Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell present KORT: Invariable Heartache

Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell present KORT
Invariable Heartache
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: City Slang

If all covers albums sounded this good, they'd likely lose their stigma of being vanity projects or the byproducts of a band just fucking around because it's clean out of new material. A collaboration between Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and singer-songwriter Cortney Tidwell under the cutely-dubbed KORT moniker, Invariable Heartache is a respectfully understated homage to the Nashville-based Chart Records label. For Tidwell, the songs are literally part of her family's history; her grandfather, Slim Williamson, ran the label, her father handled its A&R and her mother was part of the label's artist roster. For Wagner, it's a chance to sing homespun lyrics that aren't coated in ambiguity; enjoy the simplicity of something like, "I'm blue as a bluebird/ With no song to sing," because stuff like that doesn't come out of Wagner's mouth all that often.

Invariable Heartache very well could have been a train wreck, with Tidwell's personal connections to the label causing the album to come across as overly worshipful and Wagner's "unique" vocals making the songs sound like little more than the latest Lambchop record. But for the most part the wheels stay on and there are no disasters and very few missteps among the 12 songs. The album favors country music's depressive side - plenty of lonesome, boozy, desperate, lovesick, jilted and otherwise distraught lovers here - and it's on such ballads like "Incredibly Lonely," "Eyes Look Away" and "She Came Around Last Night" where the two singers' contrasting voices (hers is clean, pure and pitch-perfect; Wagner's is...not) mesh well together. Tidwell brings a wounded-country-heart believability to the several songs she solos on, especially "He's Only a Memory Away," "I Can't Sleep With You" and the album-closing, grand weeper "Who's Gonna Love Me Now," though her vocals on "Yours Forever" lay on the woe-is-me misery too thickly. The duo's timing and the album's pace are integral, as both artists sprinkle in up-tempo, cheerful and sometimes humorous moments, particularly on "Let's Think About Where We're Going" - where a man and woman each vow to basically forget about the other's sordid pasts, sexual perversions and rampant promiscuity - and "Penetration," whose somewhat-bizarre arrangement makes it the oddest song included. It is not, as some may have hoped, a Stooges cover.

One obvious advantage Tidwell and Wagner have in reworking the songs on Invariable Heartache is that none of them are standards. Aside from perhaps "Picking Wild Mountain Berries," which treasured icon/butt-of-the-joke Conway Twitty made semi-famous, very little here will be familiar to listeners whose interest in country music doesn't extend past the late greats or today's current plague of pickup-truck-and-whiskey poseurs. The songs' obscurity makes it easy for a listener to not have any preconceived notions about what they "should" sound like; knowledge of the source material isn't a prerequisite to enjoying the album either.

Invariable Heartache is simply a consistently strong selection of cover songs that speaks to the quality of the material Chart Records released throughout the 1960s. A little bit of legwork to track down the label's originals comes highly recommended.

Drive-By Truckers: Go-Go Boots

Drive-By Truckers
Go-Go Boots
Rating: 3.7/5.0
Label: ATO Records

Whether or not Drive-By Truckers will ever manage to surpass 2001's Southern Rock Opera - considered the band's high-water mark, as well as one of alt-country's signature records - remains to be seen, but in almost every release since that double album they've managed to come damn close. Aside from their occasionally clumsy debut, Gangstabilly, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and a revolving cast of cohorts haven't released a bad album yet; few artists with a comparable volume of output in any genre can make that claim. Age hasn't caused the band to settle into a predictable pattern either; previous album The Big To-Do found the band successfully embracing classic rock, leading to some of the most positive reviews of their career.

Expect this general Truckers love-fest to continue with Go-Go Boots, an album that is, generally, the group's most introspective record to date. It's not a quiet album by any means - and parts of it are reminiscent of To-Do, especially the embers of electric guitar that burn on "Ray's Automatic Weapon" and "Used To Be a Cop" - but it's definitely not a, ahem, Southern rock opera, either. There's a Muscle Shoals-meets-Hoosier-blues feel to several songs, especially in the guitar work of the title song - about as sleazy and sordid a song Hood has written, complete with a cheating, murder-arranging man of God and his go-go boot-wearing mistress - and "The Thanksgiving Filter," a mostly bemused, if somewhat cynical, look at a family's numerous eccentricities ("You wonder why I drink and curse the holidays/ Blessed be my family from 300 miles away," Hood deadpans as the song closes). A large chunk of the album is acoustic-oriented with its instrumentation arranged in clean, straight lines; this approach almost always works, especially in "Assholes" - where Hood's vocal delivery coincidentally sounds a whole lot like Jeff Tweedy - and in "Dancin' Ricky," where Shonna Tucker religiously drops the "g" off words (somethin'/dancin'/countin'/spinnin'/actin') like any self-respecting twangy country singer should. Mike Cooley, sounding as much like a Statler Brother as Don Reid ever did, takes lead vocal on "The Weakest Man" and "Cartoon Gold," two plainspoken, traditional country tunes just begging for a Grand Ole Opry airing circa about 50 years ago.

But it's the murder songs that make Go-Go Boots worth its hour-plus running time. As self-contained narratives, the title song, "The Fireplace Poker" and "Pulaski" are flawless, with each song fleshed out with the kinds of articulate, lyrical details that give these songs believability. The manner in which the band tells these tales is similarly engaging and often quite contrasting. In "The Fireplace Poker," Hood practically gives a step-by-step account of the preacher's murder plot, whereas in "Go-Go Boots" he leaves the story to the reader's imagination and clams up like one of his villains might, saying only that, "it took only a little bit of cash and the deed was done." Cooley gives even fewer details in "Pulaski," whose final, and most lasting, image is that of a funeral procession for, presumably, the dead local girl for whom California once "seemed like heaven."

A few down moments on the album prevent it from being a Truckers masterpiece; Tucker's vocals are too bombastic for the tender balladry of the Eddie Hinton song "Where's Eddie," and the album ends with a dull, timid whimper via "Mercy Buckets." But its strengths more than make up for these rare weaknesses, and though Go-Go Boots isn't perfect, like almost every album the band has released since 2001, it's loaded with good stuff and doesn't get consumed by the broad shadow that Southern Rock Opera casts.

Daniel Martin Moore: In the Cool of the Day

Daniel Martin Moore
In the Cool of the Day
Rating: 2.3/5.0
Label: Sub Pop

In the Cool of the Day is primarily a collection of old American spirituals and gospel songs. Those few readers who actually have an interest in that stuff and are still reading already know that it's difficult to both record definitive versions of these songs and to make them resonate with a broad audience. For more than a few listeners, such songs might seem well past their expiration date, as neither their home-spun, quaint arrangements nor their frequently bizarre iconography are readily accessible in these hyper-modern times. Musicians of various calibers have attempted to make such songs matter to contemporary listeners and failed miserably; even masters like Cash and Dylan have periodically struggled to breathe new life into these songs.

Little surprise, then, that Daniel Martin Moore's latest album is merely serviceable; it won't launch a renewed interest in the music of this country's past, but to be fair that likely was never Moore's intention anyway. Cool is, quite simply, a politely conservative and almost immediately forgettable album in which the artist covers a few traditional songs, provides new lyrics to another and offers several new songs in a traditional vein. Anyone familiar with either Stray Age or Dear Companion will know what to expect here, as Moore never really deviates from those previous albums' blend of folk and Americana, as both he and his backing band utilize guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin and other instruments to keep these songs well within a definite comfort zone. The album's greatest strengths can be found in the four songs written by Moore - "All Ye Tenderhearted," "O My Soul," "Lay Down Your Lonesome Burden" and "Set Things Aright" - all of which speak to his talents as a lyricist and his ability to draw from both the themes and styles of the past without simply mimicking them (even if the song titles border on being a little too derivative).

