5 posts tagged “reviews”

33 1/3. Again. Thought I was done with these, didn't you?

Recently I hit something of a dry patch with the 33 1/3 books. I read several in a row that, to varying degrees, did not work for me. After thoroughly enjoying volume 20 on The Ramones, I meandered through books on People's Instinctive Travels..., Doolittle, and Unknown Pleasures, finding fault with each, though they all had something to offer (1). This dissatisfying selection culminated with one book in the series that I would not recommend other people read: Pernice's novella based on The Smiths Meat is Murder.

Exercising the full extent of the freedoms allowed the authors in this series, Pernice writes not a non-fiction book about the album itself, but a story -- likely much of it autobiographical, in setting and mood if possibly not as much in historical fact -- of a Boston teen falling in love and coming of age to a soundtrack of the Mozzer and Co. The narrative begins with a completely unnecessary latter-day sequence which gives way to the flashback that comprises the rest of the book. The rest of the book, the actual story being told, does little for me. As a member of what is likely the last generation of pre-internet kids that had to discover new music through friends and trading tapes, I can sympathize with that condition of Pernice's characters, but otherwise the personalities and situations generally just fall flat. Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned is more effective on every level, including when it comes to music. Overall, I found Meat is Murder very disappointing, not least because I feel the Smiths entry in the series has been squandered. I can only hope they'll change their one-book-per-band rule and we'll get another shot at this band in the future.

After all of these let-downs, I was beginning to fret. Could I find another volume in the series to reignite my passion? My answer arrived via UPS the day I finished Meat is Murder. As I've mentioned before, I've eagerly awaited Carl Wilson's exploration of taste and art as examined through the lens of Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love. After reading the first two chapters during the promotional period, my expectations ran very high. I'm pleased to say that Wilson delivered on every front, vaulting neatly over even my highest of bars. Wilson is a skilled writer. His volume in this series shines a harsh light on many of the less polished entries, and future authors would do well to compare the quality of their prose to Wilson's.

The book itself is well-researched, nicely balanced, and very well organized, flowing from topic to topic in a way that makes sense and draws the reader further along the author's journey into aesthetics. The more academic aspects, discussions of the cultural traditions that produced Celine or historical analyses of the origins and meaning of taste, are tempered with Wilson's own experiences of seeing Celine in concert, meeting a variety of her fans, and, eventually, learning how to listen to her music. Never dry or stuffy, Wilson also manages to not become too conversational. Whereas some books in the series read like blog postings, this reads like what it is: a finely crafter work of non-fiction. I'm gushing, but I'm blown away by this book. I can't recommend it highly enough.

--

footnote

1) NB: Only one of the dozen or so entries I've read has been a waste of time; at the risk of repeating myself for the thousandth time, this series is really a must-read for people who love music.

current music: Bohren & der Club of Gore "Black Earth"

 

Listening to Yours Truly, Angry Mob, the second effort by Kaiser Chiefs, I'm yet again struck by my enjoyment for an album that I had previously written off. When I purchased ...Angry Mob back in the early part of 2007, I was underwhelmed at best, but hearing it again, having cleansed all memory of it in the ensuing months, it's a solid, mature album, in some ways much better than their debut. Where Employment has more catchy, cheeky hits, ...Angry Mob, possibly anticipating in that title the inevitable backlash, cuts the sass in favor of stronger songwriting. And while I lament the absence of some of the catchier and edgier aspects of the debut, the newer album will likely have more staying power, now that I've given it a fair shake.

As with Blackalicious's The Craft, I'm finding that I now disagree wholeheartedly with my first impressions of an album. Just a few weeks ago I decided to give the latest 31 Knots opus, The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere and was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually like it. While it's still nowhere near the level of perfection of their previous record, Talk Like Blood, it has plenty to offer that for whatever reason fell on deaf ears with my initial listens. I must be unconsciously building expectations for new albums based on my previous experiences with the bands, falling into the all-too-common trap of not approaching each album as its own work, on its own terms. Musicians, for the most part, grow and change, their music along with them, AC/DC being the exception that proves the rule. While that doesn't mean I should give a pass to any musician that tries something different (DJ Shadow - Jesus H., man, seriously), I do need to take a moment and keep my knee from jerking so quickly when I hear something new from an established artist. So far, giving myself some months of palette cleansing and revisiting the music has worked out fairly well for me, a lesson I should keep in mind in the future.

