Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

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It's tempting to view Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle as just another entry in that long line of breakup albums, with Bill Callahan sorting through the wreckage of his split from pixie harpist Joanna Newsom. Amid all the horse/river/bird imagery that recurs throughout the album, its songs certainly serve up heavy doses of looking back, with a mixture of regret, disappointment and rueful bemusement. Leave that two-bit analysis to the armchair psychologists out there; such an approach sells this album far too short.

Whatever its inspirations, Sometimes I Wish is a remarkably understated and textured album. As an artist Callahan has never seemed particularly interested in confining his style. The primary consistency in Callahan's albums is his speak/sing baritone voice; like fellow Drag City cohort Will Oldham, all other elements are negotiable. In his Smog and solo guises Callahan has explored lo, lo-fi, folk and pop, though the crimes committed on Rain On Lens still aren't forgivable. Previous effort Woke On A Whaleheart was fairly optimistic and contented - or at least as optimistic and contented as Callahan gets - so it should come as no surprise that Sometimes I Wish is primarily pensive and rife with mournful undertones.

Sometimes I Wish is unassuming and unimposing, a near-perfect blend of guitars, keyboards, strings, percussion and occasional horns that Whaleheart merely hinted at. These are the type of songs where the listener can't help but listen to with just a little bit more attention; the songs' emotions and intentions unfold slowly and reveal themselves more fully with repeated listens. With its sparse guitars, weary strings, hushed percussion and half spoken/half sung vocals, opening track "Jim Cain" sets the template for most of what follows. Name checking the fiction writer best known for The Postman Always Rings Twice, Callahan offers a depiction of someone brooding over the past with an eye to the present, equal parts resignation - "I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again" and disappointment - "Things didn't pan out as planned." "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" mines similar thematic territory, the song playing like a walk through the bleakness and dark comedy of someone's mind. Callahan lays on the equine imagery pretty thick, contrasting the song's somber image of someone haunted by a memory with a bouncy arrangement and humor, as the narrator's dream of his lyrical masterpiece is revealed to be little more than the nonsensical babble of the song's title. "Rococo Zephyr" is arranged beautifully, with acoustic guitar, keyboards, and strings used to devastating effect. Moments of joy are tempered and measured in the song; the woman who laid next to its narrator "like a branch from a tender willow tree" is presumably long gone, the narrator left with little more than a bittersweet moment of clarity: "I used to be sort of blind/ now I can sort of see."

Austin-based musician Brian Beattie provides string and horn arrangements that are as integral to the album's mood as Callahan's lyrics and vocals. Subtle strings and horns float throughout the gloom of "The Wind and The Dove," while "Too Many Birds," with its central image of a wandering and lost bird, features a string section that heightens the song's impact. "My Friend" and "All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast" up the album's intensity level via strings and guitars that stab through Callahan's growls, both songs building tension like a wave that crashes and then recedes slowly.

Still overall the album's vibe is one of disappointment, regret and restlessness. When Callahan sings that "it's time to put God away" in closing song "Faith/Void," it's hard not to view it as a summary of the conflicted emotions that preceded it, a sentiment of deep resignation or perhaps an optimistic acknowledgment that things haven't completely gone to shit. For an artist who has tended to jump genres with seemingly perverse glee, Sometimes I Wish is nearly flawless in its approach and execution.

Oh No Not Stereo: 003

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The press materials for the Los Angeles-based band Oh No Not Stereo note that the group's music has been featured on MTV shows like Paris Hilton's My New BFF, Bam's Unholy Union and Meet the Barkers, that their sophomore album 003 had production and mixing help from people who have worked with Live, Incubus and Fall Out Boy, and that their music would likely be favored by fans of groups like The All-American Rejects and Head Automatica.

A few songs into the album, it's difficult not to think that these biographical details were intended as warnings rather than praise. Simply put, the songs on 003 are blandly derivative and indistinguishable from that ever growing glut of punk-pop bands currently targeting the pre-pubescent and barely adolescent music market. The album's tracks play like by-rote assembly line pieces just looking for a little MTV or PlayStation love; indeed, it's not hard to imagine these songs playing as Bam Margera attempts another half-baked stunt or as background music blaring in the next Skate video game.

Yet the album lacks guts and, worst of all, even the faintest hint of heart, emotion or righteous outrage; the press materials' boasting of the band's DIY aesthetic is more like a punch line than anything of real substance. 003 sports some of the most incidental music that has come across these ears in a long time, with an endless shitstorm of predictably crunchy guitars, gigantic hooks, fatass bloated riffs and reedy vocals filled with whine. With a sameness of sound that courses through the album's 50-minute running time, songs like "Let's Get It Started," "Get Over It" and "Hurricanes" congeal together into a single blob. Being charitable, a few songs might work individually as either a single or as part of a compilation album (maybe Now That's What I Call Mediocre Music Vol. 1). "A World of Your Own" features strings - strings! - and briefly suggests that the band could break from the album's narrow confines. But as an album, the songs fail miserably, with far too much repetition and slavish adherence to pop tones that become dated as soon as they leave the listener's ears.

So what are the songs about? It really doesn't matter. The rage and angst expressed in the lyrics usually sounds both hollow and benignly nonthreatening, a clichéd collection of sanitized punk sentiments mostly reminiscent of tortured freshman college poetry. "Shot Down By the Man" is about (wait for it) being shot down by the man and that most hallowed act of defiance: "No one believes anything you say/ You're never right/ The only thing that's left to do/ That means anything at all/ Middle finger in the air." Other songs read like a checklist of stereotypical rock images: cars offer salvation, Friday nights are wild and unhinged, men boast with machismo, women break hearts and...hey! Wake up - the album's not over yet.

Maybe it's a generational gap my 1990s indie ears cannot bridge. Given the current popularity of bands similar to Oh No Not Stereo, it's easy to see plenty of suburban kiddies getting dropped off at concert venues by their parents to see the band live. But for anyone over the age of 16 the album will likely be vacuous and empty, a sort of fourth-generation punk-pop that will leave most listeners wanting to go back to the primary source material. 003 is an also-ran wreck of an album in a musical genre that largely places style over substance, and in which the only thing that differentiates one band from another is its name.

Revisit: Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads

Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. go to spectrumculture.com for more.

In these depressingly shitty economic times, where executives pay themselves and their cronies massive bonuses and then solicit the government for grotesque sums of money for their failing companies, where the lowly workaday peons that make up the bulk of America's population see their home values plummet and employment status grow ever more precarious, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads sounds as startlingly relevant as ever. Originally released in 1940 as the Great Depression had not yet ended - it would take a war to do that - Guthrie's concept album chronicles the hardships and injustices wrought by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Guthrie's depictions of those most affected, those migrant workers who slowly shuffled west to a California spoken about in mystical tones and would be saddled with the derogatory "Okie," are sympathetic, humorous, sobering and, ultimately, defiant and optimistic. Its music is deceptively simple, featuring little more than Guthrie's voice set against strums of the machine that he claimed killed Fascists; for better or worse, the approach utilized here and throughout much of Guthrie's catalog still influences generations of earnest folksingers. Yet under this simplicity lies one of music's most coherent, focused and endearing concept albums.

Dust Bowl Ballads marked Guthrie's first commercial recording and, even when judged against his extensive recorded output, remains his finest effort. Recorded in just two separate sessions in 1940, it's since been released in various formats. RCA Victor Records, with the type of hatchet job insight that major labels still follow today, would eventually issue 11 of these songs, with "Dust Bowl Blues" and the key "Pretty Boy Floyd" excluded because of length. A mid 1960s LP version included these two omitted tracks and offered a new running order. The currently available CD version is likely the most complete view we'll get, containing yet again a different running order as well as an alternate version of "Talking Dust Bowl Blues."

Filled with allusions to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that would effectively shape Guthrie's worldview for much of his life, the album mixes a loose chronological narrative with the singer's experiences as he traveled around the country chronicling the effects of the Depression. Guthrie mythologizes these Dust Bowl refugees as he rails against the profiteers of migrants' labor. Certainly the common depiction of Guthrie as an intensely serious, humorless, firebrand proletariat folkie who dealt only in absolutes is at least partly attributable to Dust Bowl Ballads; it's clear who the heroes and villains are throughout the album. The album contains doses of bleakness and despair, with a righteous accusatory finger pointed at the grossly wealthy and their authoritarian abuses of power that often defined Guthrie's oeuvre. The central image of "The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)" is that of a family huddled in a shack as the children cry, the migrants' naïvely optimistic view of California as a "garden of Eden" is shattered amid the disillusionment of "Do Re Mi," and the dead man walking in "Dust Pneumonia Blues" isn't long for this world. The narrators of "Dust Bowl Blues" and "I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore" have suffered countless indignities; in the latter song the narrator describes his rootless existence and matter-of-factly mentions how he's been harassed by the cops, had his house taken from him by a rich man, and lost his wife in the dust storm. In these simple songs Guthrie paints a dark portrait of both the Dust Bowl and its affect on those hardest hit by it, as well as strictly adheres to the social awareness usually associated with folk music.


