read more stuff at spectrumculture.com
Bleach remains Nirvana's most inconsistent and least appreciated album, a tiny and wobbly baby step for a band whose legacy and permanent pop culture presence are both assured (as long as Kurt Cobain's likeness continues to be used for grotesque commercial purposes, at least). Certainly, Bleach is flawed like no other Nirvana release, with both circumstances and Cobain himself contributing to the record's unwanted bastard child status. Two different drummers (neither of them named Dave Grohl) were utilized during the recording sessions, while Cobain was consistently dismissive of the final product, attributing its sludgy sound to label pressures for the band to conform to a specific rock style and frequently discounting the lyrics as little more than hastily thrown-together words that he didn't particularly agonize over. If Cobain never exactly disowned the record, his attitude toward it was ambivalent at best. His self-deprecating introduction to "About a Girl" during the band's 1994 MTV Unplugged performance - besides making the track seem far more obscure than it actually was - nevertheless contained an element of truth: in the wake of Nevermind blowing up, scorching the musical landscape in its wake, Nirvana's awkward and occasionally clumsy debut album would always be overshadowed by the behemoth that was Nevermind.
Though Bleach is still an uneven and fumbling album 20 years after its initial release, Sub Pop's superb reissue suggests a re-examination of the record is in order. Although time hasn't transformed this debut into a lost gem, it hasn't hopelessly dated these songs either, and several tracks are (almost) as good as anything that would later surface on Nevermind and In Utero. First the obvious: the thick-and-plodding instrumentation, bloated big-rock riffing, barely-competent pre-Dave Grohl drumming and affected vocals that doom certain songs show all the markings of a band struggling to find a unique voice. Bleach's second half, from "Swap Meet" through album closer "Downer," continues to feel monotonously repetitive and aimless. Still, there are traces of brilliance here, and with the benefit of hindsight, several songs - "About a Girl," "Negative Creep," "Blew" and "School" - clearly point towards the mostly mainstream-ready sound (let's be honest) the band would achieve on its next two studio releases. If this reissue doesn't exactly wash the stink off the album as a whole, it does at least make the case that its best songs offset these duds.
More revelatory and satisfying is the February 9, 1990 live show that immediately follows. A soundboard recording from Portland's Pine Street Theatre, the sound quality is flawless, easily surpassing previous versions of this show that have circulated on bootleg, revealing a vocalist and bassist who have both outgrown the sonic confines and stylistic constraints of its budget-conscious debut album. Though six of the 11 songs come from Bleach, they differ significantly from their album counterparts; gone are the metallic, muddy arrangements, Krist Novoselic's oppressive bass and Cobain's exaggerated vocals, replaced instead with the first hints of the more focused and direct live sound the band would effectively employ until its demise. Though the band hadn't yet hit upon its classic lineup - the much-maligned Chad Channing is still on drums - the duo's progress, at least in this live setting, is striking. Most noticeably, Cobain's guitar is less grimy than it was on Bleach, and his scorched vocals surpass the tortured and sometimes clownish singing style of that debut album.
Though this show likely won't ever enter the Nirvana pantheon as among the group's best (Reading 1992, Halloween and New Year's Eve 1991) or most infamous (Rome 1994), there is still plenty to like throughout this brief 40-minute, feedback-laden set, in particular Cobain's sing-screaming on "School," "Blew," "Spank Thru" and "Dive," as well as the aggressive cover versions of "Love Buzz" and "Molly's Lips." It's a glimpse into a mostly unknown band playing toward the bottom of the bill, before the massive commercial success of Nevermind briefly made them The Single Most Important Band in the History of Recorded Sound. Skeptics who still can't get past Bleach's shortcomings will find little to gripe about with this show; trimmed of that album's fat, it's simply a blistering rock show and essential listening for any Nirvana fan.
The reissue is rounded out with a booklet of previously-unreleased band photos that should tickle the buying bone of fans who expect such reissues to do more than just thoughtlessly repackage the original release. Coupled with a clearly audible remastering job from Bleach producer Jack Endino, the original album and Portland show offer a fairly complete picture of Nirvana circa 1990. Although this reissue likely won't change the popular consensus of Bleach as the band's least consistent work, it does show how quickly Cobain and Novoselic had moved past that album's limitations, especially in a live setting. The band isn't yet the mighty beast that would be unleashed in 1991, but this reissue offers a compelling snapshot of a band whose creativity, ambition and, for better or worse, mainstream success would soon reshape the 1990s musical landscape.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Devendra Banhart: What Will We Be
lots of good stuff at spectrumculture.com
Depending on a listener's point of view, the typical Devendra Banhart album can be interpreted as either a uniquely ambitious exercise in genre manipulation or a gaudy testament to a musician's self-indulgent musical whims and pretentions. The artist has flirted with the type of experimentalism that critics and indie types adore and mainstream audiences loathe, earning his fair share of both loyalists and detractors along the way. Such an approach has, perhaps not surprisingly, yielded mixed results; 2004's Rejoicing in the Hands belongs in any serious discussion of the decade's best releases, whereas 2007's Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, with its near 70-minute running time and genre workouts that inadvertently border on parody, suggested the musician's eccentricities and a paucity of self-editing had gotten the better of him.
Although What Will We Be, Banhart's latest effort and major label debut, still mostly adheres to the template he has followed throughout his career, it is also his most musically straightforward and direct record to date. The album is focused in a way that was absent among Thunder Canyon's excesses, though Banhart's lyrics are as enigmatic as ever. Most songs rely on guitars, piano and drums to lock into a mid-tempo pace that emphasizes restrained vocals, melody and finely crafted instrumentation over his sometimes obtuse style-shifting tendencies. Opener "Can't Help," "Goin' Back to the Place" and "Angelika" are instantly memorable and sound better with repeated listens, with the backing band that also appeared on Thunder Canyon giving these tracks atmosphere and color. The balladry and lyricism of "Meet Me At Lookout Point" are as evocative as anything you'll find in Banhart's back catalog, with Banhart's vocals more conventional than what fans and critics might expect. If Thunder Canyon's seemingly directionless wanderings too often gave the impression of a vocalist and band still trying to figure each other out, such flaws do not surface here, as most songs' instrumental arrangements show the group can be steady and understated without being dull.
This isn't to say that the album is primed for mainstream commercial appeal; it's indeed difficult to imagine many of these songs appealing to a broad audience. Still, this primarily direct approach suits Banhart well, and it's ironic that What Will We Be's least engaging and successful inclusions are those in which the musician attempts the genre exercises for which he's best known. "Brindo," "Wiliamdzi," "Rats," "Foolin" and "Baby" border on being lifeless pastiche and do little more than again demonstrate Banhart's capacity for contrasting musical styles. Although Banhart has made his name bending such disparate genres, these songs sound strangely out of place and make the album seem overly drawn out.
Although it doesn't quite measure up to Rejoicing in the Hands or even parts of Cripple Crow, Devendra Banhart's latest effort is a respectable rebound from the missteps that ultimately doomed Thunder Canyon. Of course, there will be skeptics who can't get past the fact that someone as unclassifiable as Banhart now toils under the auspices of a major label (get ready for critics to renew that long-dead argument about whether an indie artist can do quality work once the jump is made to a major label). Fans willing to look past that major label stigma will find plenty to like here, as What Will We Be succeeds in finding the middle ground between Banhart's folk sensibilities and his fascination with divergent musical forms and structures.
Depending on a listener's point of view, the typical Devendra Banhart album can be interpreted as either a uniquely ambitious exercise in genre manipulation or a gaudy testament to a musician's self-indulgent musical whims and pretentions. The artist has flirted with the type of experimentalism that critics and indie types adore and mainstream audiences loathe, earning his fair share of both loyalists and detractors along the way. Such an approach has, perhaps not surprisingly, yielded mixed results; 2004's Rejoicing in the Hands belongs in any serious discussion of the decade's best releases, whereas 2007's Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, with its near 70-minute running time and genre workouts that inadvertently border on parody, suggested the musician's eccentricities and a paucity of self-editing had gotten the better of him.
