Surfing in Babylon

Worth It In 2011: #1 - Eric Church (PLUS THE COMPLETE LIST)

2012-01-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

At PopMatters's Best Country of the Year list, I wrote:

On Chief, Eric Church plays the cad, honing his voice into pure aggressive TWANG. He’ll pick a fight with your boyfriend and then graciously let you buy him a drink. After you dump his sorry liver, he’ll drown his sorrows in breakup songs that sting like prime Taylor Swift. It figures that this album’s most perfect line, “Here’s to all us haters of old lovers’ new last names”, is a toast. But rather than weepy honky-tonkers, Church and producer Jay Joyce have made wall-to-wall classic rock tunes, including a Springsteen ode that sounds more like John Waite. And the singles are phenomenal. In 2011, no song embodied America’s racial and class tensions like “Homeboy”; few songs chronicled our subsequent need to medicate those tensions like “Drink in My Hand”.

At Singles Jukebox, where "Country Music Jesus" was Anthony Easton's pick, I wrote:

No no no, Eric, you’re thinking of Charlie Daniels, and he is not Jesus, no matter what he says when you’re together hunting, fishing, and enjoying other outdoor activities. But then, Eric and I have so much to talk about. Why, for instance, does his excellent soft rock ballad “Springsteen” sound like Bad English, while THIS song swipes the riff from Springsteen’s “Fire”? (Maybe to set up the “Fire On the Mountain” bit?) Will Country Music Jesus’s reach extend to all humanity, or simply to the realm of country music? I dunno where Eric places Jamey Johnson in the great “Country Music Jesus” sweepstakes, but the shaggy concert I attended was a little more laconic than this whole revival business, while I’m pretty sure people bang drums, scream, and shout at Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum shows. Which, I guess, proves once again that you can never predict what Jesus is gonna look like. Speaking of which, has anyone ever told Eric Church, maker of my favorite album of 2011, that his twang sometimes resembles Rob Thomas?

[7]

(From Anthony's blurb, in a passage that gives me chills: "So he is blaspheming the good Lord, and he is blaspheming country music, but sacramentalizing both at the same time. It is a viciously sophisticated work.")

At Singles Jukebox, where "Homeboy" enjoyed a somewhat controversial reception, I wrote:

As a narrative I buy it, because I know the Brother. Back in high school he had ridiculous dreadlocks instead of a “hip-hop hat” and the rest, he didn’t push Daddy around but he did spend some time in jail, and now he’s a solid taxpaying citizen with strong family ties. Small predominantly-white towns SUCK in many ways, so you try to escape to the first Other that comes along, and your conception of that Other is probably based on the broadest stereotypes, and maybe you pair those stereotypes with violence because that’s an Other too. The problem is, Church isn’t handing this sermon to his wayward Brother as a private press 45. As a cautionary tale “Homeboy” is worthless, because any real-life Brothers won’t listen to it. No, Church is preaching to a public country audience, much of which already views hip-hop culture as an Other and equates it with violence. But I’M Church’s audience too, and maybe lots of us know Brothers of our own and “Homeboy” touches us as a well-constructed piece of songcraft. Job well done! On the other hand, “Homeboy” is definitely constructed — Church and co-writer Casey Beathard have invented this Brother, the fake gold on his teeth, and his superficial take on Otherness. They’ve also appropriated the word “homeboy” and the synths from the hip-hop culture they’re dissing. They’re hypocrites and opportunists. But the synths sound great, and the lyrical twist “come on home, boy” is deeply felt; this song isn’t glib about Otherness like the go-to pariah “Beer for My Horses”. Finally all my back-and-forth on “Homeboy” zips it up into a tense interlocking bundle of contradictions that I can’t separate from how much I enjoy its details, guitars, and narrator, even if he’s using his bully pulpit to congratulate his country’s narrowest minds.

[8]

#1
Eric Church
Chief
(EMI Nashville)

The complete list!

1. Eric Church -- Chief (EMI Nashville) (major, country)
1 REISSUE. Neil Diamond--The Bang Years: 1966-1968 (Legacy) (major, reissue)
2. Limp Bizkit -- Gold Cobra (Interscope) (major, rap, metal)
3. Henri Pousseur--Parabolique d’Enfer (Sub Rosa) (indie, classical, electronic, reissue)
4. Monotonix--Not Yet (Drag City) (indie)
5. El Bebeto y su Banda Patria Chica -- Quiero Que Seas Tú (Disa) (major, Latin)
6. Lady Gaga--Born This Way (Interscope) (major, dance)
7. Original Cast -- The Book of Mormon (Sh-K-Boom) (indie, CCM)
8. Cheer-Accident -- No Ifs, Ands or Dogs (Cuneiform) (indie)
9. DJ Quik -- The Book of David
10. Thi’sl -- Beautiful Monster (X-Hustler) (indie, CCM, rap)
11. Steel Magnolia--Steel Magnolia (Big Machine) (major?, country)
12. Burlap to Cashmere -- Burlap to Cashmere (Jive/Essential) (major, CCM, folk)
13. Quintron--Sucre du Sauvage (Goner) (indie)
14. Randy Montana -- Randy Montana (Mercury Nashville) (major, country)
2 REISSUE. Various Artists--Nigeria 70 -- Sweet Times: Afro-Funk, Highlife & Juju from 1970s Lagos (Strut) (indie, reissue)
15. The Dirtbombs--Party Store (In the Red) (indie, dance)
3 REISSUE. Various Artists--Fania Records 1964-1980: The Original Sound of Latin New York (Strut) (indie, reissue, Latin)
16. Charlotte Martin--Dancing on Needles (Test-Drive) (indie)
4 REISSUE. Bacilos--20 Grandes Exitos (Warner Music Latina) (major, Latin)
17. Mary Mary -- Something Big (Columbia) (major, CCM, R&B)
18. PJ Harvey--Let England Shake (Vagrant/Island) (major)

[THIS IS WHERE I GIVE UP ADDING LINKS]
19. Iron and Wine--Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD/Warner Bros.) (major)
5 REISSUE. Stephin Merritt -- Obscurities (Merge) (indie, reissue)
20. Locussolus--Locussolus (International Feel) (indie, dance)
21. Bragado -- De Pies a Cabeza (Discos Power) (indie, Latin)
22. Various Artists -- 101 Things To Do In Bongolia (Electric Cowbell) (indie)
23. Jake Owen -- Barefoot Blue Jean Night (RCA) (major, country)
24. Group Doueh--Zayna Jumma (Sublime Frequencies) (indie)
25. Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio -- Clustrophy (TUM) (indie, jazz)
26. Paul Simon--So Beautiful or So What (Hear) (indie?, CCM)
27. The Lonely Island -- Turtleneck & Chain (Universal Republic) (major, rap, comedy)
28. Dead Cat Bounce -- Chance Episodes (Cuneiform) (indie, jazz)
29. ChuCha Santamaria y Usted -- ChuCha Santamaria y Usted (Young Cubs) (indie, dance)
30. Los Huracanes del Norte--Soy Mexicano (Musinorte/Disa) (major, Latin)
31. Those Darlins--Screws Get Loose (Oh Wow Dang) (indie, country)
32. Buraka Som Sistema -- Komba (Enchufada) (indie, dance)
33. Thompson Square--Thompson Square (Stoney Creek '10) (indie, country)
34. Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans -- Electric Fruit (Thirsty Ear) (indie, jazz)
6 REISSUE. Drive-By Truckers -- Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians (New West) (indie, country, reissue)
35. Alexi Murdoch--Towards the Sun (Zero Summer) (indie, folk)
36. R. Kelly--Love Letter (Jive ‘10) (major, R&B)
37. David Banner & 9th Wonder--Death of a Pop Star (b.i.G.f.a.c.e./eOne ‘10) (indie, rap, CCM)
38. Heavy Winged -- Sunspotted (Type ‘10) (indie, metal)
39. Blind Boys of Alabama--Take the High Road (Saguaro Road) (indie, country, CCM)
40. Gucci Mane--The Return of Mr. Zone 6 (Warner Bros.) (major, rap)

Worth It REISSUES In 2011: #1 - Neil Diamond

2012-01-19T07:28:00.000-08:00

A commenter at PopMatters notes, "Josh Langhoff and Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield must be hanging out in the same circle of friends, or one of them is a plagiarist. It seems strange that you both began your reviews the exact same way. FWIW, Langhoff’s appears to have been published first." Also FWIW, Rob Sheffield is one of my favorite writers, but I did come up with my opening line (see below) before I read his Rolling Stone review, which opens, "If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, these are his Sun Sessions." See? Clearly different! Sheffield omits the unnecessary "then"! Full disclosure: I read Sheffield's Neil Diamond overview for the most recent Rolling Stone Record Guide -- which employs the term "Jewish Elvis" -- while preparing to review this essential compilation. And my wife will attest that I was wildly excited to open Rolling Stone and discover that my thought patterns, at least, travel in the same circles as Sheffield's.

#1 REISSUE
Neil Diamond
The Bang Years: 1966-1968
(Legacy)

The PopMatters review:

He got the western movement!

If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, then Bang was his Sun Records. Bang was a small New York City label, distributed by Atlantic and operated by “Twist and Shout” songwriter Bert Berns. When Berns signed Diamond in 1966, Bang Records was best known for the McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy”, another Berns composition. Like his boss, Diamond had graduated from New York’s Brill Building, a sort of Harvard for staff songwriters; unlike Berns, Diamond didn’t graduate with honors. As he puts it kindly in the liner notes of his new compilation The Bang Years 1966-1968, Diamond’s early non-hits were “silly songs about made up people”. By 1966, Diamond was frustrated and out of work, with a baby on the way. Bang was where he pulled it together and found a voice that was completely new.

As with most completely new voices, Diamond pillaged what other people had already done. Specifically, Diamond’s music combined the introspection of Greenwich Village singer-songwriter folk, the tightly wound beats and arrangements of Brill Building pop, and the brooding, leather-clad urban cowboy sensibility of a thousand solitary men toiling away in garage bands. This music was post-Beatles and post-Dylan (another compelling candidate for Jewish Elvis), but it was an utterly contemporary urban pop sound, with a scraggy rock edge in Diamond’s voice. Had Diamond undergone electroshock therapy and become friends with John Cale, he might have started the Velvet Underground.

That’s a big “if”, but listen to “Someday Baby” and see if you don’t hear more than a little Velvets in its droning, cavernous groove. “Someday” is a deep cut from Diamond’s debut album, The Feel of Neil Diamond, heretofore unavailable on CD except as part of sketchy bootlegs or a short-lived stereo compilation. Feel only reached #137 on Billboard’s album chart, but it’s terrific from top to bottom. It showcases Diamond the rhythm fiend, the backbeat scientist, the Dr. John of NYC guitar-slingers.

Feel’s songs are practically a taxonomy of different backbeats. Besides the druggy Factory vibe of “Someday”, there are the boogaloo touches of “Cherry, Cherry”, the horn stabs of “Solitary Man”, the slowed-down bubblegum of “Do It”, and the morose tambourine folk of “I’ve Got the Feeling (Oh No No)”. Diamond’s covers catalog his influences: “Red Rubber Ball”, “La Bamba”, “New Orleans”, “Monday Monday”, and “Hanky Panky”. Each is seemingly chosen for its locomotive energy, each manifests that energy with a distinct rhythm.

These rhythms are played straight, rarely swung, and they subsume all other musical elements. The trombone chorus, honking one-note bari sax, and omnipresent bottom half of the piano don’t play melodies so much as extensions of the grooves. Even Diamond’s melodies are rhythmic marvels. Go ahead, sing the stunning line that opens this album (you know you want to): “Melinda was miiiine ‘til the tiiiime that I found her.” Notice how it starts and ends with syncopated figures, and how they contrast and highlight the longer notes in the middle. Diamond’s biographer Laura Jackson describes those early recording sessions:

“He didn’t merely sing the song. To the surprise of those in the control room, he performed it, and in such a way that the strong sense of rhythm running through him was channeled visibly in the way his body and his acoustic guitar would sway in perfect harmony with each other. [Engineer] Brooks Arthur called it ‘a kinetic thing happening’...”
—from Neil Diamond: His Life, His Music, His Passion

If Diamond wrote and performed with innate beat savvy, his arranger Artie Butler and producers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich made those beats explicit. Barry and Greenwich had discovered Diamond, and the authors of “Hanky Panky” knew how to bring songs to life. That’s them singing backup and clapping throughout these songs; their vocal arrangement on “Cherry, Cherry” is one of humanity’s proudest achievements.

The Bang Years also includes Diamond’s second album Just For You—as poorly represented on CD asFeel—and the single “Kentucky Woman” b/w “The Time Is Now”. All this stuff is uniformly great. Just For You boasts the hits “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, “Thank the Lord for the Night Time”, and the eternal classic “You Got to Me”. It features songs that were bigger hits for other artists: “I’m a Believer”, “Red, Red Wine”, and the eternal classic “The Boat That I Row”. It’s got “The Long Way Home”, a majestic song that barrels like a subway train. And the whole comp ends with “Shilo”, the first big Neil Diamond power ballad—it trades Ellie Greenwich and her handclaps for strings and actual drum fills. A harbinger of adult contemporary schlock to come, but a great bittersweet song nonetheless.

Two caveats: this package omits two of Diamond’s unofficial Bang songs, “Shot Down” and “Crooked Street”, and the mono remastering sounds a little loud through headphones. No matter. Overall, it’s a steering-wheel-pounding treat. For decades it’s been hard to find all these songs in the same place, especially in the sonic glory of their hard-hitting mono recordings. Because half these songs are already widely available elsewhere, this collection has slightly less archival impact than the Gentile Elvis’s Sun Sessions or last year’s widely-circulated Never Mind the Bullets, Here’s Early Bob Seger. Musically, though, it’s in their league.

Worth It In 2011: #2 - Limp Bizkit (BEWARE OF CUSSING)

2012-01-18T19:07:00.000-08:00

For reasons I sort of understand but hold in contempt, my positive review of this album (see below) was far and away the most controversial thing I wrote all year. Usually negative reviews get all the angry comments, but this one garnered its share. People like and dislike what they like and dislike, I get that. But the conventional wisdom of people who read reviews and make lists of popular music TENDS to arrive at the consensus that Limp Bizkit Sucks. Before I heard this album, I was inclined to agree. I'd barely listened to the guys, just whatever was on the radio around the turn of the century. I still haven't listened to their other albums. As I said earlier (somewhere around here...) I did not expect to like Gold Cobra when I requested it for review. I expected I'd be able to listen to it, form an opinion, and quickly turn around a review full of smutty jokes.

But here's the thing -- IT'S REALLY GOOD. I wish I'd written more about this in the review -- Fred's persona kind of sidetracked me -- but Wes Borland's riffs somehow manage to ape death metal while being catchy and funky, and the hooks are monsters, and the beats make me jerk around my car like Ke$ha. For PopMatters's year-end list extravaganza, Adrien Begrand, whose metal writing I admire, called this one of the worst albums of the year for its "incredible lack of hooks," and I literally have NO IDEA what he's talking about. I hear a song like "Douchebag" or "Shotgun" (one of Entertainment Weekly's worst singles!) and I'm chanting it in my head all day long.

And the thing is, this conventional wisdom is unwarranted because Limp Bizkit haven't been universally loathed. Sometimes music writers ACTUALLY LIKE THEM, to say nothing of all those music fans who don't read reviews or make lists. I mean, they're not Radiohead, but Significant Other got a positive lead review in Rolling Stone, Chocolate Starfish got good writeups in RS and SPIN, people love to pay Wes Borland backhanded compliments, but for some reason Durst's persona, which is diametrically opposed to most review-reading listmakers' personalities, overwhelms anything else that people might actually hear in their music. This is the main reason I chose to focus my review on Durst's persona rather than what the band's doing musically: I was writing to those people. Of which I am one -- albeit one who jams the Bizkit.

#2
Limp Bizkit
Gold Cobra
(Interscope)

The much-loved PopMatters review:

You can't make them stop, no matter how hard you tryyyyy...

“A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”
—Marcel Proust

“I’m really feelin’ bad that we both gonna hafta say good-bye now… (GOOD BYE!!!)”
—Fred Durst

Like plenty of rappers before him, Fred Durst feels beset on all sides. Sometimes it seems like that was his main takeaway lesson as a neophyte rapper: “Dude, everyone hates rappers. Run with that.” Who exactly hates the guy, I’m not sure. Limp Bizkit haven’t done much lately—Gold Cobra is their first album since 2005—but a mid-career slump doesn’t equal the trials of Job. I’m guessing they have enough money to live. Besides, it’s worth remembering that they’ve garnered pretty good, if sheepish, reviews throughout their career. Nü-metal may be scorned, but at least Bizkit aren’t Hollywood Undead. (SERIOUSLY, have you heard that Hollywood Undead album? Don’t.)