But Cool is nevertheless bland and lifeless, nondescript in both its vocals and instrumentals and respectful of the source material to a fault. It's a trap that claims its fair share of victims - how does one adequately interpret these songs without making them sound overly reverential? - and it snares Moore throughout much of the album. The singer adds new lyrics to the Grayson/Whittier composition "Dark Road," a needless update on a song that doesn't really need to be tampered with. And so we're essentially called to worship at the altar of our musical heritage, as Moore and company academically perform oft-covered traditionals like "In the Garden," "Closer Walk with Thee" and "Up Above My Head" as well as the fairly obscure "It Is Well With My Soul;" dating from sometime in the 1880s, it's the oldest song included on Cool.

The album's prospects brighten, however briefly, with Moore's version of fellow Kentuckian Jean Ritchie's "Cool of the Day." It's a rare standout moment on an album whose greatest sin might be its ordinariness. No sane listener expects Moore to wildly reinvent these songs, but some sense of adventure would have counted for a lot here. Instead, we're left with an album that aids in the cultural preservation of old songs, and little else.

Broken Records: Let Me Come Home

Broken Records
Let Me Come Home
Rating: 2.0/50
Label: 4AD




So what does over-the-top emotional pleading mixed with deadly serious earnestness sound like? A lot like Let Me Come Home, the latest album from Scottish band Broken Records. In much the same way as their debut effort Until the Earth Begins to Part, super-heavy feelings of dread and despair are laid on pretty thick in both Jamie Sutherland's vocals and the group's arena-ready instrumentals, but rarely are they remotely believable. That might sound a bit callous, as the group spends Home pouring its guts out and doing its damnedest to make its songs sound grave and important, but the record is too overblown and dramatic for its own good. If subtlety in music is your thing, best to stay away from this one.

A listener can often tell a lot about an album by its song titles; in Home's case, track names like "A Darkness Rises Up," "I Used To Dream" and "You Know You're Not Dead" make the record's intentions painfully obvious. It's dark out there in the cruel, cruel world, man, and Broken Records wants you to know it, song after song. Thus the lyrics speak of tired bodies, heavy hearts, hometown ghosts and the ubiquitous one true love. And that's just the first song. Elsewhere there are concerns about insomnia, unemployment, death, mental decline, various methods of burial and virtually all other topics reminiscent of a twentysomething intoxicated on existentialism. As a vocalist Sutherland is too often prone to bouts of grandiose theatricality; he sometimes sings in a falsetto on both "The Motorcycle Boy Reigns" and "You Know You're Not Dead" and bellows almost the rest of the time, particularly on "A Leaving Song" and "Modern Worksong." One is almost tempted to dismiss these exaggerated vocals as intentionally overdramatic, but clearly that wasn't the aim here. The arrangements aren't unique or varied enough to either fit with or compensate for Sutherland's vocal approach; instead, the band repeatedly opts for a mighty big indie rock sound and even bigger finishes that soon become predictable and tedious.

Now, the nice section. Good things happen when both Sutherland and the band reign in their excesses and show even the slightest bit of restraint. The bleakness of "Dia dos Namorados!" is plausible, as Sutherland asks to be buried in "the shallow soil/ The filth and grime." His vocals are measured and understated, while the song's arrangement is practically skeletal compared to most of Home. "I Used To Dream" ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and for the better; the song is wonderfully sparse and well-written, its keyboards and light touches of strings complementing Sutherland's almost-hushed vocals. But such moments are rare, and ultimately the album suffocates under the weight of its lyrical melodrama and musical indulgences.

On the strength of these two tracks as well as album closer "Home," it's possible that Broken Records might be capable of crafting a more nuanced, heartfelt record before long. The emotions in Home's songs just might be the real deal, but they're couched in so many layers of verbal and auditory bombast that the album too frequently comes across like an emotional basketcase crying fake tears while the world checks it out, yawns and then goes about its business.

Lucinda Williams: Sweet Old World

Revisit:
Lucinda Williams
Sweet Old World
1992


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

In the early 1990s, Lucinda Williams was a mostly unknown country-folk singer/songwriter, her self-titled 1988 album garnering enthusiastic reviews from critics and fellow musicians but only modest commercial attention. It took a damn-near-perfect album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), to gain Williams a much larger fan base and establish her as one of music's leading lyricists. After Car Wheels, the singer faced a lifetime of critical hyperbole - even being inaccurately defined as the "female Bob Dylan" - and every album that followed would inevitably be judged against the mighty weight of that masterpiece.

All of which gives Sweet Old World a unique position in the musician's discography. It marks the final album in which Williams would be largely free of preconceived expectations from both critics and fans; it's also likely to be the last album in which the musician could work without facing comparisons to Car Wheels. It received consistently favorable reviews upon its release in 1992, though a complaint that continues to plague the artist - the amount of time it takes her to release a new record - can be found in some of these reviews. It's around the time of Sweet Old World that Williams gained a reputation as a truculent perfectionist in the studio; indeed, it would take another six years before its follow-up album was released.

The album is essentially split between tragic character studies - the one exception, "Little Angel, Little Brother," is commonly mistaken as a song about death, owing largely to its funereal arrangement and slow vocals - and relationship songs that emphasize specific details over grandiose, generalized statements about Love. In both cases the album is somewhat inconsistent, and pieces of it haven't aged particularly well. Still, Sweet Old World does contain two of Williams' finest written suicide songs: the title song and "Piñeola." Complete opposites in terms of execution - one is a tear-soaked ballad, the other mixes the blues with southern rock - both songs find Williams using specific images like the "sound of a midnight train," "dancing with no shoes," the cemetery in which Sonny is buried, a mourner dropping a "handful of dust" on a grave and parents removing blood-soaked sheets to make both songs and their sentiments tangible. We don't personally know the person or people she's singing about, but we almost feel like we do.

In a similar manner, both "Six Blocks Away" and "Memphis Pearl" are precise depictions of two people whose lives didn't turn out as they'd planned, though the subject of "Memphis Pearl" - a once-married and now presumably single mother whose eyes offer only a "vacant stare" - seems to be in a far more precarious situation than the lovesick fellow with the "regular job" and a "roof over his head and food to eat" in "Six Blocks Away." But Williams does occasionally falter. The lyrics to "He Never Got Enough Love" read like a bad Nebraska-era Springsteen parody, its central figure ultimately pulling his own Johnny 99 by shooting someone in a liquor store; the song's impact and believability are completely deadened by the excessively banal reason Williams gives for the man's actions (read the song title; if only it were that simple).