Although What Will We Be, Banhart's latest effort and major label debut, still mostly adheres to the template he has followed throughout his career, it is also his most musically straightforward and direct record to date. The album is focused in a way that was absent among Thunder Canyon's excesses, though Banhart's lyrics are as enigmatic as ever. Most songs rely on guitars, piano and drums to lock into a mid-tempo pace that emphasizes restrained vocals, melody and finely crafted instrumentation over his sometimes obtuse style-shifting tendencies. Opener "Can't Help," "Goin' Back to the Place" and "Angelika" are instantly memorable and sound better with repeated listens, with the backing band that also appeared on Thunder Canyon giving these tracks atmosphere and color. The balladry and lyricism of "Meet Me At Lookout Point" are as evocative as anything you'll find in Banhart's back catalog, with Banhart's vocals more conventional than what fans and critics might expect. If Thunder Canyon's seemingly directionless wanderings too often gave the impression of a vocalist and band still trying to figure each other out, such flaws do not surface here, as most songs' instrumental arrangements show the group can be steady and understated without being dull.
This isn't to say that the album is primed for mainstream commercial appeal; it's indeed difficult to imagine many of these songs appealing to a broad audience. Still, this primarily direct approach suits Banhart well, and it's ironic that What Will We Be's least engaging and successful inclusions are those in which the musician attempts the genre exercises for which he's best known. "Brindo," "Wiliamdzi," "Rats," "Foolin" and "Baby" border on being lifeless pastiche and do little more than again demonstrate Banhart's capacity for contrasting musical styles. Although Banhart has made his name bending such disparate genres, these songs sound strangely out of place and make the album seem overly drawn out.
Although it doesn't quite measure up to Rejoicing in the Hands or even parts of Cripple Crow, Devendra Banhart's latest effort is a respectable rebound from the missteps that ultimately doomed Thunder Canyon. Of course, there will be skeptics who can't get past the fact that someone as unclassifiable as Banhart now toils under the auspices of a major label (get ready for critics to renew that long-dead argument about whether an indie artist can do quality work once the jump is made to a major label). Fans willing to look past that major label stigma will find plenty to like here, as What Will We Be succeeds in finding the middle ground between Banhart's folk sensibilities and his fascination with divergent musical forms and structures.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Alec Ounsworth: Mo Beauty
spectrumculture.com
An indie musician from Philadelphia walks into a New Orleans studio and records a quasi-Southern Gothic album with a small army of Crescent City players. What has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster instead results in one of this year's most varied and intriguing releases. Although cynics might see Mo Beauty, the sprawling "solo" debut from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman Alec Ounsworth, as little more than a vanity project or a fleeting stylistic diversion, its songs are uniformly strong and its style is wonderfully dynamic and original, even if Ounsworth's vocals are an acquired taste and almost certain to limit the record's chances of widespread appeal.
Though Mo Beauty features an unconventional set of contributors whose backgrounds and styles sharply contrast with Ounsworth's and the album is primarily culled from the musician's older material, the record holds together remarkably well. A barrage of various guitars, horns, synthesizers, drums, pianos and keyboards is used to create songs that are alternately raucous and exuberant - and always impossible to guess just where the hell the players will take each one. Guitars, drums and a swampy organ give "Bones in the Grave" an appropriately sinister tone, while "Me and You, Watson" moves with a martial drum rhythm and muffled organ. A trio of songs smack in the middle of the album - "That is Not my Home (after Bruegel)," "Idiots in the Rain" and "South Philadelphia (Drug Days)" - are all punctuated with drums, keyboards and numerous trombones that defy easy categorization. Despite the songs' seemingly meandering arrangements, there is a sense of control and craft to them, as each song sounds carefully rehearsed and executed but not overly produced.
For all the charms and eccentricities of these tracks, the quieter and more traditionally-arranged tunes offer the album's most emotional and gripping moments. Built around an acoustic guitar, stately piano and quiet baritone sax, "Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (song for New Orleans)" is the album's most accessible and memorable track. With its references to "rain and fire" and "high tides" and Ounsworth's understated vocals, the song plays like a contemporary elegy to this Southern city. "What Fun" moves at a faster but mostly deliberate pace, its acoustic guitars and organs accenting the song's wistful and nostalgic (or is that just bitterness?) feel and a pedal steel guitar mixed with an organ lending a dusty time-worn element to the song.
Ounsworth's vocals are suitably unconventional; he doesn't sing so much as nasally wheeze the words out. Sometimes these vocals threaten to go off the rails as Ounsworth crams words into some tight spaces - check out the singer's sporadic slurring on "Me and You, Watson," "Idiots in the Rain" and opener "Modern Girl (with scissors)," as if he's fighting to keep pace with the band behind him - but even in these cases the vocals are more exciting and unpredictable than pretentious or affected. The lyrics are likewise evocative, with specific phrases and images - "pages ripped from some holy book," "like an ordinary citizen tied up in the trunk of a car," "counting cars in South New Jersey" - offering enough ambiguity without feeling deliberately obtuse (though I swear the "all this useless beauty" line that shows up in "Modern Girl" has been used somewhere before...).
Those still clutching their dog-eared copies of CYHSY's self-titled debut should be placated, as Mo Beauty shares that album's spirit of genre-hopping without sounding derivative or intentionally difficult. If there's a stigma about an indie artist branching out for a solo foray, Ounsworth dispels such thoughts throughout this album, even if calling this album a solo effort is misleading. Mo Beauty moves with its own unique logic, its influences and intentions present but not oppressively so. What had the potential to be yet another exercise in gross self-indulgence best relegated to the boneyard of failed albums is instead one of this year's most creative and unclassifiable efforts.
An indie musician from Philadelphia walks into a New Orleans studio and records a quasi-Southern Gothic album with a small army of Crescent City players. What has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster instead results in one of this year's most varied and intriguing releases. Although cynics might see Mo Beauty, the sprawling "solo" debut from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman Alec Ounsworth, as little more than a vanity project or a fleeting stylistic diversion, its songs are uniformly strong and its style is wonderfully dynamic and original, even if Ounsworth's vocals are an acquired taste and almost certain to limit the record's chances of widespread appeal.
Though Mo Beauty features an unconventional set of contributors whose backgrounds and styles sharply contrast with Ounsworth's and the album is primarily culled from the musician's older material, the record holds together remarkably well. A barrage of various guitars, horns, synthesizers, drums, pianos and keyboards is used to create songs that are alternately raucous and exuberant - and always impossible to guess just where the hell the players will take each one. Guitars, drums and a swampy organ give "Bones in the Grave" an appropriately sinister tone, while "Me and You, Watson" moves with a martial drum rhythm and muffled organ. A trio of songs smack in the middle of the album - "That is Not my Home (after Bruegel)," "Idiots in the Rain" and "South Philadelphia (Drug Days)" - are all punctuated with drums, keyboards and numerous trombones that defy easy categorization. Despite the songs' seemingly meandering arrangements, there is a sense of control and craft to them, as each song sounds carefully rehearsed and executed but not overly produced.
For all the charms and eccentricities of these tracks, the quieter and more traditionally-arranged tunes offer the album's most emotional and gripping moments. Built around an acoustic guitar, stately piano and quiet baritone sax, "Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (song for New Orleans)" is the album's most accessible and memorable track. With its references to "rain and fire" and "high tides" and Ounsworth's understated vocals, the song plays like a contemporary elegy to this Southern city. "What Fun" moves at a faster but mostly deliberate pace, its acoustic guitars and organs accenting the song's wistful and nostalgic (or is that just bitterness?) feel and a pedal steel guitar mixed with an organ lending a dusty time-worn element to the song.
Ounsworth's vocals are suitably unconventional; he doesn't sing so much as nasally wheeze the words out. Sometimes these vocals threaten to go off the rails as Ounsworth crams words into some tight spaces - check out the singer's sporadic slurring on "Me and You, Watson," "Idiots in the Rain" and opener "Modern Girl (with scissors)," as if he's fighting to keep pace with the band behind him - but even in these cases the vocals are more exciting and unpredictable than pretentious or affected. The lyrics are likewise evocative, with specific phrases and images - "pages ripped from some holy book," "like an ordinary citizen tied up in the trunk of a car," "counting cars in South New Jersey" - offering enough ambiguity without feeling deliberately obtuse (though I swear the "all this useless beauty" line that shows up in "Modern Girl" has been used somewhere before...).