While I spent the majority of the year listening to dub, goth, and post-punk from the late 70s and early 80s, I still acquired some thirty-odd albums released in 2007, most often via paid download (1). Narrowing these down to my top 10 albums (2) of the year was no easy task. Among the also-rans, local d-beat heroes Coliseum just missed the list with their raging Relapse debut No Salvation, as did Bloc Party with their sophomore effort, A Weekend in the City. 31 Knots made a strong late-year bid when I gave The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere another listen, blowing away my original misgivings about the album. Angels of Light nearly made it on based solely on the strength of the opening track of their very enjoyable We Are Him. Panda Bear's Person Pitch was actually on the list up until the last minute; the problems with that album finally broke through the things that I love, and I'm starting to realize just how flawed it is. Shellac and Modest Mouse both put efforts that were just too hit-and-miss, the highs being some of the best music I've heard this year (3), and the lows dragging the albums down. Many others entered into consideration, and on any given day they could probably take the place of one or two of the albums that made my list. Twenty-o-seven was a great year for music, even if I did sleep on much of it until late in the year.

I thought about ranking these, but I don't think that I could. The rankings could too easily change to have any real meaning. So, in no particular order, here are my top ten records of 2007.

Battles Mirrored

An early front-runner for album of the year, Mirrored still rides in high esteem. While I had found Battles' earlier EPs enjoyable, they never did much for me that the seemingly endless instrumental math-rock legions couldn't also deliver. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was introduced to Mirrored and had my mind quite thoroughly blown. With the addition of Tyondai Braxton and what can only be described as child-like glee and creativity, Battles made an album that will forever outshine their contemporaries. When the grueling work week ends, I imagine this is the sound of Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompa laborers cutting loose with wild abandon. It's the celebratory feast of the Ewoks or the peyote freak-out of the Jawas of Tatooine, the triumphant joy of all peoples small and mischievous. (4) It's pure joy in rock-and-roll form.

108 A New Beat from a Dead Heart

108's Holyname is probably my all-time favorite hardcore album, and it's usually in my overall top 10 albums. I've never gotten to see 108 play live, and I didn't really get into them until after their break-up in 1996. Their entire body of work was already there for me with little hope of anything else coming out. Ten years later they reunited for a few shows and found that the fire was still there. Two years after that, they've given us the appropriately titled A New Beat from a Dead Heart. Most reunions give listeners diminished returns, the magic of the band having been lost somewhere in the hiatus, but every once in a while it works. The moment I heard the bare chanting opening the album, I suspected that 108 were back in proper form. Confirmation came moments later with a grinding, beautifully distorted bass, pounding drums, and the feedback fade-in building into 50 seconds of mid-tempo sludgy destruction. Not only is the dirge of later-era 108 intact, but the next thirty minutes, filled with the wildly impassioned, edging-dangerously-close-to-chaos paeans to Krshna (5) I originally fell in love with, prove that 108 have lost none of their ardor. While occasionally crossing just a little too far into noise, they always bring it back to head banging hardcore perfection. No one crafts metallic hardcore like 108, and A New Beat... ranks right up there with their previous masterpiece Threefold Misery, even if it doesn't quite reach the height of Holyname.

Arcade Fire Neon Bible

This one surprised me. Until I saw the Arcade Fire on Austin City Limits a short while back, I really had little regard for them. The first album was pretty good, but I just didn't care to check in on Neon Bible. The samples I heard did nothing to pique my interest, and I had pretty much written the band off. The strength of that performance, however, made me take a second listen. After reacquainting myself with the debut album, I went ahead and downloaded Neon Bible from eMusic. The one-two (two-three?) punch of “Keep the Car Running” and “Neon Bible” just laid me out. It's apropos that Arcade Fire played with Springsteen this year as Neon Bible strikes me as the modern response to Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, not so much in sound (6) but in the dichotomy of brooding depression and the desperate hedonism-as-escape. Whereas the Boss's characters are looking to break out of decaying dead-end towns, Arcade Fire seems to be reacting more to a dead-end society. To where do we look for escape? There ain't much hope for survival if the neon bible is true.