Still Dust Bowl Ballads is equally optimistic, a fact that was too frequently lost on all those earnest folksingers of the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps this is where Steinbeck's influence on Guthrie is most apparent; the folksinger mimicked Steinbeck's sympathetic and heartfelt depiction of the Joads' uniquely American character and set it to music. The album's despair is often tempered with both humor and defiance, with Guthrie's migrants displaying an internal strength and determination to not succumb to life's hardships. Sometimes this comfort comes from tales of near-mystical heroes; in "Pretty Boy Floyd," the bank robber is transformed from a petty criminal into a Robin Hood figure who gives his loot to the poor. Other times this optimism stems from a strong sense of self-identity and pride, especially in "Blowin' Down This Road" and "Dust Bowl Refugee," where Guthrie's subjects maintain dignity in the face of poverty, hunger and unemployment. Guthrie's characters are mentally strong, at times almost unbelievably so. The subject of "Dust Can't Kill Me," whose alternately had his baby and family die in the dust storm, landlord take his home and then destroy it over with a tractor, crops rot and furniture sold off at the local pawn shop, somehow boasts of his own invulnerability at sharing a similar fate. It's an uplifting snapshot of the will to live and the album's most singular moment of defiance (or, perhaps, hubris).

If Dust Bowl Ballads can be faulted for anything, it does, like much of Guthrie's catalog, offer few shades of gray in terms of heroes and villains. Its migrant masses are all heroic and its outlaws are simply misunderstood vigilante philanthropists, while cops and unscrupulous capitalists stand firmly with their feet on the necks of these masses. Seventy years after its first release, there's a poignancy to the album that still resonates with contemporary listeners. Given the album's minimal arrangements and Guthrie's often deadpan delivery, coupled with its stark cover of a dilapidated and abandoned shack and subject matter chronicling a dark chapter in this country's history, it's tempting to view the album as mournful and exceedingly dark. Yet the album breathes with determination and defiance, with Guthrie's characters rarely succumbing to their horrible lot in life. In times like these, Guthrie's wandering Okies and their troubles don't seem so remote or irrelevant.

Concert Review: Future Clouds & Radar

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In a city that has only the faintest hint of a music scene with a functioning pulse - though locals still like to boast that the blues originated in St. Louis - and very few quirky concert venues, Off Broadway is one of this town's more unique and reliable places to see a show. It gives off a cool and comfortable vibe, like a neighborhood bar that cross-dresses in concert venue clothes. Pictures of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson giving that most famous of salutes line its brick walls, a mounted antelope head rests above an old time cigarette machine in a venue that's exclusively non-smoking now, various miscellany from the Lemp brewery is scattered throughout, and the sinks in the men's bathroom are stained with a black liquid that, while hinting at something far more sinister, only adds to the charm. A few rows of folding chairs are included almost as an afterthought, while the upstairs section offers a perfect view of the stage below for those concertgoers who'd prefer to avoid the pit and the urchins that swarm there.

My brother and I arrived early enough to catch the tail end of Future Clouds & Radar's sound check. With plenty of time to kill after this minor invasion of band privacy, it was enjoyable just soaking in Off Broadway's aesthetic and engaging in conversation ranging from which artist has the most obnoxious fans (Dylan, and it's not debatable) to deep-seeded childhood fears of being sodomized by the Knights of Columbus (it never happened). As this talk deteriorated we expected people to filter as the show's start time grew closer, but no one really did. Even after second opening act The O's wrapped up, the place was far too empty.

Blame it on the fact that it was a Thursday and that there are few places on earth as miserable as St. Louis in February - if you don't like gray punctuated with occasional bursts of lighter gray, leave now - but the show was, and this is being generous, sparsely attended. Yet those who stayed away missed their chance to see a band that, if there's any justice in the music world, will eventually outgrow the confines of such venues. Drawing heavily from their truly underrated and death-heavy 2008 album Peoria, Future Clouds & Radar played an energetic set that emphasized tight arrangements over the instrumental meanderings and studio effects of both Peoria and their self-titled debut album. Sure, lead singer Robert Harrison sounds eerily like that other band that had a Harrison in it, but in a live setting this similarity was far less pronounced. The atmospheric "Epcot View" featured nice harmonies and emphasized keyboards more than its album version, while "18 Months" was chaotic and heavy with distortion; one dancing fan, still clad in his suit and clutching his beer bottle like a life raft, punctuated with the latter song with some groin-splitting high kicks. Other songs more clearly revealed the melodies that are sometimes buried amid the studio tinkering, especially "Mummified," "The Mortal" and "Drugstore Bust."

Though Harrison may still be best known for his work with previous project Cotton Mather - at least judging from the applause that greeted Kon Tiki track and concert closer "Homefront Cameo" - Future Clouds & Radar seem to be flying under the, well, radar. The band's performance Thursday night was an intriguing showcase in how songs that incorporate studio enhancements and mix musical genres are translated in a live environment. Without exception the songs benefited from this focus, with the band playing a lively set of songs. For those in attendance it was every bit as good as the under appreciated Peoria, and, even better, allowed listeners to hear its songs in a different context. Still it's a shame more people didn't stop by to hear it, the gray St. Louis February be damned. One can't help but think that the "antipathy island" mentioned in "The Mortal" could serve as a fitting summation for the band's tour stop here.

The Weight: The Weight Are Men

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The Weight Are Men sounds completely and hopelessly out of time and out of place. It's the type of generically feeble alt country/Americana hybrid that will send listeners scurrying for the comfort of vintage Uncle Tupelo to help wash the stale countrified taste out of their mouths. Its 10 songs play like a stereotypical laundry list of worn-out clichés and images. Lyin' women, cheatin' women, schemin' women, and the occasional good-hearted woman just waiting at home for her man litter these songs like so many stock characters. Men's hearts are stomped and shat upon and, somewhere I imagine, those men slobber into schooners filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon in shitty juke joints that reek of cigarette smoke and masculine desperation. And of course there's also hard drinkin' - lots of hard drinkin' - and please sir make it cheap whiskey.

A five-piece band fronted by Joseph Plunket on guitar and vocals twangy enough to make your Hee Haw-watching hoosier relatives insanely jealous, The Weight undeniably had ambitious goals with Are Men. The sound is big, bold and full of barroom stomp and holler, with its songs incorporating three-part harmonies, shredding guitar workouts, and macho group vocals. The album is primarily rowdy and boisterous; one can practically hear the shattered chairs and overturned tables as a drunkard is tossed ass-first through a saloon window. The production is suitably punchy, with songs like "Like Me Better," "Closer Than a Friend" and "A Day In the Sun" featuring Plunket's vocals up front in the mix and a heap of guitars, piano, drums, and harmonica thrown in underneath. Most of the album is unabashedly ballsy and macho; the beers in these songs likely come accompanied with a double shot of testosterone.

Perhaps more so than other music genres, alt country and Americana have always required a certain degree of suspension of disbelief; these genres are often rooted in long ago, far away times and places much removed from the people singing about them. When Jay Farrar sang that he was going where there was no Depression, it somehow sounded both relevant and heartfelt, a young kid reinterpreting an American standard and applying it to his contemporary times. What Uncle Tupelo knew is that if a band's going to play music that sounds like it's from a bygone dusty era, you'd damn well better make it convincing. If albums rooted in these genres are judged against such criteria, Are Men is a dismal failure. Its songs and sentiments are simply just not believable, and too often play like little more than a predictable and listless stroll through Americana's back pages. "Sunday Driver" offers played out motifs like a whiskey-swilling lonesome-hearted Georgia boy who's stuck in - where else - that big mean city of New York. The narrator of "A Day In the Sun" begs the operator to put him through to his girl, though no one in the Western world actually relies on phone operators anymore. "Hillbilly Highway" (no shit, that's the song's title) tells the sad-sack tale of a man who vows to return to his mountain town to fetch his beautiful Lilly. Apparently she's a basset hound. And so the album goes, a by-rote walkthrough of music clichés that never gets grounded or goes anywhere.

Certainly part of the album's flaws can be attributed to Plunket's vocal delivery, which can best be described as an extreme country drawl that makes Toby Keith sound like Frank Sinatra. While Plunket's earnestness isn't in doubt, his vocals and subjects are simply too exaggerated to resonate with the listener. Still Are Men's fatal flaw is more basic: we've heard all this before, and we've heard it before in better ways. We've already got Uncle Tupelo, Drive-By Truckers, Dave Alvin, Green on Red for those digging a bit deeper, and, if you're really, really desperate, The Bottle Rockets. Are Men offers a procession of booze, broken hearts, and big hooks steeped in Americana; unfortunately, it's doubtful many listeners will want to bother going there.

Rediscover: Angus MacLise: Brain Damage in Oklahoma City

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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.