Fortunately, Durst has figured out a way to fight back. He actually has several coping mechanisms. There’s the unbridled aggression (“Douchebaaag! I’mma fuck you up! FUCK you FUCK you FUCK YOU UP!!!”). The regression to an animal-like state (“Polar Bear ain’t a cracker you should fuck with”). Sometimes he walks away (“Walking Away” doesn’t have any memorable lines, sorry). Mostly, though, he lies like a polar bear rug. Look at that quote at the top. He doesn’t feel bad about leaving his lady at all; the gleeful “GOOD BYE!!!” clinches it.

Durst lies when he cries. He also lies when he doesn’t cry, when he shuns tears and emotion and turns himself into a cold shell of a man. “Should I remind you motherfuckers I don’t give a fuck?” Durst asks over the big lurching riff of “Shotgun”. No need, Fredrick! You’ve already told us so, over the monster riffs of “Bring It Back”, “Get a Life”, “Shark Attack”, and “Gold Cobra”. Remember when you were rapping all those words back there? Funny thing about making an album is that you have to MAKE it—write words and music, rehearse, book studio time, basically run a whole gauntlet of rigamarole designed by the music industry to ensure that, if anybody’s ever gonna hear your music, you do in fact “give a fuck”. If you didn’t, you might sit in the living room with the sawed-off on your lap, but you wouldn’t release a song about it.

So by definition, Durst lies about not caring, which means when you listen to most of Gold Cobra you’re dealing with some version of the unreliable narrator so adored by pop sophisticates. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone who loves pop music, because pop singers say one thing and mean another all the time. At the very least, music makes singers overstate their cases, and listeners can see right through that. For some reason, though, people tend to think Fred Durst is incapable of irony, maybe because they sell him short in the intelligence department. At one point he does rhyme “habit”, “grab it”, and “stab it”, so that might have something to do with it.

Just to be clear: Durst’s unreliable narration isn’t some abstract device meant to curry favor with pop sophisticates. This device may or may not provide Durst himself with some aesthetic satisfaction, I don’t really care. But in his songs, Durst’s irony comes across as clear-cut communication with listeners. It’s a writing device that clarifies and specifies our feelings.

You ever have a really bad day at work when it felt like you were, I dunno, fighting off a bunch of douchebags or sharks or something? And all you wanted to do was either obliterate your adversaries or convince them you don’t care about them? But you couldn’t attempt either of those things because they’d see right through you? So instead you drove off and got all teary listening to “Working Class Hero”? (I, um, must’ve read about this somewhere.) Fred Durst also understands the impotent rage of the working class hero. He knows it’s vitally important to convince your enemies that YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THEM, he knows this desire is futile, and he knows his listeners feel that same futility. All that impotent rage is embodied in his lyrics.

Musically, too, Durst knows what he’s doing. Though his rhymes and rhythm patterns aren’t complicated, you don’t rap as well as he does without honing some technique. He’s got a good ear for a syncopated line. Durst makes rhymes that are easy for his Everydude audience to learn and remember, but they’re also indelible enough that they’re hard to forget.

Bizkit’s music, played here by their original lineup, clarifies and specifies Durst’s rage. As plenty of reviews last decade sheepishly pointed out, Limp Bizkit are actually a Good Band. They’ll nod your head. Guitarist Wes Borland pulls off one huge catchy riff after another, and he and DJ Lethal add sound effects that alter their songs subtly and not-so-subtly. (“Shotgun” ends with an Andes flute playing “There’s a Place in France” over a beat made entirely of shotgun sounds. Badass.) The rhythm section’s bottom end is fatter than your girlfriend.

That reminds me! Limp Bizkit have some unreasonable expectations of women. Specifically, if Limp Bizkit attend a party, they expect that there will be nine women for every one of them, and that these women will undress, enter a swimming pool together, and kiss one another. I think they request this stuff in their tour rider. Frankly, with Odd Future innovating the field of female objectification every day, Bizkit’s imaginations seem a little quaint.

Also quaint, at least in the context of all Durst’s fighting and threatening, is a sung bit of advice that just sort of appears out of nowhere. In the middle of “Get a Life”, right after screaming murderous threats at some haters, Durst sings, “Don’t let the world bring you down.” Twice. That advice could serve as the band’s aperçu, sort of the flipside to Durst’s refusal to care about the haters he’d like to kill.

You and I both know the world is full of haters. Life in the world is inseparable from pain, at least if you care about people, and nobody except a sociopath is capable of not caring about people. Caring equals pain like love equals reciprocal torture. Proust and Durst don’t share much, but they do share this darkly funny truth: the more you try to detach your feelings from a lover or an adversary, the more you realize how little control you have over those feelings. People go to desperate lengths to assert that control. Some people even liken themselves to golden cobras or go swimming with sharks like Frank Whaley (not to be confused with Frank Ocean). With any luck, those people also form a crack band and make an album that sounds better than 90% of the music released this year. Let your guard down and jam some Bizkit. You owe it to yourself. Besides—and I hate to make threats, but it’s true—if you tangle wit’ the lion you gon’ end up in the zoo.

Worth It In 2011: #3 - Henri Pousseur

2012-01-18T16:48:00.000-08:00

No surprise that I was the only person to vote for this in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, but I was also the only person to vote for a Sub Rosa album! And come on, they must have put out SOMETHING else that was one of the top 1,000-however many albums last year. Not that I know offhand what those might be, but weirdo electronic stuff is their forte, and I hope to listen to more of their output in 2012. (I also voted for one by Ata Ebtekar, an Iranian electro-acoustic dude, back in '09.) Free samples are scant, but the kind folks at Weirdo Records dot com have put up this sound clip, which unfortunately lacks Ethiopian choirs. This album created as compelling and immersive a sound world as anything else I heard last year.

#3
Henri Pousseur
Parabolique D'Enfer
(Sub Rosa)

The PopMatters review:

Henri Pousseur was one of those electronic music pioneers you read about but rarely get the chance to listen to. Belgian, with the look of a jovial mad scientist in need of a comb, he came up in the Darmstadt school of the 1950s, alongside new music legends Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Like much of that milieu, Pousseur composed and theorized in equal measure.

In particular for our purposes, he devoted much thought to the new sonic vistas opened up by electronic composition. InParabolique d’Enfer, you can hear him grappling with his electronic medium and the questions it posed: What does live electronic performance mean? How do you maintain musical spontaneity when all your sounds are canned? How can electronically generated sounds evoke anything other than themselves?

When you hear someone play a Beethoven sonata in person, you hear a new creation of an old piece of music. The pianist mediates Beethoven’s fixed notes in a way that’s unique to that performance, highlighting certain phrases and making the music speak in ways that Beethoven couldn’t have predicted. Something similar happens when a pop musician covers a song live. Now, when you hear a recording of such a performance, it may strike you differently in different frames of mind, but the essence of the performance doesn’t change. Cliburn’s Beethoven recordings will always be his, and they’ll always be different from Horowitz’s Beethoven. These differences explain why some people collect so many different recordings of Beethoven sonatas, or Grateful Dead concerts, or covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, or whatever.

What if your composition is the recording? What if your music can’t be conventionally notated and played because it’s all sine waves and timbres specific to this recording, made with this equipment, onthis particular day? Is that composition fixed for all time? Is there any way that, somewhere down the line, a performer will be able to reinterpret it, so that it remains the same composition but speaks in a different way?

Reggae producers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, people like King Tubby and Lee Perry, hit upon one solution: the remix. Henri Pousseur and his buddies came up with something similar: open form. Different composers made different sorts of open form compositions, depending on their media and whims. Pousseur’s idea was to record a set of source material—the “8 Etudes Paraboliques” of 1972—that he and other people could use to construct new pieces of music.

The etudes themselves are fixed electronic compositions, set in stone—or rather, tape. Unlike many electronic compositions that were built by painstakingly splicing magnetic tape, Pousseur’s etudes are real-time recordings of their composer messing around in the studio. According to Pousseur scholar John Dack, Pousseur spent several productive days recording his “sonic voyages”, which he produced using sexy gadgets like ring modulators and voltage control generators. Though always intended as source material for future works, the eight etudes can reportedly stand on their own as varied and intuitive collections of blips and bloops.

Like most of his fellow Darmstadters, Pousseur also composed for more traditional ensembles. In 1991 he wrote “Leçons d’Enfer”, a centennial tribute to the poet and gun runner Arthur Rimbaud. It was an electroacoustic musical theatre piece featuring singers, instrumentalists, electronic gizmos, and field recordings from Ethiopia, where Rimbaud lived late in life. (Conspiracy theorists should note: while in Ethiopia in the 1880s, Rimbaud befriended Ras Makonnen, father of Ras Tafari Makonnen, aka future Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Conquering Lion of Judah so beloved by remix pioneers King Tubby and Lee Perry. Small world.)

“Leçons d’Enfer” didn’t conquer the Great White Way, but it did provide more source material for Pousseur’s sonic voyages. In 1992, Pousseur combined bits of his etudes with recorded bits of “Leçons”, and came up with the 70+ minutes of Parabolique d’Enfer.

If you’re at all interested in electronic art music from the ‘50s on, you should hear this piece of music. For one thing, you’ve read about a similar mix, based on the same raw materials, in that dogeared copy of Björn Heile’s The Modernist Legacy on your nightstand. For another, Parabolique beautifully illustrates one solution to the problem of making old electronic works say new things. And it does so in a way that obviously parallels the contributions of reggae and rap producers, who make old recordings say new things all the time.

If you’re not interested in all that theoretical mumbo jumbo and you’re inexplicably still reading this, the 13 tracks of Parabolique are worth hearing for their sonic splendor alone. This mix is deep and layered, varied and surprising. It’s atonal and certainly nobody’s idea of easy-listening, but it’s no monolithic wall of noise either. Pure electronic squealing gives way to Ethiopian choirs, who are interrupted by angry blasts of squall, which melt into flitting synthetic insects and chimes. The music crescendos and morphs in gestures that are unpredictable but obviously intentional. At times it even settles into regular rhythms that are sort of catchy and bouncy. It’s arresting and devoid of cliché.

If you’re a Rimbaud fan, Parabolique may shed new light on the poet’s later years. If you’re not, don’t sweat it. After all, you don’t need an extensive knowledge of reggae riddims to know that Lee Perry’s dub music sounds great, and you don’t need to spot all the samples to appreciate a Public Enemy song. Those things might add to your interest, but ultimately the combination of sounds is what gets you. That fascination with sonic possibility inspired Henri Pousseur, too. Listening to Parabolique d’Enfer, you may find yourself lost in thought, pondering the implications of our brave new electronic world, or you may simply find yourself marveling at all this sound for its own sake.

Worth It In 2011: #4 - Monotonix

2012-01-18T05:09:00.000-08:00

After cursorily scanning their reviews, the two common themes -- which I sought to address in my own writeup, below -- are "Monotonix are wild live" and "Monotonix don't do anything new". I haven't seen 'em live, but music penpal Jeremy E. reports, "Monotonix actually got kicked out of Bumbershoot in 2008 after only playing a few songs. I wasn't at that show, but people who wrote about it said the security guards had no idea what to expect and shut things down when a garbage can got involved. Also, there was mooning." Yikes! But I do hear newness in the guitar work -- it adds beauty to an often beauty-averse genre.

#4
Monotonix
Not Yet
(Drag City)

The PopMatters review:

I dunno about you, but when I hear about a garage band that kills it live; that’s single-handedly reviving the pure punk spirit of a bygone era gilded in sepia and blood; whose mustachioed derelict singer lubricates the floor with a never-ending stream of bodily fluids; whose only instruments are a guitar and drum kit routinely set ablaze by said mustachioed derelict singer; AND who’ve been banned from playing most of their local clubs, I gotta wonder: “Are these guys from Israel?” Because seriously, that shit’s been done to death in America. Call me a relic or what you will, but the notion of getting drenched in someone else’s sweat while helping a shirtless 40-something rocker crowd-surf is a tad less appealing than the prospect of being stricken insensate by the Signature Cocktails of some obnoxious casual dining chain. For one thing, those casual dining places have to clean their bathroom floors every hour, a nicety likely overlooked at the dives frequented by Monotonix, the killer Israeli garage band in question. For another thing, Monotonix’s new album Not Yet is a great, non-sticky substitute for their live shtick.

Monotonix sound pretty much how you’d expect. Ami Shalev, the 40-something singer, opens “Everything That I See” with a cough and sounds like he’s puking the rest of the time. Drummer Haggai Ferschtman flails his arms like they’re 20 feet long, and he seems unusually proud of his cymbal collection, accurately miked by Steve Albini. Yonatan Gat’s guitar veers between fuzzy riffs and strangled lead lines. Song for song they sound good and threatening, but the romance and mystery in Gat’s guitar set ‘em apart from other such miscreants.

Unlike most guitarists whose ideal is scuzz, Gat isn’t beholden to the blue notes. In fact, he comes up with surprisingly pretty riffs, laced with major 6ths, 7ths, and 9ths, giving his squalid gusts a feel somewhere between Hüsker Dü and some classic rock band I can’t place. The album’s masterpiece is the portentous five-minute “Late Night”, a two-chord choogalooga that cuts its guitar haze with syncopated swagger. Gat throws in little detuned blasts that sound like the steam rising up from the dark streets of a Scorsese movie, while Shalev leers a full-on madonna-whore complex, promising his ladyfriend “To let you under my skin / To feel you in my hands.”

In a recent interview, Gat speculated that Shalev’s lyrics are about “trying to come to terms with tying your life to someone else’s.” Um, okay. Mostly, Shalev sounds like a raving psychopath, a fine aesthetic mode, though I concede the lines that register are pretty emo: “Just let me whisper in your EARS TO-NIGGGGHHHHHT!”, “You just need to let me find my WAAAAYYYYYY!”, “[Something something something] like an octopus!” Clearly he’s coming to terms with SOMETHING; an unfamiliar appetizer plate, perhaps.

Monotonix trust their rock chops enough to let in some beauty and softness along the way, and that’s what makes them more than just garage revival sticks in the mud. But make no mistake, they’ll still flatten everyone in the room. Ultimately, if you’re trying to learn about the vagaries of the heart from Monotonix, you’re even sicker than they are.

Worth It In 2011: #5 - El Bebeto y Su Banda Patria Chica

2012-01-17T17:35:00.000-08:00

SUCH a good album -- song for song, as good as anything on this list, the distinctions becoming smaller from here on up. Maybe my marching band background renders me more susceptible to El Bebeto's charms, but even if you don't THINK you like regional Mexican stuff, this is undeniably big and bright and impressive, with indelible melodies and virtuosic funk. I could listen to gigantic banda ballads (like the one below) all day long; they're a pinnacle (a plateau?) (a really high plateau) of consistent greatness in Western music, like Western swing songs. It's hard to find a bad one. And this album does a whole lot more.

#5
El Bebeto y Su Banda Patria Chica
Quiero Que Seas Tú
(Disa)

From PopMatters's "Best New and Emerging Artists 2011" feature:

2011’s splashiest regional Mexican debut came from babyfaced 20-something Carlos Alberto García Villanueva—“El Bebeto”—and his Sinaloan Banda Patria Chica (“hometown band”). Their Disa album Quiero Que Seas Tú comprises 26 minutes of fat brass grooves and unbelievable moments—it’s hard to fathom that human lips and fingers can achieve some of these effects. El Bebeto was last seen in the likable but little-heard Banda Sairú, and he leads his own group with the confidence and drive of a tiger freed from a cage. Equally adept at rapid-fire waltzes, huge swinging ballads, and one very catchy cumbia, the band fires off 10 well-chosen songs full of humor and high drama. They sound perpetually eager to play their next amazing tune—not a bad way to begin a career.

Worth It In 2011: #6 - Lady Gaga

2012-01-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

I can still remember where I was when "Born This Way" first came over the radio, apparently in concert with every other media outlet in the country. (In the car, with the family, no unicorns in sight...) As a pop music event, I can't remember anything as big and exciting since Michael Jackson's Dangerous videos aired on network TV in the early '90s. The monoculture lives! Gaga and Adele battling for ultimate supremacy! Adele winning handily! But still!

Below is my not-necessarily-readable Gaga thesis for Burnside. (Needed an editor.) More readable are the Singles Jukebox writeups on "Marry the Night", "You and I", "The Edge of Glory", "Judas", and "Born This Way": the blurbs nearly as indelible as the songs, and just as divisive.