Those still clutching their dog-eared copies of CYHSY's self-titled debut should be placated, as Mo Beauty shares that album's spirit of genre-hopping without sounding derivative or intentionally difficult. If there's a stigma about an indie artist branching out for a solo foray, Ounsworth dispels such thoughts throughout this album, even if calling this album a solo effort is misleading. Mo Beauty moves with its own unique logic, its influences and intentions present but not oppressively so. What had the potential to be yet another exercise in gross self-indulgence best relegated to the boneyard of failed albums is instead one of this year's most creative and unclassifiable efforts.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Revisit: The Rape of Nanking - by Iris Chang
spectrumculture.com
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
November 9, 2009 marks five years since author Iris Chang, after a long battle with depression, committed suicide by putting a bullet through her mouth. By all accounts Chang's mental health had been in decline in the months leading up to her death: she suffered from nervous breakdowns, sleep deprivation and mood swings that medication didn't correct, while research she was conducting for a study about the Bataan Death March reportedly increased her bouts of depression. All clichés aside, it was a tragic end to one of the most promising and polarizing writers of recent years.
Chang's legacy is primarily tied to The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Originally published in 1997 on the 60th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre during the second Sino-Japanese War, the book has the distinction of being the first English-language non-fiction account of one of the 20th century's darkest moments. While the massacre has long remained a source of intense debate and contention throughout Asia - much like the Holocaust and Armenian genocides, it has given birth to its own subculture of reactionaries who deny anything ever happened - Chang's study greatly contributed to raising its visibility in the States. Though for the most part the massacre remains on the outskirts of general knowledge in America, the book reached a wide audience and its lasting impact cannot be denied.
The book's greatest strengths stem from both Chang's direct writing style and the substantial number of Nanking survivors who contributed to her narrative. Chang never slips into a professorial mode - in a fit of academic snobbery, some critics would later attack the book because Chang wasn't a trained historian - and she avoids what's commonly referred to as the Goddamn Boring Approach to History. The author expertly conveys the atmosphere and political spirit of Asia as World War II approached, providing a detailed overview for readers whose knowledge of Nanking is cursory. Chang brings an obvious sense of compassion and pity for the Chinese victims of the massacre to this examination; it's worth mentioning that Chang's grandparents successfully fled the massacre and later shared their stories with the author when she was still a child. Survivor accounts are used throughout the book to devastating effect. Regardless of however faulty the human memory is, the stories recounted by the massacre's survivors go a long way in giving the reader a sense of the cultural tensions between Japan and China in the years leading up to World War II and how those tensions played out once Nanking was occupied. Journals written by two humanitarian aid workers in Nanking likewise give credibility to the massacre's scope and also offer a Western perspective on the slaughter.
Perhaps not surprisingly, few recent non-fiction books have evoked such visceral responses like The Rape of Nanking. As the book continued to sell in large numbers and inspire fierce debate, Chang's fame nearly rose to levels usually reserved for pop princesses and starlet actresses, with the author appearing on various talk shows and magazine covers. Gushing reviews poured in as Chang was given the A-list celebrity treatment, as respected newspapers, academic journals and bearded professors heaped praise upon the book's scope and the author's ability to vividly recount the horrible events that had largely been ignored by the Western world. Indeed, one of the most telling and memorable aspects of the book is how it ties the massacre into a century punctuated by similar atrocities, a trait that was identified and emphasized by the more perceptive of these reviews. With the backing of such high-profile reviews, the Nanking massacre became a cause célèbre of sorts: Chang embarked on a lengthy book tour and various speaking engagements, while some members of Congress - exhibiting the type of political savvy that's in big supply for such issues - advocated a resolution requesting an official apology from the Japanese government. It's easy to see why Chang's book evoked such responses from usually reserved and straight-laced critics, academics and politicians: The Rape of Nanking is a moving and thorough account that speaks to the violent side of human nature as well as the dignity and determination of Nanking's victims.
Yet it's impossible to consider the book above reproach. While some of its detractors clearly have political or ideological agendas that drive their criticism - most notoriously, there is a small but vocal minority who claim the entire Nanking story is fabricated - several concerns about the book's accuracy and research methods are valid. Chang sometimes lets her emotions and personal beliefs get in the way of objective historical reporting, while her amateur psychological analysis of the Japanese mindset comes precariously close to racial stereotyping. Chang's contention that Japan hasn't done enough to acknowledge Nanking is open to debate: she fails to acknowledge conciliatory steps like a 1995 government resolution and apologies from high-ranking Japanese officials, and also ignores the fact that Japanese-language works - including some memoirs by Japanese soldiers present at Nanking - continue to objectively examine the origins and impacts of the massacre. Chang's death toll numbers have likewise been called into question; the author's estimation of over 300,000 murders was challenged by both Nanking deniers and those who acknowledge the atrocities but consider such numbers grossly inflated.
Perhaps the true impact of The Rape of Nanking can be found beyond both the effusive praise and often-pointed criticism of the last 10-plus years. Chang's work unquestionably introduced many Western readers to these events for the first time, contributing to a better understanding and more complete picture of a world that would soon erupt into global warfare. The book speaks to how the past continues to shape relations between countries and how such tensions persist due to events from decades ago. Though Chang's methods can be questioned and her study sometimes tramples the fine line between reasoned argument and a writer's overzealousness, her book ranks among the most thought-provoking historical narratives ever penned. The success of The Rape of Nanking came at a cost to its author - death threats from extremists were common, while she too often viewed any criticism of the book as a personal attack - but the book has become one of those rare historical accounts that transcends academia and finds a broad audience among readers mostly unfamiliar with its story.
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
November 9, 2009 marks five years since author Iris Chang, after a long battle with depression, committed suicide by putting a bullet through her mouth. By all accounts Chang's mental health had been in decline in the months leading up to her death: she suffered from nervous breakdowns, sleep deprivation and mood swings that medication didn't correct, while research she was conducting for a study about the Bataan Death March reportedly increased her bouts of depression. All clichés aside, it was a tragic end to one of the most promising and polarizing writers of recent years.
Chang's legacy is primarily tied to The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Originally published in 1997 on the 60th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre during the second Sino-Japanese War, the book has the distinction of being the first English-language non-fiction account of one of the 20th century's darkest moments. While the massacre has long remained a source of intense debate and contention throughout Asia - much like the Holocaust and Armenian genocides, it has given birth to its own subculture of reactionaries who deny anything ever happened - Chang's study greatly contributed to raising its visibility in the States. Though for the most part the massacre remains on the outskirts of general knowledge in America, the book reached a wide audience and its lasting impact cannot be denied.
The book's greatest strengths stem from both Chang's direct writing style and the substantial number of Nanking survivors who contributed to her narrative. Chang never slips into a professorial mode - in a fit of academic snobbery, some critics would later attack the book because Chang wasn't a trained historian - and she avoids what's commonly referred to as the Goddamn Boring Approach to History. The author expertly conveys the atmosphere and political spirit of Asia as World War II approached, providing a detailed overview for readers whose knowledge of Nanking is cursory. Chang brings an obvious sense of compassion and pity for the Chinese victims of the massacre to this examination; it's worth mentioning that Chang's grandparents successfully fled the massacre and later shared their stories with the author when she was still a child. Survivor accounts are used throughout the book to devastating effect. Regardless of however faulty the human memory is, the stories recounted by the massacre's survivors go a long way in giving the reader a sense of the cultural tensions between Japan and China in the years leading up to World War II and how those tensions played out once Nanking was occupied. Journals written by two humanitarian aid workers in Nanking likewise give credibility to the massacre's scope and also offer a Western perspective on the slaughter.