As shadowy musical figures go, it's hard to top Angus MacLise. The first drummer in the Velvet Underground's earliest incarnation, the story goes he quit after learning that the band might get paid for a gig in 1965, viewing this as an act of selling out (one wonders how he'd react to the his own catalog finally being issued on CD in 1999 and 2000). Though the story might be apocryphal - over the years the band's members have mentioned that MacLise seemed to operate on his own time in his own world and have also implied that his days with the band were numbered as a result - it has contributed to the legendary depiction of the drummer that still persists among music history's most dedicated fringes. Though MacLise would later briefly play with the band in 1966 and also try to rejoin the group - the always laid back and never domineering Lou Reed refused this request - his time as a member of the Velvets was short.

In many ways MacLise's biography reads like the ultimate example of the wandering artistic spirit and speaks to the joys of a rootless, nomadic existence that still define the popular depiction of the 1960s counterculture. Indeed, MacLise managed to cram more into his 41 years of life than most people do with more time, alternately being described as a composer, percussionist, poet, mystic, shaman and calligrapher. He was well read, studying everything from Haitian drumming to Middle East percussion. He played with La Monte Young's now-celebrated Theater of Eternal Music, a collective that created avant garde music so unlistenable that it was, of course, highly influential; future artists would later temper this approach into something a bit more palatable. In his post-Velvets career he traveled extensively, before settling in Nepal. He'd eventually die in 1979 of tuberculosis.


But does MacLise's recorded output equal the stuff of legend that his life has become? Certainly his work, most of which went unreleased until 20 years after his death, has never had broad appeal and probably never will. To many people, it likely sounds like the type of racket that would be most effective in extricating a third-world dictator from an underground bunker. It's also not hard to imagine albums like The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Brain Damage in Oklahoma City and The Cloud Doctrine forming the soundtrack to a mentally deranged person's existence. Though MacLise's music is usually lumped into that big swirling mass known as psychedelia, it exists within that genre uneasily and only for lack of a better term. It's either the product of pure genius or a melody-challenged psychopath, with MacLise's songs incorporating chants, droning, electronic fuzz, tribal percussion, various stomps and yelps, and other mind-bending and ear-shredding traits. Even for fans of such music, it's not easy or particularly enjoyable listening; it's usually lo-fi and contains few hints of a reference point that makes even the most inaccessible music somewhat approachable. Spend a day with MacLise's albums and you'll likely feel like your brains have been mixed in a blender.

Brain Damage in Oklahoma City is perhaps MacLise's most representative release. Even so, for listeners not wired a certain way, the album borders on being nothing more than a mess of noise and nonsense, wandering and meandering with no real purpose except to try the listener's patience and mental health. And though even fans - excluding those whose brains were fried decades ago chasing the 1960s dream - would likely admit that it's not something that can be listened to often or as background music, it is worth hearing occasionally. Consisting of recordings the percussionist made between 1967-1970, it's also MacLise's most musically consistent and coherent effort, with its eight pieces (and 70 minute running time) taking the musician's drumming as its centerpiece. The album is bookended by two songs that feature MacLise playing cembalum, with opening song "Another Druid's Nest" also including chants and random thumps that recall Indian music. This chanting repeats on the manic "Haight Riot Mime," with MacLise this time pounding on bongos before the song abruptly cuts off, "Epiphany" augments hand drums with a hypnotic organ pattern, and the aptly titled "Drum Solo" consists of MacLise beating on barrel conga and bongos, again giving the song a primitive flavor.

The album's key tracks are also its most difficult. Clocking in at nearly 45 minutes, the two tracks that comprise "Dreamweapon Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police" are live ensemble works from 1968 that rely on improvisation in its most extreme form; no sane person would attempt to map out the songs' structures, shifts, or changes. Taken together they serve as a nice primer of MacLise's style or particular brand of torture - take your pick - as well as contain major avant garde elements that that still influence musicians today. The song ebbs and flows uneasily, with moments of calm used to steadily build tension, before it explodes and recedes again. Its most memorable parts are primarily chaotic, noisy, and aggressive; a sort of demented chanting rises and falls against MacLise's barrel conga and wife Hetty MacLise's tampura, while Tony Conrad's limp string and Henry Flynt's flute become increasingly abrasive as the song progresses. What it brings to mind is a traffic jam from hell or a set of schizophrenics turned loose in a musical instruments store. While the song sometimes tends to overindulge in its own experimentalism - one could argue that the song is too experimental for its own good, and that you've got to be stoned out of your gourd to really get it - it's a nice summation of MacLise's musical vision.

Setting aside the nagging fact that Brain Damage in Oklahoma City will always remain a cult favorite. Regardless of those cynics who argue that MacLise's music would have been relegated to the dustbin of history if it weren't for his involvement with the Velvets, it still remains one of the clearest examples of late 1960s experimental music. Though its content may not equal the long shadow cast by MacLise's legend, it offers a good opportunity to see MacLise as a musician and artist, not as a mystical figure best known for his extremely brief time with the Velvet Underground.

The Alternate Routes: A Sucker's Dream

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After spending a weekend listening to A Sucker's Dream, I needed a few stiff drinks to wash the mainstream radio-friendly taste out of my mouth. The Alternate Routes' latest effort is unabashedly commercial, with a clean production that emphasizes fatass guitar riffs, crisp and up-front vocals, drums punchy enough to make Max Weinberg jealous and anthemic rhythms that beg to be played in front of a packed music club as a relief pitcher takes the mound. The band's style is balls-ahead rock n' roll with a faint hint of country and pop - and that's all in big capital letters - with little room for subtlety, nuance or experimentation. The album doesn't try to map out a new musical vision or strange new language; it's clear the band is more interested in working within the confines of existing styles than in trying to map out new ones.

For the most part this approach works; if you're in the mood for pure rock music with more than a hint of machismo and a twist of humor, you could do a lot worse than A Sucker's Dream. "To the Line" features both shredding guitars and shouted manly-man group vocals, while the title track punctuates this vocal approach with the album's biggest guitar riffs. These bursts of bombast are at least somewhat tempered with several sparse ballads. "Desdemona" includes Patty Griffin and is the album's most disarming and engaging track; built around an acoustic guitar melody and running nearly six minutes, this hushed and reserved song manages to stand out in the sea of decibels that characterizes most of the album. "Already November" takes a similar approach and is held together by a subdued guitar line, with lead singer Tim Warren's vocals occasionally reminiscent of Jeff Tweedy, John Hiatt, Jim James or, less charitably, Edwin McCain at his soulful worst.

Still there's something just a bit too AOR about A Sucker's Dream. While the album's press materials suggest that the band is aware of (and perhaps embraces) these tendencies, on several songs it gets the better of them. "Ain't No Secret" and "All that I See" are both heart-on-sleeve love songs, with overwrought musical and vocal arrangements primed for a television melodrama and with enough syrup to upset even the most cynical stomach. The sentiments expressed are just too close to what you've heard from countless buskers on the promenade or from that subculture of Devendra Banhart-lookalike musicians who frequent the quads across American universities. It's on these moments when the sheen is uber-polished and the lyrics are hopelessly romantic where the album loses the listener's interest.

A Sucker's Dream's experimental moments are rare; aside from the hazy and echoed vocal treatment on "The Future's Nothing New," it offers straightforward rock tunes, with the occasional ballad thrown in. While the songs sound organic and it's somewhat refreshing to see a band simply trying to rock with a mixture of humor, sympathy, hope and determination instead of attempting a grand musical statement and bombing miserably - hell, it's worked for The Hold Steady - the album is ultimately uneven and underwhelming. Too often it simply sounds like overly familiar music just looking for a home right of the dial.

Swan Lake: Enemy Mine

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Enemy Mine shouldn't work as well as it does. The product of three musicians from three different bands with largely contrasting styles - Dan Bejar of Destroyer and sometimes The New Pornographers, Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, and Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes - it's a mostly abrasive and dizzying mess of an album. It plays like a veritable indie stew of various musical and lyrical concepts; its nine songs each veer off in their own direction before the listener can ever get grounded. It's a strategy the trio utilized to great effect on debut album Beast Moans, that release succeeding despite (or perhaps because of) each musician's instrumental and vocal eccentricities. Such experimentation and lack of cohesion are too often the hallmarks of a band who thinks their shit doesn't stink as they drown in shameless self-indulgence. Such failed efforts don't dot the indie landscape so much as litter it like stinking refuse, yet Enemy Mine almost flawlessly avoids these pitfalls.

Each musician takes the lead on three songs and provides backup on most of the others, with each man applying his vocal quirks and twitches to songs that are primarily dark and impressionistic. Upon first listen Mercer's vocals are the least accessible and most ragged, with a yelping, wrecked voice of oddly-enunciated syllables occasionally drenched in echo. Though his voice remains difficult even with multiple listens - a smooth crooner Mercer is not - an element of gothic theatricality that strangely holds the listener's attention emerges. Opening song "Spanish Gold, 2044" builds from throbbing percussion, jagged punctuations of guitar and keyboards and chanted background vocals that suggest all three musicians have been drinking from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' well of misery. The song also favors the lyrical ambiguity that surfaces throughout Enemy Mine, with clipped images and phrases - "I left this bullwhip by the nightstand/ Julliard was a thousand miles ago" -suggesting meanings without making anything obvious other than all sort of bad shit's about to go down. The ironically-titled "Peace" features none of that; it augments drums and guitar stabs with backing vocals from Behar and Krug as Mercer howls like a deranged rush-hour street corner preacher.