#6
Lady Gaga
Born This Way
(Interscope)

Lady Gaga
Born This Way
(Interscope)

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
– DA BOSS, from “Da River”

What he doesn’t consider is that it might be something better.

At Burnside I’m a rock critic. If I said I was a theologian I’d be fooling myself, though probably not anyone else. Nor would I be presenting an accurate idea of what theologians do. But if I continued to insist I was a theologian, I’d be telling you plenty about myself, about my values and aspirations. Lies and delusions can be good for that.

Where Unicorn meets Highway.

On Lady Gaga’s second-or-third album Born This Way, she tells us she’s all sorts of things. Most obviously, she thinks she’s Bruce Springsteen. The album’s title starts with “Born”, Big Man Clarence Clemons plays sax on a couple tunes, and on the cover, Gaga nearly straps her hands ‘cross her own engines. If nothing else Gaga’s lyrics sound like a once-removed Springsteen copycat — Jim Steinman, maybe, or the Killers’ second album.

Why do pop musicians so often want to be Springsteen? You know, besides factors like Money, Success, Respect, Good Parenting, etc? I mean sure, the guy can be great, but so can Neil Young, and nobody’s been drinking from THAT particular adenoidal well lately. But Springsteen! Back when the Killers were recording their explicit Boss-mage Sam’s Town, lead singer Brandon Flowers said:

“Springsteen touches on the American dream, and that’s everybody’s dream… Most of [our new] songs are about getting to that place, of making it to the promised land… It’s very optimistic.”

If you’re anything like me, that sort of claptrap makes you wanna either puke, blast some KMFDM records, or create a garish piece of public art consisting of desecrated baseballs, apple pies, and the Goldman Sachs logo. But maybe that’s just me. More than most pop stars, Springsteen’s capable of drawing people together into a simulacrum of National Uplift. His post-9/11 album The Rising meant a lot to a lot of people. Also to his credit, he’s usually more nuanced than his role of National Uplifter would suggest, as I tirelessly remind my poor wife whenever we hear the bleak character study “Born in the USA” during a fireworks display.

But for pop musicians who wanna be uniters-not-dividers, Springsteen’s the guy. Gaga, with her blond ambition and her devotion to her litter of adopted “monsters”, wants to signify that same broad, all-accepting appeal. She also wants to make money. As Karen Spears Zacharias andRich Juzwiak have both pointed out, Gaga knows how to pander to our insecurities and our desire for glory. So she’s crammed Born This Way with Bruce-derived symbols of the runaway American dream — the Road, the Night, Freedom and stuff. None of the symbols dig very deeply into that dream, nor do they acknowledge its central paradox: that it somehow manages to glorify both democratic equality and cutthroat individual achievement. Album closer “The Edge of Glory” could almost be a parody of that paradox, given its parity of Springsteen-isms with the lyrics of adult contemporary D-listers Lifehouse. Why else would an otherwise intelligent woman spend half her song singing “I’m hanging on a moment with you”?

But of course, the uplift is only half of it.

I’m guessing that Gaga’s unity claptrap sometimes makes her wanna puke. This may explain why half the album sounds like a KMFDM record. (Goodness knows the Lady’s been responsible for some garish public art.) More even than on The Fame Monster, the Gaga of BTW tells us she’s a dark outsider. Her songs are thick with heavy industrial beats, and every song seems to have some huge phasing distorted synth in the background. She claims to be a “Government Hooker”, fulfilling all your sinister fantasies, over a track that could have come from the most recent Skold album. “Scheiße” works the same theme, evoking a Eurotrash world of dirty youth hostel experiences. There’s also “Heavy Metal Lover”, officially approved by Decibel magazine, in which she aligns herself with a whole subculture of leather-clad gay-friendly Eurometal without actually sounding like any of it. (Sadly, “Lover” is one of her most forgettable songs.)

And then there’s all the religious talk. Please tell me you don’t turn to Lady Gaga for theology. I doubt even her most ardent monsters do, except to feel flattered by some fancy Bible-talk. That’s fine; that’s also what people get from Bob Dylan. I’d guess that 90% of your record collection flatters you in some way, even the “challenging” stuff.

But yeah, “theology.” The lyrics of “Judas” use a wild phantasmagoria of Gospel images to express a timeless girl-group message: “He’s a bad boy, but I don’t care.” Actually, “wild phantasmagoria” is generous; you could also say “random-ass freewrite.” In the first verse Gaga’s boyfriend “Judas” betrays her three times, and that’s after she’s washed his feet with her hair, which seems to indicate that both Gaga and her boyfriend are Jesus. May we all so honor our loved ones.

I suppose I should mention, this is a really good album.

Ever since I’ve known my wife, she’s had a very weird poster hanging on the wall: The Arrival, byCliff McReynolds. It’s a surrealistic landscape with a bunch of little naked people running around, doing possibly symbolic things — worshipping a giant breast, holding aloft a big piece of cherry cheesecake, etc. It strikes me as the decadent ramblings of a twisted mind wary of self-editing — which isn’t to say I couldn’t look at it for a while.

On Born This Way, Lady Gaga tells us she’s a dark industrial musician who’s also Bruce Springsteen. She’s a hooker who’s steeped in religion. (I won’t even attempt to parse the lyrics to “Bloody Mary”.) She wants to marry the night while riding away on Highway Unicorn. Her disparate identities practically fight with one another. The imagination of this album is all over the place, but it’s definitely got personality.

That goes for the music, too. Sure, it’s wall-to-wall dance music, but Gaga’s main producers RedOne and DJ White Shadow (hometown!) draw from an immense variety of past disco styles. Besides the Euro-club thumpers and the industrial stuff, there’s the sleek and spacious “Electric Chapel”, the sparkling “Bad Kids”, and the Santa Esmerelda handclaps of “Americano”. (You may know Santa Esmerelda from that epic version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on the Kill Billsoundtrack.)

That said, Gaga’s classical popcraft is as sturdy as ever. Her songs have memorable meat-and-potatoes hooks and unified constructions. Britney Spears’ recent Femme Fatale album may be more sonically adventurous, but it’s harder to love. After only a couple listens, Born This Way felt like home.

Part of that is Gaga’s singing. Pretty much everybody acknowledges that Lady Gaga is a better straight-up singer than her Top 40 peers. Her songs sometimes rip off Madonna, but isn’t it nice to hear Madonna songs sung well? She can do American Idol wailing, but she can also cut loose, and she’s not afraid to distort her voice to serve her songs. You rarely catch her preening. I mean, preening is basically all she does, but in the unself-conscious manner of a wild fowl who must preen to survive. You can practically see the bugs wiggling between her teeth. She’s not precious.

But an even bigger part of that comfortable, homey feeling is that Gaga comes across as recognizably human in her songs. It’s weird. She hardly ever looks or acts recognizably human in public. She’s a workaholic who hugs people while wearing raw meat. But somehow, despite sounding like the soundtrack to a green-tinted German art film about organ trafficking, Gaga’s music comes across as warm.

Sometimes in life we don’t want recognizably human people. Especially if they’re strangers. We want polite small talk or maybe gossip, but above all we want people to be easy. Understandable. Followers of protocol. People should let us know what they’re gonna do and then do it, and our expectations will be met and nothing will be disturbed. Smooth sailing.

Of course, that approach rarely works in music — if people kept singing about their normal everyday lives, music would get pretty boring and/or country. Musicians are more effective when they’re larger than life. But Gaga’s something else again. In some ways she’s an abject slobbering failure. Her music doesn’t even meet its own expectations. She tells us what she’s gonna do — basically, make a world-unifying fusion of high art and pop that melds de Tocqueville with de Sade — and she totally misses the mark. With such a tall order, how could she do otherwise? She’s not unlike that fascinating person you meet at a bar, or maybe on the street, with big dreams and no apparent chance of success. She’s the hustler who’s becoming an entrepreneur, the Vietnam vet who’s also a one-man prog band, the rock critic who dreams of being a theologian. Her failures are more captivating than other singers’ successes.

Of course, it helps that her songs are insanely catchy.

Worth It In 2011: #7 - The Book of Mormon

2012-01-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I listen to -- rarely see -- a new musical, and it's often a great experience. The Drowsy Chaperone soundtrack was my favorite album of whichever year, and Urinetown always makes me avoid flushing the toilet for a couple days. Add another one to the list!

#7
Original Cast
The Book of Mormon
(Sh-K-Boom)

From Burnside and PopMatters, here's an article that stirred up little controversy, except in the "why's he keep going on about U2?" department. BECAUSE IF YOU SEE A U2 SHOW YOU HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT IT, that's why. They spare no expense!

THE BOOK OF MORMON: CCM ALBUM OF 2011

If you’re not familiar with the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, beware: what follows contains heresy and spoilers, and I’m not sure which is worse.

As a straight white 30-something Christian, I’m required by law to be a U2 fan. Over the summer my wife and I cheerfully paid a large sum of money to see U2’s impressive stadium show. From our seats on the roof of the stadium, we had a great view of that famous U2 contraption that served as the stage’s centerpiece, a gigantic spaceship/TV that magnified the band and broadcast all sorts of Important Messages about Social Issues. And God bless ‘em — did you know U2 sprung Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi out of prision? At least I think that’s how it went down. There she was on the spaceship’s screen, wishing us well and thanking us for raising our voices for justice, while Bono stretched his arms wide and sang “Walk On”. True, “Walk On” has zero cool guitar parts, but in that moment we were all citizens of the world.

I know, I know, it’s counterproductive to make fun of U2 for being huge and using their power for good. So I’ve come to an important conclusion: U2 are not vainglorious idolaters who deserve to be burned at the stake, but they could use a good poke in the eye with a stick. (Metaphorically.) And Christians should be doing the poking! After all, we have to put up with U2’s most annoying and hilarious baggage. You know how many times I’ve heard good-hearted brothers and sisters favorably compare U2’s stadium shows, attended almost exclusively by white people who paid large admission fees, to worship services?* Or how for 20 years we’ve been bombarded by Contemporary Christian Music that rips off the boys’ chiming guitars and soaring vocals? Much as I enjoy seeing Bono serenade seas of white faces with the MLK anthem “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, I bristle at how he equates acts of charity with grand gestures, as though he won’t settle for anything less than freeing Nobel laureates or saving Africa. Bono’s good works do not inspire me to dream bigger; they make me feel like I’m out on the stadium roof, looking in. But since we Christians are too nice to call him on this, leave it to Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon:

“Just like Bono, I am Africa! I flew in here and became one with this land.”

Later in the song comes this stirring group affirmation, sung by a bunch of white people:

“Africans are African, but we are Africa!”

“I Am Africa” is just one of the many Mormon songs that skewers mainstream Christian hangups. Right off the bat in “Hello!”, as young Latter Day Saints practice their evangelizing (while sounding like the telephone kids in Bye Bye Birdie), Cunningham (Josh Gad) spazzes through his own improvised sales pitch — “I’ve got a free book written by JESUS!” — only to receive the reprimand, “No, no, Elder Cunningham! That is NOT how we do it! Just stick to the approved dialogue.” For anyone who’s ever sat through an evangelism seminar or applied Best Practices to develop their church’s Mission Statement, this uncomfortable corporate-ese should hit close to home.

The show goes on to depict Cunningham and his higher-achieving counterpart, Elder Price (Andrew Rannells), departing on a mission trip to a cartoon Uganda. Because Mormon was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) and Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), these Ugandans have a great ear for catchy tunes and English profanity. In words that modernize (let’s say) the Old Testament’s tradition of lament, the Ugandans hurl curses at God for condemning them to a world teeming with AIDS, warlords, baby rape, female genital mutilation, and maggots in their scrotums. Naturally, they sing their rage to a chipper faux-African tune straight from The Lion King.

In the softshoe shuffle “Turn It Off”, our nice Mormon boys celebrate the proud Christian tradition of repressing their problems and desires. (“Imagine that your brain is filled with tiny boxes / Then find the box that’s gay and CRUSH IT!”) During a whiplash Church history “All American Prophet”, the angel Moroni tells Joseph Smith to hide his famous golden plates, even if doing so causes people to question the plates’ existence. Recalling Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor parable, the angel explains, “This is sort of what God is going for.” Meanwhile, the butt rocker “Man Up” evokes neckless Mars Hill pastor and mixed martial arts fan Mark Driscoll — and, by extension, those Christians who fetishize the sufferings of Jesus (“He crawled up on that cross and he stuck it out…”). And that’s just Act One!

Here’s where I make two uncomfortable admissions. I haven’t actually seen the Broadway show ofMormon, Tony’s Best Musical 2011, because I’m a cheap Lutheran and I understand they make you pay to get in. Also, I don’t know much about Mormonism’s indigenous American take on Christianity. For thumbnail history, listening to “All American Prophet” and “I Believe” is way more entertaining than Wikipedizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The songs make me want to read the actual Book of Mormon, just to see how all that crazy stuff about different planets is worded. (This should please Church leadership.) But for spiritual insight and prophetic discomfort, no 2011 album spoke to my faith like The Book of Mormon cast recording.

That wasn’t for lack of trying. The year’s Christian music was rich in spiritual insight, at least for those fortunate enough to find the good stuff:

On their self-titled comeback album, bouzouki folk virtuosos Burlap to Cashmere crystallized their visions into melodies that stay on your lips.

Gungor’s Ghosts Upon the Earth is an epic consideration of humanity’s need for God, and the most endearing all-hands-on-deck Bible School program this side of Sufjan Stevens.

The brutal Beautiful Monster, by St. Louis rapper and ex-hustler Thi’sl, wove gunshot noise and thug tropes into pinpoint social critique, and made me re-evaluate Gucci Mane.

And for all its beauty, Mary Mary’s Something Big was messy with the paradoxes that define Christian life.

Secular artists as diverse as Paul Simon, Brad Paisley, Alexi Murdoch, and David Banner contemplated the divine and asked their audiences to follow.

Richard Smallwood and the Blind Boys of Alabama turned out excellent gospel sets, while Cortni, the Ambassador, Deitrick Haddon, and Tedashii made exciting singles.

Somebody must have released a good worship music album. (Faith is the conviction of things not seen.)

But man, The Book of Mormon… In a sense, Lopez, Parker, and Stone have the same privileged relationship to Christianity that Jon Stewart has to journalism. They’ve carved out spaces where they can entertain masses by throwing stones at the “real” discourse. They have the freedom to cuss and break the rules. If they manage to slip in some excellent points that the mainstream won’t allow itself, that’s just icing on the cake that they’re having and eating. Also worth noting, their work is wildly successful — it’s not like these guys are wild-eyed prophets living in desert poverty. I don’t want to oversell the spiritual import of a show that’s essentially one hilarious provocation after another.

On the other hand, maybe that’s a clue to where more CCM should aim. Little of the year’s CCM provoked anyone, and only Thi’sl, Mary Mary, and some of the general market guys made me laugh at their audacity. While hilarity isn’t something I’d expect from the mystics of the bunch (BtoC, Gungor), if you’ve made it your job to describe how God is working in everyday life, which often sucks, you should try to communicate the comedy of our human predicament. If Depeche Mode have taught us anything, it’s that God’s got a sick sense of humor.

Act Two is where Mormon really gets audacious. Elder Price escapes Uganda for sunny Orlando, leaving the spazzy Cunningham to convert his jaded, baby-raping flock. And wouldn’t you know it? Cunningham succeeds by “Making Things Up Again” — essentially writing a whole new Book of Cunningham, in which Joseph Smith learns to rape frogs instead of babies, and evil genital mutilator Brigham Young gets his face turned into a clitoris. Ewoks and Boba Fett play important roles. You can debate the merits of improving Ugandans’ lives by lying to them; such a tactic would be more patronizing than anything Bono’s ever done.

But Mormon isn’t a prescription for real life. It’s more a thought experiment. Just after Cunningham starts lying to the Ugandans by adding Ewoks to his holy book, Price sings about his “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”. He imagines himself consigned to eternal torment for lying about cookies and abandoning his mission. Price’s vision will ring true to anyone raised in a fundamentalist faith, but it’s no more Biblical than the Ewoks. Mormon makes the excellent point that believers constantly write our own books of faith, that we’re all “Making Things Up Again”, and that no orthodoxy will speak beyond its original audience without becoming perverted. Faith is about how you handle the perversions.

Near the end of the show, the converted Ugandans create an endearing all-hands-on-deck Bible school program for the visiting Church leadership. You can imagine the leadership’s response to all this talk of frog sex and clit faces. (Seriously — I haven’t seen the show, so I have to imagine.)The Book of Mormon’s question is, how do we respond when someone adds to our orthodoxy, whatever it might be? If we worship traditional country music (for instance), can we welcome Taylor Swift or Lady Antebellum? If we’re lifelong Protestants, what do we say when Mormons want to join Christianity’s mainstream, or become President? And if we’re CCM fans, how do we handle a musical that speaks seriously to our faith while cracking profane jokes? CCM artists should challenge themselves to ask these kinds of questions way more often.