Perhaps not surprisingly, few recent non-fiction books have evoked such visceral responses like The Rape of Nanking. As the book continued to sell in large numbers and inspire fierce debate, Chang's fame nearly rose to levels usually reserved for pop princesses and starlet actresses, with the author appearing on various talk shows and magazine covers. Gushing reviews poured in as Chang was given the A-list celebrity treatment, as respected newspapers, academic journals and bearded professors heaped praise upon the book's scope and the author's ability to vividly recount the horrible events that had largely been ignored by the Western world. Indeed, one of the most telling and memorable aspects of the book is how it ties the massacre into a century punctuated by similar atrocities, a trait that was identified and emphasized by the more perceptive of these reviews. With the backing of such high-profile reviews, the Nanking massacre became a cause célèbre of sorts: Chang embarked on a lengthy book tour and various speaking engagements, while some members of Congress - exhibiting the type of political savvy that's in big supply for such issues - advocated a resolution requesting an official apology from the Japanese government. It's easy to see why Chang's book evoked such responses from usually reserved and straight-laced critics, academics and politicians: The Rape of Nanking is a moving and thorough account that speaks to the violent side of human nature as well as the dignity and determination of Nanking's victims.
Yet it's impossible to consider the book above reproach. While some of its detractors clearly have political or ideological agendas that drive their criticism - most notoriously, there is a small but vocal minority who claim the entire Nanking story is fabricated - several concerns about the book's accuracy and research methods are valid. Chang sometimes lets her emotions and personal beliefs get in the way of objective historical reporting, while her amateur psychological analysis of the Japanese mindset comes precariously close to racial stereotyping. Chang's contention that Japan hasn't done enough to acknowledge Nanking is open to debate: she fails to acknowledge conciliatory steps like a 1995 government resolution and apologies from high-ranking Japanese officials, and also ignores the fact that Japanese-language works - including some memoirs by Japanese soldiers present at Nanking - continue to objectively examine the origins and impacts of the massacre. Chang's death toll numbers have likewise been called into question; the author's estimation of over 300,000 murders was challenged by both Nanking deniers and those who acknowledge the atrocities but consider such numbers grossly inflated.
Perhaps the true impact of The Rape of Nanking can be found beyond both the effusive praise and often-pointed criticism of the last 10-plus years. Chang's work unquestionably introduced many Western readers to these events for the first time, contributing to a better understanding and more complete picture of a world that would soon erupt into global warfare. The book speaks to how the past continues to shape relations between countries and how such tensions persist due to events from decades ago. Though Chang's methods can be questioned and her study sometimes tramples the fine line between reasoned argument and a writer's overzealousness, her book ranks among the most thought-provoking historical narratives ever penned. The success of The Rape of Nanking came at a cost to its author - death threats from extremists were common, while she too often viewed any criticism of the book as a personal attack - but the book has become one of those rare historical accounts that transcends academia and finds a broad audience among readers mostly unfamiliar with its story.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Mason Proper: Olly Oxen Free
Olly Oxen Free is a difficult album to fully embrace and is by no means a whimsical or particularly easy listening experience. The second record from Ypsilanti-based band Mason Proper, it never settles on any particular musical style for long, instead trying and discarding approaches with a seemingly perverse glee. The result is an uneven album that is sometimes painfully lacking in focus and direction, but is at other times the work of a wonderfully experimental band just starting to find its voice. Though this album suggests that the band hasn't quite yet moved past a tendency to stand on the shoulders of a few musical giants, it nevertheless is a pleasantly eccentric record that becomes more palatable with repeated listens.
Initially it's tempting to dismiss Olly Oxen Free as a bastardized, inferior clone of TV On the Radio's wildly-celebrated Return To Cookie Mountain. Besides enlisting the help of Cookie Mountain producer Chris Coady, the band is apparently cut from a similar cloth on songs like "Only a Moment" and "Fog." Similarities to other artists are likewise either a clear indication of the band's influences or an amazing mind-fuck of a coincidence: Jonathan Visger's left-of-center vocal tendencies and the band's copious use of various studio embellishments on tracks like "Safe for the Time Being" and "In the Mirror" resemble outtakes from Radiohead's {Kid A}, while Visger's yelps that kick off "Alone" sound ripped from the Frank Black playbook. Whether it's homage or pastiche is up for debate.
Still, there are enough unconventional quirks here to show the band has creativity to spare and that their best work is yet to come. Mason Proper ambitiously covers a wide range of musical terrain, and in its best moments, this approach gives the album some personality and color. Opener "Fog" features refreshingly restrained keyboards and unassuming guitars, while "Point A to Point B" and "Out Dragging the River" are infectious pieces of indie pop, with nice harmonies, unobtrusive atmospheric flourishes, shimmering guitars and vocals that forgo the twitchiness that occasionally rears its spastic head. Musical and lyrical knives are brought out occasionally as well: the angular and piercing guitars of "Lock and Key" are accented by a few well-placed vocal darts, while "Shiny" features driving guitars - we'll let all the random blips and bleeps that add nothing to the song slide - and sneering vocals from Visger.
For the most part, these stylistic swings hold up and make for a satisfying, though sometimes overly derivative, listen. Though post-production clutter and studio embellishments doom certain songs - witness the remedial quasi-funk of "Only a Moment," complete with mildly distorted vocals and enough instrumentation to make the listener beg for a simple acoustic tune -Olly Oxen Free periodically succeeds because it never settles on any one musical concept for very long. If the album unintentionally tempts the listener to focus only on identifying the band's apparent influences, beyond such games a few intriguing tracks prove the band has originality to burn. It won't send listeners into convulsions of hysteria and likewise won't make critics swoon, but it's a solid enough effort from a young band. For right now, at least, that's good enough.
Initially it's tempting to dismiss Olly Oxen Free as a bastardized, inferior clone of TV On the Radio's wildly-celebrated Return To Cookie Mountain. Besides enlisting the help of Cookie Mountain producer Chris Coady, the band is apparently cut from a similar cloth on songs like "Only a Moment" and "Fog." Similarities to other artists are likewise either a clear indication of the band's influences or an amazing mind-fuck of a coincidence: Jonathan Visger's left-of-center vocal tendencies and the band's copious use of various studio embellishments on tracks like "Safe for the Time Being" and "In the Mirror" resemble outtakes from Radiohead's {Kid A}, while Visger's yelps that kick off "Alone" sound ripped from the Frank Black playbook. Whether it's homage or pastiche is up for debate.
Still, there are enough unconventional quirks here to show the band has creativity to spare and that their best work is yet to come. Mason Proper ambitiously covers a wide range of musical terrain, and in its best moments, this approach gives the album some personality and color. Opener "Fog" features refreshingly restrained keyboards and unassuming guitars, while "Point A to Point B" and "Out Dragging the River" are infectious pieces of indie pop, with nice harmonies, unobtrusive atmospheric flourishes, shimmering guitars and vocals that forgo the twitchiness that occasionally rears its spastic head. Musical and lyrical knives are brought out occasionally as well: the angular and piercing guitars of "Lock and Key" are accented by a few well-placed vocal darts, while "Shiny" features driving guitars - we'll let all the random blips and bleeps that add nothing to the song slide - and sneering vocals from Visger.
For the most part, these stylistic swings hold up and make for a satisfying, though sometimes overly derivative, listen. Though post-production clutter and studio embellishments doom certain songs - witness the remedial quasi-funk of "Only a Moment," complete with mildly distorted vocals and enough instrumentation to make the listener beg for a simple acoustic tune -Olly Oxen Free periodically succeeds because it never settles on any one musical concept for very long. If the album unintentionally tempts the listener to focus only on identifying the band's apparent influences, beyond such games a few intriguing tracks prove the band has originality to burn. It won't send listeners into convulsions of hysteria and likewise won't make critics swoon, but it's a solid enough effort from a young band. For right now, at least, that's good enough.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Revisit: Big Black
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. read them all at spectrumculture.com
The album title is probably enough to still keep most nervous onlookers away. Released in 1987, Big Black's Songs About Fucking was a fitting swan song for a band whose records unapologetically and brashly explored the seediest and most disturbing of human tendencies and perversions. With songs covering topics that few other bands would have the balls (or perhaps good taste) to take on - indiscriminate violence, sexual dominance, South American torture techniques - the album is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull. Few records have a sound that fits the subject matter as well as this one, with the album incorporating the trademarks early industrial music that would eventually be hijacked by a seemingly endless piss stream of Big Black imitators and Steve Albini wannabes. As uncompromising now as it was when it was released over 20 years ago, Songs About Fucking is among the most direct albums to slither its way from the sordid underbelly of any decade.