Krug's vocals are no less interesting. "Paper Lace" opens and ends with acoustic guitar and a subdued synth line, a welcome change of pace after the mania of "Spanish Gold, 2044." If Krug's vocals here are more restrained than what he shows in his Wolf Parade guise, "Settle On Your Skin" has all the hallmarks of that band's sound: driving rhythms moving at breakneck pace, fidgety and somewhat distorted vocals that imply that the microphone's about to be swallowed, and lyrics teeming with the fatigue and insomnia of someone about to go off the rails. Hushed backing vocals support Krug on the piano-driven "A Hand At Dusk;" the closest thing to a ballad the album offers; the song's romantic sickbed sentiment is both humorous and oddly devotional, with Krug singing, "It's getting old, I know, I know/ But I'll hold your hair back when you're sick."

Bejar mostly reins in the vocal exaggerations that have plagued Destroyer's albums to varying degrees ever since masterpiece City of Daughters. Though his vocals lack Mercer's recklessness or Krug's, um, Wolf Parade-essness, Bejar's disciplined low-key approach offers a nice counterpoint to the spasms from Mercer and Krug. While "Ballad Of A Swan Lake, Or, Daniel's Song," with its other-worldly setting and an arrangement that sounds like a cross between a circus song and a funeral march from hell, acts as Bejar's contribution to the album's experimental quality, it's the simplicity of "Heartswarm" that stands out. The album's most melodic song, it's framed by Bejar's direct vocals and an acoustic guitar accented by keyboards, a touch of fuzz, and Mercer's backing vocals. Besides containing Enemy Mine's best lyric - "Do my eyes deceive me/ Or is it truly springtime in Paris for that piece of shit?" - it makes the album's dramatic stylistic shifts most apparent.

Ultimately, Enemy Mine plays like a collaborative effort, and not just because of the album's recurring images of time, distance, death, fractured psyche and assorted acts of violence. Despite each vocalist's singular quirks, each of them leave their mark on each song, with contrasting styles that comfortably fit together when they really shouldn't. The album doesn't so much bend musical genres as it turns them on their heads, shakes their pockets out and kicks them hard in the groin. It's a swirling, disparate tramp through often difficult terrain, but the reward is an album that's both unpredictable and highly original.

(Don't) Revisit: Black Flag - Damaged

Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. Go see more at spectrumculture.com

Few classic albums have aged as poorly as Black Flag's Damaged. Now over 25 years since its release, the album's impact on future generations of musicians has far surpassed the staying power of its actual content, giving the album a revered and slavishly worshiped status it might no longer deserve. While its balls-ahead musical arrangements and lyrical sentiments that covered everything from teenage alienation, angst, boredom and frustration to, well, that's about it, marked the high point of the band's career and perhaps hardcore itself, time has not been kind to the album. Though the emotions it expresses are certainly universal - especially in the world of music, where everyone from The Smiths to Bush have tackled these subjects - it now sounds hopelessly anchored to a specific era and genre.

By now Damaged's history can be recited chapter and verse by music's more deranged fringes, but a quick recap is in order:

1. Henry Rollins jumped on stage at one of the band's shows in New York and later fell ass-backwards into becoming the lead vocalist (think Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star).
2. Rollins, with coaching from primary lyricist and SST Records founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, recorded his vocals on top of the band's backing tracks.
3. After Unicorn Records refused to issue the album on grounds that it would really, really upset your parents, Ginn released the album on his SST label. Critics went wild with praise, the youth of America got their inner graffiti artist on and spray painted four parallel bars on everything from school notebooks to freeway underpasses, and the authorities and parentals went on red alert and braced for the downfall of Western civilization.
4. In keeping with the true hardcore and anarchic ethos, the band was for a time prevented from using the name "Black Flag" or their logo due to an unseemly legal squabble.
5. The album would later be credited with influencing bands like Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer. Thanks a lot guys.

This isn't to say that Damaged is a bad album; songs like "Rise Above," "Thirsty and Miserable" and "Life of Pain" still stand as some of the clearest and most concise examples of classic Los Angeles hardcore, with Rollins' vocals barked and yelped on top of the band's incessant and pounding sludge. "T.V. Party" even managed to inject some humor into all the misery and rage that coursed through the album's half hour. But that's exactly the problem; as hardcore's defining moment, the album now clearly reveals both the musical and thematic limitations of the genre that persist to this day in smelly garages and dingy concert cellars across the country. Perhaps even more so than early British punk, the West coast brand of hardcore espoused on Damaged by and large emphasized a singular musical and lyrical approach over innovation and variation.

And the album has that in spades, with most songs featuring Rollins' strained and muddy vocals against musical arrangements that, while full of adrenaline and righteous fury, are overly repetitive. In 2009, the album sounds like an artifact of a specific time preserved under glass, not an evolving classic that takes on new meanings or interpretations to later generations of listeners. The album's flaws are also largely early 1980s Los Angeles hardcore's flaws: an overly disciplined and dogmatic adherence to music played loud, fast, hard and severely pissed off, with little room for deviation or improvisation; it's telling that bands that went through their growing pains under the auspices of hardcore - most notably Husker Du, Meat Puppets and the Minutemen - did their best work once they moved past these confines.

Occasionally the fury and outrage beaten into the listener's skull in songs like "Police Story" and "Padded Story" are less than convincing and sound far less threatening to modern listeners; the anxiety the album caused to the powers that be in 1981 seems almost quaint now. This is an inevitable risk for any band that focuses on overt political and social disillusion and hypocrisy; it's the same reason the Clash couldn't convincingly perform "Career Opportunities" after the money rolled in and that Bruce Springsteen's "Mansion on the Hill" now rings hollow. It's a posture that's largely impossible to maintain over the years; regardless of how sincere most of Ginn's lyrics or Rollins' delivery are, such sentiments tend to be viewed with increased skepticism as the album gets dustier. Sometimes Damaged gives off an air of anger rather than actual genuine anger; it's worth mentioning that the album cover is itself an illusion, with the cracked mirror caused by a hammer and Rollins' bloody wrist little more than a combination of coffee and red ink.

That the five-man combination of Ginn/Rollins/Dukowski/Cadena/ROBO conjured up a genre-defining work with Damaged isn't in question. As the West coast hardcore's most recognizable example, it's a reflection of both that movement's best traits - a sense of musical and lyrical urgency mixed with social and political dissatisfaction - and its worst excesses, especially a tendency for sounding excessively dated and repetitive. Like Nirvana's Nevermind, its reputation, influence and long list of disciples have masked its shortcomings. As a key document of music history it's indispensable. As an album that still sounds relevant today, it's greatly flawed.

Handsome Furs: Face Control

Handsome Furs:
Face Control
March 10, 2009 10:35 AM
Handsome Furs

Face Control

Rating: 3.5

Label: Sub Pop

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Ah, that cruel bitch known as the side project. Like the lure of the siren's song, it pulls musicians into its embrace, nuzzles them gently, whispers seductions into their ears and then systematically murders their hard-fought reputation. At its worst, the side project album often comes across as nothing more than an opportunity for artists to indulge their most inflated and overindulgent whims, outside the confines of their full-time band. Of course there are exceptions - Shearwater has gone from an Okkervil River offshoot to a unique and highly original group in its own right, thanks to recent album Rook - but far too often these side projects are ultimately disappointing and carry the stink of being little more than vanity releases.

Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner has so far mostly managed to avoid these pitfalls. Though his side gig known as Handsome Furs, its core consisting of Boeckner and poet-fiancée Alexei Perry, hasn't surpassed his work with those indie darlings, it hasn't hurt his credibility either or led to much fan backlash. Debut album Plague Park was executed well enough, with an emphasis on synthesizers, sparse arrangements, drum machines, and programmed beats. Despite its nine songs occasionally sounding redundant and plodding - monotony reared its ugly head perhaps a bit too much - it offered a nice divergence from Wolf Parade's more frenetic style.

These shortcomings are mostly absent on Face Control. Although the album's approach isn't a dramatic shift from Plague Park, it does add more instrumentation and, thank Christ, changes of pace to the mix. For the most part the songs are more musically varied than those from the debut album, with guitars, shifting tempos, and even a few instrumentals thrown in to complement (or offset, take your pick) the band's foundation of synths and programmed rhythms. The songs are more diverse and interesting than those from Plague Park; only the minimalism of "Legal Tender," "Nyet Spasiba" and "I'm Confused" is immediately reminiscent of that debut effort. "Evangeline" works in some jagged stabbing guitars on top of all those damn synthesizers, with Boeckner's yelping voice more restrained than it is in his Wolf Parade guise. Both "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" and "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything" are defined by their shifts in rhythm and tempo, with each song relying more on guitars than synths and drum machines. Though sometimes the songs blend together, only one track, the nearly six-minute "Officer of Hearts," is endlessly repetitive and seems much longer than its already ADD-challenging running time. The lyrics mine familiar subjects: the dehumanizing effects of technology, crass commercialism, isolation in an impersonal world, and a general feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction. "Every little thing has been bought and sold," Boeckner says in "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," which seems an appropriate summation of the album's lyrical approach.