Low Drums and Guns

“All the soldiers, they're all gonna die. All the little babies, they're all gonna die. All the poets and all the liars and all you pretty people, you're all gonna die.” Alan Sparhawk's dry, slightly strained voice comes out of the left (7) speaker, breaking through the ebb and flow of swirling feedback and noise, and in just a few short sentences sets the scene for the album to come. This album is stark resignation. Whether we're helplessly watching the world fall to pieces or just a relationship, the feeling of inevitable ruin is in escapable, made all the more piercing by the beautiful male/female harmonies and mostly spartan compositions. At first a distraction, the production putting most of the vocals in one channel and most of the drums in the opposite makes perfect sense after the fifth or sixth listen. The album wouldn't sound right with more traditional panning. In what could be considered blasphemy among the Low faithful, Drums and Guns is my favorite of their albums, eclipsing even Things We Lost in the Fire.

Baroness The Red Album

Growing up here in Louisville, the gateway to the South, I've had the benefit of being able to both see the South from the inside and out, of being able to examine the problems of the South both from experience and through the Yankee lens. It goes without saying that the South has had a very troubled past (8), but strife often creates the fertile ground in which rich, diverse cultures can grow and flourish. The home of American music, every native form of music aside from hip-hop was born in the South, and sometimes bands play music that is undeniably Southern, even if what makes them so is hard to define or describe. Baroness is one such band. When I hear their hazy, stretched-out metal, a heady blend of Sabbath doom and Allman Brothers harmonized guitars, I can almost feel the humidity in the air or hear the cicadas buzzing in the night. Baroness are, hands down, one of the best metal bands making music today, and The Red Album is a shining achievement, a dynamic, sophisticated album that deserves to be heard end to end.

[no picture] Bridge and Tunnel s/t 7"

In the mid-nineties, The Get Up Kids released the Woodson EP that, to me, was the distilled essence of what was at that time considered “emo” (9), and it fucking rocked. A form of punk born from the disparate parents of Dischord records and heartland rock, the mid-90s emo that I enjoyed very quickly turned into the saccharine, overly precious garbage that polluted CD racks for the rest of the decade. I don't know what happened, but this form of rock music virtually disappeared, buried beneath an avalanche of GAP clothing and a headache-inducing legion of simpering, wimpy poonhounds. Bridge and Tunnel have answered my unspoken prayers and delivered an excellent four song slab of rock that evokes the earliest days of TGUK more than anything I've heard in years. It's punk strained through a power pop sieve, replete with driving, extra-tight rhythms, big guitars, and bigger harmonies, all with the added bonus of intelligent lyrics that aren't just self-obsessed plays for attention or sympathy. I can't wait until Bridge and Tunnel record their LP, which, as luck would have it, is being recorded here in town. Maybe I should buy these folks breakfast one day in thanks for this fantastic 7”.

The Besnard Lakes The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse

I regularly listen to the podcast of Sound Opinions, a music-based talk show on Chicago public radio. Seemingly all year I've listened to one of the hosts extol the virtues of the Besnard Lakes. For some reason, the clips they played on the show did nothing for me, and the samples on eMusic left no impression on me. Then I heard the track "Devastation", and it singlehandedly proved true every bit of the hype lauded on this group. Based on that one song, I went ahead and downloaded the entire album and gave it serious consideration. Much to my chagrin for sleeping on this for so long, I was highly rewarded for finally giving this a shot. The opening track sets the stage nicely, sounding something like Pet Sounds as channeled by Elbow. Reverb-drenched orchestral pop sounds layered with vocal harmonies follow the more modern extended crescendo-as-song English format. The highlight of the album is still “Devastation”, the loudest and most dramatic of the tracks, owing as much to the Pixies as any of the other influences I've cited. Even if the rest of the album doesn't necessarily live up to the promise of that track, it's still a phenomenal work.