By 1987 Big Black had achieved a certain level of indie notoriety and infamy. "Vocalist" Albini had already earned a reputation as one the surliest and sharpest-tongued critics of mainstream music, the record industry and anything else that dared to stumble into his cross-hairs. Much of this abrasive, in-your-face approach has become the stuff of Big Black legend: the Headache EP's original artwork with its gruesome photos of an alleged car crash victim's head split in two; Atomizer's parade of bored-as-hell small-town suicidal arsonists, child molesters, killers and societal bottom feeders; the band's fiercely-defended indie ideals; a pounding drum machine coupled with guitars and deranged vocals that either left listeners running for cover or wanting more.
Songs About Fucking synthesizes everything brutal, challenging and memorable about Big Black better than any of the band's previous EPs or even the holy grail of Atomizer. While that first full length record sometimes sounded like a nihilist film set to music as it offered its fair share of depravity - "Jordan, Minnesota," "Kerosene" and "Fists of Love" for example - Songs About Fucking was the band's most focused, cohesive and thought-provoking work. The album is essentially a sensory assault with few peers in '80s indie: against the persistent and throbbing drum machine Roland TR-606 (credited in the liner notes as a band member), Santiago Durango's and Albini's guitars are malevolently precise, while Dave Riley's bass adds to this tension. Albini's vocals, variously barked or simply spat out and delivered with a mixture of malice and rage, are alternately buried in the mix to be rendered incomprehensible or just audible enough to require careful listening; the listener's eardrums pay the price when trying to decipher who's dying or killing, getting screwed over or just plain screwed, or some combination of all of these. After the warm-up of "The Power of Independent Trucking" and a cover of Kraftwerk's "The Model," the rest of the album rushes by in a blitz; from "Bad Penny" to "King of the Jews," the album's manic pace never eases. It's a litany of horrors that never relents, with only one song - the twisted fairy tale of "Kitty Empire" - eclipsing the three-minute mark. A good thing perhaps: any longer and the album's metallic dissonance might have become repetitive, predictable or more than one person can take.
While other albums deemed confrontational upon their release now sound tame by comparison, Songs About Fucking's content is still unnerving. Albini almost too-convincingly inhabits the minds of the album's villains in various first-person narratives. The sadist of "Precious Thing" says that "I would like to wrap your hair round your neck like a noose/ I would like to wrap your legs around my neck like a lock," while the narrator of "Bad Penny" is remorseless as he boasts of the revenge he's exacted via the oldest weapon known to man ("I think I fucked your girlfriend once/ Maybe twice, I don't remember/ Then I fucked all your friend's girlfriends/ Now they hate you"). For as blunt as such songs are, they almost pale in comparison to "Fish Fry," hands down the album's most chilling track. An appalling ditty about a murderer "hosin' out the cab of his pickup truck" who's "got his 8-track playin' really fuckin' loud" after heaving his victim into a pond, Albini's vocals vacillate between an observer's journalistic detachment or cop talk ("she's wearin' his bootprint on her forehead") and the killer's rationale for his actions: "sometimes you know you want to fuck somebody up/ Sometimes you just want to fuck." Coupled with the song's tough arrangement, Albini's delivery is sinister like few other songs can claim to be, with these venom-laced vocals an unholy union of spite and disgust.
At some point an ambitious critic will show how these songs fit within the American folk murder ballad tradition (setting aside the sound and liberal use of F-bombs, the similarities between Big Black's songs and, say, "Stagger Lee" are intriguing) but, for now, Songs About Fucking can be seen as a number of different things: a warped inversion of the love song taken to its nastiest extreme; an intentionally provocative record from a group whose frontman clearly mastered the art of the put down; a crowning achievement from a band who manipulates its artistic license to spit in the face of what's considered appropriate subject matter, all the while blurring the line between a band's persona and its musical content. Of course there are plenty of objectionable acts throughout Songs About Fucking, but perhaps that's the point. It's simply an album of ugly events, characters and desires set to a devastatingly appropriate soundtrack of pummeling guitars and a jacked-up drum machine. It makes no apologies for its content and sometimes precariously seems to revel in its thick layer of filth and violence. The social commentary here is of the most cynical kind, suggesting that the line between civility and our darkest impulses is thin. Though Albini would go on to be better known for his "recording" work with numerous bands and a younger generation would eventually get their grubby paws on Big Black's sound and deaden it enough for mass consumption, Songs About Fucking puts all of those imposters to shame. It still ranks among the most complex and unforgiving albums to emerge from the 1980s.
The album title is probably enough to still keep most nervous onlookers away. Released in 1987, Big Black's Songs About Fucking was a fitting swan song for a band whose records unapologetically and brashly explored the seediest and most disturbing of human tendencies and perversions. With songs covering topics that few other bands would have the balls (or perhaps good taste) to take on - indiscriminate violence, sexual dominance, South American torture techniques - the album is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull. Few records have a sound that fits the subject matter as well as this one, with the album incorporating the trademarks early industrial music that would eventually be hijacked by a seemingly endless piss stream of Big Black imitators and Steve Albini wannabes. As uncompromising now as it was when it was released over 20 years ago, Songs About Fucking is among the most direct albums to slither its way from the sordid underbelly of any decade.
By 1987 Big Black had achieved a certain level of indie notoriety and infamy. "Vocalist" Albini had already earned a reputation as one the surliest and sharpest-tongued critics of mainstream music, the record industry and anything else that dared to stumble into his cross-hairs. Much of this abrasive, in-your-face approach has become the stuff of Big Black legend: the Headache EP's original artwork with its gruesome photos of an alleged car crash victim's head split in two; Atomizer's parade of bored-as-hell small-town suicidal arsonists, child molesters, killers and societal bottom feeders; the band's fiercely-defended indie ideals; a pounding drum machine coupled with guitars and deranged vocals that either left listeners running for cover or wanting more.
Songs About Fucking synthesizes everything brutal, challenging and memorable about Big Black better than any of the band's previous EPs or even the holy grail of Atomizer. While that first full length record sometimes sounded like a nihilist film set to music as it offered its fair share of depravity - "Jordan, Minnesota," "Kerosene" and "Fists of Love" for example - Songs About Fucking was the band's most focused, cohesive and thought-provoking work. The album is essentially a sensory assault with few peers in '80s indie: against the persistent and throbbing drum machine Roland TR-606 (credited in the liner notes as a band member), Santiago Durango's and Albini's guitars are malevolently precise, while Dave Riley's bass adds to this tension. Albini's vocals, variously barked or simply spat out and delivered with a mixture of malice and rage, are alternately buried in the mix to be rendered incomprehensible or just audible enough to require careful listening; the listener's eardrums pay the price when trying to decipher who's dying or killing, getting screwed over or just plain screwed, or some combination of all of these. After the warm-up of "The Power of Independent Trucking" and a cover of Kraftwerk's "The Model," the rest of the album rushes by in a blitz; from "Bad Penny" to "King of the Jews," the album's manic pace never eases. It's a litany of horrors that never relents, with only one song - the twisted fairy tale of "Kitty Empire" - eclipsing the three-minute mark. A good thing perhaps: any longer and the album's metallic dissonance might have become repetitive, predictable or more than one person can take.
While other albums deemed confrontational upon their release now sound tame by comparison, Songs About Fucking's content is still unnerving. Albini almost too-convincingly inhabits the minds of the album's villains in various first-person narratives. The sadist of "Precious Thing" says that "I would like to wrap your hair round your neck like a noose/ I would like to wrap your legs around my neck like a lock," while the narrator of "Bad Penny" is remorseless as he boasts of the revenge he's exacted via the oldest weapon known to man ("I think I fucked your girlfriend once/ Maybe twice, I don't remember/ Then I fucked all your friend's girlfriends/ Now they hate you"). For as blunt as such songs are, they almost pale in comparison to "Fish Fry," hands down the album's most chilling track. An appalling ditty about a murderer "hosin' out the cab of his pickup truck" who's "got his 8-track playin' really fuckin' loud" after heaving his victim into a pond, Albini's vocals vacillate between an observer's journalistic detachment or cop talk ("she's wearin' his bootprint on her forehead") and the killer's rationale for his actions: "sometimes you know you want to fuck somebody up/ Sometimes you just want to fuck." Coupled with the song's tough arrangement, Albini's delivery is sinister like few other songs can claim to be, with these venom-laced vocals an unholy union of spite and disgust.