For those few remaining people still interested in album aesthetics and packaging - and I know one of you is out there - the album cover is, well, appallingly bad. An open-mouthed foaming Doberman is set against a red background, with the band's name and album title along the top in a greenish color somewhat reminiscent of snot. Maybe there's some type of inside joke going on here, who knows; but if you're ever looking for an example of the content not matching the packaging, look no further. It's an early favorite for worst album cover of 2009.

Nevertheless, its music is what makes Face Control a worthy release and an improvement over Plague Park. Even better, Boeckner manages to survive this side project with his Wolf Parade reputation still intact.

Elvis Perkins - Elvis Perkins In Dearland

Singer-songwriters with a folkie bent like Elvis Perkins walk a precarious line between finding new ways to reinterpret a quaint and staid musical genre and making listeners want to grab their guitars from their dexterous little fingers and smash them like Bluto Blutarsky. Add a penchant for aping Basement Tapes/John Wesley Harding-era Bob Dylan to the mix and you've got a potential recipe for a disaster of Donovan proportions. To Perkins' credit, he's mostly managed to avoid these pitfalls; debut album Ash Wednesday was an engaging if frequently dark effort that offered songs of both loneliness and implied promise; tracks like "Good Friday" and "While You Were Sleeping" existed in that gray area between utter desolation and the faintest glimmers of hope. Though it wasn't a flawless album - "It's a Sad World After All" flirted with exposing the worst traits of a musician armed only with a guitar and a heavy dose of sincerity - it was a solid initial effort.

Elvis Perkins In Dearland mines similar lyrical territory to that debut effort, but also marks a noticeable shift in both instrumentation and mood. Though the songs mostly remain rooted in an acoustic sensibility - most of them start with guitar or piano, and the harmonica is busted out on more than a few tracks - a small army of horns, strings and various squalls of sound are incorporated to give the album a more frenetic pace. Dearland sounds more like a cohesive band album than a singer-songwriter record with session musicians; bassist Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett and drummer Nicholas Kinsey provide nice assists that give that album a definite vibe and consistency.

There's an impressive range of musical styles to these tracks. Songs like "I Heard Your Voice In Dresden," "Chains, Chains, Chains" and "Doomsday" all incorporate horns reminiscent of a grand mariachi marching band, while "Hours Last Stand" veers in the opposite direction; built around a bluesy piano melody, Perkins practically croons the lyrics. Those who suffer nervous twitches at the first reedy puff of a harmonica would be best served to avoid this album, with songs like opener "Shampoo," "Hey" and morose closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" prominently featuring the poor man's harp. Other songs offer unexpected shifts in both style and instrumentation: the gently strummed guitar that opens "Send My Fond Regards to Lonelyville" is eventually swallowed up with more horns and harmonica, the song transformed from a dryly humorous folk ballad into something far more pounding and raucous. Only on the distorted vocals and strangled horns of "I'll Be Arriving" does this approach ever really fail; the song is entirely inaccessible and, with its unintelligible lyrics, essentially subverts the album's vocal approach and remains the album's weakest track.

Perkins occasionally crams a pile of words into some fairly small spaces. He doesn't quite walk a tightrope like Elvis Costello, but the songs are sometimes lyrically dense. Though it's difficult not to view these songs in light of Perkins' biography - he's the son of actor Anthony Perkins and 9/11 victim Berry Berenson - the album frequently dwells on farewells, ghostly voices, memories, and glimpses into the past, usually with a mixture of sadness and affection. Perkins' lyrics are subtle and nuanced; any sense of nostalgic contentment is tempered with an equal sense of loss. "I love you more in death/ Than I ever could in life," he sings in "1 2 3 Goodbye," a conflicted sentiment that surfaces throughout the album. Similarly, the stomp and bounce of both "Doomsday" and "Hey" is offset by a dark sense of humor, with Perkins mentioning in the latter song the "cemetery of the century/ But hey, what a starry day..." The stark piano and guitar arrangement of closing track "How's Forever Been Baby" fits the regretful lyrics; it's the album's darkest and perhaps most cynical moment, with Perkins looking back at a relationship that's permanently gone off the rails. These songs offer shades of various emotions and degrees of uncertainty; it's tempered and mature songwriting at its finest.

Though Elvis Perkins In Dearland contains trace amounts of singer-songwriter folksiness, it's nevertheless a stylistically diverse album. Its arrangements burst with musical ideas, with horns and strings adding both tempo and muscle to Perkins' quirky and textured songs. It's catchy without being too slick, emotional without being maudlin, and addictive as hell, a nearly perfect album that never becomes repetitive or predictable.

Neko Case: Middle Cyclone

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Neko Case's voice floats somewhere between indie pop and the fringes of country music. While it sometimes sounds ripped straight from the pages of the Official Singer-Songwriter Handbook, that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's an endearing directness and simplicity in her vocal approach, and if most indie fans are being honest, they would gladly take such traditional accessibility over the overwrought stylings of Sharon Jones or the bordering-on-self-parody mangled garbling of Lucinda Williams any day. Case's voice can be comforting or foreboding, lighthearted or caustic, its smoothness used to accentuate the melodies in her songs.

All of these characteristics are again present on Middle Cyclone, the follow-up to the musician's wildly celebrated Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. It's mostly a solid and steady release, with a few standout tracks that exhibit the confident and self-assured vocals and cryptic lyrics of its predecessor. Still, the final product is somewhat disappointing. Too often the album is far too studied and reserved, with a lack of spontaneity and an excessively clean production that make it both overlong and dully repetitive.

Middle Cyclone's best songs play to Case's strengths as a vocalist and arranger; invariably, these songs favor stripped-down arrangements over the shimmering borderline mainstream pop bombast that plagues other songs. The title track is perhaps the album's finest moment, featuring Case's gorgeous vocals set against a gentle guitar melody played by long-time backing band member Paul Rigby. "The Next Time You Say Forever" augments Case's vocals with two acoustic guitars and an understated cello from Calexico's Joey Burns, and offers sentiments that betray the song's passive and pastoral vibe: "The next times you say 'forever'/ I will punch you in your face." "Magpie To the Morning" rolls along with a countrified rhythm as Case's spoken word vocals transition into one of her more memorable vocal performances, this time supported by M. Ward on guitar and hushed backing vocals from Carolyn Mark, Lucy Wainwright-Roche, and Kelly Hogan.

Yet these aren't enough to compensate for Middle Cyclone's flaws. Too many songs sound forced, overly crafted, and too precious for their own good, with textured studio arrangements offering slickness and sheen where raw emotion and breathing room should be. "This Tornado Loves You," which includes no fewer than 12 participants, is the album's most egregious offender, a swirling miasma of backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, strings, drums, and keyboards that sacrifices spontaneity in favor of a saturated, radio-friendly treatment that suggests its players were given little wiggle room for improvisation or going off script. This clinical precision also plagues "The Pharaohs;" not even Garth Hudson on organ is enough to breathe some life into it. Other songs precariously border on sounding like - rip it off fast like a Band-aid - Tuesday night at your local coffeehouse where every singer-songwriter is armed only with a guitar and disconcerting amounts of folkie seriousness. The humor of "People Got a Lotta Nerve" - it's either about caged animals exacting their revenge on their captors, or something far less literal - is deadened both by its AOR leanings (Pieces of You-era Jewel unfortunately comes to mind) and Case's tendency to repeat words until it grates on the listener's nerves: "I'm a man-man-man-man-man-man-eater/ but still you're surprised-prised-prised when I eat you." Two cover songs are included and are curiosity pieces at best, with a saccharine and plodding take of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" suggesting it would have been best served as a b-side or free download.

Case's excellent songwriting and her ability to offer glimpses of a song's intentions without making them painfully obvious sometimes offset Middle Cyclone's weaker moments. While her vocal approach is usually straightforward, the lyrics are suggestive and evocative, with phrases and images - whether it's the "gunpowder eyes" of "Prison Girls" or the "diamond at the bottom of the drain" in "Magpie To the Morning" - keeping the listener's attention where the arrangements might cause it to wander. The lyrics mask some flaws but not all of them; Middle Cyclone is simply too meticulous and predictable to maintain any momentum. Its best moments exist when its songs are at their most vulnerable and unadorned. All too often, such subtlety is bypassed in favor of an army of instrumentation that, while expertly performed by a strong supporting cast, offers only technical expertise where warmth and emotion should be.

Golden Bear: Everest

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If one of the goals of an EP is to make the listener want to hear more the second it ends, then Golden Bear's Everest EP is a resounding success. Its five songs are melodic and catchy bits of indie pop that lodge in the listener's head somewhere between last night's drunken revelry and the morning after's headache-inducing sunlight. These songs settle in and don't leave easily, and that's a good thing. The EP's tracks are free of the frills, extraneous diddling and self-indulgent experimentalism that have been the downfall of countless indie bands. The band seems to know that sometimes it's okay to be straightforward and direct, leaving the pretentiousness to those hapless and overly sincere bands that litter the landscape.