White Rabbits Fort Nightly

With their debut album, the White Rabbits have produced the album that I wish Spoon or the French Kicks would have produced this year. Where the latest releases from both of those bands have done little to ensnare me, I've become infected by Fort Nightly's irresistible hooks. There's not much I have to say about this album. It's catchy as hell, a nice solid record that stretches no bounds, delivering only straightforward indie rock that you can dance to. I'm not sure if this will stand the test of time, but for now it's at the top of the heap normally occupied by more experienced and/or more hyped bands.

 

 

Tinariwen Aman Iman: Water is Life

Still a relatively new album to me, Aman Iman: Water is Life is also a new experience for me. Appropriately described as Saharan desert blues, this album is through and through a “world music” album, which for many western listeners, myself often included, usually means a mildly enjoyable musical novelty. While I would like to believe that it's my own growing maturity of taste that makes this album transcend those bounds, I have to give credit to Tinariwen. They've crafted an album that does not compromise a shred of authenticity and yet still captures the ear of the western listener. Rangy electric guitar weaves together with acoustics, bass, and various percussion and hand claps to create a hypnotizing tapestry against which the strong, guttural Touareg vocal melodies paint a picture of the desert that could be no more clear if I could understand the words. At once a great rock album and a worldly experience, Aman Iman fulfills the promise of “Riders on the Storm” in a way The Doors could only have dreamed.

Yeasayer All Hour Cymbals

Quite possibly my favorite record of the year, All Hour Cymbals embodies all of what I liked about music this year. Yeasayer's apocalyptic laments as likely become wild exultations of quasi-spiritual fervor as break down into unbridled fireside chants. Proto-rock vocal harmonies and pan-ethnic instrumentation blend perfectly with a dark sort of modern post-punk, creating a sound that evokes so much of the familiar and yet manages to sound so fresh. The dark night to Mirrored's blazing afternoon, All Hour Cymbals proves there is still new ground to be broken in pop music if bands will just open themselves up to new (or old) sounds. Even the inevitable flood of imitators will be unable to dull the keen edge of this album.

 

footnotes

1. I frequent eMusic for most of my download needs, though iTunes comes through in a pinch. I feel like I'm overpaying on iTunes, considering the lack of liner notes, but I've given in. Visits to the local music store are becoming increasingly rare. Their selection has suffered a great deal over the past year, and, frankly, it's just easier to find what I want when I want it on-line. The problems with this system are myriad, and I'm particularly concerned about where my money is going. It's certainly not staying in Louisville, a price I'm somewhat willing to pay, if guiltily, until the local stores figure out how to deliver a better customer experience. How a brick-and-mortar store is supposed to compete on price and convenience with the Internet, however, is beyond my ken.

2. Okay, so one of these is a four-song seven inch. Hardly an album, but the enjoyment I've gotten from those four songs rivals half of my top ten list, not to mention the 20 records it beat out to make the list.

3. A partial list of my favorite songs of the year: Modest Mouse “We've Got Everything”, Shellac “Be Prepared”, Battles “Atlas”, Arcade Fire “Neon Bible”, Foxy Shazam “Red Cape Diver” (okay, that's technically a 2008 song), Panda Bear “Comfy in Nautica”, Studio “West Side”, Angels of Light “Black River Song”, Stephen Marley “Traffic Jam”... I could go on.

4. I normally hate descriptions that rely more on esoteric metaphor than attempts to actually describe the music, but I know of no other way to approach this album.

5. edited

6. Not that there's not a similarity in sound. The Spector-esque cacophony of sounds is present, but the sax is replaced with accordion and mandolin, the post R&B boogie of Springsteen's more upbeat tracks replaced with a post-post-punk headlong drive.

7. Actually, it could be the right. I might have my speakers backwards. Or I might not.

8. No more so than the rest of America, really. Our problems have just been more visible. America still has very real problems with both race and class, and it's still very easy to point to prevalence of both in the South. That doesn't mean the problems do not exist everywhere.