Sweet Old World is not purely dark, however. As she would on every album from Car Wheels to the present, Williams devotes plenty of disc space to that most frequent of song topics. The cynicism and dysfunction chronicled in her catalog starting with Car Wheels are mostly absent here, as she instead includes love songs that range from affectionate to raunchy. True there are some weepers - most notably "Sidewalks of the City," where Williams tracks someone's movements through a city of early afternoon boozers, bums and "crumbling buildings and graffiti" - but the love songs here are generally affectionate. There is an underlying sadness in the departure about to take place in "Something about What Happens When We Talk," but it's mixed with a bit of hope and nostalgia, while "Prove My Love" is a straightforward, unadorned song about fidelity and is notably free of Williams' sometimes-caustic tongue. Sometimes Sweet Old World is even a little dirty - on " Lines Around Your Eyes" and more so on "Hot Blood," a song of old folk music puns and sexual innuendo - but never do these songs approach the levels of bitterness and betrayal that would surface on Williams' later records.

Lucinda Williams was by no means a novice when she recorded Sweet Old World, but in retrospect it probably was the last time listeners didn't have preconceived notions about who she was or what her songs should sound like. Free of such expectations, Williams created an album that, though not perfect, has a number of remarkable songs and deserves some of the spotlight usually reserved for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean

Iron & Wine
Kiss Each Other Clean
Rating: 3.3/5.0
Label: Warner Bros.


Sam Beam has stated that he wanted Kiss Each Other Clean to sound like the radio-ready pop songs of the early '70s. That it does, at least sporadically; elsewhere, the album wanders in various directions, using synthesizer, horns, distorted vocals and various other studio effects. Parts of it even apparently owe a debt to jazz, blues and prog rock. It's unarguably the most atypical record Beam has released - even more so than 2007's The Shepherd's Dog - and it marks a major stylistic shift from the gentle folk with which Beam is most commonly associated. Quite simply, it damn near makes The Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days sound like the work of an entirely different musician.

Whether this new style fully succeeds is open to debate. Even after spending a few weeks listening to Kiss Each Other Clean, I can't decide whether it's a work of unpredictable brilliance or a disorganized mess. Probably it falls somewhere in between. There is a mesmerizing vocal and instrumental consistency to much of the album; like lyrical masterpiece "The Trapeze Swinger" before them, "Walking Far From Home," "Tree By the River," "Half Moon," "Godless Brother in Love" and "Glad Man Singing" make frequent use background vocals and harmonies to accentuate Beam's narratives. Equally striking is Beam's singing; absent are the whispery, breathy, sometimes frail vocals of the first two Sub Pop albums, replaced by a more muscular and assured vocal delivery. The imagery is still prototypical Beam - lots of references to the past, memories, religion, life and death - though at times it tends to be far more surreal than before; the nightmarish visions of opening track "Walking Far From Home" include bridges collapsing, birds falling from the sky, a car crash, a praying widow and a "millionaire pissing on the lawn."

It's that pesky, sometimes perplexing other half where fans' opinion will likely be divided. In a similar way that The Age of Adz found another previously folk-based musician strolling into weirder, electronic pastures, pieces of Kiss Each Other Clean easily rank as the most bizarre stuff Beam's put to tape. "Me and Lazarus" is perhaps the most consistent of this new breed of Beam song; its synth and stately saxophone give the song personality as Beam imaginatively recasts the biblical figure as a mad dancing punk. But that dubby/trippy approach soon wears thin and, worse, starts to sound a little bit like a lark or a novelty. "Monkeys Uptown" and "Rabbit Will Run" are synth-dripping affairs that sound artificial and too manufactured - the latter song also contains distracting amounts of heavy percussion - while the funky, slightly sleazy horn that opens "Big Burned Hand" is soon overshadowed by the song's overly distorted vocals. Unique songs one and all, certainly, though it's debatable as to whether many listeners will return to these songs that frequently.

The fact that Beam managed to release his least immediately accessible album on a major label is a nice bit of irony and, aside from those oh-so-smooth songs mentioned earlier, Kiss Each Other Clean is a difficult listen and hardly as warmly inviting as Iron & Wine's previous work. Still, Beam deserves credit for at least pushing his music in new directions, even if it occasionally leads to synth and sax-laden dead ends that, much like the wistful narrator of "Tree By the River," might make some listeners dreamily nostalgic for the past.

No Peek Chicken

It's not music, but spectrumculture.com has great Food articles too. And we all need to eat.



No Peek Chicken
January 12, 2011 11:24 AM
It won't be mistaken for gourmet cuisine and, if it's possible for food to have a working class vibe, No Peek Chicken has exactly that. This dish might also have zero aesthetic appeal and food connoisseurs will likely cringe at its remarkably bland color palette, but with No Peek Chicken, such things are easily forgiven. It's a food idiot's best kind of meal: easy to prepare and even easier to wolf down in massive amounts.

Ingredients

1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of celery soup
2 cups milk
2 cups uncooked rice
1 large frying chicken, cut up
1 package onion soup mix (optional)

Heat oven to 350 F. Mix undiluted - man up people; massive doses of sodium are what your body craves - soups, milk and rice in 9x13 pan. Place the chicken skin side up on top and sprinkle with onion soup mix unless doing so will exacerbate your chronic halitosis.

Cover with heavy foil and bake for two hours. Do not lift the foil or peek while the chicken is baking; if you do the Old Testament God will turn you into a pillar of salt.

Carefully remove from oven and serve the chicken up or horde it for a solitary blowout meal. If you're the cautious type, before serving check the chicken and if there is any pink...well, a little salmonella never hurt anyone, right?

Rediscover: Vic Chesnutt: About to Choke

Rediscover:
Vic Chesnutt
About to Choke
1996


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

The fact that Vic Chesnutt was able to release even one album on a major label is still almost impossible to believe. The bulk of his songs - sparse, dark, grimly humorous - made for a lousy mainstream fit, and perhaps not surprisingly, his time with Capitol ended after About to Choke was issued in 1996. But seemingly every year a major likes to champion a left-of-the-dial artist as a sign of its indie credibility, and, thanks in large part to the Sweet Relief II tribute album that preceded About to Choke, Chesnutt was once, however briefly, that artist.

If Capitol had expected a polished, ready-for-the-masses record, they likely were sorely disappointed. Chesnutt gave up none of his rough-as-sandpaper edges on About to Choke, as several songs featured Chesnutt alone on vocals, guitar, piano and a Yamaha Portasound keyboard. Its subject matter was likewise vintage Chesnutt, with the artist again returning to the types of meditations about life - and, more frequently, death - that dominated Little through Is the Actor Happy?. Almost every aspect of About to Choke, from the out-of-focus cover shot of the wheelchair-bound Chesnutt in a strangely-lit room to the songs' somber content, signaled that he likely didn't give a damn which label was releasing the record.

There is a noticeable difference in Chesnutt's lyrical style throughout much of About to Choke, and several songs are more abstract and oblique than those of the musician's previous albums. On spectral opening track "Myrtle," the singer hints at some misdeed - "I'm horrified now I could do such a thing" - and possibly a resulting cataclysmic event whose impacts can't be understood; he ends the song with one of the album's most visceral images: "It was bigger than me/ And I felt like a sick child/ Dragged by a donkey/ Through the myrtle}." The subject of the equally skeletal "Tarragon" is likewise open to conjecture; Chesnutt had stated that the opening line about someone "suckin' on a toothpick soaked with cinnamon" was inspired by one of his earliest memories, but the rest of the song remains mysterious, most noticeable for the haunting tone it takes as Chesnutt repeats the phrase "the boys in the back room played on." "Swelters" is similarly evasive - the singer liked to say it was about sex, and with lines like "after the cool/ When it's wound on the spool/ When it is spent/ You're rarely glad it went," maybe he was being sincere. Elsewhere, references to illness and death punctuate the album; between "Giant Sands," "Threads" and "Hot Seat," there are mentions of a blood clot, a brain that feels like a "brittle fragile vessel," "secret tequila shots and a patch of morphine" and, in another of Chesnutt's brutally direct lines, "shallow rattling breath/ With a wee cough."