The band plays what it describes as "galactic-forest rock," a term most likely devised to confound gullible music journalists and bloggers and to give the band a memorable jumping off point. Yet whether the term is a lark or genuine is beside the point; the songs on Everest are strong enough to stand on their own, without needing the support of vague and obtuse genre-bending categories. The Austin, TX band - given the current glut of bands hailing from that city, we should seriously consider tagging them before they are released into the musical wilds - shows enough musical and lyrical dexterity on this EP to distinguish themselves from their peers.

The songs here are four-minute bursts heavy with guitars, drums, occasional horns, dueling keyboards and up-front vocals. Amidst many indie bands' seemingly willful obtuseness - if it's incomprehensible and murky it must be deep and meaningful - such an organic approach is welcome. The production is clean and the arrangements are unapologetically up tempo; opener "Night Lights" starts with electric guitars and drums, "All the Stars" is built around nice group harmonies and the requisite horns - every indie album must include horns - and closing track "Miracle Mile" wraps up the EP nicely with more guitars and drums. The band's sound recalls a number of other bands - most often Built to Spill and, to these ragged ears at least, Pavement in a pinch - without sounding derivative.

Indeed, Chris Gregory's vocals are at times reminiscent of Doug Martsch, minus that voice's occasional thinness and compression. The songs are frequently dryly humorous and sometimes dour; their lyrics contain countless references to lost time and the future, coupled with a confused and restless psyche spinning its wheels and just killing time. "I might break the law/ Or go insane if I don't find some peace of mind," Gregory deadpans on "All the Stars;" while later on the title track he admits that "All those fantasies I started believing/ Show no signs of coming true." Still the EP isn't sad-sack depressing - plenty of doses of comedy and hope creep in, especially in the wonderfully ambiguous "Future Blues" - and the band manages to successfully navigate between punchy arrangements and intelligent if sometimes serious lyrics.

Though in some ways the Everest EP doesn't stray too far from the sound of previous album To the Farthest Star, it's an instantly likeable EP that's both easy on the ears and worthy fodder for all those indie armchair psychologists. While some bands lose points and shatter their reputations in the name of absurd experimentation, Golden Bear shows that sometimes a direct approach is the best way to go.

Revisit: Lou Reed and John Cale - Songs For Drella

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Regardless of whether it's because it marks a crucial chapter in music history or simply because we can't help but watch a train wreck, any talk about the shared legacies of Lou Reed and John Cale inevitably turns to the gory details about the prolonged pissing contest the two artists have had over the years. Ever since that fateful day Cale was unceremoniously ousted from the Velvet Underground at the behest of a control-mongering Reed -let's be honest here - the two men have had a bizarre and often contentious sparring match that rivals any type of melodrama you'll see in a television soap opera.

Yet for all the hard feelings, bruised egos and darts thrown about in print media since Cale's departure, the two men's limited post-Velvets collaborations have mostly been respectable. Reed and Cale shared a stage with singer and cautionary tale Nico in an oft-bootlegged (and now commercially available) 1972 show in France, where the three former bandmates performed mellow, somewhat acoustic takes of various songs. Less successful -and that's being charitable - was the Velvet's ill-fated and legacy-humping reunion tour (and substandard live album, natch) in the early 1990s.

In between that Bataclan one-off novelty and the reunion clusterfuck, Reed and Cale created Songs for Drella. Their most successful and creative collaboration, the album is an emotional and sincere (if occasionally fictionalized and romanticized) concept album about the life and death of pop artist and now crudely commercialized icon Andy Warhol. A sparsely arranged album based around Reed's guitars and Cale's keyboards and occasional strings, its songs trace a rough chronology from Warhol's childhood in Pittsburgh to his eventual death in 1987. It's a moving and striking homage to the artist as a person instead of his more widely known, primarily distant public persona, and still stands as one of the most inventive concept albums to date.

Giving those armchair psychologists who view Reed as a diabolical control freak plenty of ammunition, Reed handles the bulk of the vocals here, sometimes to mixed results. Occasionally the vocals are over-enunciated and far too over the top (especially on "Starlight"), an unfortunate and frankly annoying tendency that has plagued Reed throughout his post-VU career. Yet these cases are rare and most of Reed's vocals are compelling. Opening track "Small Town" begins with Cale's bouncy keyboards as it describes the young Warhol - "Bad skin/ Bad eyes/ Gay and fatty" - and his desire to get the hell out of his Pittsburgh hometown. Up tempo and dryly humorous, it establishes the theme of Warhol as artistic visionary that later surfaces throughout the album. "Open House" offers brief biographical sketches as it portrays Warhol looking back at his Czechoslovakian heritage, against Cale's piano melody that simply repeats the same two notes. "Work" and "Images" take a crack at Warhol's artistic philosophy ("images are worth repeating") and approximate the Velvet's style, especially in the electric viola that tears through the latter song.

The tracks sung by Cale usually take a decidedly different approach. With the exception of the manic "Trouble With Classicists" and the dully electric "Forever Changed," Cale's songs are mostly hushed and languid, relying on atmospherics, strings, and keyboards to convey Warhol's story. "Style It Takes" and "Faces and Names" are both airy and floating, with somewhat orchestral strings, subdued percussion, and a fluid guitar line. Cale's depiction of Warhol is similarly heartfelt and sympathetic; the lyrics read like a eulogy to the artist. These songs also straddle the line between biographical reporting and mythmaking; anything that could be perceived as a character flaw in Warhol is instead depicted as the quirks or eccentricities of a misunderstood genius.

The songs that focus on mortality and aging, often in the guise of the two musicians offering a farewell to Warhol with a mixture of regret and pathos, still remain the album's true centerpieces. It's on these songs where both Reed and Cale explore themes that extend far beyond the sphere of a Warhol retrospective. "A Dream" is perhaps the album's standout track; a spoken word piece with Cale accompanied by minimal piano and brushes of percussion, it depicts Warhol pouring over his past in a dream, both his Factory crowd and artistic inspiration long gone. As Factory shadows from Warhol's earlier years flit in and out, Cale imagines the artist as brooding and pensive, as he recalls everything from not being invited to Reed's wedding to being shot by Valerie Solanis in 1968 ("There's blood leaking through my shirt/ From those scars from being shot"). Similarly, Reed provides his own tribute in closing song "Hello It's Me." Backed by Cale's viola, it's one of Reed's more confessional and emotional songs, thankfully free of the macho armor and posturing that have sunk too many of his post- VU albums. It's a goodbye disguised as an apology, where Reed does a shitload of pride swallowing, blankly admitting that he has "some resentments that can never be unmade."

Though Songs for Drella doesn't match the musicians' output from either The Velvet Underground and Nico or White Light White Heat, it's still one of music's more unassuming and unimposing concept albums. It focuses not on the aloof and cool public persona usually associated with Warhol, but instead on a poignant and personal depiction of Warhol as someone with insecurities and doubts about his life and what it's meant. Though it's likely that Lou Reed and John Cale will never collaborate together again - the punches that the two men still occasionally throw at each other don't count - Songs for Drella is a nice closing chapter to that relationship.

Various Artists - Dark Was the Night

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Compilation charity albums are frequently a mixed bag of odds and ends, with a couple gems sprinkled in among the more lackluster musical curiosity pieces. Although the noble intentions of these albums are commendable, the actual finished product is frequently underwhelming. Something along the lines of the supremely disappointing Vic Chesnutt tribute too often seems to be the norm. Released when there was actually some buzz about Chesnutt breaking into the mainstream, artists like R.E.M. and Sparklehorse offered revelatory interpretations of Chesnutt tunes alongside turgid reworks from the likes of lightweights like Live, Garbage, and, ugh, Hootie and the Blowfish.

Produced by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National and benefiting the AIDS awareness organization Red Hot, Dark Was the Night fortunately contains none of these drawbacks. Simply put, it just might be the best compilation released this decade: ecstatic press materials and Uncut previews comparing it to the seminal No Alternative aren't as outlandish or excessive as they appear at first blush. Though the enduring mystique of No Alternative has perhaps caused some of its flaws to be overlooked - along with quality tracks by Nirvana, Pavement, Sonic Youth and Uncle Tupelo among others, it also included duds from Goo Goo Dolls, Matthew Sweet and Buffalo Tom- Dark Was the Night might be destined for a similar canonization. It boasts a stellar cast of indie artists, including Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Cat Power and Kevin Drew, as well as a few old-timers like Yo La Tengo, David Byrne and Stuart Murdoch.