At some point an ambitious critic will show how these songs fit within the American folk murder ballad tradition (setting aside the sound and liberal use of F-bombs, the similarities between Big Black's songs and, say, "Stagger Lee" are intriguing) but, for now, Songs About Fucking can be seen as a number of different things: a warped inversion of the love song taken to its nastiest extreme; an intentionally provocative record from a group whose frontman clearly mastered the art of the put down; a crowning achievement from a band who manipulates its artistic license to spit in the face of what's considered appropriate subject matter, all the while blurring the line between a band's persona and its musical content. Of course there are plenty of objectionable acts throughout Songs About Fucking, but perhaps that's the point. It's simply an album of ugly events, characters and desires set to a devastatingly appropriate soundtrack of pummeling guitars and a jacked-up drum machine. It makes no apologies for its content and sometimes precariously seems to revel in its thick layer of filth and violence. The social commentary here is of the most cynical kind, suggesting that the line between civility and our darkest impulses is thin. Though Albini would go on to be better known for his "recording" work with numerous bands and a younger generation would eventually get their grubby paws on Big Black's sound and deaden it enough for mass consumption, Songs About Fucking puts all of those imposters to shame. It still ranks among the most complex and unforgiving albums to emerge from the 1980s.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Raincoats: The Raincoats
spectrumculture.com.
Although The Raincoats don't exactly qualify as an entirely unheralded post-punk band, in many ways they were never afforded the broad critical acclaim their music warranted. Relying on an odd mixture of sometimes-shouted, sometimes-spoken vocals, intricate vocals and harmonies that floated above and underneath each other, as well as arrangements that fell somewhere between abrasive and bouncy, the band quietly released a series of remarkable albums that were met with little commercial fanfare and polite, but modest critical reception. The group seemed destined for little more than a cult following until Kurt Cobain, in the type of patronage that did wonders for other bands, offered his endorsement in the Insecticide liner notes. It's no coincidence that the band's albums were soon thereafter reissued by Rough Trade in 1993, with Cobain and Sonic Youth screecher/killer of songs Kim Gordon offering their fan boy-like thoughts on the band as part of these reissues.
Kill Rock Stars' vinyl-only reissue of The Raincoats' self-titled 1979 debut confirms that the record deserves a spot among the most essential post-punk releases. The Raincoats has aged remarkably well and shows none of the musical shortcomings and idiotic posturing that have made numerous albums that arose from punk's ashes unlistenable and downright laughable. While time has a way of cruelly exposing an album's flaws, there is very little to quibble about with The Raincoats, even 30 years after its original release.
Though the band's members - Ana DaSilva, Gina Birch, Vicky Aspinall and one-time Joe Strummer girlfriend/Slits drummer Palmolive - were clearly products of the British punk scene, a second glance at the album reveals that the band had more in common with groups like Pere Ubu and the Pop Group than the myopic and musically-stunted British punk rockers with whom they are usually associated. The album still defies easy categorization. With its chanted vocals and searing guitars, the band's first single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket," - added as the leading track on this reissue, though it wasn't included on the original LP - is reminiscent of the Clash circa 1977, but the remaining songs are far more diverse. Though some past reviews never got much further than gushing about the novelty of an all-female group covering Ray Davies' "Lola," the album's best moments occur in the band's original material. Songs like "No Side To Fall In," "Off Duty Trip" and "Adventures Close to Home" juxtapose rough vocals with hypnotic harmonies and repeated phrases with layers of instrumentation that incorporate elements of punk, folk and 1960 garage rock. Though the lyrics aren't incidental, the band was clearly equally interested in how words and phrases could be manipulated to create unique sounds.
In retrospect, the album sounds far less harsh and severe than it likely did in 1979. Even the record's most experimental moments - the tempo shifts and shouted vocals of "Life on the Line," Lara Logic's squealing saxophone on "Black and White," Aspinall's piercing violin squawks on "The Void," "You're a Million" and "In Love" - are tempered by a range of musical styles and textures that relieve some of the songs' fairly desperate sentiments and avant-garde tendencies. While a vinyl-only reissue will likely find only a limited audience, it nevertheless allows listeners to place The Raincoats and their addictive debut within a broader context of both its influences and later bands that would claim it as inspiration. The Raincoats is now, quite simply, a classic album and one of the most thrilling debuts to emerge from the post-punk era.
Although The Raincoats don't exactly qualify as an entirely unheralded post-punk band, in many ways they were never afforded the broad critical acclaim their music warranted. Relying on an odd mixture of sometimes-shouted, sometimes-spoken vocals, intricate vocals and harmonies that floated above and underneath each other, as well as arrangements that fell somewhere between abrasive and bouncy, the band quietly released a series of remarkable albums that were met with little commercial fanfare and polite, but modest critical reception. The group seemed destined for little more than a cult following until Kurt Cobain, in the type of patronage that did wonders for other bands, offered his endorsement in the Insecticide liner notes. It's no coincidence that the band's albums were soon thereafter reissued by Rough Trade in 1993, with Cobain and Sonic Youth screecher/killer of songs Kim Gordon offering their fan boy-like thoughts on the band as part of these reissues.
Kill Rock Stars' vinyl-only reissue of The Raincoats' self-titled 1979 debut confirms that the record deserves a spot among the most essential post-punk releases. The Raincoats has aged remarkably well and shows none of the musical shortcomings and idiotic posturing that have made numerous albums that arose from punk's ashes unlistenable and downright laughable. While time has a way of cruelly exposing an album's flaws, there is very little to quibble about with The Raincoats, even 30 years after its original release.
Though the band's members - Ana DaSilva, Gina Birch, Vicky Aspinall and one-time Joe Strummer girlfriend/Slits drummer Palmolive - were clearly products of the British punk scene, a second glance at the album reveals that the band had more in common with groups like Pere Ubu and the Pop Group than the myopic and musically-stunted British punk rockers with whom they are usually associated. The album still defies easy categorization. With its chanted vocals and searing guitars, the band's first single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket," - added as the leading track on this reissue, though it wasn't included on the original LP - is reminiscent of the Clash circa 1977, but the remaining songs are far more diverse. Though some past reviews never got much further than gushing about the novelty of an all-female group covering Ray Davies' "Lola," the album's best moments occur in the band's original material. Songs like "No Side To Fall In," "Off Duty Trip" and "Adventures Close to Home" juxtapose rough vocals with hypnotic harmonies and repeated phrases with layers of instrumentation that incorporate elements of punk, folk and 1960 garage rock. Though the lyrics aren't incidental, the band was clearly equally interested in how words and phrases could be manipulated to create unique sounds.
In retrospect, the album sounds far less harsh and severe than it likely did in 1979. Even the record's most experimental moments - the tempo shifts and shouted vocals of "Life on the Line," Lara Logic's squealing saxophone on "Black and White," Aspinall's piercing violin squawks on "The Void," "You're a Million" and "In Love" - are tempered by a range of musical styles and textures that relieve some of the songs' fairly desperate sentiments and avant-garde tendencies. While a vinyl-only reissue will likely find only a limited audience, it nevertheless allows listeners to place The Raincoats and their addictive debut within a broader context of both its influences and later bands that would claim it as inspiration. The Raincoats is now, quite simply, a classic album and one of the most thrilling debuts to emerge from the post-punk era.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Revisit: The Worst Hard Time - by Timothy Egan
spectrumculture.com
One of the enduring images of the Great Depression is that of the Dust Bowl migrant family heading for any point west, their rickety jalopy packed and heavy with whatever the dust storms hadn't yet destroyed. While this image has been forever etched into Americans' understanding of the Depression - due in no small part to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie's songs of the triumphs and tribulations of these Dust Bowl refugees - it's nevertheless a bit misleading. The overwhelming majority of people who experienced the Dust Bowl actually never pulled up their stakes and instead simply did their best to survive this country's worst environmental disaster, as Timothy Egan points out in his stunning and heartbreaking The Worst Hard Time. Originally published in 2006, the book is quite simply historical writing of the best kind: vibrant, engrossing, well researched and carefully crafted.