Worth It In 2011: #8 - Cheer-Accident

2012-01-15T19:47:00.000-08:00

Cheer-Accident are:

1. the second-oldest musicians in my 2011 Top 10, although the oldest is also dead, so I should say "oldest living";

2. the only Chicago musicians from my geographically diverse Top 10; I salute both them and Thi'sl with a hearty "Hometown!";

3. pretty much the only new prog I enjoyed this year, but that's not saying much considering I haven't even heard the new Opeth, and Opeth are great, so don't listen to me about The State of Prog;

4. another Kris N. endorsed band;

5. the most prolific musicians in my Top 10, possibly excepting the aforementioned old, dead musician, to be named later.

#8
Cheer-Accident
No Ifs, Ands or Dogs
(Cuneiform)

The PopMatters review:

My friend warned me not to mention Henry Cow.

It’s tempting, but possibly meaningless, to say that Cheer-Accident’s gonzo synth-horn prog rock couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Midwest. In one sense, sure—they come from Chicago and its suburbs, and they’ve worked with a whole host of Chicago musicians, including Steve Albini and more than one Flying Luttenbacher. But in the musical sense? Well, maybe some coastal band would’ve eventually hit upon Cheer-Accident’s blend of ‘70s AOR hooks, unfussy chops, stone-faced humor, math-rock time signatures, overdubbed horn lines, collective humility and patient willingness to chase musical ideas to their inevitable conclusions. But probably not. In fact, on their 17th album No Ifs, Ands or Dogs—no highfalutin’ Oxford comma for them!—Cheer-Accident’s music often seems like the inevitable nexus of half a century’s worth of Chicago music, Styx meets the AACM meets SKiN GRAFT noize. I suppose you could call them “post-rock” if they didn’t, in fact, rock.

Though their musical ideas come from all over the place, Cheer-Accident put those ideas together in ways that approach the ideal of ears raised on radio: one kick-ass sound after another, a never-ending string of rad shit. “Trial of Error” opens with a booming drum strut from founder Thymme Jones, then adds a blaring synth melody that wanders through two distinct keys before returning home. Imagine ELP with better beats and a yen for German neo-tonal composer Paul Hindemith. After repeating that melody many times amid escalating levels of synth buzz, the noise falls away, leaving the guys singing a different sinister melody over funky guitar scratching. Then the synth melody returns, only this time with an even MORE exuberant synth counter-melody howling over the top. Fibonaccian fans of the golden ratio, take note: this climax occurs a little less than ⅔ of the way through the song, roughly where you’d find the climax of a classical etude. After that euphoric moment, the band rounds things out with a charming coda of disintegrating piano chords. “Trial of Error” is one basic musical idea, examined for four and a half minutes, and all of its 274 seconds sound cool.

If you’re NOT a fan of neo-classical etudes, Cheer-Accident does plenty of other stuff, too. Sometimes they do straight-up guitar rock. “Drag You Down” kicks off the album with a chugging riff, the hairy man-child of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Lady”. They also do Super Sounds of the ‘70s pop, like the sweet horn-and-fake-strings number “Cynical Girl”. (Unlike that smug bastard Marshall Crenshaw, Jones wants to cure his girl of her cynicism.) At various points you’ll also find nods to minimalism, maximalism and motorik. They’ve played around these sonic extremes for decades. Their 1997 album opened with a droning ode to a vacuum, but four songs later, “Failure” resembled whatever Ben Folds was churning out the same year.

Like any good prog band, they also do multi-song suites—or mini-suites, as befits this modest 48-minute album. No Ifs features three such, on the subjects of sleep, Pollyanna and a province. At album’s end, the driving five-note riff of “Empty Province” leads into “Provincial Din”, which starts with everyone belting some starchy provincial anthem, only to dissipate into noise and sirens. Fellow heartland weirdo David Lynch achieved a similar effect in his movie Mulholland Drive, when a happy jitterbug contest dissolved into chaos.

The only problem with No Ifs is that it doesn’t threaten chaos more often. This music isn’t stiff—Cheer-Accident plays too well for that—but it’s a little polite, a little too-obviously planned. The vocal melodies often resemble vocalese, that Midwest-born jazz practice of setting words to instrumental lines. This usually works out well, because Cheer-Accident writes interesting and unconventional melodies, but hearing them as vocal melodies requires some suspension of disbelief (that is, unless sometime-vocalist Carmen Armillas is singing—she can pretty much barrel through anything). And although the band rocks plenty, Cheer-Accident never cross the line into pure scary heaviness. There’s never the sense of danger you find in similarly complex bands like Zep, King’s X, or Cathedral—the sense that a crushing guitar is about to liberate your brain from its skull and your organs from their solidity.

So more liquefied organs! That is my wish for Cheer-Accident, or at least for all of us who dig their music and find it endlessly fascinating. And there are… well, some of us. I’m a relative newcomer, but heed the wise words of Matt DC over at the I Love Music message board:

“btw I wasn’t kidding about Cheer Accident, they are a band i think lots more ppl would love if there weren’t relegated to the weirdo midwest skronk rock skin graft records ghetto…they are TOTES prog and very unique and distinctive”.

Seriously, you should listen to ‘em.

Worth It In 2011: #9 - DJ Quik

2012-01-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

Shoulda voted for this album in the Big Critix Poll that goes up next week -- you got lucky, Steel Magnolia! -- but my love for it only just snuck up on me a few days ago. It's a production showcase, probably the best that came out this year, with some really good rapping, both handled by the same guy who's been doing this for 20 years. It's often funny, but the kind of funny whose eyes take on an icy hardness just to let you know that once the laughter stops, Quik will probably start insulting you with ferocity. He's a little intimidating, even if he does enjoy Entenmann's donuts and milk. Jeff Weiss wrote a fine profile in LA Weekly.

Way better than Jay and Kanye's Watch the Throne, which'll go Top 10, maybe Top 5, in the aforementioned Big Critix Poll, which makes me just a little sadder that this likely nonfinisher didn't rock my world until after I'd submitted my ballot.

#9
DJ Quik
The Book of David
(Mad Science)

And there's a Babylon song! FEATURING BIZZY BONE!!!

Worth It In 2011: #10 - Thi'sl

2012-01-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

Chopped and screwed Christian rap exists! It's creepy for, like, a minute, and then it gets sort of tedious, but hey -- that's what you expect with chopped and screwed rap, right? Anyway, call me rockist, but Thi'sl's music sounds to me like the equivalent of "edgy" Christian metal back in the day -- just as bracing and calculated-to-offend-parents as its secular inspirations. (Which reminds me, my best music writing this year was probably this long take on three Christian metal albums from 1990 -- Holy Soldier, Stryper, and Extreme. If you read it, you'll be in very select company!)

(Way better than Talib Kweli's Gutter Rainbows, which, I'll admit, did feature some amazing rapping.)

#10
Thi'sl
Beautiful Monster
(X-Hustler)

The Sheep & Goats review:

Besides all the Jesus talk, there are two basic differences between Thi’sl’s stupendous slap of ghetto noise and comparable epics from Jeezy or Gucci: 1) no cussing, and 2)-count-’em-two Momma songs. Good call — Momma songs sound even better amid a bunch of music that Momma would HATE. There’s a lot of ugliness here, especially in the first half, more ugliness than the bigger-name Christian rappers on Reach Records allow themselves — beats built from gunshots and guttural “HUNH!”s, layers of synth screams offset by chimes and theremins and all sorts of melodramatic hokum. Even Thi’sl’s chorus hooks revel in his worldly trappings: “Let them guns go POW!” “Money! Money! Money! Mo’… / Trynna stack that paper from the ceiling to the flo’!” This is radical stuff for holy hip-hop, but it’s also loose and refreshing, not at all concerned with toeing somebody else’s imaginary line of acceptability.

Over all this noise, X-hustler Thi’sl rasps out gritty details, bloody bodies in the streets and babies searching through rubble for their Moms. His mission is letting brothers and sisters know he’s legit — a tactic that gets old pretty quickly when Rick Ross uses it — and then showing them that Jesus is the way out. And here’s the great thing: that contrast actually helps him aesthetically. It mixes up the light and shadow in his songs, lets them breathe. When the martyrs in his crime stories proclaim, “I signed up to DIE,” their freedom speaks louder than their bravado.

This is Christian music that comes out of the trenches, like Holy Soldier: “We born in the ghetto, we raised in the ghetto / They call us rock stars ‘cause we wave heavy metal.” Thi’sl speaks to the unchurched first, and if the choir wants to listen — well, he won’t wave his heavy metal at them, at least. He might even make them rethink the value of those nihilistic Jeezy and Gucci epics. Like, maybe those secular guys aren’t merely reveling in their hustler tales. Maybe they’re showing us how the hopelessness of the hustle is wrapped up with the revelry, depicting why it’s so easy to get sucked into the game. At its best, gangsta rap is nihilism that lays bare a nihilistic real-world system. It sounds exhilarating, and it can make you feel like some sort of amoral superhero. And Thi’sl’s music is ultimately different for one reason: he found a Way Out.

Worth It In 2011: #11 - Steel Magnolia

2012-01-11T18:28:00.000-08:00

The Singles Jukebox reviewed "Keep On Loving You" back in Summer 2010, before anyone had heard of 'em, and the penetrating gaze of Alfred Soto saw right through them: "Thankfully not a REO Speedwagon cover, but a tough-voiced couple whose timbres suggest they spend as much time arguing as as they do loving."

#11
Steel Magnolia
Steel Magnolia
(Big Machine)

One of my favorite short reviews from Sheep & Goats:

It’s filed under “Country”, but really this is a straight-up Married Pop album in the tradition of John and Yoko,Womack and Womack, or Quarterflash, with the minor caveat that this couple isn’t married yet. During their 12 songs, cute-as-buttons betrotheds Meghan and Joshua pledge fidelity, argue, tease, break up, make up, wonder what it’d be like to break up again, and enjoy fantasy field trips like Phil and Claire on Modern Family. Even when the going gets tough, the relationship and the music remain buoyant. Partly that’s because of the sparkling production by Nashville lifer (and founding White Heart guitarist) Dann Huff. But mostly it’s Meghan and Joshua’s intimate two-part harmonies — so persistent in their pursuit of pleasure, you’ll remember why people heard homoerotic undertones in Big & Rich.

Worth It In 2011: #12 - Burlap to Cashmere

2012-01-11T10:57:00.000-08:00

Well THIS is a little heartbreaking: an impressively virtuosic, catchy, and thoughtful band releases their first album in 13 years on a MAJOR LABEL, and it goes nowhere -- a couple weeks on the CCM chart and the folk chart (I didn't even know Billboard had one of those!) and that's it. I never once heard "Nehemiah (Build a Wall)" on my dadrock radio station! What on earth was Jive doing? Britney didn't need their help! Chris Brown is categorically evil, mostly because of that "Wet the Bed" song. I guess Hot Chelle Ray and Cage the Elephant are becoming omnipresent, so maybe that's where Jive's promotional lasers were trained. Anyway, not to get all Friday Night Lights on you, but of all the albums on this list, Burlap to Cashmere is the one I imagine would appeal to the largest cross-section of music fans. Meaning you!

(Way better than Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues.)

#12
Burlap to Cashmere
Burlap to Cashmere
(Jive/Essential)

The well-received PopMatters review:

If there’s room in your pop heaven for Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, the Indigo Girls, and Fleet Foxes, you oughta make room for Burlap to Cashmere, mostly-acoustic choogaloogers with a thing for lyrics both inscrutable and sincere. Their self-titled second album even OPENS by emulating the Foxes’ wide-eyed wonder: chiming guitars and tenor voices advise, “Keep your eyes on the new day / You and me, we are the same / Shout it out at the horizon / And don’t forget to change your name.” (No idea what that means, though it reminds me of the end of The NeverEnding Story, when Bastian shouts the Empress’s new name out the window.) From there the music gets fleeter and foxier, as the hard-strumming trio builds into a weird-time-signatured ode to… vacation? Singer/songwriter Steven Delopoulos is at ease, the ocean’s near, and the sun is sinking; he keeps telling his baby, “Don’t forget to write”, even though he keeps seeing said baby in the sun and the wind. Oh, and Delopoulos also tells us he’s the ocean, which might make him Neil Young. In any case he’s a hippie who’s one with nature. I keep trying to dislike him for this, but he and his band sound terrific.

If you were listening to Christian pop radio in the late ‘90s—AND WHO WASN’T?—you may remember Burlap to Cashmere as the guys who sounded like Jars of Clay, if Jars of Clay had just seen a kickass Gipsy Kings show. Flamenco and Greek flourishes and “lai lai lai” vocals made the Burlaps jump out of CCM’s morass, and they scored four hits and a Dove Award for best rock album. Anybody Out There? had some good songs, but the band’s ethnic folk elements came across as CCM novelties more than musical necessities, not unlike Jars of Clay’s tinwhistle or Chris Rice’s cartoon praise song. BTC also had some boring ballads awash in synths. And then they disappeared for more than a decade.

With the public’s expectations at a feverishly low pitch, the new Burlap to Cashmere could be anything, really—adult alternative dreck, four-to-the-floor dance pop, witch house, you name it. So, it’s sort of amazing that this album not only sounds like Clinton-era BTC, but it actually sounds better. And it’s on a major label. Adult alternative producer Mitchell Froom provides some keyboards and, presumably, direction, but aside from that it’s just the guitar-bass-drums folk rock band playing 11 fine songs. Even a relative snooze like “Love Reclaims the Atmosphere” has a memorable tune and an indelible sound. The band sings in harmony. You can hear the walls of Froom’s room. And if that’s not enough to get you excited, plenty of their songs are flat-out great.

You can divide Burlap to Cashmere songs into two rough groups: straightahead coffeehouse tunes, and totally bitchin’ odd-meter stuff that sounds really hard to play. The former category includes “Live In a Van”, a cheerful country ditty that reimagines Chris Farley’s most famous Saturday Night Live character as a Thomas Merton-style seeker. The rest of their coffeehouse tunes aren’t quite so happy-go-lucky. “Seasons” ominously equates its locomotive backbeat with time’s ever-rolling stream. “Hey Man” is a tough little rocker about being in a band, possibly Appalachian prog band Crack the Sky. “Closer to the Edge” sounds like the Indigos singing about a boxer, lai lai lai. These guys really cover all the acoustic bases. Most of these coffeehouse songs have mysterious minor-key melodies that are impossible to shake but fun to sing around the house.

Harder to sing are the bitchin’ songs, even though their melodies are no less catchy and memorable. In fact, their melodies sound even more natural floating over the top of weird roiling meters like 9/8 or 7/8 or whatever. They feel less composed, more like they’re drifting in from whatever ether produced this eternal music. Alternately, they feel like boats adrift on the irregular pulse of the ocean, which makes some sense—Delopoulos really likes singing about the ocean. He wants to live on a boat and sail away with his children, maybe to the Greek island of Santorini. Don’t forget to write! Thanks to the band and maybe Mr. Froom, these songs are constant wellsprings of motion and life, with abrupt dynamic shifts and subtle “diddidit dit dit” background vocals, even some gang shouts. Back on the band’s ‘98 hit “Basic Instructions”, such stuff sounded like it was tacked on to a message song. Now everything is integral to everything else—these new songs writhe around like organisms.

Which is to say, they’re not message songs. The Jive label isn’t marketing Burlap to Cashmere 2.0 as a Christian group—though CCM label Essential is taking care of that end—and I’m struggling to think of a Christian radio station that would play them. Religious themes are certainly there, notably in “Other Country” (“Draw near, the Lamb’s awaiting”) and the triple-A radio single “Build a Wall”, probably the only pop song about wealthy Hebrew purity fiend Nehemiah. But even that’s more a dark, Dylanesque tall tale.

Instead, Delopoulos is working the same semi-Christian lyrical turf as King’s X or the Indigo Girls: lots of Bible imagery, lots of openhearted reckoning with life and death, but not much overt confession. Now he sings stuff like, “Through the hills and valleys / Someone calls my name / Opens up the sky, takes me off my train.” Dude. That’s heavy stuff, but coupled with the Burlaps’ expert musicianship it sounds colorful, passionate, ambitious, and warm—just like the rest of this wonderful album.