Although only the most devoted - and perhaps uncritical - music fans will like all the songs included here, the two discs offer a solid cross section of indie music's often divergent trends and styles. Though the album covers such a broad spectrum, the sequencing works; rarely does the album sound like a disjointed collection of singles you'll never hear on mainstream radio. Of the more frenetic tracks included, opener "Knotty Pine" by Dirty Projectors and David Byrne, "Lenin" by Arcade Fire and "You Are the Blood" by Sufjan Stevens are the most memorable, with Stevens transforming the Castanets original into a 10 minute mass of distortion and fuzz that's a radical departure from his more straightforward and melodic "States" albums. Yet the most affecting songs are those rooted in an acoustic sensibility. Grizzly Bear's simple "Deep Blue Sea," Iron and Wine's "Stolen Houses (Die)" and final track "Love vs. Porn" by Kevin Drew are among the starkest songs included, featuring little more than hushed guitars and creaky vocals. Conor Oberst's song of sordid hookups and morning after regrets "Lua" carries a similar tone and is sung as a duet with Gillian Welch, whose addition offsets Oberst's tendency to periodically wallow in self pity. "El Caporal" from My Morning Jacket is built around a catchy melody and horns, while The National's dryly humorous "So Far Around the Bend" is bouncy and also prominently features violins.

A number of cover songs are also included and mostly remain faithful to the original versions. The Books and Jose Gonzalez offer a strong interpretation of Nick Drake's "Cello Song," Dave Sitek of TV On the Radio transforms the Troggs' "With a Girl Like You" into an unholy union of shoegaze and drone and Kronos Quartet provides an instrumental version of the Blind Willie Johnson song that gives this compilation its name. Perhaps the standout cover is Antony and Bryce Dessner's take on the obscure Bob Dylan song "I Was Young When I Left Home." Foregoing the radical and bombastic approach that has been the ruin of countless Dylan covers, Antony's vocals are similar in style to Dylan's, and Dessner's guitar arrangement also remains faithful to the original. Dylan's bleak song resonates because of its simplicity; both Antony and Dessner seem to recognize this and avoid bludgeoning the song with extraneous clutter.

Dark Was the Night isn't perfect - with over 30 songs, how could it be? - but it does offer a remarkable snapshot of today's indie music scene and its various styles. Though notables such as Okkervil River and Animal Collective are absent, it's hard to squabble with the overall results. For those unfamiliar with modern indie music, it's a good starting point. And for those psychotically dedicated indie musos among us, it's an essential purchase.

M. Ward: Hold Time

M. Ward could probably sing the contents of an old Vladivostok telephone directory and make it sound good. On his previous Merge albums such as The Transfiguration of Vincent, Transistor Radio and Post-War, Ward explored a variety of musical styles and themes and carved out a niche as one of indie's more experimental and reliable artists. His songs are somehow both immediately accessible and hard to place; disparate elements, arrangements and production techniques are often melded together to create something that sounds both rooted in music tradition and singularly unique. With a sometimes-gravelly voice that frequently never gets much above a too-cool whisper - the label's characterization of Ward's voice as being "like drizzled honey" is a cute phrase but doesn't say much - Ward will likely remain just out of reach of mainstream recognition. Yet for those in the know, his songs are highly original and won't be mistaken for that of any other artist.

Hold Time adheres to the same general pattern mapped out on those previous releases from Merge, with a handful of new tunes sprinkled in with a few cover songs and at least one instrumental. As on those previous albums, the production is also quite similar: Ward's vocals are hazy and mostly subdued, the songs feature pleasant guitar and piano work amid a whole army of studio flourishes, and the lyrics read like a catalog of 20th century musical motifs. Yet despite these similarities, or perhaps because of them, the album is Ward's least interesting and engaging in quite some time. Though it's not exactly a case of déjà vu (and a new album from the musician is always welcome) there's not a whole lot here that really distinguishes Hold Time from Ward's three previous efforts.

This isn't to say the album is bad or a throwaway; certainly, a number of solid tracks are included. Ward's guitar picking talents are frequently on display, especially on songs like opener "For Beginners," "Jailbird" and "Stars of Leo." "Never Had Nobody Like You" and "To Save Me" roll along with a stomping rhythm and rolling piano that offer a nice change of pace from the album's mostly reserved and restrained tone. Ward also dramatically reworks a couple cover songs. "Rave On" is re-imagined as a jangly guitar version that slows down the harmonies of the original, while "Oh Lonesome Me" features Lucinda Williams and a stark guitar melody played somewhere between a country blues and a dirge. Though Williams' vocals are occasionally overwrought - with a tortured and exaggerated delivery, she sometimes she sounds like a caricature of herself - the song is perhaps the album's standout moment.

Still, there's a sameness and familiarity to Hold Time that bogs it down; everything from the production techniques (including Ward's vocal treatment) to the musical arrangements are just too reminiscent of Ward's previous albums. Though this release offers a good collection of songs, it lacks the narrative arch of Vincent and the thematic cohesion of Transistor Radio. Although it's not strictly a case of the musician spinning his wheels or stalling for time, the album doesn't find Ward straying far from his comfort zone. It's a reliable, steady album, and in this case that's mostly a drawback.

Revisit: Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Brutal Youth

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Let's get the obvious out of the way first: there are some irredeemable duds on Brutal Youth. Indeed, several songs are horrifically awful and have rightly earned their place with anything from Goodbye Cruel World and Punch the Clock as among the worst of Elvis Costello's career. "Clown Strike" wanders in no particular direction and is just downright bizarre, "Still Too Soon To Know" is among the sappiest songs Costello has recorded this side of jazz groaner North, and "My Science Fiction Twin"...well, the less said about it the better.

That self-editing would have improved Brutal Youth really isn't debatable; many contemporary reviews of the album rightly zeroed in on these excesses. Robert Christgau, never at a loss for snide words, dismissed the album as "fussy as Streisand, ugly as sin, touched with grace," All Music Guide said that it "lacks guts, no matter how smugly secure it is in its tempered 'experimentation,' and Rolling Stone...ah shit, like today, no one really cared what Rolling Stone said in 1994. Still, nearly 15 years after its original release date the album has aged far better than what those initial reviews would have suggested. It very often sports all the trademarks of Costello's best work: caustic and biting lyrics, insistent arrangements of guitars/drums/keyboards and a few well-placed pokes to the eye of various hapless targets.

Brutal Youth marked the first Elvis Costello and the Attractions album since Blood and Chocolate, though calling it that is a stretch: Nick Lowe played bass on more songs than Bruce Thomas. That the bassist, who landed on Costello's shit list when he violated an apparent code of omerta when his agonizingly dull and monotonous book The Big Wheel was published, contributed his talents to only a handful of songs was often missed in contemporary reviews. Predictably enough, Warner Bros. - always on the cutting edge of inventive marketing - hyped the album as the triumphant return of Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Whether this approach helped or hindered the album's reception is debatable.

The album is roughly split between up-tempo songs that mostly adhere to the Attractions playbook and slower tunes that emphasize melody and sparse instrumentation over that band's carnival racket; Costello's somewhat-wussy balladeer side would eventually be more fully realized on next album All This Useless Beauty. Like many other Costello albums, a parade of hypocrites, shysters, liars, cheaters, fools, criminals, shady men and slutty women makes up the cast of these songs. Several songs focus on domestic matters: humorous opening track "Pony Street" finds a daughter "reading Das Kapital" and watching videos of her cross-dressing father while trying to curb her mother's increasingly bizarre behavior, "You Tripped At Every Step" promises an unseemly marital squabble, and "Rocking Horse Road" evokes suburban boredom and regret, with its protagonist looking backwards at least one relationship he badly botched. Closing track "Favourite Hour" is perhaps the album's standout moment. Described by Costello as being about "the terrible anticipation of a dread event" in the liner notes to the Rhino reissue version, it features him playing the piano and contains one of the musician's best and most understated melodies.

Other songs drip with the venom, spite and disgust that Costello is best known for, even though this depiction is by now largely inaccurate. We can all thank a questionable dalliance with Burt Bacharach for that. "All the Rage" includes a wonderful rolling piano and boasts a litany of insults, especially in the terse request to "spare me the drone of your advice." "Just About Glad" sounds like a harder-edged companion piece to this song, with Costello taunting the song's subject with a snotty question of "Is that a tear in your eye?" Similar verbal jabs are thrown at the woman "discovered wearing last night's dress" in "Sulky Girl," which contains a tight arrangement and some of Pete Thomas' best drumming on the record. There's no concern or sympathy to be found here; with her dyed hair and phony name, she's primarily shown as an object of derision. Other songs are more sordid. "13 Steps Lead Down" is rather ragged and mines the familiar theme of temptation - in this case the dual vices of sex and alcohol - that appears throughout Costello's catalog. With their procession of drunkards and delinquents, killers and phony alibis, a palpable sense of disgust and anger runs through the frenetic "20% Amnesia" and "Kinder Murder."

Like most artists who have received a significant amount of critical plaudits and pans over the course of a lengthy career, Elvis Costello's later work is frequently judged against his classic early albums like My Aim Is True, This Year's Model and Get Happy!. Still, such an approach sells Brutal Youth far short. While it doesn't stack up to those early albums, it has aged very well and incorporates the best elements of Costello's music - an uneasy balance between harmony and abrasiveness, lyrics that stick like knives, and a sense of humor that can be equally cruel and comforting.