Chesnutt returns to his narrative style on two of the album's most poetic songs; both "New Town" and "See You Around" are as literate and expertly crafted as anything he had released on his first four records. "New Town" is far removed from the "filthy steps/ The cold concrete" and small-town Athens that underscored so many of the musician's previous songs; instead Chesnutt offers, one assumes, a satirical depiction of suburbia, complete with a green police force, smiling politicians and old ladies with busy social calendars. His vocals are almost too warm and polite, an effect that heightens the song's cynical humor.

"See You Around" matches this lyricism in "New Town" while sharing plenty of its cynicism; it also might be Chesnutt's defining fuck-off song. Never before had his bile been more focused or vitriolic, the song's insults mounting as he practically spits out the words. The song begins simply, congenially, with an apology, as Chesnutt vows civility - "I'll save us both the hassle and leave" - apparently willing to shoulder the blame. But in the song's final verse there is an abrupt shift; the apology gives way to classic Vic venom, his voice rising to a mocking sneer as he gets in a few final shots, ending with one of his most barbed insults to date: "Well I'm sorry/ But your routine is coming off a bit ragged."

About to Choke is commonly considered one of the musician's lesser works; Chesnutt himself was relatively ambivalent about the album, but then again he was frequently dismissive of almost everything he'd done. He really didn't have time for the niceties, including those about himself, and if praise for the record in 1996 was a little muted, in retrospect time has been good to it. There are a few throwaways - the distorted "It's No Secret (Satisfaction)" and the goofy "Little Vacation" don't really fit in well - but there are enough good songs here that warrant a better standing for the album. That it was done under the watchful eyes and big budget of a major label is incidental; it's the content that matters, and with About to Choke, Chesnutt can be seen evolving as a writer even as he reused elements of his Texas Hotel albums.

Great Musicians Who Haven't Made a Great Album in At Least 10 Years

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R.E.M.

Up. Reveal. Around the Sun. Accelerate. Those are the last four spectacularly mediocre albums R.E.M. has released since their last truly great record, New Adventures in Hi-Fi. The band hasn't exactly been directionless since Hi-Fi, but ever since Bill Berry's departure, Buck-Mills-Stipe haven't yet managed to craft a classic album. None of the trio's post-Berry records have been particularly awful, and each album contains a few decent tunes, but none are consistently solid from start to finish, and all of them reveal an amount of self-indulgence and filler the band's 1980s and early 1990s selves would never had stood for. They are, quite simply, average, middle of the road albums by a band we all know is capable of much better.

What's perhaps worse is that plenty of us have consequently lowered our expectations of the band. Listeners and critics generally went ape shit for Accelerate - some even had the stones to compare it to Lifes Rich Pageant and Document - but that's likely largely because its predecessors were so underwhelming. Upcoming album Collapse Into Now is planned for release this year, and maybe we all should prepare ourselves for a worst-case scenario. Today's R.E.M. is like watching a once-mighty athlete gimp through the twilight of a legendary career: despite the whiffs and errors, there's an occasional flash of brilliance, and we collectively still hold out hope for a glorious return to form. - Eric Dennis

Five Years Later: Black Sheep Boy

Go check out Spectrum Culture's always-amazing Five Years Later feature for the full list. Go now men and women.


8. Okkervil River
Black Sheep Boy
[Jagjaguwar]

Black Sheep Boy established Okkervil River as one of indie's most emotionally-wrenching and literate bands, marking both a massive musical and lyrical leap forward for the group and especially frontman Will Sheff. A pseudo-concept album inspired in part by the Tim Hardin song of the same name, Black Sheep Boy wove connected themes and topics together from song to song, an approach the band would later utilize on both The Stage Names and The Stand Ins. It mixed roughly-strewn American indie rock with ballads whose darkness dripped from every line and note; both types still sound remarkable five years later.

The violent and tragic world that unfolds in Black Sheep Boy is still vivid and palpable today, with references to childhood abduction and possible molestation, tragically unrequited love and victims being led "up the hill in chains." Its arrangements are expansive and precise, played out via guitar, brass, strings, keyboards and other instruments, while Sheff's vocals heighten each song's impact. Sometimes he lulls us in gently, his slowly-drawn vocals on "A Stone" paced perfectly as perhaps the album's saddest song unfolds and recedes in lovesick despair. In other places Sheff violently spits out his words, most menacingly on the revenge-and-murder fantasy of "Black" and the explosive last few moments of penultimate track "So Come Back, I Am Waiting."

Whether it's described as an allegory or simply a series of inter-related songs, Black Sheep Boy will likely stand as one of the past decade's most enduring albums. Music can rarely comfortably be described as poetry, but the record is precisely that. The ghosts of poets and porn stars would eventually haunt Okkervil River's later work, but their origins can be found here, in stunning detail. - Eric Dennis

Honorable Mention: The Secret History, The World That Never Was

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Many critics couldn't even be bothered to review The World That Never Was. Their loss, as the Secret History's debut LP is an altogether brilliant piece of indie pop that combines intelligent lyricism with flawless musicianship. Refining both the style and narrative structure of the Desolation Town EP - also mostly ignored - the band produced a complex and mature record that deserved far more recognition that it received.

World's songs sound immediately familiar but never derivative, inviting but never too polished; its shimmering arrangements hint at influences ranging from '50s girl groups and '60s folk rock to glam rock and '80s British indie. The album frequently sounds buoyant and hopeful, as seen in the intricate harmonies of "Our Lady of Stalingrad" and in Lisa Ronson's pitch-perfect vocals on "Love Theme." Other songs are understated in the sense of tragedy they evoke; songs of mourning like "God Save the Runaways" and "Sex with Ghosts" move at a tempo best suited for a funeral. EP holdover "Our Lady of Palermo" is similar in both style and substance, the loneliness of its "pilgrimage to where God's never been" accented by Ronson's carefully-paced vocals, a martial drumbeat and rising strings.

Dubbed a "requiem for young monsters," World's subject matter is almost always dark, primarily consisting of runaways, travelers, transients, musicians, monsters and dead horror film icons usually dealing with everyday sad shit. Themes of distance and mortality emerge in a vast geography of ghettos, grottoes, European landmarks and all points in between, with Michael Grace, Jr. and Darren Amadio's lyrics - precise lines like, "They buried her there in the garden/ Behind the refinery" - contrasting with Ronson's bright vocals while reinforcing the album's desolate landscapes. It's fitting that one of the album's characters walks "on the shadowy side of the street." So for now The World That Never Was remains an undiscovered masterpiece, and while numerous worthy albums went under the radar this year, it'd be difficult to find one better than this debut from the Secret History

The National - High Violet

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The National reportedly intended to make an optimistic, catchy record as their follow-up to Boxer. Instead, this year's High Violet was every bit as dark as its predecessor. It also ended up every bit as good; indeed, one is hard-pressed to identify the album's premier song because almost all of them are just that damn great. The record arrived with much anticipation and eventually garnered the type of mainstream attention that snags a couple of indie acts each year, yet somehow the band managed to exceed these lofty expectations. We might end up looking back at 2010 as the year we began to take it for granted that every new National album would be as remarkable as the one that came right before it.