Worth It In 2011: #13 - Quintron

2012-01-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

I like music fans almost as much as I like music, and one of my fave fans is Kris N., who introduced me to my favorite band of last decade, Lightning Bolt, plus Quintron, Weasel Walter (#34), and another band yet to appear on this list. 2011: the year Kris N. was VINDICATED.

(I wanna say this is way better than the Black Keys, but I haven't actually heard that album.)

#13
Quintron
Sucre du Sauvage
(Goner)

The PopMatters review:

Quintron’s 13th album, Sucre du Sauvage (“Sugar of the Savages”), is, among other things, another chapter in the ongoing life-as-art odyssey of Quintron, his wife Miss Pussycat, and their whirring contraption and eternal houseguest, the Drum Buddy. It’s also a tribute to New Orleans that sounds nothing like the Treme soundtrack. Recorded and mixed entirely in and around the New Orleans Museum of Art—quite a stunt—the album’s “making-of” legend could easily have overshadowed its music. So give Quintron credit: the rollicking organ rock on Sauvage is even better than its backstory.

Quintron songs have more dirty organ parts than the basement of a Moldovan youth hostel, but despite his reputation for low-fi scuzz, the guy can write some polished pop tunes. One such tune totally rips off “99 Luftballons”, but still. The first eight songs on Sauvageare supremely catchy and not at all low-fi—they sound rich and deep, as the songs’ textures morph through multiple organ sounds and plinking mallet percussion lines.

Quintron’s beats are canned, but over the years he’s learned techniques for playing with drum machines so the songs don’t sound stiff. His wild organ fills have something to do with it, but he’s also got a good feeling for sonic space. The Drum Buddy squelches along merrily, and every once in a while Quintron inserts some found sounds from the museum’s grounds—burbling water, quacking ducks, whatnot. In “Kicked Out of Zolar X”, he corrals “all [his] friends” (read: random people passing through the museum) into shouting “SO WHAT! SO WHAT! SO WHAT! SO WHAT!” There’s no one-man-band claustrophobia in this music, and those touches really open up the songs. (It’s worth noting that Paul Simon cops to the same production technique in his recent Rolling Stone interview: “I put the wildebeest in just to change the sound.”)

Of course, Quintron’s not always a one man band. Miss Pussycat’s two songs and shouted interjections are whimsical, colorful, and not a little loony, the cheapo musical equivalent of a Royal Wedding hat. Her “Spirit Hair” is OK, akin to one of those goofy puppet shows she puts on in concert, but “Banana Beat” is delightful cartoon music with the useful proverb “Life is a zebra that I ride.” (Do zebras even live near bananas?)

Speaking of lyrics, Quintron gets in several good lines on Sauvage. “We don’t do Jazz FESTival!” is doubtless true. “Everybody calls me Dr. Guitar!” is doubtless a lie. “Traded Versace for a week in Milwaukee” may or may not be accurate, but it’s great. And the couplet “Face down in the gutter / Rock bottom like a metal brother” out-Thurstons Sonic Youth at their own crypto-scuzz game.

AND THEN… there’s Sides Three and Four. The last six songs are ambient soundscapes composed of field recordings (i.e., more water and ducks), phasing electronic ostinatos, a really cheap trumpet setting, and, in “Bells”, bells. They’re all very bargain-basement Eno, but they’re even more reminiscent of the onomatopoetically-titled instrumentals on the first Half Japanese album—“T/ T/ T/ T/ T/ T” and “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”, among other popular favorites. Quintron’s six instrumentals are warm and charming, with the same sense of high-quality homemade adventure as the rest of Sucre du Sauvage.

Worth It In 2011: #14 - Randy Montana

2012-01-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

I'm curious about people's calculus when compiling lists of favorite albums. As with any list of favorite things -- colors, poultry seasonings, what have you -- I'm guessing it's usually an intuitive thing; so with albums, the calculus would go something like "This one gives me better feelings than this one," or "I'd rather listen to this one than this one", or (maybe this is just me) "This one feels more alive and vibrant than this one". Which is all just different ways of stating preference, but preference is a surprisingly complicated thing. On Randy Montana, I'd rather listen to songs #2 and #3 than any songs on a couple of the albums yet to be named on this list, but I'd rather put on those entire albums than Mr. Montana's fine debut. But also, weirdly, I think I'd just as soon put on Jake Owen's clearly inferior #23 album Barefoot Blue Jean Night as this one, because its songs #3 and #4 totally slay me, and the rest is certainly listenable. As when you're deciding your fave Republican presidential candidate, a decision for fave album is a mix of the head and the heart -- but since Best Album isn't a decision of national consequence, I'm much more willing to err on the heart's side, and respond graciously to those who do likewise.

Chuck Eddy had intelligent things to say about this album! (And about another one yet to be listed, BUT I WON'T REVEAL WHERE.) Below, song #3. (LOVE the cadence of the line "the hell that I'm GOIN' thru" -- Randy tosses off the word "hell" like he can't bear to consider it.) Way better than Miranda Lambert's Four the Record, which wasn't bad.

#14
Randy Montana
Randy Montana
(Mercury Nashville)

Worth It REISSUES In 2011: #2 - Nigeria 70

2012-01-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

My New Year's Resolution 2011 was "to get paid for writing a review", because I write pretty well and money is useful. Me being me, there's also some guilt lurking around the edges of this resolution. I write regularly, or at least semi-regularly, for three websites that don't pay, not including this blog. This seems to be the direction the music-writing "industry" is going, toward more unpaid, online, and (overall) poorly-written-and-edited outlets. Nonetheless, talented freelance writers remain in the field, hustling up what work they can and trying to forestall day jobs. Fine writers like Michaelangelo Matos and Mikael Wood continue to write a staggering amount of really good freelance words, but those opportunities are dwindling, especially at the sorts of once-reliable alt-weeklies that used to pay me to write on occasion.

I like reading the three websites to which I contribute, and I appreciate that my words get read by more people than they would at this blog. Nonetheless, I sometimes feel like I'm "crossing a picket line" (in the words of my drummer friend; we play mostly for free, too) when I contribute to the non-paying sites that glut the marketplace. Good music writing should be worth something, and it's sad to see it devolve toward this sort of -- what? internship? indentured servitude? I'm not really "indentured" -- where your only compensation is promos and "exposure". So that's the guilt -- I want all these writers I love to be able to earn a living, and part of me hates contributing to a financial system that's making that more difficult for them.

However, before I commit a grand gesture and resign my unpaid posts, I should admit that I LOVE writing about music. It's often the highlight of my week -- getting in there and listening and figuring out what's going on and wording that effectively and cracking jokes and editing myself down and being shocked and awed by some inspired phrase that just APPEARS on the computer screen, seemingly having bypassed my brain. (All you angry Kool & Together fans can have some fun with that.) If I didn't do it elsewhere, I'd just do it a lot more here. So if I'm being charitable to myself, I compare my reviews to the output of my carpenter grandfather -- beautiful wooden calendars, rocking horses, and furniture, sometimes sold but often given away, created out of personal satisfaction and love of craft. Surely there's nothing wrong with having a hobby! And by extension, if a marketplace exists that rewards that hobby by giving it wider exposure but no money, you can't really fault that marketplace either, as long as the terms are clear. It's mostly those asshats that run the alt-weeklies that we should be mad at. Right?

All this is my roundabout way of saying I pitched this review to SPIN but never heard back. (SPIN is now an alt-bi-monthly.) So I posted it for free in my Sheep & Goats column at Burnside:

Archivist Duncan Brooker’s third Nigeria 70 comp is a two-decade mishmash of styles and languages, legends and unknowns, sacred and secular, brief outbursts and longer jams. If there’s a common thread, it’s that this stuff has been largely invisible outside Nigeria — UNTIL NOW. Brooker curates with a hook-friendly ear for indelible moments. Highlights include Zeal Onyia’s stop-time highlife “Idegbani”, Tunde Mabadu’s vaguely porny “Viva Disco”, and the proto-English-Beat sax squonk of Eji Oyewole’s “Unity In Africa”. Everything peaks with Admiral Dele Abiodun’s 15-minute blissout “It’s Time for Juju Music”, an ideal soundtrack for your own crate-digging exploits, if only because you won’t want this music to end.

(Also, I did eventually get paid for writing a review! This New Year's Resolution was brought to you by Lisa Jane Persky, the LA Review of Books, and Chuck Eddy.)

#2 REISSUE
Various Artists
Nigeria 70 - Sweet Times: Afro-Funk, Highlife & Juju from 1970s Lagos
(Strut)

Worth It In 2011: #15 - the Dirtbombs

2012-01-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

From Sheep & Goats:

This is a covers album — Detroit garage band covers Detroit techno jams — but you won’t hear many more original rock records this year. Like the Fall before them, the Dirtbombs have realized the giddy truth that as long as your two drummers keep the groove going, you can get away with anything. Including, as it turns out, a 21-minute version of a 10-minute Innerzone Orchestra track, complete with looooong guitar freakout. Dancing to it is, admittedly, a trick; grooving to it is perfect.

(And then I go on to make a tenuous connection to worship music, basically "keep 'em dancing" = "keep 'em worshiping" = "If you succeed, you can get away with freaky stuff".) (Way better than Moby's Destroyed.)

#15
The Dirtbombs
Party Store
(In the Red)

Worth It REISSUES In 2011: #3 - Fania Records

2012-01-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

#3 REISSUE
Various Artists
Fania Records 1964-1980: The Original Sound of Latin New York
(Strut)

The PopMatters review, in all its glory (9/10 rating):

Music geeks like to call New York’s Fania Records the Motown of salsa music. That’s not completely accurate, because Fania wasn’t exactly Hitsville, but you can boil the comparison down to three factors:

1. Like Motown, Fania created a sound all its own.

The genre of salsa music didn’t exist before Fania invented it in mid-’60s NYC. Fania’s bands were happily mixing up exotically named Afro-Cuban styles—son, charanga, guaracha, bomba—that sounded intimidating to gringo audiences without access to Wikipedia. Fania co-founders Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci created “salsa” as a catch-all marketing term.

On Strut’s wonderful new two-disc compilation Fania Records 1964-1980: The Original Sound of Latin New York, you can hear the music throb with energy as it picks up different genres, like a giant snowball tearing down the Manhattan streets. It starts with Pacheco’s 1964 “Dakar, Punto Final”, a simple three-chordpachanga that alternates impressive trumpet solos with a repeated gang vocal line. From there, the songs grow louder and more aggressive, gobbling up jazz and soul, Chopin and “Bat-maaaaan!”, until they sound like the hungry streets of New York. Joe Bataan’s “Subway Joe” drives the point home by creating a subway train out of relentless handclaps and blaring trombones. (What do cities sound like? Horns and clatter, mostly.)

2. Like Motown soul, Fania’s music is both great salsa, and great salsa for people who don’t like salsa.

A couple of these 29 songs—stuff by Ismael Miranda and Orchestra Harlow—are what you might call “generic”. They sound fine, but non-afficionadi would have trouble picking them out of a salsa lineup. At their best, though, Fania artists rarely settled for craftsmanship. On plenty of songs they seemed to be daring each other to record the most outrageous horn cascade, or the goofiest group vocal, or the most outlandish instrumental texture they could imagine. (Cheo Feliciano’s “Anacaona” has vibes but NO HORNS.)

The instrumental solos are similarly daring. Pianists like Markolino Dimond, Larry Harlow, and Richie Ray demand to be heard, cutting through their bands with noisy tone clusters and, in Ray’s case, Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude”. Various timbaleros bang away like John Bonham doing “Moby Dick”, only they’re not boring. Hovering over all this instrumental activity is the great trombonist and bandleader Willie Colón. He leads five songs here and arranges others, and his imaginative arrangements and meaty horn sound helped establish the label’s muscular, try-anything atmosphere.

For several of these songs, “salsa” seems an inadequate descriptor. (But since these guys invented the stuff, whaddo I know?) “Subway Joe”, Ray Barretto’s “Mercy Mercy Baby”, and Bobby Valentin’s “Coco Seco” are groovy soul tracks. With its deep bottom end, electric keyboard, and call-and-response vocals, Mongo Santamaría’s “O Mi Shango” sounds like a great Manu Dibango outtake. And then there’s singer Héctor Lavoe’s “El Cantante”, a deranged epic on the order of the movie Fitzcarraldo, with bizarre pasted-on strings and wild cymbal crashes. A Celebration of The Singer’s Art, it tries to devour the whole world and doesn’t really succeed, but once you’ve heard it you won’t forget it.

3. Like Motown, Fania was a uniquely American enterprise.

Besides establishing an indigenous American musical form, Fania embodied its country’s diversity and capitalist drive. Salsa was music played by Caribbean immigrants, sure, but it was also music played by NYC-born Latinos (Barretto, Colón) and non-Latinos (Bataan, Harlow). Along with its omnivorous music, Fania was also an omnivorous company, swallowing up smaller labels and their Latin-soul assets. Fania’s two biggest pop hits—Barretto’s “El Watusi” and Joe Cuba’s “Bang! Bang!”—started their lives on the smaller Tico label. (Neither is included here.) All together, Fania released about 1,300 albums, many of which are currently out of print.

After an initial creativity burst of 12 years or so, Fania’s ambition began to catch up with it. The final five songs on Fania Records show us musicians mired in nostalgia while attempting big statements. In other words, Fania succumbed to that peculiar American insecurity that’s afflicted everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Robin Williams. Why settle for crass and delightful when you can be Big and Important?

“El Cantante” is one such folly—generally, if a Fania song is a Celebration of the Singer’s Art, it’s kind of boring. And once singer Rubén Blades shows up, on 1977’s “Pablo Pueblo”, the songs take on a bad case of Significance. Back on Ray Barretto’s 1973 “Indestructible”, vocalist and horn lines were musical equals, rudely battling for audio space and drowning each other out. But on “Pablo Pueblo” and “Padro Navaja” (a “Mack the Knife” rewrite), Perico Ortiz’s arrangements tiptoe carefully around Blades’s socially conscious lyrics. On this compilation’s final two songs, singing superstar Celia Cruz’s bands seem cowed by her talent and reputation, to the detriment of the musical energy.

Even so, the Significant songs are listenable and well worth hearing. Most of the other songs are well nigh essential. Summing up 1,300 albums in 29 songs will always be a fool’s errand, and there are glaring omissions: Cuba, Tito Puente, and the fabulous crackpot singer La Lupe are all excluded. Fania Records also shares three songs with Strut’s last Fania compilation, Salsa Explosion! But if you need a salsa comp that showcases the genre’s variety and it’s heaviest hitters, you won’t do much better than this one.

Worth It In 2011: #16 - Charlotte Martin

2012-01-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

I dunno why this one didn't get more traction -- it was easily the most accessible Tori Amos album of the year!

From Sheep & Goats:

Martin writes strong, unusual melodies that wind up in unexpected places — they haunt the same ethereal moors as Loreena McKennitt or scale the banshee heights of her voice, only to come back down for a perfectly landed hook. Martin owes plenty to Tori Amos and Kate Bush, don’t think she doesn’t know it, but she avoids their distaff visions, leaving her songs open to broader interpretations. Which is to say, I don’t usually know what she’s talking about. But that’s OK, because her writing arm enjoys a symbiotic relationship with her classically-trained throat — she writes words that sound good coming from her voice, and her voice pulls those words through its enormous range without ever sounding fussy. Martin’s piano stalks and twirls throughout, an accompanist second only to her producer/husband Ken Andrews. His sound effects dress up her songs without clutter; every horn stab or twinkling chime or ominous background rumble fits perfectly. For an album that often sounds like it’s dancing with fairies, Needles has sharp pop instincts.

#16
Charlotte Martin
Dancing on Needles
(Test-Drive)

Worth It REISSUES In 2011: #4 - Bacilos

2012-01-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

Somewhat redundant with 2006's Grandes Exitos, probably a total cheapo money grab by Warner, but on the other hand, you probably don't own a Bacilos exitos collection, DO YOU??? Well, here you go: the ONLY comp to include both the hilarious "Cronica de Una Immigracion Anunciada" and the gorgeous "Sangre Americana", and 18 other songs besides, full of rhythmic spunk and soft-rock beauty. (Some years ago, I wrote about their final studio album here.)

#4 REISSUE
Bacilos
20 Grandes Exitos
(Warner Music Latina)

Worth It In 2011: #17 - Mary Mary

2012-01-04T04:00:00.001-08:00

Reviewing Something Big for PopMatters, I underrated it by over-analyzing it -- or rather, by analyzing it in the wrong direction, focusing on the Christian R&B duo's lyrical contradictions instead of how great they make those contradictions sound. Sorry, Mary Mary! By the time we reviewed the perfect single "Walking" for the Jukebox, I'd sort of come around. (Way better than Kirk Franklin's Hello Fear, btw.)