9. Has any other musical label been applied to so many different types of music in the last 20 years? Emo in the original sense, as embodied by Rites of Spring and Embrace, was just an introspective form of punk that stripped away a lot of the all-go-no-slow trappings of the hardcore scene from whence it sprang. In the mid-90s, The Get Up Kids and about 10,000 other bands changed the meaning of the word. At first, as evidenced by the Woodson EP or the crank! label's Don't Forget to Breathe compilation, this wasn't a bad form of music, but I think it was only like, I dunno, six months before it devolved into the insipid bubblegum collective diary entry that most people of my generation (punk generation = probably a five year age span) think of when we hear the word emo. And don't even bring up the current crop of losers lumped together under this poisonous label.

10. There is no tenth footnote.

In the study of history, there has long been disagreement over whether the men made the times of the times made the men. That is, were the big events in history pushed forward by great men or were they the result of the events that came before and the societal conditions of the day? Like any decent historian I tend to fall somewhere in between. One can easily show how the events after World War I created the conditions that made a second world war unavoidable, but without Hitler's charisma and peculiar ideals, would there have been the Holocaust? It's a fascinating debate and one for which I'm ill-equipped.

As with history, these same theories bubble up from time to time to explain cultural shifts, particularly with music. Did Nevermind cause the sea-change in popular music that followed it, or did it just ride the oncoming wave to the top? I've argued with friends in the past that Nirvana were just a product of their times, that if it wasn't Cobain, it would have been someone else. That's really another argument for another time, but I give way somewhat to the Great Man Theory in thinking that without the Pixies there would have been no Nevermind, or at the very least it would not have been the album we know today. Aside from Cobain's own statements, one but has to listen to Bleach and then listen to Nevermind to see the Pixies influence. Where the previous album was for the most part a morass of braindead slowed-metal riffing, Nevermind managed to bridge the gap between the earlier proto-grunge sound and pop music. Cobain borrowed heavily from The Pixies already-perfected amalgam of pop and noise, but whereas Doolittle's critical acclaim turned into very little real-world success at the time, Nevermind swept the American people off of their collective feet. Why was it successful where The Pixies failed? Was it that they had the right looks, the right marketing? Like Elvis before them, did they take an established formula and repackaged it in a sellable format? Was it that Cobain's emotionally-stunted angst connected more with listeners than Thompson's surrealism and ever-apparent sense of superiority? There are probably a thousand reasons, and the truth is likely a mixture of all of them.

But forget for a moment Doolittle's place in music history. We know how influential it and the band were, but how does the album itself hold up outside of the historical context? All of the strengths of the album are summarized in the first song. With Debaser, The Pixies have a strong contender for one of the best opening tracks of all time. This three minute blast has everything I've come to love about Doolittle, while managing to avoid the pitfalls that plague much of the album. First, The Pixies' signature loud-quiet-loud formula is intact, but not so overt as on many of their songs. After Smells Like Teen Spirit brought the sound to every household in America every three minutes for two years, there's nothing really special about it now, but the Pixies perfected it first.

With its blend of tuneful poppiness and screeching noise, Debaser perfectly captures the other dichotomy that makes The Pixies so brilliant. When riding that fence, the album is singular in its power, but when the band slides more toward one side, pop or noise, the songs suffer a great deal. While Debaser and Wave of Mutilation are excellent examples of why The Pixies deserve the praise they receive, the poppy confection Here Comes Your Man and the almost-annoying Crackity Jones both betray the band's limits. With Deal's bass bouncing along, her voice adding the melodic counterpoint to Thompson's strained ejaculations, Lovering's solid drumming and Santiago's midrange guitar abuse, the Pixies created a balance of sounds that is almost impossible to successfully recreate.