Everything about High Violet - from Matt Berninger's suffering-voiced baritone to the band's carefully crafted arrangements - reveals a gravity and seriousness that would make lesser bands sound completely overblown. Moments of black humor notwithstanding, the album is exceptionally and plainly sad, whether it's in the distance felt in songs like "Sorrow" and "London," in images such as "Manhattan valleys of the dead" or in mysterious, ambiguous lyrics like "it takes an ocean not to break." There are few comforts throughout - maybe a little consolation can be found in the comforts of family and on the hints of devotion in closer "Vanderlye Crybaby Geeks" - but Berninger's lyrics mostly center around mental and personal issues exacerbated by lousy trips back home and a lack of drugs to "sort it out."

The album might not receive highest placement on many year-end best-of lists - that honor seems likely to go to a handful of righteously seething New Jersey rockers, a certain Canadian band with a knack for grandiose statements about The State of Man or an ego-centric rapper who lived up to his self-generated hype - but High Violet, like most of the National's output, might age better than any of them. It takes no small amount of guts and skill to make an album so disarmingly honest; the National have plenty of both, delivering yet another album whose timelessness already seems assured.

Gonjasufi - "She Gone"

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Sometimes we just need a pissed off song madly conducted by a gruff, snarling voice to get the blood bubbling, and for 2010 we got Gonjasufi's "She Gone." Perhaps the standout track on A Sufi and a Killer, an album so jammed up with genre-busting ideas that it's likely to remain a dizzying mind fuck years from now, the song perfectly captures both the implied and overt violence of the album's most psychotic moments. The track starts off deceptively with a basic acoustic guitar and plainly sung lyrics, but soon degenerates into a whole other beast, with the sufi/killer spitting out lyrics of betrayal and occasionally growling out guttural screams against a demonic keyboard melody and a stabbing guitar that enhance the song's threatening tone.

The song's tale is a familiar one, though it comes with a twist. She's gone for sure, but we never find out to what extent. Is she simply a departed lover or has something far more sinister transpired? Given the lyrics - barked out lines like, "When you're driving down the street/ And acting like you do not know me/ Wondering why your life's incomplete/ And you feel so damn lowly" - it's likely the former, but the song sounds so homicidal that it's tempting to view it in far more macabre terms. Either way, "She Gone" is simply a perfect pseudo-rock song, an ugly mix of emotions building up and boiling over in less than three minutes. Unresolved anger and a score not yet quite settled rarely sounded so good. - Eric Dennis

Various Artists: Baby, How Can It Be? Songs of Love, Lust and Contempt from the 1920s and 1930s

Various Artists
Baby, How Can It Be? Songs of Love, Lust and Contempt from the 1920s and 1930s
Rating: 4.6/5.0
Label: Dust-to-Digital





It's easy to see the earliest 20th century roots of that most popular of song topics - love - throughout Baby, How Can It Be? Songs of Love, Lust and Contempt from the 1920s and 1930s, though no deep knowledge of music history is needed to enjoy this archival concept album. Consisting of 66 tracks taken from the collection of musician/collector John Heneghan, this set should be immediately accessible for contemporary listeners, even for those who find songs this old exceedingly quaint. Think of it as a 69 Love Songs from another era; like Magnetic Fields' album, Baby explores love from nearly every conceivable angle and says more about the subject than most works of high culture ever have.

Baby appropriately opens with the Bo Carter song that gives this set its name, a wistful, head-in-the-clouds number with simple lines such as, "I'll never believe/ That you belong to me." It sets the template for most of the first disc; in this way, the disc has its fair share of female muses - there's Angeline, Lulu, Little Indian Napanee, Hapa Haole Hula Girl and the more nebulous sweetest girl in town - and even if these women occasionally struggle with fidelity and often bring nothing but misery and sometimes even death to their lovesick admirers or themselves, the first disc is generally the most carefree of the set. There are exceptions - "Dock" Walsh bemoans that he "never knew was misery was" until he met a woman - but mostly these are songs of new love before the bloom is off and domestic warfare begins. "I'm walking on air/ I've left all my blue days behind," Ted Lewis pseudo-sings on "I'm Crazy 'Bout My Baby," a representative slice of the type of love-struck whimsy of this first disc.

The tone changes on the second and third discs, entitled "Lust" and "Contempt," respectively. "Lust" showcases the raunchier side of these old songs, especially in "Pussy" by Harry Roy and His Bat Club Boys, perhaps still the standard bearer for double entendre with lines like, "There's one pet I like to pet/ And every evening we get set/ I stroke it every chance I get/ It's my girl's pussy." Elsewhere there are infidelities, sordid affairs, a drunken Irish threesome and generally every type of sexual debauchery one can think of. The final disc is heavy with the lovesick blues and various woeful laments; almost everything goes to shit and the titles say it all: "I'm Gonna Kill Myself," "Left All Alone Again Blues" and "Pretty Mama Blues." A mean streak runs through these songs; all varieties of barbed, if antiquated, insults and general meanness can be found. The object of derision in Bill Carlisle's "I'm Wearin' the Britches Now" is dismissed as a"lousy sow," Robert Hill mocks someone who's "gonna look like a monkey" in old age and Fiddlin' John Carson and His Virginia Reelers cloak a catchy singalong about daily boozing and gambling with some particularly distasteful marital advice: "It's a shame to whup your wife on Sunday/ When you've got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday...." Taken together, these two discs are remarkably cynical and darkly humorous and, maybe because of that, enjoyable as hell.

The scope of Baby ventures far beyond the typical old-timely folk usually favored by such compilations to also include early jazz, blues, bluegrass, brass bands, yodels, dignified urban tunes and ridiculously rural ones, as well as some truly unclassifiable stuff like "I Ain't a Bit Drunk." Much of it is pretty obscure - the Mississippi Sheiks' "The World Is Going Wrong" and Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Corinna Blues" are probably the most "obvious" inclusions - a trait that's sure to appeal to a certain segment of listeners. Its packaging plays up the comedic and caustic tones of these songs; the gatefold shows a happy couple "Before Marriage" sharing an umbrella, and an "After Marriage" photo of them back to back, under separate umbrellas, the man smoking a cigarette and the woman dejectedly staring downward. The lack of simple biographical details and recording information is perplexing, especially for a label that is typically is spot-on in this area. A minor complaint to be sure, and while there are literally thousands of great love songs from the 1920s and 1930s out there, Baby, How Can It Be? is an excellent overview and comes wholeheartedly recommended for both novices and experts alike.

Revisit: Rookie Cop: by Richard Rosenthal

Revisit:
Rookie Cop
by Richard Rosenthal
2000

Rookie Cop is Richard Rosenthal's account of his time spent as an undercover police officer embedded in the Jewish Defense League in the early 1970s. Published in 2000 and chronicling the events of the group's early history, the book still serves as an outstanding insider's view of one of this country's most controversial fringe organizations as well as a snapshot of New York's political, cultural and racial climate during the Cold War. The JDL Rosenthal depicts could be both remarkably incompetent and dangerously motivated, with its key figures defiant in their defense of Jewish interests and advocating the types of provocative actions - confrontational sloganeering and protests, bombings, one attempted hijacking - that would eventually land the JDL a spot on the FBI's register of right-wing terrorist sects.