From Sheep & Goats:

After a couple months of grappling with their theology of winners and losers, their contradictions, their unwillingness to sound imperfect, their willingness to sing a song that sounds like “Hey, Soul Sister”, I had an abrupt revelation — I simply wanted to enjoy their voices, again and again, to luxuriate in their voluptuous glow and mix my metaphors with abandon. Was not my heart burning within me whenever they sang the words, “I see the haters standing around… Get ready for war”? Not that I can tell their voices apart, but they’re both rich and clear and I’d be happy to hear ‘em deliver lyrics a lot more problematic than anything here. Eventually all Mary Mary’s problematics are resolved in the album’s centerpiece, “Walking”. It’s an ode to the Christian Walk and to resisting the rush of the world, but it’s also a suitable accompaniment to actual walking — midtempo, four beautiful chords that never resolve, and cheerful encouragement that never slips into outlandish over-promising. Few pastimes are more pleasurable than the humble walk, and few singers are more enjoyable than these humble fans of Jesus.

#17
Mary Mary
Something Big
(Columbia)

As singles go, "Walking" is more perfect and "Something Bigger" more audacious, but "Sitting With Me" is the one I sing in my head.

Worth It In 2011: #18 - PJ Harvey

2012-01-03T19:17:00.001-08:00

Here's my review of "The Words that Maketh Murder" from Singles Jukebox. This particular entry enjoyed some uncharacteristically (if entertainingly) pedantic comments concerning the grammatical agreement of the words "words" and "maketh". The Internet no longer cares. Ahem... like I said, my review:

It’s a stinky lump of something: brassy stomp, poker-faced background singers, autoharp interlude and deliberately unattractive voice. There’s some stuff here that annoys me, namely the King James “maketh” and the umpteen repetitions of Eddie Cochrane’s “United Nations” line. But after a while they simply become parts of the song’s indelible character, like undesirable traits in a person you otherwise enjoy spending time with. In this case, said person’s a veteran who talks about war in a manner so unadorned you can feel the heft of the bodies falling like lumps of meat, you can smell the flesh quivering in the heat, summertime blues adopting grisly implications. Our veteran is pretty jaunty about the whole experience, which may be a coping mechanism, or may just be the resignation borne of countless hours spent grappling with a series of life-altering visions. This song is uncannily close to certain conversations with a Vietnam vet friend of mine; I’ll bet he’s gonna love it.
[8]

#18
PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
(Vagrant/Island)

But "Words" is not the song I want to share! No, here's "Written on the Forehead", all lush and beautiful and sampling Niney the Observer, himself no stranger to Babylon songs:

And finally, the Sheep & Goats review of the album:
Harvey’s take on folk music is just as uncanny and death-obsessed as the old-timey stuff. “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” she asks — in a cadence that’ll stick in your head for days — only to offer up “deformed children” as a punchline. In Harvey’s vision, the pastoral English countryside is complicit in stuff like murder and war; it’s a stoic observer at best and a malevolent killer at worst, though Harvey’s certainly not one to judge. With versatile collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey, she crafts music that’s deceptively simple, even artless. The rhythms are clunky, the mood loose, the tunes unexpected but ripe for singalong. The band creates sophisticated effects through simple means, like the dropped beats in the title track and the rippling guitar chords that open up whole vistas of emotion. In “Battleship Hill”, guitar-bass-drums-piano reveal all you need to know about the expansive beauty of the hill, the sweeping wind, and the narrator’s wistfulness. The song’s pastoral hook? “Cruel nature has won again.”

Worth It in 2011: #19 - Iron and Wine

2012-01-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

From Sheep & Goats:

I long ago wrote off Sam Beam as a sad-eyed troubadour of depressing M&M commercials. This was dumb of me, but in my defense, NOBODY TOLD ME his songs have hilarious saxophone parts! Not to mention gorgeous falsetto harmonies, crazy fuzz bass, floppy attempts at R&B, mallet percussion, slide whistles, Paul Simon polyrhythms, and long prophetic visions that recall Dylan in their uncanny humor. That stuff doesn’t show up in every song, of course, but most of Beam’s melodies are crafty and compelling enough to stand up to any arrangement, even if it’s just acapella in the shower. Also, just try looking away from the hypnotic album cover — it’s like the beard follows you.

(Way better than the Civil Wars' Barton Hollow.)

#19
Iron and Wine
Kiss Each Other Clean
(4AD/Warner Bros.)

Worth It REISSUES In 2011: #5 - Stephin Merritt

2011-12-22T21:38:00.000-08:00

I first heard Magnetic Fields, the band of which Stephin Merritt is impresario, back in 1999 on KDHX, the St. Louis public radio station. It was late at night, the song was "The Book of Love", Merritt started singing in his deep voice tinged with wiseass-ness -- "The book of love is long and boring / No one can lift the damn thing" -- and I chalked them up to another indie band I didn't need to care about, until Merritt sang the chorus: "But I-I-I-I-I-I-I [that's a melisma], I love the way you SING to me", and my heart blew up and I can't believe I didn't crash my car. It's still one of my most vivid memories of being introduced to an artist, akin to being stricken by Ne-Yo's "So Sick" six(?) or so years later. '99 was the year Merritt blew up LOTS of music lovers' hearts, and if nothing since has gripped me like 69 Love Songs, this compilation of B-sides and whatnot comes close. It's full of classically constructed pop songs, beautiful melodies, plenty of wiseassery, and even some loud synthesizer noise in "Rats in the Garbage of the Western World". Fine musical comfort food, and songs like the one below bring me right back to Manchester Road.

#5 REISSUE
Stephin Merritt
Obscurities
(Merge)

Worth It In 2011: #20 - Locussolus

2011-12-21T19:07:00.000-08:00

Hey, here's one of my singles of the year: the Lindstrom and Prins Thomas remix of "I Want It"! At Singles Jukebox I said this:

Imported from the sleek original, the dialogue between DJ Harvey and his female admirer is funny enough, especially if you picture them haggling over a donut, but Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas send their remix to exalted heights of lunacy. The music here is hilarious in itself; I will attempt to correct this hilarity by dissecting it. Some of the hilarity comes from the abrupt, precise marksmanship of the musical elements, horn charts and honky-tonk piano furrowing brows and pursuing serious purposes known only to them — I call this the Evil Choir From “Blue Monday” kaBLOOM! effect. (New Order: greatest comedy band since the City Slickers? Discuss.) Some of the hilarity is referential, with the immensely gratifying sonic punchlines “Shocking Blue” and “Mannheim Steamroller”. And the beat — THE BEAT — combines timing with reference, a giddy twitch recalling the Chemical Brothers’ “Galaxy Bounce”, which — you remember! — underpinned that immensely gratifying scene in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the part where Lara Croft raided all the tombs.

[10]

I was a little nervous to review the album, a collection of singles and remixes, because whaddo I know about dance music, but it turns out DJ Harvey "Locussolus" Bassett is a funny and fun-loving dude whose attitude translates into pop terms. Below: the parts of the PopMatters review that don't concern "I Want It":

#20
Locussolus
Locussolus
(International Feel)

“Next to You”, the flipside of “I Want It”, features a slow strut of a beat and a synth breakdown that sounds more like an Atari breaking down. A female admirer sings wispy come-ons while Harvey offers to eat his shoe in his suavest Right Said Fred croon. It’s the true sound of chillwave. “Tan Sedan” plunders the deathless sound of Canadian Italo-disco group Lime, with Harvey looking for some loving in minor-key desperation as arpeggios gush around him.

Harvey makes his share of downtempo tunes, though he never sacrifices momentum or cool sound effects to do so. “Bloodbath” doesn’t exactly sound like a bloodbath, but it does have ominous white noise in the background, a repetitive three-note chirp, and ruminative strums out of Morricone. The bloodbath, you see, is taking place in the workroom of the lonely leather-clad DJ, his tools analogous to those used by the serial killer, his life a matter of careful planning and steady nerves, his hands always in the right place at the right time. (Harvey used to kill ‘em at the Ministry of Sound.) And “Throwdown” gets the “One of These Tunes Is Not Like the Others” award for most idiosyncratic track on a dance album. Specifically, it sounds like an Oasis ballad. Not a bad one, at that. Pretty chords, some weird guitar throb, and it makes for a nice change of pace.

Harvey’s dry British smirk is plastered across the very notes and beats of his disco music, so it’s ironic that the most annoying song here is also the one that goes for out-and-out laughs. Andrew Weatherall’s remix of “Gunship” has Harvey leering at “thickums” and pontificating about “big girls” and their “two cans of Spam”. Regardless of whether you dig the sentiment, a little of his unhinged drooling goes a long way. Aside from that nadir, Locussolus is varied, body-moving, and endlessly listenable. It’s also full of personality—no matter how far Harvey stretches his instrumental grooves, he can’t hide his cheeky sense of humor. I like his beard.

Worth It In 2011: #21 - Bragado

2011-12-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have the disconcerting feeling that I'm the only person, aside from the band and their lovely cover model, who heard this album. Maybe she didn't even hear it! Judging by the production values of the cover art, Ms. Cover Model could've been photoshopped in from some magazine ad for a gentleman's club, and nobody'd be the wiser, BECAUSE NOBODY LISTENED TO THIS CD. I just got it blind from the library, and I probably could've stolen it without anybody noticing, but it's good! Livelier than most Latin albums I heard this past year. Bragado aren't changing the face of regional Mexican art or anything, but they've got one solid accordion-led tune after another, with lots of what I (possibly incorrectly) call "cumbias" -- uptempo dance tunes that don't sound like polkas, with a beat in 2 instead of 4 and jaunty syncopation -- and even some tunes that you could call rock en espanol (e.g., "Como te Va Con El", a rockin' cover of a song that previously sounded like a syrupy waltz, in the hands of Grupo Zima or whoever). (In case you were wondering, Grupo Zima do NOT resemble jolly ranchers.) For a cumbia, try the one below: "El Mudo", i.e. "The Mute" or "The Dumb Guy". Make sure you keep listening until you hear El Mudo "speak"! (This song annoys the heck out of my wife, as it does all right-thinking people.)

#21
Bragado
De Pies a Cabeza
(Discos Power)

Apparently this "El Mudo" is a thing, a meme or a trope or whatever -- witness this mindboggling 2009 tune from Chacarron Macarron:

Anyway, the songs aren't all novelties, but they ARE mostly spritely and energetic, and even the polkas and waltzes are full of harmonies and crammed-in syllables and rhythmic invention. Inter-library loan them today!

Worth It in 2011: #22 - Electric Cowbell Records

2011-12-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

This boutique label specializes in vinyl singles of synthy new-wave and various international genres, most of it done really well. Bongolia is their first compilation.

#22
Various Artists
101 Things to Do in Bongolia
(Electric Cowbell)

From me PopMatters review -- or, I guess, THE WHOLE THING:

Though not as cool as owning all its constituent singles on 7-inch vinyl, 101 Things to Do in Bongolia is definitely a cheaper way to enjoy the output of Brooklyn boutique label Electric Cowbell. Easier to play in the car, too, where it sounds really good—one indelible driving rhythm after another, it’ll get you across the county with hooks and personality aplenty. MVPs are the horn-driven combo Superhuman Happiness, who deliver five songs full of hooks, riffs, and beats. Their “GMYL” (“God Makes You Live”—a fine sentiment) is super-catchy and chill New Wave; its warm synths evoke sweet and lonely teenage hearts.

Also nostalgic are electro-dudes Amazing Ghost, whose “Tiny Raindropz” quotes both “Band on the Run” and the early ’80s Genesis keyboard sound. LVPs are probably Virginia salsa band Bio Ritmo, whose tunes come across as limp and by-the-book. But NYC’s Spanglish Fly know how to bugalú; Boston’s Debo Band make free-swinging Ethiopian pop; and the two electro-scuzzballs in Talibam! fall apart all over the place but still pack a wallop. Most arresting may be “A Troll’s Soirée Troll” by label owner Jim Thomson and his CSC Funk Band. It’s seven minutes of mysterious gamelan groove, ripe for getting lost inside—just like Brooklyn!

Worth It in 2011: #23 - Jake Owen

2011-12-19T18:51:00.000-08:00

When he's not flipping his hair and doing push-ups, Jake Owen is busy smashing the boundaries between country and rock in ways not seen since the heyday of Eric Church and Montgomery Gentry, only he can't put together an album as beginning-to-end solid as those guys. So instead we have this lovely collection of hits plus filler ("Apple Pie Moonshine", I think it's called), sort of the sonic equivalent of watching Clear and Present Danger just so you can enjoy a few amazing scenes and let Henry Czerny's glower melt your schoolgirlish heart. Amazing songs here are the title single, "Wide Awake" (see below), "Alone With You" (sort of Eagles-y), and... why do I get the feeling I'm overrating this album? I dunno, but I'd be glad to play it any time, and it seems like something I'll be glad to put on a few years down the line, whereas the Pistol Annies' undoubtedly superior Hell On Heels already feels played out. I GET IT PISTOL ANNIES, YOU'RE SO GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO. Now let me hear "Wide Awake" again.

#23
Jake Owen
Barefoot Blue Jean Night
(RCA)

Worth It In 2011: #24 - Group Doueh

2011-12-15T07:39:00.000-08:00

The track below captures most of what makes this West African group so enjoyable -- trancelike repetition of off-kilter rhythms, organ and guitar textures that nod to Western rock music, and pure exuberance. Because I'm me, I compared it to Genesis.

#24
Group Doueh
Zayna Jumma
(Sublime Frequencies)

Um, what the heck, I'll post my entire PopMatters review, even though I'm afraid it reads like the ravings of a madman/dork (madmen aren't always so interesting, you know):

Group Doueh plays noisy and exultant music, designed to pitch listeners into throes of bewildered ecstasy. This makes sense—they’re a wedding band. Remember how bewildered and ecstatic everybody was in the first third of The Deer Hunter? Or rather, recall how ecstatic the film making was, with its leisurely voyeurism and its willingness to simply observe all the dancing and drinking in something approaching real time. That filmed observation, almost an hour-long, was itself virtuosic, itself a celebration. Yet it wasn’t real time. The Deer Hunter achieved its ecstasy by masterfully confounding viewers’ expectations of movie time. Doueh’s songs aren’t that long, actually—only one song on their new album tops six minutes—but they capture the same spirit of staggering along in search of joy, unmoored from time’s tyranny. Sometimes Group Doueh struggles for that joy, and sometimes joy seems handed to them by a happy confluence of design and fortune.

In Doueh’s case, the design is in the repetitive grooves laid down by drummer Hamdan Bamaar and a singing all-female percussion section that includes Hamdan’s mom, Halima Jakani. The fortune is in the jamming. Hamdan’s brother, El Waar, plays the keyboards and family patriarch Salmou plays electric guitar and tinidit, an amped lute. Throughout Group Doueh’s fourth album, Zayna Jumma, Salmou leads the group through a mix of traditional griot music and Hendrix-inspired acid rock, riffing and soloing over some heavy beats. You can tell why Western critics love this band from Western Sahara, and why the Sublime Frequencies label took interest. Group Doueh sound familiar yet exotic, and it’s easy to disappear into their ferocious two-chord vamps—at least, until you notice all the wild flailing shit Dad’s pulling out of his strings.

The word “ecstatic” comes up a lot around Group Doueh. Much of that ecstasy comes from the beats, which somehow hurtle from one bar to the next without speeding up. The band portrays this effect in a couple different ways. On most of the songs, drummer Hamdan either anticipates or delays parts of his beat patterns, making every bar sound uneven. Along with that, one element of the monster rhythm section—hand claps or resonant tbal drums—subdivides the beat into two or four, while another element splits the beat into thirds. This uneven two-or-four-against-three leaves you feeling off-kilter, and then the band repeats the off-kilterness. Over and over.

In effect, Group Doueh’s rhythm section normalizes their rhythms’ abnormality, resetting listeners’ sense of groove, of time and its smoothness, of normalcy itself. For ears raised on rock or disco, sinking into a straight back-beat is like sinking into a hot tub, but you can’t sink into these beats the same way. Eventually you grow accustomed to the not-sinking feeling. The band’s tempo remains the same, but life seems to speed forward. This sensation can resemble carsickness. No word on whether Salmou Bamaar’s fingers feel the same way.

Maybe interestingly, other musicians also normalize their rhythmic abnormalities, but to different effects. Norteño band Los Tigres del Norte sometimes delay the third beat of a waltz rhythm to be funny and uncanny. Electronic glitch musicians loop their glitches because it sounds cool, and probably to make important points about the disruptive effects of technology on everyday life, or something. But it’s worth noting that glitches’ normalized abnormalities may have ecstatic implications as well. Says Rob Young in the Wire article “Worship the Glitch”: “Common time… locks you into the tyranny of sequential time; the earthbound temporality that mystics and hermits meditated their way out of”. In their own ways, Group Doueh and Autechre liberate us from such tyranny.