Thompson's lyrics are probably my biggest sticking point. At their best, like on Debaser, Thompson crafts a surrealist puzzle that at first sounds meaningless, as Thompson would have us believe, but that opens up to reveal a deeper meaning. Unfortunately, Thompson often slipped completely into surrealism and despite attempts to tack on a meaning after the fact, the truth remains that he was just picking words that sounded good together or fit the rhyme scheme, like on I Bleed. This doesn't work for me. I don't think every song has to be some profound statement, but I do want some thought put into the lyrics. The sense of humor, often lacking in the bands that came after the Pixies, helps to save some of these mindless songs. Thompson, however, falls prey to occasional fits of snobbery, particularly on Tame. It's not so much that he knows these women he's singing about, these women whom he calls tame, making it a virulent insult, but that he sees them from afar and thinks he knows them. He'd never give them a chance, because he already has them all figured out. That sort of narcissism is a turn-off. There are times on this record that I want to grab him by the lapels and tell him to just get over himself.

Still, despite the faults, Doolittle is a fantastic record. It's held up extremely well, and I'm certainly glad I finally decided to give it a chance.

Much like jazz is a musician's music, Michael Chabon is a writer's writer. That analogy is not entirely apt, for whereas jazz lacks a certain broad, pop audience, Chabon has consistently managed to bridge the literary with a mass appeal. Rare is the author that can write a novel that both wins the Pulitzer prize and which you can feel comfortable recommending to all of your friends, not just the most dedicated of bookworms. My introduction to Chabon's work came in the form of that award-winning work, The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, a nearly flawless novel, the one scene that did not work for me being so dwarfed by the rest of the opus as to be a minor quibble at best. Oddly, I didn't follow up after K&K with his other works until my friend Jason gave a somewhat forceful recommendation of Wonder Boys, a novel that I actually liked more than K&K, solidifying Chabon in my mind as a master of his craft. Again, a very long time passed after Wonder Boys blew me away, but I've finally just read Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Written as his thesis and submitted without his knowledge to an agent by his professor, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh launched Chabon's career in the sort of fairytale fashion that we like to believe happens to all rockstars or authors. He went from just another budding writer student to a full-fledged celebrity author so quickly that he himself had a hard time catching up to his fame. Having arrived at his earliest work after experiencing his later, even more lauded and certainly more mature works, I feel a bit cheated, like someone who reads Catcher in the Rye for the first time as an adult, missing that window of opportunity to really see the work from the proper perspective. That's not to say I did not enjoy Mysteries. Quite the contrary, I was rapt and devoured it in a fraction of the time it's taken me to push through my recent disappointing literary fare. The problem is simply that I don't have the correct frame of reference, so the mis-steps seem that much more egregious.

I have two main complaints with Mysteries: first, the protagonist, Art Bechstein, and second the crime aspects of the story. Bechstein is the son of a Jewish gangster who has never had any desire to follow in his father's footsteps, one of the few subjects on which he and his father agree. Art's development and his relationships, their successes and failures, are the crux of the story, and they are where the story truly shine. Unfotunately, Art himself can be rather unlikable. He starts crying in nearly every other scene, and when he's not crying (and sometimes when he is), he's mentally remarking on his erections, which are legion. Sex and love are both central themes in the book, so I don't begrudge the phallic obsession the way I might in other stories, but even here there are times when it's a bit much. I chalk both that and Art's too-quick-to-tears reactions to almost every situation as maybe the excess of a young writer, the sort of things Chabon has since grown out of.

More problematic for me is the end of the book, wherein the crime/mob story points suddenly take the reins, forcing this wandering, loose confederation of brilliant scenes into a more typical narrative format, complete with high action climax that seems to come too quickly and does not carry the weight of the rest of the book. I think I would have enjoyed the story much more if the mob aspect had been removed completely and if it were just a study of the relationships shared by the four main characters. Bechstein's struggle to reconcile his simultaneous romantic love with his friend Arthur and his girlfriend Phlox, his wildly swinging emotions that thrust him from one lover's embrace into the other's and back again, is in itself enough for a story. The monolithic character of Cleveland, who serves to eventually tie the two disparate halves of Bechstein's life together, could easily have filled another, similar role.

In the end, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is brilliant, despite the flaws I see in it. Even without his later works to reference, Chabon's future greatness would be undeniable. You can see it in the effortless way he creates a world that is totally believable yet still has a fairytale dreaminess to it that lets the readers lose themselves in the story. You can hear it in the natural, broken dialogue, where two lines can express more heartache or joy than a chapter of exposition could ever hope to.