Rosenthal's back story is the stuff of Hollywood; indeed, it's hard to understand how Rookie Cop hasn't yet been adapted to the silver screen. After a four-year stint in the Air Force where he worked as a Russian language specialist followed by an aborted attempt at college, Rosenthal was accepted into the NYPD but didn't receive a single day of training before being recruited for his undercover assignment. Over the ensuing months Rosenthal would essentially play the role of weapons expert, with direct access to the JDL's leader - the "strong willed, determined, and...forceful" Rabbi Meir Kahane - as well as gain and dutifully report to his law enforcement superiors intimate, first-hand knowledge of the JDL's attempts to acquire and, ultimately, utilize, firearms and bomb-making materials.

Through Rosenthal's book we see individuals driven by a narrowly-defined but broadly applied ideology and the steps they would go to defend that ideology. Though the group may have had its fair share of "a bunch of people who were some combination of fools and neurotics," Rosenthal never discounts the JDL's desire to combat its perceived enemies and their policies, particularly the Soviet Union's refusal to allow Jews to emigrate from the Communist nation. While there are actually some humorous moments in which Rosenthal recalls some of the members' almost caricature-like amateurishness - "inept bomb-making attempts, long hours spent with heavily armed paranoids who hadn't a clue how to handle their firearms" - the JDL undeniably meant business.

Backed by a charismatic, media-savvy leader who once famously preached a policy of "every Jew a .22" and a core following of disaffected, financially struggling men, the JDL made its aims violently clear, attempting to hijack an airline as retribution for an earlier Arab hijacking and later bombing the offices of Sol Hurok, an entertainment mogul who earned the JDL's scorn by arranging for Soviet artists to perform in the United States. The explosion would injure scores of people and leave one person dead: a young Jewish woman.

To Rosenthal's credit, he never sensationalizes his gig as a spy; unlike other true crime memoirs that seem designed to stroke the author's ego and portray said author as a super-badass James Bond hopped up on righteousness and 'roids, Rosenthal's text is understated, humble and meticulously detailed. He harbors no illusions about how laborious and monotonous his job often was, albeit with a degree of risk most of us will never encounter in the workplace. In this way Rosenthal is likeable as both a writer and cop, and though he occasionally weakens his narrative by tangentially offering his views on gun control, wiretapping and various other hot-button topics, for the most part he presents his story without prejudice or judgment. Rookie Cop is never sexy or stylized; it is simply a reliable, informative and responsibly written snapshot of the JDL in its earliest incarnation, as well as an important document in understanding the collective mindset of a collection of zealots.

Orange Juice: Coals to Newcastle

Orange Juice
Coals to Newcastle
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Label: Domino

It takes about seven hours to listen to Coals to Newcastle's six audio discs - tack on more time to plow through the DVD that's also included - but goddamn if it isn't worth almost every last minute. A certain degree of mental fortitude and a whole lot of down time are required, much like listening to 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions or Dylan's bootlegged Rolling Thunder rehearsals, but it's immeasurably enjoyable nonetheless. Compiling the band's complete studio discography and throwing in enough extras to satisfy long-time fans, the box set is an exhaustive and meticulously compiled summary of a band whose influence can still be seen in the best - and, yes, the worst - that current indie has to offer.

Orange Juice's original lineup of Edwyn Collins, James Kirk, David McClymont and Steven Daly has practically been canonized, and rightly so; the first two discs included here, consisting of that foursome's first Postcard recordings and debut Polydor album You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, are nothing less than the sound of modern indie rock being shaped, twisted and perfected. Enough has been written about those early songs to render further commentary superfluous; suffice it say that the band's 1980-1982 work is required listening for anyone even remotely interested in indie history as well as those who think Scottish indie music began with Franz Ferdinand or, for those who are really enlightened, If You're Feeling Sinister. The commercial backlash that followed Orange Juice jumping ship to Polydor now seems both quaint and silly; it's simply a matter of personal taste as to whether a listener prefers the lo-fi Postcard or the polished, glossier Polydor versions of "Falling and Laughing," "Dying Day," "Consolation Prize" and "In a Nutshell," among others. In whatever form, these songs are as close to perfect as music gets.

The band's first lineup change would precede the release of Rip It Up in late 1982, with Daly and Kirk replaced by Zeke Manyika and Malcolm Ross, who had previously produced some of the band's Postcard songs. That album's self-titled track gave Orange Juice their only significant UK charts hit, and the album as a whole found the band abandoning indie-pop in favor of a style that fused funk, soul, reggae and disco. It might be grounds for psychological treatment to claim that Rip It Up trumps the original lineup's work, but there is plenty to like here, particularly the Four Tops' homage "I Can't Help Myself," "A Million Pleading Faces" and "Flesh of My Flesh." In hindsight, the stylistic changes that occurred between You Can't Hide Your Love Forever and Rip It Up are more dramatic than those the distinguish the Postcard recordings from that debut album.

The severely stunted Texas Fever EP was released before Orange Juice was, at least officially, reduced to the duo of Collins and Manyika for the 1984 swan song The Orange Juice. Usually bluntly dismissed as the band's most dismal efforts, Coals might change that perception somewhat. Both recordings are probably best enjoyed in small doses and have plenty of flaws - McClymont and Ross reportedly half-assed the EP's sessions, and "Punch Drunk" and "A Sad Lament" lend that sorry tale credence, while "Scaremonger" and "Salmon Fishing In New York" do the final studio album no favors - but some flashes of brilliance do cut through both records' trendy 1980s' production techniques. Both "Bridge" and "What Presence?!" rival the band's celebrated earlier work, and The Orange Juice is notable for containing some of Collins' most cheerless lyrics.

The band's one-liners are already the stuff of indie legend - "I'll never be man enough for you;" "I hope to God you're not as dumb as you make out;" "What are we/ If not a couple of specks of nothing;" "How I wish I was young again" - while a few stomps through this set show the band was never entirely as fey/campy as they were usually depicted - and as they frequently depicted themselves. Their songs could be as cynical, fatalistic and downright mean as any snarling post-punk band, although the lyrics' biting tones were often obscured by Collins' odd vocal delivery and the songs' peppy arrangements. Orange Juice could rock - check out the 1981 Postcard 7'' version of "Poor Old Soul" and the shambolic live songs that close the first disc - and this collection should dispel the simplistic image of the group as lovesick, twee lads.

Coals to Newcastle warrants a purchase for newcomers as well as those who already own The Glasgow School (2005) alike, despite some overlap with that previous compilation. It corrects the sorry state of disrepair the band's discography has been in for years, the Postcard-era excluded; it also contains a respectable amount of previously unreleased material, adds a bunch more alternate takes, live tracks and miscellany than only an Orange Juice super-freak would already have and tacks on a full disc of BBC radio sessions with stellar versions of some of the band's most representative songs, including "Lovesick" and "Wan Light." The packaging is classy, with vintage photos and enthusiastic, though occasionally cutesy and too-clever, liner notes by Simon Goddard. More live inclusions would have been nice, but Coals to Newcastle is as flawless as such box sets can be. Barring the discovery of previously unknown tunes or good old-fashioned greed, it looks to be the final, definitive word on the band's studio history.

