and place; these are the people who keep nostalgia tours in business. The hard truth is that while Williams has admirably refused to settle into a particular style, most of her releases from this decade have been mediocre at best and inessential at worst. - Eric Dennis

Revisit: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads (1996)

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Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

Murder has long been a central character in Nick Cave's albums. Acts of bloodshed frequently drip from his songs, often with very little subtlety and usually with no apologies or sense of remorse from its killing hands. Heads are wrapped in pillowcases, flies hum and buzz around mad John Finn's carved-up corpse outside a sweaty and seedy dancehall, a shit-broke booze hound is comforted by a fantasy of a woman groaning in the dirt as she finally dies of thirst. Still it wasn't until 1996's Murder Ballads where Cave set aside his other lyrical preoccupations to singularly focus on this topic. The album blends songs penned by Cave and sundry Bad Seeds with traditional songs that are drastically reworked or bludgeoned, depending on one's point of view. Taken as a whole, the album fits nicely within the bizarre and often surreal world of such murder songs.

The old-timey "Henry Lee" is sung as a duet with PJ Harvey and features a flittering piano arrangement, with the poor Henry Lee, content with his true love "in that merry green land," refusing a woman's advances and paying for his faithfulness as she offs him with a penknife. Although written by Cave, "Where the Wild Roses Grow" contains some well-worn decades-old motifs: a murder whose motives are uncertain and an incredibly naïve and innocent girl who describes her final moments from beyond the grave. A duet with Kylie Minogue, the track relies on strings to set the mood for its account of a strangely poetic killer and his target. Its events echo those of much older songs- "Ommie Wise" immediately comes to mind - as the man sweet talks the virgin-for-not-much-longer Eliza Day and eventually kills her for no reason other than his belief that "all beauty must die."


If the thematic elements of "Wild Roses" are ripped from the pages of a dusty 1920s music folio, "The Kindness of Strangers" is the album's most contemporary and unsettling track. Starkly framed by Conway Savage's piano, the song recounts the final moments of the prophetically-named Mary Bellows, a small-town Arkansas girl who leaves home to see the ocean - big aspirations - and meets the mysterious Richard Slade. Soon after she's dead, "Cuffed to the bed/ With a rag in her mouth and a bullet in her head." Though the killer is never named, we can only assume it's Slade, perhaps enraged that Mary refused his sexual advances. The young girl is a true victim in the most tragic sense; Anita Lane cries in the background as Cave details the murder almost like as a journalist, both of whom successfully avoid being overwrought and melodramatic. The effect is chilling and the song ranks among Cave's darkest and most emotional.

Other songs batter the listener with the chaos, noise and gothic arrangements for which Cave and the Bad Seeds are best known. A parade of psychopathic butchers tears through large parts of Murder Ballads, leaving a bloody trail of carnage in their wake. In some cases these killers are so exaggerated that it's hard not to view them as comical caricatures or as Cave's way of upending the intense seriousness and social commentary found in many folk ballads. In "The Curse Of Millhaven," little 14-year old Loretta, with her green eyes and yellow hair, is a peerless and indiscriminate embodiment of evil as she offs Handyman Joe with a circular saw and places his severed head in the mayor's fountain, burns the town to the ground ("a wee little girl with a can of gasoline") and generally makes a nuisance of herself. The song's circus organ swirls and overly dramatic choir suggest it isn't meant to be taken at face value, in sharp contrast to "The Kindness Of Strangers." Likewise, the 14-minute splatter fest of "O'Malley's Bar" includes an over the top villain whose actions play like something out of a lousy Dean Koontz novel or laughably gory slasher film. It's a delicate balancing act between pastiche and tastelessness, yet everything about the song - its sad-sack bar patrons, an overly verbose yet philosophical perpetrator who's apparently well versed in biblical saints, Cave's vocal delivery against the Bad Seed's stutter-stop instrumentation - hints that its excessive death toll is meant not to frighten or give scathing social commentary about a violent society. Instead, it's meant to evoke at least some laughter, albeit uneasily and even if the listener feels like a soulless bastard for laughing at such things.

The tone is decidedly different on "Song Of Joy" and "Stagger Lee;" the first two tracks on the album, they're also the album's most provocative songs. While artists like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and The Clash have each interpreted the story of Stagger Lee and his killing of Billy Lyons - supposedly over a goddamn Stetson hat - none match Cave's vulgar, F-bomb-laden version. Built around a stabbing piano, Blixa Bargeld's and Mick Harvey's tense guitars and eventual gun shots after Stag's dirty deeds have been done and drawing from an obscure transcription, the song imagines the man as a divorced Depression-era drifter, sexual deviant and supreme badass. Here the fabled Stetson hat is already in Stag's possession before anyone is murdered; in a further break from both these older versions and historical accounts of the event, Lyons is reworked as the hapless Billy Dilly, either the pimp or boyfriend of a local prostitute. In Cave's version the hat is incidental; Stag kills the bartender in a test of just who the biggest hardass is and then kills Billy while being orally pleasured by him. No motive is given. While previous songs and books have offered everything from a wronged sense of honor to political differences between Stag and Lyons to a combination of alcohol and macho boasting as the catalyst for their dispute, here Stag seemingly kills simply because he enjoys it.


"Song Of Joy" is terrifying as hell and one of the Bad Seeds' best ensemble performances. Its tension builds slowly and never really recedes, first established by Cave's almost symphonic piano melody, Bargeld's understated guitar and a menacing atmosphere maintained by Martyn Casey's and Mick Harvey's rhythm. What unfolds is the narrator's tale of how his wife and three children - Hilda, Hattie and Holly, nice alliteration - were brutally murdered by a John Milton-quoting killer who's still on the lam. Coupled with Cave's sinister spoken word vocals, it's immediately apparent that this man might be something far different from the mourning husband and father he portrays himself as. His alibi is shady and probably complete bullshit, his arrival on the doorstep of a "family man" is accompanied by howling wolves and hissing serpents, and like the murderer he quotes Milton more extensively than Donald Sutherland. Practically every lyric can be read with drastically opposite meanings - "all things moved toward their end," "my bones are cold right through" - and the listener is left to determine what happens next as the song ends. Given all the bloodlust that follows as the album progresses, one can only hope this family man locked his door that night.

Though Murder Ballads might not be Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' best work, it is their most focused and as close to a conceptual album as they've come. It pays homage to the spirit and subjects of the often fascinating and morbid world of traditional ballads while its original songs likewise fit within this scope like few other modern songs. It's a dark and darkly comic world in Murder Ballads, where its killers are variously frightening and unbelievable, and its victims, most of them anyway, are viewed with empathy, pity and sorrow.