It's become fashionable for various news media to flippantly compare the United States' current economic recession to that of the Great Depression. Though Egan's book was published well before the economy went into the crapper, the author's exploration of the Depression's causes will sound familiar to contemporary readers: banks loaned massive amounts of money with reckless abandon as settlers across the Great Plains spent wildly, giving very little thought to the possibility of a market downturn or that the bottom would ever fall out. Yet what becomes clear is that no financial plunges or declines in standards of living have yet to even come close to what Dust Bowl families experienced: farms that grew nothing, wheat prices falling until they couldn't get any lower, years without any income, a nearly-five year drought, tumbleweed and thistle for food, dust storms so frequent they practically became part of daily life, dust pneumonia in the lungs. "The dust always found a way in...dust dominated life" Egan writes, later pointing out that the dust storms were sometimes strong enough to carry to New York and even the White House.
Written like a great novel, with none of the monotony and detachment that plague countless historical studies, The Worst Hard Time is essentially an elegy to both those who suffered through the Depression in the heartland as well as the American spirit, with all its flaws, vitality, dignity and contradictions. In this way, Egan points out that the dusters were primarily the result of massive over-plowing, where the once-grassy land was beaten to shit by both well-meaning citizens and "suitcase farmers" interested only in making a killing before leaving town, without losing any sense of sympathy for the Dust Bowl's true victims. Indeed, some of the stories recounted here are the stuff of true tragedy: a Nebraska farmer's diary records his struggle to simply survive and find any meaning in a jobless and joyless life; Russian immigrants desperately try to retain a sense of identity on the unforgiving plains; a Boise City family suffers the death of its matriarch and her youngest great-granddaughter within a few hours of each other.
The Worst Hard Time is far more than just another book about the Depression. While its focus is on those who experienced the Dust Bowl at its harshest and most punishing, its scope is broader and its themes are universal. It's about how Americans ravaged by the Depression coped with an unforgiving landscape fallowed by overzealous farming and its consequences, maintained a sense of dignity and identity against impossible odds and attempted to survive in long-ago places like Dalhart, Texas and Inavale, Nebraska. As the number of Dust Bowl survivors becomes fewer each year, it's likely their story will be relegated to the history books and as fodder for academics. The Worst Hard Time shows that their story, while of a specific time and place, is universal and relevant to modern readers.
One of the enduring images of the Great Depression is that of the Dust Bowl migrant family heading for any point west, their rickety jalopy packed and heavy with whatever the dust storms hadn't yet destroyed. While this image has been forever etched into Americans' understanding of the Depression - due in no small part to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie's songs of the triumphs and tribulations of these Dust Bowl refugees - it's nevertheless a bit misleading. The overwhelming majority of people who experienced the Dust Bowl actually never pulled up their stakes and instead simply did their best to survive this country's worst environmental disaster, as Timothy Egan points out in his stunning and heartbreaking The Worst Hard Time. Originally published in 2006, the book is quite simply historical writing of the best kind: vibrant, engrossing, well researched and carefully crafted.
It's become fashionable for various news media to flippantly compare the United States' current economic recession to that of the Great Depression. Though Egan's book was published well before the economy went into the crapper, the author's exploration of the Depression's causes will sound familiar to contemporary readers: banks loaned massive amounts of money with reckless abandon as settlers across the Great Plains spent wildly, giving very little thought to the possibility of a market downturn or that the bottom would ever fall out. Yet what becomes clear is that no financial plunges or declines in standards of living have yet to even come close to what Dust Bowl families experienced: farms that grew nothing, wheat prices falling until they couldn't get any lower, years without any income, a nearly-five year drought, tumbleweed and thistle for food, dust storms so frequent they practically became part of daily life, dust pneumonia in the lungs. "The dust always found a way in...dust dominated life" Egan writes, later pointing out that the dust storms were sometimes strong enough to carry to New York and even the White House.
Written like a great novel, with none of the monotony and detachment that plague countless historical studies, The Worst Hard Time is essentially an elegy to both those who suffered through the Depression in the heartland as well as the American spirit, with all its flaws, vitality, dignity and contradictions. In this way, Egan points out that the dusters were primarily the result of massive over-plowing, where the once-grassy land was beaten to shit by both well-meaning citizens and "suitcase farmers" interested only in making a killing before leaving town, without losing any sense of sympathy for the Dust Bowl's true victims. Indeed, some of the stories recounted here are the stuff of true tragedy: a Nebraska farmer's diary records his struggle to simply survive and find any meaning in a jobless and joyless life; Russian immigrants desperately try to retain a sense of identity on the unforgiving plains; a Boise City family suffers the death of its matriarch and her youngest great-granddaughter within a few hours of each other.
The Worst Hard Time is far more than just another book about the Depression. While its focus is on those who experienced the Dust Bowl at its harshest and most punishing, its scope is broader and its themes are universal. It's about how Americans ravaged by the Depression coped with an unforgiving landscape fallowed by overzealous farming and its consequences, maintained a sense of dignity and identity against impossible odds and attempted to survive in long-ago places like Dalhart, Texas and Inavale, Nebraska. As the number of Dust Bowl survivors becomes fewer each year, it's likely their story will be relegated to the history books and as fodder for academics. The Worst Hard Time shows that their story, while of a specific time and place, is universal and relevant to modern readers.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Elvis Costello: Live at the El Mocambo
spectrumculture.com
The Elvis Costello reissue machine continues to hum along relentlessly. After the Rykodisc reissues of 1993-1995 did a serviceable job in re-examining Costello's back catalog, these were eventually bested by Rhino's stunning series, which, to use the technical term, kicked major ass. With their classy packaging, carefully considered artwork and humorous, honest and revealing Costello-penned liner notes, this collection of outtakes, live cuts, alternate versions and failed experiments appeared to be the final word on all things Costello. Not so fast. Since then, the artist's work has been repackaged several times over, in products ranging from interesting to entirely pointless. While another release of both My Aim Is True and This Year's Model from Hip-O each included a second disc with a live show - in addition to a plethora of bland outtakes, forgettable demos and other travesties - they at least offered something not previously commercially available. Other efforts, such as a pricey box set of singles and another pressing of the musician's studio albums, have been less forgivable, especially in an era where CD sales continue to plummet and music has been effectively reduced to little more than pieces of digital data.
Hip-O's reissue of Live at the El Mocambo will likely do nothing to change the skeptical minds of fans who have long since dismissed such artifacts as little more than mercenary cash grabs. While the performance is amazing, this release offers nothing new and too often plays like just another thoughtless, recycled rehash from a label short on both new ideas and any real interest in giving fans something of merit. Though Hip-O is quick to point out that the concert was previously only available in limited quantities as a promo album and later as part of the 2 ½ Years box set, this recording is about as difficult to track down as a right-wing health care reform reactionary; the El Mocambo show is perhaps Costello and the Attractions' most bootlegged concert. This latest repackaged dud shows the complete lack of imagination, creativity, and bang-for-your-buck that we've all, unfortunately, come to expect from music labels.
Enough has been written about the El Mocambo performance to render additional commentary redundant; suffice it to say that it's a defining moment in the group's history. At the least, this reissue confirms that the show's reputation as among the foursome's best is well-deserved. The tentativeness that crept into the group in late 1977 shows- check out the Nashville Rooms concert included in the MAIT deluxe edition for a band struggling to mesh- is long gone here, with Costello spitting out various barbed insults, insinuations and put-downs while Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas add musical venom to the mix. It's simply the sound of four guys with a jaw-dropping set of songs and the right chemistry- of a few different kinds, I'd guess.