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964

Bob Dylan
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
Rating: 4.7/5.0
Label: Columbia

It's practically a tradition that each new Bob Dylan Bootleg Series release will be accompanied by complaints from Dylan freaks (sorry, "aficionados"). Though Dylan Fandom's response to The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 has been largely positive, some predictable grousing about how some classic performances still haven't seen the official light of day and how Columbia over-emphasizes the musician's 1960's work at the expense of his later stuff has surfaced. A quick perusal of Dylan message boards - proceed with extreme caution - also reveals gripes about the release's sound quality, packaging and track order.

Such dissension is difficult to understand, though, as archival releases don't get any better than The Witmark Demos. They have neither the luster nor the mythology of Dylan and the Hawks 1966 or Rolling Thunder 1975/1976, but these demos document a key piece of the 1960's Dylan puzzle, finding the musician moving past his Guthrie-aping days yet still before the "thin, wild, mercury music" of his mid-1960s electric trilogy. In the tradition of Dylan boots the title here is only partly accurate, as this set contains demos for both the Leeds and Witmark publishing houses, a technicality of course and one that doesn't detract in the slightest from the brilliance of the record's songs. These recordings are immediate as we hear Dylan occasionally flub lines and offer various comments about these songs; some of them are mere fragments, but the majority are fully formed and sometimes contain alternate lyrics to what would eventually be included on record.

Though the demos include plenty of the socio-political songs usually associated with early Dylan - "Blowin' In the Wind," "Ballad of Hollis Brown," "Masters of War," "Oxford Town," "John Brown, " among many others - they nevertheless suggest that the accepted image of the young Dylan as primarily a topical songwriter isn't entirely accurate. Of course Dylan initially embraced, and unarguably advanced, this depiction, framing himself as a folkie devotee of both Guthrie and mysteriously nicknamed socially-righteous bluesmen that most people hadn't heard of; still, the demos are indicative of an artist whose lyrical scope already extended far beyond sometimes too-simplistic topical ballads. For example, the demos include all varieties of love songs; there are subtly dismissive ones like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Boots of Spanish Leather;" nostalgic, mournful ones like "Bob Dylan's Dream;" and occasionally tender ones like "Girl From the North Country" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." Humor and tragedy exist in equal measure; the acerbic bite of "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the pure silliness of "I Shall Be Free" contrast with the personal dramas of "Seven Curses" and "Ballad For a Friend" as well as the global ones of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," all in a manner that belies Dylan's young age at the time of these recordings.

Any serious Dylan fan will have heard some of these songs in various incarnations already, either via the debut 1991 Bootleg Series release or the plainly titled Witmark Years boot. Among such completists there may be a tendency to approach these demos from a too-academic perspective, whether it's in terms of Dylan's debt to archetypal American folk themes or his lyrical evolution; indeed, the poetic intricacies revealed in "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Mama, You Been On My Mind" are still striking. Such approaches are valid but unnecessary, as this newest Bootleg Series is simply fun to listen to and a perfect snapshot of a young artist with a pile of amazing songs to his name. With any artist whose volume of quality unreleased output surpasses his officially sanctioned material, it's impossible to satisfy everyone as the vaults are purged, but The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 is an essential Bob Dylan release and every bit as captivating as much of his best work.

Elvis Costello: National Ransom

Elvis Costello
National Ransom
Rating: 3.8/5.0
Label: Hear Music


What is there to say about Elvis Costello that hasn't already been said? For over 30 years, critical wits have described him in various too-clever ways; he's been the Angry Young Man, Buddy Holly on Acid and the Bearded Bard, laughable depictions that may have made for good press but still say very little about the musician or his music. His discography has likewise made a mockery of such depictions; while Costello's earliest albums tentatively placed him as a post-punker whose folk tendencies were obscured by his aggressive vocal delivery and the Attractions' manic pace, his last several albums, particularly The Delivery Man and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, have incorporated elements of jazz, country and Americana.

So it's a guess as to what side of Costello will dominate each new album; during the lead-up to listening to National Ransom, one of Spectrum Culture's writers jokingly asked if I thought it would be Rocker Costello or Wimpy-Crooner Costello. It's actually a bit of both, though the rocking isn't as hard as it could be and the crooning isn't all that wussy. Recorded quickly and including songs that have been part of Costello's recent live shows, Ransom was produced by frequent cohort and former Coward Brother T-Bone Burnett. Featuring contributions from backing bands the Imposters and the Sugarcanes, Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller, Leon Russell, Vince Gill and formerly estranged bassist Bruce Thomas (wait, never mind), the album might be Costello's most musically varied, as it genre-jumps like an ADD-addled kid.

It's a scattershot approach that mostly works well. The self-titled album opener and "Five Small Words" are classic Costello rock songs, though the equally up-tempo "The Spell That You Cast" sounds to me like a bad Brutal Youth outtake; as fun as the song is, it tends to feel every bit as slight as something like "Playboy to a Man" or "Luxembourg." There are hints of jazz in "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," a song that contains some of the album's best lines ("forgotten man/ Indifferent nation") and, with its references to "slow coaches rolling o'er the moor" and a cowboy singer "mild and bitter from tuberculosis," is presumably about Jimmie Rodgers. Steel guitar features prominently on "I Lost You," "That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving" and "Dr. Watson, I Presume," a trio of solid songs that owe a debt to Americana/country every bit as much as Almost Blue did before them. Costello was always a folk singer of sorts at heart - a fact obscured by his pissed-off persona, surly disposition and infamous fixation with exacting revenge through his lyrics - so it's fitting that unadorned and simply-arranged songs like "All These Strangers" and "Bullets for the New-Born King" offer National Ransom's most enduring moments. An acoustic assassin's lament that consists of only Costello and acoustic guitar, "Bullets" interweaves history and geography and contains some of the album's most evocative imagery and will likely age better than some of the album's genre-specific tracks.

Like most Costello albums, the writing is exceptional, with characters like a stage-door Josephine, charlatans and princes, privateers and brigands, a double-agent girl and disgraced priest heading for some unnamed border flittering in and out of these songs. Costello's occasional bouts of verbosity sometimes rear their wordy heads, and shades of North unfortunately creep in on "You Hung the Moon," a song about a dead soldier that's ultimately wrecked by Costello's exaggeratedly theatrical vocals and strings that are laid on pretty thick, but these spots are rare. If National Ransom was a debut album from an indie band with a bizarre name we'd all say it lacks focus and lives too much in the past. But with Costello such absence of uniformity somehow works, and his latest album again confirms that he's simply an expert musician who damn well knows what he's doing, witty critical characterizations be damned.

Rediscover: The Dashboard Saviors: Kitty

Rediscover:
The Dashboard Saviors
Kitty
1992



The Dashboard Saviors released three studio albums in four years - 1992's Kitty, 1993's Spinnin On Down and 1995's Love Sorrow Hatred Madness - before disbanding. Not that many people outside of Athens, GA noticed. The band was met with commercial and critical indifference throughout their brief career; a feature write-up in Rolling Stone's "New Faces" section in December 1992 was the closest the group ever came to sucking at the mainstream teat, and time has done little enhance the band's legacy. Perhaps the supreme insult, Saviors vocalist Todd McBride is better known for his connection to Vic Chesnutt than for his work with his own band: he played with Chesnutt in the La Di Das and also asked the musician to write a song with the line that opens "Isadora Duncan" on Little.