Salmou loves his American rock, so several of these eight shred-fests resemble a really cool classic rock station. “Ishadlak Ya Khey” and “Zaya Koum” have none of that two-against-three stuff. They’re straight-up rock jams with serpentine wah riffs and strident call-and-response vocals. And the closing power ballad “Wazan Doueh” is a gorgeous appropriation of synth-rock cheese, like ‘80s Genesis or something, with El Waar channeling his inner Tony Banks into some very enthusiastic keyboard stabs. Unlike Genesis, there’s frenetic soloing, only two chords, and wild vocal ululating from the rhythm section (jokes about Phil Collins howling “Who Dunnit?” will be considered). Chances are your wedding band was not as remarkable as Group Doueh.

(Way better than The Rough Guide to African Guitar Legends.)

Worth It In 2011: #25 - Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio

2011-12-14T18:55:00.000-08:00

In a bizarre instance of synchronicity, my review for this album just came up on PopMatters! I certainly did not finagle the End-of-Year results in any way and this is certainly the 25th best album of the year. Good looking album cover, too!

#25

Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio

Clustrophy

(TUM)

Here is part of what I said:

Ever the good host, Innanen has placed “Panoramic View” between two of the most kickass blowing sessions of this or any year. He composed “Clustrophy” and “The Grey Adler Returns Again” according to “clustonic principles” understood by approximately six people in the world, none of whom are friends with me on Facebook. Even more obscure than Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, clustonics outlines methods of extrapolating melody and harmony from non-repetitive tone rows. Or something. At any rate, “Clustrophy” repeats its nine-tone synth bassline over and over, the saxes buzzing overhead like a cloud of gnats. It’s a head-solos-head tune, accessible to jazz neophytes and elevated by the band’s vibrant tone colors and visceral interplay. (Or vice-versa.)

“Grey Adler” is something else again. It’s introduced by an aggressive group head—another nine-tone row punched out like a paddleball—before everything breaks up into chaos. Kantonen plays a wild atonal synth solo, and then Ljungkvist plays the tenor sax version of a synth solo—dry and choppy, an inhuman squeak, until some longer notes finally remind you that a breathing creature is creating these sounds. At this point, the other guys feel compelled to come in and blow whatever the hell they want, and it’s glorious. Before the final head, we hear a crackling sound, as though drummer Riippa is unwrapping a candy bar, while the saxes play long and slow and Kantonen meditates on the tones of the atmosphere. Over in the corner, Innanen pulls out his slide whistle, because…well, why not? The head may be derived from clustonic principles, but the rest seems like people freaking out in whatever entertaining ways occur to them.

Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio: Clustrophy (from "Clustrophy") by Mikko Innanen

(Way better than the Black Lips' Arabia Mountain, which doesn't have anything to do with this album but which I've inexplicably seen on at least one Year-End list, so help me out in the comments.)

Worth It In 2011: #26 - Paul Simon

2011-12-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

#26
Paul Simon
So Beautiful Or So What
(Hear Music)

Sure signs that I am an old man, Rolling Stone edition:

1. Of all the Best of 2011 lists I've read so far, I have the most albums in common with Rolling Stone's, and that includes the PopMatters list to which I contributed. (This album was on both lists.)

2. I've started reading the music articles in Rolling Stone, not just the political screeds; and not just reading, I'm enjoying the music articles! Even the recent "100 Greatest Guitarists" nonsense has gone onto my bookshelf, because they offered just enough technical detail to pique my interest in those (almost exclusively) guys. For instance, someday soon I'll want to figure out what it means that Albert King "used an indecipherable secret tuning, hitting notes with his thumb", so I'll listen to a bunch of Albert King and see how he sounds different than all those other (almost exclusively) guys. Then I'll report back, and this'll turn into a blues blog read exclusively by old men. Lookee, there's Paul Simon at #95 on the list of best guitarists! Apparently he is better than Sonny Sharrock, who is NOT on the list. Should I listen to Bert Jansch? Simon sez Yes! He also sez "Dazzling Blue" off the new album is folk fingerpicking "on top of this rhythm with Indian musicians playing in 12/8". Beautiful song -- simple, in love with wife and existence, with as sure a sense of rhythm as anybody else on this list. In his somewhat soporific PBS special (pledge week!), he was impressive, but he limited his impressive displays to some virtuosic runs he had clearly worked out in advance. Not much in the way of extended improvisationals, in other words, but my, was he fluid.

3. Simon produced my favorite music quote of the year, also in RS: "I put the wildebeest in just to change the sound." (I should figure out which song he's talking about.) In addition to rhythm, the guy's obsessed with sounds -- wildebeest sounds, percussion sounds, sampled sounds, whatever different sounds he can pull out of his guitar and fit onto his records in subtle ways. More than almost any singer-songwriter his age (maybe excepting Neil Young?), Simon knows his game isn't just lyrics-melody-voice -- yet he EXCELS at lyrics-melody-voice. He just throws in all that other stuff, too.

4. (I fear we've veered from the original thesis.) Here's what I said at Sheep & Goats:
“Most folks, they don’t get when I’m jokin’,” he tosses off in a deep Bing Crosby voice only his wife knew about. This occurs in the middle of “Love Is Eternal Sacred Light”, with lyrics linking the Big Bang to terrorist bombs, a beat best described as wood-flute hoedown, and a title like a Divine Styler outtake. This album is weird. It’s also effortless, a confident weirdo singing about whatever interests him — this time out, God and love. He hits on a dead lady while waiting in the line to heaven, for instance. But he also attributes his marriage to divine providence, kicks everything off with a preacher-sampling Christmas song, and teaches his kids to add to the world’s beauty like Sara Groves, so I’ll call it a CCM album until God and his only Son pay me a “courtesy call”. Admittedly, it’s groovier than most CCM (or most rap) — two meandering ballads aside, the rhythms subsume all, as is usually the case with prime Simon. How many songwriters would carefully construct a beat out of guitar tremolo, the way he does in “The Afterlife”? Yet he makes it all sound as careless as the album’s best line, “I am an empty house on Weed Street.”

(Way better than tUnE-yArDz' Whokill.)

Worth It In 2011: #27 - The Lonely Island

2011-12-11T19:45:00.000-08:00

#27
The Lonely Island
Turtleneck & Chain
(Universal Republic)

I have nothing intelligent to say about these guys, but nearly every song contains at least one line that still makes me giggle. And the songs are short. So here's something semi-intelligent I once wrote about their song "I'm On a Boat" (not on this album). And here's the intelligent Singles Jukebox disliking "Jack Sparrow" ("Turns out Michael Bolton's a major cinephile" -- what, because he likes Pirates of the Caribbean and Forrest Gump??) and "I Just Had Sex" ("I think she might've been a racist!"). Don't worry, this is NOT the highest ranked rap album on this list. (Though it is way better than Raekwon's Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang.)

BEWARE OFFENSIVENESS!

Farewell to Paul Thorpe, Extraordinary Teacher

2011-12-06T19:27:00.001-08:00

How do you make sense of something like this? From the Asheville, NC, Citizen-Times:

The owner of the Asheville Music School died Saturday after falling and striking his head on a sidewalk while doing yard work at his Montford home, police said... Paul Mark Thorpe, 45, of 176 Tacoma Circle, was doing yard work on a steep bank when he apparently fell and struck his head on the sidewalk, according to Lt. Wallace Welch, a spokesman with the Asheville Police Department.No one saw Thorpe fall, but Welch said “it looks to be an unfortunate accident.”Thorpe was dead at the scene when police arrived about 3 p.m. Saturday.

Paul was my band teacher for three years, from 1989-92 (7th-9th grade), and besides being a really good teacher -- dedicated, positive, adventurous, going above and beyond, all that gold medal teacher stuff -- he was also a hero and, to a teacher-ish extent, a friend. A tuba player, he encouraged me to switch from trumpet to euphonium, a good move for me, and then brought me along to Tubachristmas, a madcap annual undertaking where a bunch of low brass players get together in a public space and play Christmas carols. (I still do this every once in a while.) From that trip, I most clearly remember our conversation in the car. He played a taped compilation of John Williams film music, and he was an obvious fan, ready with an anecdote for each piece, telling me how he and his college buddies used to watch the end credits of the NBC nightly news just to hear the Williams score in all its glory. Shortly after that excursion, he loaned me "Super Mario Brothers 3" -- the man was only 11 years older than me -- to enjoy during Christmas break.

Paul encouraged my love of music and pushed it; if you enjoy this blog, he's partly to thank. For one of our high school concerts he taught us Dan Bukvich's "Voodoo", a gimmicky-but-cool crowd pleaser that's memorized and played in the dark -- he covered up all the windows in the gym where we performed -- featuring eerie singing, flashlights, and lots of percussion. Selling this to a small-town Missouri crowd was a neat trick, but in Paul's mind it was a gateway drug. During one rehearsal he told us that "Voodoo" might seem weird, but it was nothing compared to true avant-garde composition, mentioning an aleatoric piece whose notes were determined by the silhouette of a swimming goldfish projected against a score. (Is that a John Cage piece? Help me out.) 14-year-old me thought that was the coolest, and that attitude stuck with me through college up until now. One of these days you'll see me raving about Reinhold Freidl's completely insane Inside Piano album; thank Paul.

But more than that, he was incredibly positive. Once as I left a lesson, he looked at me with a smirk and said something like, "What's up today? You just seem really happy." Well, if I wasn't before, I got happy then! And after he left town to get his Masters Degree, whenever he came back to visit and I caught sight of him -- randomly walking past him outside the high school, or bussing his table at the local fancy restaurant -- it made my day. I dunno how many people he affected in this way, but he radiated confident happiness.

He maintained this positivity and musical curiosity to the end. Just a couple weeks ago he messaged me on Facebook to see if there was any way of importing this blog to his music school's posts. (Alas, there wasn't.) I was obviously flattered, but skeptical -- "Do the patrons of Asheville Music School really want to read about Gucci Mane or whoever?" He admitted, "Personally, I didn't take the time to read about Gucci!", but was otherwise complimentary. From the look of things, he lived a rich life in Asheville with his partner and the musical community that formed around his school. Losing one of my favorite teachers might seem insensible to me, but to his friends and family, his loss is something far worse. Prayers.

Another great Paul Thorpe field trip: the summer of '91 (I think), he drove me and several other brass players to a drum and bugle corps competition. (Paul: "Do you have any idea what you're going to see at this thing?" Me: "Drums and bugles?") The contest was loud, obnoxious, thrilling, and it prepared me for marching band, which pretty much centered my studies and social life throughout high school. I have to think he would have enjoyed this live version of "Take On Me", from one of my favorite singles of 2011, by the NO BS! Brass Band:

Paul taught me how to play music and how to love music and, along with that, how to love life. What a treasure.

Worth It In 2011: #28 - Dead Cat Bounce

2011-12-04T19:32:00.001-08:00

Of the three jazz albums on this list, this one is the most straightahead -- all the tunes are pretty obviously composed, and while the solos get into some rangy territory, they remain within a context familiar to anyone who's listened to the last century of big band or chamber music. In other words, ACCESSIBLE! I will warn you, there's also a "comedy rock" group called Dead Cat Bounce, and they're hogging up Youtube, so you have to limit your searches with the name "Steckler" if you wanna find these guys. (The comedy rockers might be good, how do I know, especially if they can justify such song titles as "Overenthusiastic Contraceptive Lady" and "Every Time You Shave, A Moustache Dies".) Matt Steckler also has an interesting blog documenting the band's work.

(Way better than Pat Metheny's What's It All About.)

#28
Dead Cat Bounce
Chance Episodes
(Cuneiform)

My PopMatters review:

At times, the members of Dead Cat Bounce sound like they’re playing contemporary chamber music in a recital hall, savoring dissonance for its own sake, honing the exquisite tones from their woodwinds. In other places they’re a hard-charging funk band, with raucous sax solos screaming over a rhythm section that knows how to groove in 9/8 time. In “Township Jive Revisited”, they simply give themselves over to thick, joyful primary chords, wailing with abandon a tune you’ll walk around humming all day. You can tell this is a jazz band because it comprises a bassist, a drummer, and four guys playing sax (also flute and clarinet)—but “jazz” for them is less a genre shackle than it is a sandbox to explore their oddball musical whims.

Most of those whims come from saxophonist, composer, and liner-note philosophizer Matt Steckler, and his songs for the grant-and-commission-funded album Chance Episodes examine “memory’s haphazard way of bringing to the fore seemingly unrelated events, so that an episodic personal narrative is created, as if ‘by chance.’” Well, you gotta write something on your grant application, but someday Steckler should explain how that compositional approach differs from ANY OTHER MUSIC EVER MADE. Doesn’t all music, or at least all interesting music, incorporate seemingly unrelated events? Why, Lady Gaga’s most recent album recounts the actions of a government hooker, Bible people, and some guy from Nebraska! More to the point, music, simply because it’s music and it sounds intentional, creates narratives all the time, almost despite itself. Granted, most such narratives are listeners’ projections. I dare you to listen to an album and not hear it as some kind of “personal narrative,” even if the narrative is very simple—“this album is the Foo Fighters’ rockin’ return to form”, say. Music, like any artwork, challenges us to take up its disparate elements and make sense of them.

Like I was saying, Chance Episodes is Dead Cat Bounce’s rockin’ return to form… Wait, scratch that! It’s actually the sandbox in which they explore Steckler’s oddball musical whims. So not only is there a tribute to South African township jive, there’s a tune called “Silent Movie, Russia 1995” that indeed sounds like a pensive silent movie score with a killer klezmer-derived groove during the solo section. You can practically see villagers dancing in the snow, or whatever Russians did in 1995. (Lined up at McDonald’s?) “Far From the Matty Crowd” and “Salon Sound Journal” surely depict something, since they are multi-part suites that your local jazz combo won’t cover anytime soon. “Matty” is especially adventurous: it starts with a surging group head, all four saxes blowing a long and winding line of melody, until the rhythm section drops out for a free woodwind smear-a-thon, after which drummer Bill Carbone ratchets up some solo excitement, and then we’re back to the head. Like most of the songs here, “Matty” boasts a structure that’s as unique and memorable as its tune.

You know Steckler’s an egghead because he titled the opening song “Food Blogger”, and then stuffed it into classical sonata-allegro finery: theme A, theme B, development, theme A, theme B. But the themes are good ones—A is a gentle midtempo swing that could’ve come from the Shorter songbook, whereas B is a madcap walk that almost sounds like a Raymond Scott rarity. The song’s real draw is its solos. Over one flexible chord, altoist Terry Goss flies free of the beat with torrents of melody. Goss is followed by baritonist and rhythmic subtlist Charlie Kohlhase, who plays with the beat and jabs it from odd angles, like a boxer or a hungry predator.

“Tourvan Confessin’” is the most straightforward tune, the one you might find in a fakebook some day, head-solos-head. Its melody is a slow creeping stalk that builds through complex counterpoint, only to resolve in an unexpected key, like the lights suddenly coming on. Jared Sims’s tenor solo is exuberant, as though he can’t wait to overblow and screech; Steckler’s solo is a bit more studied, but you cut him some slack because he wrote the tune. Along with the resonance and perfect timing of bassist Dave Ambrosio, all these guys are fine players with individual voices. Their best group moment comes in the album closer “Living the Dream”, when they join together for some wild counter-pointillism.

Chance Episodes’ main weakness is that not every episode connects. “Watkins Glen” is memorable mainly for its bowed bass solo, never a good sign. And “Bio Dyno Man” is a study in abstraction, with seemingly random bits of chord and melody falling where they will, but without any sense of momentum, or any compelling reason to listen. Overall, though, Chance Episodes is lively, varied, and vividly recorded. It reminds us that jazz is a useful laboratory for highbrow art music experiments. More importantly, it cooks.

Worth It In 2011: #29 - Chucha Santamaria Y Usted

2011-12-02T13:14:00.001-08:00

A sureshot Grammy nominee for Best Album Packaging -- if the Grammys weren't a CORRUPT CABAL RULED BY THE MONEYED INFLUENCE OF STING AND CHICKENFOOT. But I digress! (And anyway, Cabo Wabo serves a fine fish taco.)

#29
Chucha Santamaria Y Usted
Chucha Santamaria Y Usted
(Young Cubs)

My PopMatters review:

They're right -- Fanta ES fabuloso!