One of the charms about this tape has always been its roughness. Costello's voice occasionally dominates the mix as the singer practically swallows the microphone in a rush to spit out various accusations and insults, most noticeably on "Mystery Dance," "Welcome to the Working Week" and "Miracle Man," while the Attractions' instruments alternately complement each other and fight for supremacy. The crowd remains wired and idiotically vocal for most of the show, while Costello engages in the requisite but mostly mild audience baiting (though his tone becomes fairly malevolent right before the band deconstructs "Pump It Up" with the help of Martin Belmont). A common shortcoming of any live disc is that it lacks a visual element, but a definite sense of atmosphere is palpable here: the crowd's amped-up disposition lasts for the show's duration (the infamous "yeehaw" concertgoer who yelps throughout and who, perhaps appropriately, makes his presence most known during "Less Than Zero," is still audible). While there is no appreciable difference in sound quality (maybe it's a little louder) on this release versus that of either its 2 ½ Years or bootleg predecessors, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yet a scintillating performance and decent packaging job (Look, kids! Pictures!) aren't enough to justify the reissue's complete lack of bonus material. There's simply no incentive for fans who already own this record to purchase it again: four songs performed with Belmont and Nick Lowe are excluded, and there are no soundchecks, interviews, or, Christ, songs from the following night's show at the same club to make the package more attractive. With the June 1978 Hollywood High concert - parts of which were already included in Rhino's Armed Forces version - reportedly next up for release, Hip-O needs to move beyond simply repackaging previously released performances and start rewarding Costello's fans for their patience and patronage, many of whom are likely developing nervous tics at that very mention of the word reissue. A wealth of vintage Costello and the Attractions shows circulate on bootleg, and if done right, this ongoing live concert campaign could provide plenty of treats for long-time fans as well as those who only know Costello as the twitchy weirdo from the Austin Powers movie.
And so the latest iteration of Live at the El Mocambo is simply another underwhelming and useless Costello reissue, of which it's hard not to conclude that Hip-O either has no real clue what music fans look for in a reissue or isn't particularly interested in finding out. Whether a listener has heard this show before or not isn't the point: there is a way to accommodate both lifers and newbies and make both feel like a record label isn't roughly shaking their pockets out like a goon squad street tough. While this 1978 performance belongs on any list of essential post-punk live shows, Hip-O's uninspired release is ultimately a failed hatchet job. It's about as attractive as sea amoeba - though it's worth noting that, unlike this release, sea amoeba serves a purpose - and suggests listeners better have low expectations for future entries in "The Costello Show."
The Elvis Costello reissue machine continues to hum along relentlessly. After the Rykodisc reissues of 1993-1995 did a serviceable job in re-examining Costello's back catalog, these were eventually bested by Rhino's stunning series, which, to use the technical term, kicked major ass. With their classy packaging, carefully considered artwork and humorous, honest and revealing Costello-penned liner notes, this collection of outtakes, live cuts, alternate versions and failed experiments appeared to be the final word on all things Costello. Not so fast. Since then, the artist's work has been repackaged several times over, in products ranging from interesting to entirely pointless. While another release of both My Aim Is True and This Year's Model from Hip-O each included a second disc with a live show - in addition to a plethora of bland outtakes, forgettable demos and other travesties - they at least offered something not previously commercially available. Other efforts, such as a pricey box set of singles and another pressing of the musician's studio albums, have been less forgivable, especially in an era where CD sales continue to plummet and music has been effectively reduced to little more than pieces of digital data.
Hip-O's reissue of Live at the El Mocambo will likely do nothing to change the skeptical minds of fans who have long since dismissed such artifacts as little more than mercenary cash grabs. While the performance is amazing, this release offers nothing new and too often plays like just another thoughtless, recycled rehash from a label short on both new ideas and any real interest in giving fans something of merit. Though Hip-O is quick to point out that the concert was previously only available in limited quantities as a promo album and later as part of the 2 ½ Years box set, this recording is about as difficult to track down as a right-wing health care reform reactionary; the El Mocambo show is perhaps Costello and the Attractions' most bootlegged concert. This latest repackaged dud shows the complete lack of imagination, creativity, and bang-for-your-buck that we've all, unfortunately, come to expect from music labels.
Enough has been written about the El Mocambo performance to render additional commentary redundant; suffice it to say that it's a defining moment in the group's history. At the least, this reissue confirms that the show's reputation as among the foursome's best is well-deserved. The tentativeness that crept into the group in late 1977 shows- check out the Nashville Rooms concert included in the MAIT deluxe edition for a band struggling to mesh- is long gone here, with Costello spitting out various barbed insults, insinuations and put-downs while Steve Nieve, Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas add musical venom to the mix. It's simply the sound of four guys with a jaw-dropping set of songs and the right chemistry- of a few different kinds, I'd guess.
One of the charms about this tape has always been its roughness. Costello's voice occasionally dominates the mix as the singer practically swallows the microphone in a rush to spit out various accusations and insults, most noticeably on "Mystery Dance," "Welcome to the Working Week" and "Miracle Man," while the Attractions' instruments alternately complement each other and fight for supremacy. The crowd remains wired and idiotically vocal for most of the show, while Costello engages in the requisite but mostly mild audience baiting (though his tone becomes fairly malevolent right before the band deconstructs "Pump It Up" with the help of Martin Belmont). A common shortcoming of any live disc is that it lacks a visual element, but a definite sense of atmosphere is palpable here: the crowd's amped-up disposition lasts for the show's duration (the infamous "yeehaw" concertgoer who yelps throughout and who, perhaps appropriately, makes his presence most known during "Less Than Zero," is still audible). While there is no appreciable difference in sound quality (maybe it's a little louder) on this release versus that of either its 2 ½ Years or bootleg predecessors, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yet a scintillating performance and decent packaging job (Look, kids! Pictures!) aren't enough to justify the reissue's complete lack of bonus material. There's simply no incentive for fans who already own this record to purchase it again: four songs performed with Belmont and Nick Lowe are excluded, and there are no soundchecks, interviews, or, Christ, songs from the following night's show at the same club to make the package more attractive. With the June 1978 Hollywood High concert - parts of which were already included in Rhino's Armed Forces version - reportedly next up for release, Hip-O needs to move beyond simply repackaging previously released performances and start rewarding Costello's fans for their patience and patronage, many of whom are likely developing nervous tics at that very mention of the word reissue. A wealth of vintage Costello and the Attractions shows circulate on bootleg, and if done right, this ongoing live concert campaign could provide plenty of treats for long-time fans as well as those who only know Costello as the twitchy weirdo from the Austin Powers movie.
And so the latest iteration of Live at the El Mocambo is simply another underwhelming and useless Costello reissue, of which it's hard not to conclude that Hip-O either has no real clue what music fans look for in a reissue or isn't particularly interested in finding out. Whether a listener has heard this show before or not isn't the point: there is a way to accommodate both lifers and newbies and make both feel like a record label isn't roughly shaking their pockets out like a goon squad street tough. While this 1978 performance belongs on any list of essential post-punk live shows, Hip-O's uninspired release is ultimately a failed hatchet job. It's about as attractive as sea amoeba - though it's worth noting that, unlike this release, sea amoeba serves a purpose - and suggests listeners better have low expectations for future entries in "The Costello Show."
Friday, September 25, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Vic Chesnutt: At the Cut
read more kick-arse stuff at spectrumculture.com
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Damon & Naomi: The Sub Pop Years
everyone cool is going to spectrumculture.com. they told me so.
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.
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.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Brown Recluse [sings]: The Soft Skin EP
go to spectrumculture.com. again. and again.
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Beatles Playlist
this is a fantastic feature. Go to spectrumculture.com and read the whole thing. Go.
"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.
"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
your crazy uncle said to go to spectrumculture.com for the full list.
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
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
Friday, August 21, 2009
1977: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Blank Generation
go to spectrumculture.com for the full fantastic Year One list.
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
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
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Revisit: Bob Dylan - Oh Mercy (1989)
go to spectrumculture.com for more good stuff.
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.
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.
Monday, August 10, 2009
The Antlers: Hospice
please frequent spectrumculture.com.
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.
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.
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