Produced by Peter Buck, Kitty remains an overlooked masterwork, with scratchy, sometimes slightly polished country-rock songs featuring McBride's nasal, reedy vocals and a core group (Michael Gibson on guitar, Rob Veal on bass and John Crist on drums) that does balladry and hard rock equally well. Scattered throughout are contributions from Buck, Mike Mills, John Keane, David Blackmon and Tim White, with Chesnutt providing occasional backing vocals. Much of the album consists of character studies of life in the small-town South; indeed, the shadow of what Chesnutt once described as "that most famous Georgia college town" - or at least how we perceive small towns - looms large over the record.

Its songs are those of everyday small-scale misery where there is nothing romantic about rural life. One would be hard-pressed to find a character more pitiful than the nameless protagonist - a one-time, and one assumes, anonymous musician - of country weeper "A Trailer's a Trailer." Its desolate images - a swig of warm beer, a baby crying above the buzzing of a window fan, a broken-down shitbox Dodge in the yard (of course), a pawned guitar, his inability to correctly sing a song he knows by heart - are accented by fiddle and pedal steel and all convey a seemingly hopeless situation. What prevents the song from being just another clichéd, booze-soaked honky tune are its narrative details: a faded bumper sticker of a shark in sunglasses that deadpans "Ain't life hard;" a domestic fight after "The Cosby Show;" a cigarette lit on a hot plate. By the end of the song the man doesn't have much to show for himself other than some hard-learned wisdom: "A dead end's a dead end/ And a trailer's a trailer/ Even if it's double wide."

Several of Kitty's other characters similarly lead lives on the skids. Images of restlessness and boredom mixed with loneliness are frequent. "Tracy's Calendar" describes the archetypal sad-eyed female, this one apparently with a mental or physical illness, while the disconcertingly jaunty arrangement of "Been Meaning To Do" belies the desperation experienced by someone who wakes up to "another morning in sunshine hell" and can only pathetically "count your blessings and . . . come up short." This type of ennui also defines "Town," a somber ballad that examines how two polar opposites react to the confines of their hometown; delinquent Johnny lights up a Salvation Army box by making a Molotov cocktail from a "Boone's Farm bottle and an Aerosmith T-shirt and some gas from his daddy's car," while "daddy's perfect girl" Julie meets a man with a "greasy frown" and ends up with a ripped dress and "tears in her eyes/ Little bruises on her thighs." They beg for Jesus to get them the hell out; we never find out how their stories end, and we probably don't want to.

"If you think I'm being cynical/ Well yeah, you're probably right," McBride sings on "Cabaret College," and he's not joking. The title act of "Consummation" brings nothing but sadness and is reduced to a series of post-deed excuses - "You'll blame the wine and I'll blame the weather" - while on the combative "Dropping" he rails against a woman who's "dropping your trousers without any shame." Even the album's rare moments of humor are coated in such cynicism. The rollicking "Drivin' Blind" describes a woman who's either got the world by the balls or is cold as hell as she mocks the narrator as nothing more than a "nickel a half dozen" - dude sheepishly agrees - and is unmoved by a man begging for food. The satirical "The Coach's Wife" is driven by White's raucous barroom piano as McBride's ramshackle vocals talk about the title figure, an absolute souse who drinks "gin with champagne chasers" and dreams of a career in politics. Even the album's most tender moments - the childhood remembrances of "G.I. Joe" - are offset by the fact that those simple days exist only in memory. It's fitting that the album ends with the fire-and-brimstone, and probably shady, radio evangelist of "Brother Shiloh Collins."

Available on iTunes but a complete bitch to track down an original copy of, it's likely that for the near future not too many new listeners will come around to Kitty. It's worth the effort to locate a copy though, and of all the great lost Southern rock operas that have come out of Athens, few are better crafted and more deserving of recognition than Kitty.

1877: America's Year of Living Violently: by Michael Bellesiles

1877: America's Year of Living Violently
by Michael Bellesiles
Rating: 2.0/5.0
The New Press

When Michael Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was published in 2000, it hit with all the force of a knee to the crotch. That crotch was the cuddly-as-a-teddy-bear National Rifle Association, which got rather rankled by the book's assertion that gun ownership in colonial America was rare and that firearms ownership in the United States became prevalent only during the Civil War era as manufacturing techniques improved and gun prices dropped. While that organization fumed and roared, the accolades poured in for the then-Emory University professor from critics, journalists and fellow historians, with the book ultimately scoring Bellesiles the Bancroft Prize.

Then the bottom fell out. The NRA's reactionary ranting gave way to reasoned examinations from serious historians who no doubt have forgotten more about history than most of us ever bothered to learn; the author would soon be accused of everything from taking quotes out of context to deliberately misquoting his sources and including statements that were historically inaccurate. After a lengthy academic review of the text, Bellesiles would eventually be stripped of his Bancroft and fired from Emory University.

1877: America's Year of Living Violently should prove far less controversial for Bellesiles. The book is a passable, if largely unremarkable, account of all the violent, shitty and otherwise awful events that transpired in that year. The author captures the obvious topics - the continuation of an economic depression that started in 1873, the contested 1876 presidential election that wasn't resolved until January of 1877, Reconstruction's ultimate failure as blacks' rights were eliminated throughout the South as "Redeemer" governments reclaimed power, the labor unrest that would culminate in a series of strikes that summer, westward expansion and the terrible toll it exacted on Native Americans - while giving the reader a marginal sense of the country's political and cultural climate. It rarely offers anything new in terms of historical scholarship, but it's readable and avoids becoming too academically dry.

But a disgraced reputation is difficult to repair, and I found myself nagged by certain doubts as I read 1877. Are Bellesiles' references legitimate and are the quotes accurate? Does he have his facts straight? Is he able to approach American history from an unbiased perspective? It's possible that other readers will have similar doubts, and though Arming America's legacy is more complicated than the extremists who either loathe or worship it admit, a historian's past writings can inform a reader's opinion of that historian's most recent work.

The book is flawed in other ways. Too often Bellesiles' view of history is incredibly simplistic: heroes are heroes, villains are villains, and there is rarely any middle ground. He rightly rakes a few well-deserving individuals over the coals, most noticeably those who used violent methods to restore white power in the South and leaders who used federal troops against striking laborers, but in general the author shows little appreciation for or interest in history's complexities. Bellesiles is prone to the type of generalized statements historians should avoid - "Everyone hated Jimmy Kerrigan, including his wife..." "The Rangers had no more respect for the border with Mexico than they did for human life" "While the rest of the country threw aside the promises of the Constitution when it came to black people, Kansas welcomed them..." The author's transgression here is obvious: he makes sweeping generalizations that can't be proven and assumes that in 1877 all members of a particular group held identical views on these topics and acted in the same way. It's a sloppy and careless approach to history.

Bellesiles also fails to acknowledge developments that don't fit his depiction of 1877 as an orgy of violence and social turmoil that stunted the nation's social progress, including Henry Flipper becoming the first African-American to graduate from West Point, the founding of the American Humane Association or even something as innocuous as the first cantilever bridge being built in Kentucky. It's just another shortcoming in a book whose reductionist account of history is impossible to ignore. Readers who aren't familiar with post-Civil War 19th century America should be warned that there are far more objective studies to be found, while readers who have even the smallest working knowledge of this period are also likely to be unimpressed.