The Modern Skirts: All Of Us In Our Night

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The sophomore release from Athens, Georgia band Modern Skirts, All Of Us In Our Night is a solid but occasionally frustrating album. At its best, it's catchy and melodic as hell and shows all the hallmarks of a band willing to experiment in finding its style. Coupled with incisive and humorous lyrics and a clean production that gives the vocals and instruments plenty of space, it's a nice enough slice of indie pop. Other times it's far dodgier and less interesting; some songs sound like Britpop leftovers that have long since passed their expiration date.

This tendency is nothing new for Modern Skirts: its debut album Catalogue of Generous Men suggested the band had been busy studying Blur's back pages. Whether the band worships at the Britpop altar or these similarities are entirely coincidental remains to be seen; certainly the vocal quirks of lead singer Jay Gulley are at times eerily reminiscent of Damon Albarn and would lead anyone to draw such comparisons. Gulley's vocals play a large part in making these similarities apparent, but the songs' musical arrangements act as co-conspirators. Some songs move at a pace and rhythm highly suggestive of bands from across the pond; these wouldn't sound out of place as b-sides to Parklife or Modern Life Is Rubbish. Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing; a band could do much worse than draw comparisons to Blur. Still, the songs sound too forced and overly crafted.

The songs that move into less derivative territory are the most engaging, and make the album worth either a purchase. The most memorable songs build from a primarily acoustic basis, with an emphasis on guitars, piano and minimal percussion. "Chokehold" features hushed vocals and a subtle guitar line. The vocals in particular are unaffected and untreated like they are on other songs, a refreshing change.. "Soft Petals" sports a similar vocal and musical arrangement, but is more airy and atmospheric, while "Yugo" features nice piano flourishes underneath intricate harmonies and background vocals. Perhaps the album's bleakest and most resigned track, "Mrs." is its finest moment, three minutes of gently strummed guitars and washes of percussion that perfectly compliment the vocals.

All Of Us In Our Night plays like a single album with two separate musical ideas that don't always mesh together. The result of either chance or osmosis, its least interesting songs sound like Britpop color-by-numbers, about 15 years too late. Still, a handful of other songs are undeniably outstanding and suggest that the best is yet to come for Modern Skirts.

Cotton Jones - Paranoid Cocoon

Paranoid Cocoon is one of those rare albums that reminds me of exactly why I like to review new releases. Sure, it's always enjoyable and perversely self-satisfying to rip some off where the scab used to be or to twist the knife a little deeper on a particularly heinous album. But any critic who says he always enjoys throwing darts at truly horrible albums that litter the world is either lying or a complete prick; no critic wants to endlessly punish his ears with such musical garbage. Most of us critics are, at least underneath the cynical and grouchy exteriors we display, hardcore if slightly unbalanced fans who just want to hear great music.

Cotton Jones Basket Ride is the latest vehicle for Maryland-based (and here comes that dreaded term) singer/songwriter Michael Nau, perhaps best known among indie psychotics for his work with Page France. That band would eventually release three albums that earned Nau comparisons to Jeff Tweedy and Conor Oberst (but shit, every quasi-sensitive singer/songwriter is compared to Oberst these days).

Nice company certainly, but such comparisons are woefully inadequate in trying to describe the sheer beauty and depth of Paranoid Cocoon. It's airy and atmospheric without sounding overly precious or dainty, musically textured and complex without being obtuse or inaccessible. It incorporates various genres and styles flawlessly; elements of folk and pop exist comfortably with the album's more experimental tendencies. Keyboards, guitars, strings, occasional horns and subtle percussion interweave to create lush and highly melodic structures; songs like "Up a Tree (Went This Heart I Have)," "By Morning Light," "Gotta Cheer Up" and "Blood Red Sentimental Blues" shuffle and sway with intricately woven arrangements. Both the main and background vocals float above the instruments. With a slight echo and hazy distance applied, Nau's voice occasionally sounds a bit like a slightly deeper version of M. Ward, though the vocal approach taken often differs from song to song. Though at times the music is reminiscent of Spiritualized in their more pensive and restrained moments, the album's overall sound is highly unique and equally hard to neatly define.

In keeping with the album's dreamlike quality, the lyrics are almost always impressionistic, vague and surreal. Though it's tempting to apply armchair psychology to the songs and interpret them in such terms, especially given the album's title, only a fool would claim to fully understand the lyrics. A variety of themes are suggested; several songs are sung from the point of view of a solitary figure, sometimes stranded in the rain and seemingly lost and lonely in an indifferent world. Specific phrases and images (especially pastoral ones) are repeated and recur throughout the album, usually accompanied with a heavy dose of melancholy and bleak humor. Certainly a sense of mental conflict and anguish is frequently implied, especially in "Up a Tree (Went This Heart I Have)," its companion song "Gone the Bells," "Cotton and Velvet" ("They got me talking to the bluebirds/ Honey honey where have I gone"), and "By Morning Light," where Nau deadpans: "I was crying just to see a tear/ Because I realized I hadn't cried all year/ It's getting better now."

Other songs explore themes of restlessness and movement. The ubiquitous train is mentioned often; it's used in closing song "I Am the Changer" before the narrator offers an ambiguous sentiment: "Everything has turned around/ Been waiting for a little change/ And when it finally came/ I just waited for another."

Paranoid Cocoon is a quietly insistent album that doesn't need screams, shouts and jagged guitars to make its presence felt. Its arrangements and vocals are atmospheric without being overproduced or cluttered, while its lyrics offer glimpses into their meaning without being incomprehensible. Music fans looking for an album that defies easy categorization would be well served to start here.

by Eric Whelchel

Revisit: Godspeed You Black Emperor - f#a#∞

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor's f#a#∞ still stands as one of the most foreboding and oppressively dark albums in indiedom. Taking the end of the world and the inevitable apocalyptic well of misery that follows as its primary themes, the album is essentially a modern symphony with several movements within each song. Usually classified as one of the best examples of post-rock (a bullshit catch-all term that means everything and yet absolutely nothing), it blends elements of classical music, avant-garde, pun, and prog rock (the few elements of prog rock that don't completely suck).

GYBE is often portrayed as a darkly mysterious or sinister Canadian musical collective; the fact that in 2003 the band was suspected of being terrorists and were subsequently questioned by the FBI after stopping at a gas station in beautiful Ardmore, Oklahoma most likely didn't help. While GYBE hasn't embraced or encouraged this characterization, it hasn't necessarily challenged it either: their albums offer scant information about or images of the band's members, the band rarely gives interviews, and its overall style is certainly not cheery or easily accessible. While this depiction has probably consigned the band to a cult following - which, given their disdain for mainstream music and corporate rock, the band likely doesn't mind - it has also allowed GYBE to create albums without the dual burdens of undue attention and expectations from either fans or critics.

Though the band's entire discography is worth hearing, f#a#∞ remains their most evocative and representative effort, with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven running a close second. Originally released on vinyl in 1997 and later remastered and updated for the digital world in 1998, the album was recorded over a three-year period and features no fewer than nine band members playing instruments including guitars, bass, strings, keyboards, drums and various pieces of percussion. Its three songs - "The Dead Flag Blues," "East Hastings," and "Providence" - are all lengthy, mostly instrumental pieces that are alternately depressing, comforting and terrifying. Stark and haunting, the album isn't necessarily easy listening; though it requires careful attention, it reveals more of its strange beauty with each subsequent listen.

Opening song "The Dead Flag Blues" is the album's standout and most startling track; it sets both the tone and mood for the movements that follow. Opening with a recurring drone and a man's deep voice that paints a scene of complete and utter ruin, it's a jarring wake up call for unsuspecting listeners:

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The tension is increased as plaintive violin strings are next heard (if this doesn't move you, you're truly a heartless bastard), as the narrator backtracks to describe exactly what happened:

It went like this:
The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

The song's movements serve as separate parts of one lengthy end of days lament. Each movement features various mixes of strings, guitars and percussion, along with varying shifts in mood and pace, though these changes are subtle and always short-lived. The song remains undeniably bleak, its various images (crumbled buildings, a horribly wrecked locomotive, dead bodies in the sewers) used to create a parallel with mankind's last days.

The final two tracks showcase GYBE's ability to lull the listener in with quiet melodies, only to then bludgeon that listener with insistent, and immediately disorienting, arrangements. The second movement of "East Hastings" spends its few minutes offering little more than electric guitar strums and random background noises, only to eventually build to a crescendo of drums, percussion, and strings, before again rolling back quietly. Likewise, several movements in "Providence" alternate between sections of gentle violins and sections that sound like pure musical doom and hopelessness, only to recede again to something deceptively soothing.

One of those rare albums that defy easy categorization, f#a#∞ takes a theme that has been explored throughout the centuries - the end of the world - and addresses it in orchestral terms. Its songs develop deliberately, alternating between controlled and melodic isolated instruments and the full force wrought by a nine-member band. Equal parts moving and disturbing, f#a#∞ is somehow both comforting and unsettling; if the apocalypse sounds anything like this, at least we'll go out with some great tunes.

by Eric Whelchel