Reportedly there’s a concept buried inside the self-titled debutChuCha Santamaria y Usted, something about the complex historical relationship between Caribbean people and the U.S., and how that parallels the complex relationship between hi-hats and synth arpeggios in all your favorite disco genres—I count freestyle, Italo, motorik, the hard-charging Pitbull stomp, and maybe more. The album may also describe how Puerto Rico’s “Fiebre Tropical” equals a tropical fever on the dance floor. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I’m not sure. Thankfully, as with all good concept albums, ChuCha Santamaria y Usted’s music doesn’t need its concept. Matthew Kirkland’s synths play a thinned-out version of early ‘80s hi-NRG, only without the 4x4 thumps. He’s got bass churgles and he’s not afraid to drop ‘em, but the focus is on the treble sounds—mallet percussion and lush Moroder-esque ostinatos that suck you into their rippling propulsion like a wave pool. Singer/wordsmith Sofía Córdova sings in inglés, español, y Vocoder, carefully unfolding her melodies with stately restraint. She never sounds like she’s reaching for the high notes, and her low notes just sort of drift into the heat haze. You’ve been here in your dreams.

(Way better than Tapes 'n' Tapes's Outside.) (Did I already rip on that one?)

Worth It In 2011: #30 - Los Huracanes del Norte

2011-12-02T09:56:00.001-08:00

It DOESN'T all sound the same. As proof, I offer the delightful polka "Carmelita", which adds texture-changing tuba and accordion arpeggios on the chorus. There's also a slow cumbia later in the album called "Agua Bendita", and it's gringo-accessible touches like these that help Huracanes stand out from the packs of polkas and waltzes that occupy the regional Mexican charts.

But even when the songs DO start to sound samey, Huracanes are worth hearing for their singers' close harmonies, their lead singer's rich tone, and their accordion players' inventiveness. We're not just talking flashy runs of notes, here -- the accordionists (I'm pretty sure there's more than one) buzz and float around the singer like clouds of gnats, or comp like jazz pianists, jamming chords into whatever spaces they can find. Listen to more here; way better than Ricky Martin's Musica Alma Sexo (but you knew that).

#30

Los Huracanes del Norte

Soy Mexicano

(Musinorte/Disa)

Worth It In 2011: #31 - Those Darlins

2011-12-01T10:13:00.001-08:00

If we're talking retro-rock that plunders '60s girl groups and the Stones in equal measure, this album is way better than the Girls' Father, Son, Holy Ghost, which wasn't such a bad record (its drumming was probably better), but wasn't nearly as funny as Screws Get Loose, whose songs reject boys who "wanna stick it in" in favor of both eating and playing in the dirt. Those Darlins are maybe the Shangri Las to the Girls' Shirelles, or something. (Yes, I realize the Girls do not actually have girls in the band; just saying.)

This is one of three (I think) albums my Top 40 will share with the Paste Top 50, which is dominated by saphead indie rock and/or stuff I haven't heard. That's roughly half the number my list shares with the Grammy nominations, out yesterday, where I spotted six (I think) of my album picks. (R. Kelly holla!) Seven if you count the liner notes to Neil Diamond's Bang Years reissue! (I've said too much.)

#31
Those Darlins
Screws Get Loose
(Oh Wow Dang)

Those Darlins' greatest song is "Tina Said", a cautionary tale about addiction and codependence that steals the riff from the Flaming Lips' "She Don't Use Jelly", and STILL manages to sound lowdown and sleazy:

Here's the score so far:

31. Those Darlins--Screws Get Loose (Oh Wow Dang) (indie, country)
32. Buraka Som Sistema -- Komba (Enchufada) (indie, dance)
33. Thompson Square--Thompson Square (Stoney Creek '10) (indie, country)
34. Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans -- Electric Fruit (Thirsty Ear) (indie, jazz)
6 REISSUE. Drive-By Truckers -- Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians (New West) (indie, country, reissue)
35. Alexi Murdoch--Towards the Sun (Zero Summer) (indie, folk)
36. R. Kelly--Love Letter (Jive ‘10) (major, R&B)
37. David Banner & 9th Wonder--Death of a Pop Star (b.i.G.f.a.c.e./eOne ‘10) (indie, rap, CCM)
38. Heavy Winged -- Sunspotted (Type ‘10) (indie, metal)
39. Blind Boys of Alabama--Take the High Road (Saguaro Road) (indie, country, CCM)
40. Gucci Mane--The Return of Mr. Zone 6 (Warner Bros.)

Worth It In 2011: #32 - Buraka Som Sistema

2011-11-30T09:08:00.001-08:00

I'm still working on a review of this one, so I'll be cagey, but it's an electro-acoustic dance album based on Angolan kuduro music, which I've never heard in its pure form, if it even has a "pure form". Think MIA in her "pure form", without any stylistic tangents. Komba is also a concept album (so they say) based on a ritual seven-day wake that Angolan people throw for their dead friends. The music is deep and dark, but also very humanistic. I've said too much! (Way better than Battles' Gloss Drop.)

#32
Buraka Som Sistema
Komba
(Enchufada)

Worth It in 2011: #33 - Thompson Square

2011-11-27T16:58:00.001-08:00

The first, and less favorite, of two country couples on my list, Thompson Square's debut album just got traction this year with their single "Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not?", which is big and fine and reviewed by the Singles Jukebox here. "The melody's got some tug to it", I said, but I missed its majesty, how it sounds like the endgame of the entire world depends on the answer to the title question -- in other words, exactly how such a situation sounds inside the head of the nervous would-be kisser.

#33
Thompson Square
Thompson Square
(Stoney Creek 2010)

Though they do some annoying list-the-humdrum-details-of-my-everyday-life songs ("As Bad As It Gets" and "One of Those Days", sort of the mainstream country version of Francesca Battistelli's "This Is the Stuff"), they also have one heck of an extended-metaphor ballad in "Glass", one heck of a hard-to-explain-to-your-kid-in-the-backseat-without-having-THE-TALK ballad in "If It Takes All Night", and lots of good riffs and harmonies. Not as MANY harmonies as that other country couple, which partially explains why Thompson Square are all the way down here in the 30s. But still good.

Listen here; way better than the Decemberists' The King Is Dead, if only because Thompson Square actually get around to explaining why we fight. (To make up, basically.)

Worth It in 2011: #34 - Weasel Walter/Mary Halvorson/Peter Evans

2011-11-18T19:16:00.001-08:00

This free jazz trio session becomes more enjoyable every time I play it, as drums/guitar/trumpet coalesce into areas of great beauty and energy, only to break down into more scattershot configurations. To way oversimplify things, Evans swings, Walter clatters, and I'm VERY pleased with this as my introduction to Halvorson, who somehow holds them both together with a giant catalog of guitar techniques. If you wanna read more about her, here's the fine Will Layman at PopMatters.

#34
Weasel Walter/Mary Halvorson/Peter Evans
Electric Fruit
(Thirsty Ear)

(Me, originally at PopMatters:)

Drummer Weasel Walter is known for his blast beats, and guitarist Mary Halvorson is considered one of the hardest pickers in the biz, so the most surprising sonic quality of Electric Fruit might be its quietness. Fruit is an improvised six-track pow-wow between Walter, Halvorson, and trumpeter Peter Evans. On occasion, these three weirdos push each other into areas of overdriven sonic violence, but more often Fruit sounds like a collective dare: How quickly and precisely can three musicians play together without ever lapsing into a conventional rhythm or tonality?

On “The Stench of Cyber-Durian”—this thing’s got the best song titles around—Halvorson starts with what sounds like a cute little ostinato figure. Or at least that’s what we’re led to believe for about 11 notes, until she starts messing with it. Walter darts around her while Evans blows one note over and over, seemingly intent on exploring every possible iteration of that pitch. From there they embark on a capricious 11-minute journey through scritches and scratches, arpeggios and melodies, prettiness and godawful rooting pig noises. Have you ever dropped everything simply to appreciate how many different sounds exist in the world? If so, this may be the album for you.

Even when someone does threaten to start grooving, the other two refuse to succumb. Halvorson, who evinces the biggest bag of tricks, will sometimes offer a lovely bit of Metheny minimalism that threatens to become music you could play at a dinner party. Sometimes Walter and Evans coalesce around her dominant rhythm; more often, they simply mess with it until everything breaks down again, bliddledybloop. This shouldn’t imply that they’re not playing nicely together, though. The interplay of these three musicians often resembles a conversation among highly intelligent people who know they should listen respectfully but, try as they might, can’t stop thinking of stuff to say and so continually talk over one another’s responses. It’s hard-charging interdependence. Think a late-night dorm-room conspiracy theory session or an episode of The McLaughlin Group. (Same thing?)

Halvorson and Walter play their music with lots of hard consonants: Brisk. Brittle. Crisp. Rattly. Lickety-split. (Though admittedly, there’s not much Slack.) Even when Halvorson uses pedals to add blasts of distortion or cool pitch-bend effects, she cuts off her sounds abruptly. This is miles away from, say, a Last Exit-style blowout, where you can get lost in gooey globs of feedback and noise. Every sound here seems intentional, and there’s nowhere for the notes to hide. Because of the nature of his instrument, Evans’ playing is more legato, but he deftly keeps up with the other two and slides through an impressive variety of timbres.

Electric Fruit makes for captivating listening. Whether you’ll feel compelled to play it a bunch is another matter, but I suspect there’ll come a day in the not too distant future when you just wanna hear three music geeks at the top of their game, playing, with obvious care and delight, music that’d sound like the infernal tortures of hell to 90 percent of the yaks you have to tolerate every day. May this deeply social collaboration chase them screaming from the room.

Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans - Electric Fruit by Thirsty Ear Recordings

Worth It REISSUES in 2011: #6 - Drive-By Truckers

2011-11-18T07:51:00.001-08:00

From writing this review for PopMatters, excerpted below, I learned two important things:

1. My taste in Drive-By Truckers differs from most fans' taste in Drive-By Truckers. Commenter Jamie McAfee kindly summarized it this way: "This was somewhat enlightening in its alternative appreciation. Clearly you know the records, but your appreciation doesn't really line up with the average DBT fan. Zip City and The Living Bubba are pretty central DBT songs, for example, and Ouftit was the big DBT anthem till Isbell left." The trouble is, those songs are pretty boring, and the Truckerz are capable of louder things and cooler guitar tones.

2. You should NEVER EVER state in a review that you don't know what a song is about, because there is undoubtedly some fan out there who has parsed the lyrics more closely than you have and will eagerly set you straight. (ahem... "Carl Perkins' Cadillac"...) You should just always follow Rob Sheffield's tactic of blithely stating your interpretation of the song, no matter how out there. If nothing else, this tactic makes for an extra joke, and jokes are useful and hard to come by.

#6 Reissue
Drive-By Truckers
Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians
(New West)

Here, let’s have some fun. Put on Southern Rock Opera, the Drive-By Truckers’ breakthrough 2001 double album, and play the first few seconds of each song, like you’re sampling it on the digital listening stations of some defunct retailer. (RIP Borders.) With a couple exceptions—the drums and bass that open “Wallace”, Mike Cooley hollering “I think I’m gonna call the PO-lice!”—every song starts with guitars: noodly guitars, foreboding guitars, guitars that have trouble getting started, guitars that have a loose relationship with soul or boogie or punk riffs. DBT can do different things, but their classic sound is meditative electric guitar worship that somehow congeals into song. To paraphrase minimalist composer Morton Feldman, those six strings are their Walden...

[then I talk about some of the boring songs]

Thankfully, as the Truckers’ extensive gay listenership might say, it gets better. Half of these 16 songs are mighty fine, and that number includes character studies like the evil “Sink Hole” and music history lessons like “Ronnie and Neil” and “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”. I’m still not entirely sure what “Cadillac” is about, but its melody rips off “Mr. Bojangles” with such sweet yearning I can’t help but love it. “Lookout Mountain” is massive; “Marry Me” sounds like a lost Stones classic. 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark album is absurdly overrated, but this compilation has the courtesy to cherrypick two of its four rockers. “The Righteous Path” is Hood’s meditation on singing one note over and over again, a righteous path of anti-melody. And “3 Dimes Down”! “3 Dimes Down” is a CRAZY song—the guitar tone from the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”, a story about a laudromat threesome, and two verses (no chorus) of perfect rock ‘n’ roll lines. “Three dimes down and 25 cents shy of a slice of the Doublemint Twins”, indeed. Throw in “Let There Be Rock” and that makes five Hoods, three Cooleys, and no Isbells, which seems about right, though I wouldn’t skip Isbell’s “Outfit” and “Never Gonna Change” if they came on.

(Way better than the Eli Young Band's Life At Best.)

Worth It in 2011: #35 - Alexi Murdoch

2011-11-17T06:57:00.001-08:00

IF YOU LIKE NICK DRAKE THEN YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ALEXI MURDOCH. Even if you don't often listen to Nick Drake, but he always sounds nice on soundtracks and on your wife's As Seen On TV compilation, then you might want to listen to Alexi Murdoch. If you saw that charming pregnancy movie Away We Go, you have already heard Alexi Murdoch. Gentle acoustic folk with propulsion and dissonance in the guitar, subtle instrumental shading, openhearted grappling with matters of life and death... You know you wanna hear this guy. And what the heck is that on the album cover?

#35
Alexi Murdoch
Towards the Sun
(Zero Summer)

The album is a study in stillness, but a fascinating stillness inside which you can move around. Steve Horowitz, a fine writer at PopMatters, turned me on to this guy. He sez, "Each of the seven tracks offers the same lesson. We are free to walk towards the light or live in the shadows. The choice is ours. No one can make it for us. Listen to that still small voice inside, like the one you hear on the record. You will know what to do."

(Way better than Bon Iver's Bon Iver.)

This Kool and Together Comp is NOT Worth It.

2011-11-15T18:52:00.001-08:00

Cymbal afficionado.

Since they read better than my PopMatters review, here are two angry comments from "Donna," who had the sagacity to NOT insult my day job:

Dude, what is your deal.....just saw these guys perform and they killed it... First of all those are old recordings and I personally do not understand why you would bring up someone [Cowboy Troy] from Victoria....Yeah he probably had better contributions but he probably had money to keep making music!!!!!! This is their first album that has actually come out..Also they were KIDS when they made this.....They did not have the technology they do now to make them sound good.....Like I said not everybody could afford top quality like the Rolling Stones!!!!!!! You are the only one that has said something negative the ONLY one...Even Spin magazine liked them and WHO are you!!!!!!!!!Whatever, before you pass judgement!!!! you should see them at the Lincoln Center in New York on December 15....then judge!!!!! Josh!!!!!!

Plus...people...THESE RECORDINGS WERE NOT MEANT FOR THE PUBLIC THEY WERE DISCOVERED BY CHANCE....JOSH did not do his research skills correctly obviously.... This review is awful and not specific and very bias....they are a damn good band and people you should check them out!!!!!!

Worth It in 2011: #36 - R Kelly

2011-11-15T18:12:00.001-08:00

R. Kelly's genius at creating albums is casual in nature. He seems to just pick up whatever's lying around and put it out there for us to devour, which explains why this late 2010 album contains a barely-altered Christmas version of the title track that includes A COWBELL SOLO. Why not? There's such an unforced feeling to his output, in pop-auteur terms he's less Stevie Wonder or Prince than he is Neil "It's All One Song!" Young. (Except is Neil Young really an auteur? Discuss.) Kelly releases his share of crap, but Love Letter, while not as extended a triumph as 2004's Happy People, is right up there with his best long players.

#36
R Kelly
Love Letter
(Jive '10)

From Sheep & Goats over at Burnside:
It’s like Song of Solomon, only it mentions God more and includes a scene in a taxi cab. This is Kells in his sunniest mode, stepping through his folks’ R&B collections while canned drums burble gently in the background. If, like me, you consider him the most gifted chart popper of the last decade, this is his most delightfully consistent effort since Happy People in ‘04. If, like my wife, you find him irredeemably cheesy, you may still appreciate the shouted adlib that ends “Number One Hit”: “You’re my Titanic! My movie star! My Coming to America! My Avatar!” Or maybe this, from “A Love Letter Christmas”: “I wanna have some fun, gimme the cowbell!” AND THEN HE PLAYS A COWBELL SOLO.

From Singles Jukebox, where the title track scored a collective 7.38:
The lyric is pretty brilliant, too. It’s a deceptively artless stream of consciousness on people’s motives for writing love letters, incorporated into his own act of writing, so that, without a shred of detail about Kelly’s surroundings, I can envision him sitting at his dining room table writing his letter, pausing every once in a while to ruminate on the nature of letter writing itself. And in my imagination, his dining room table is my dining room table, which in turn makes me think I should catch up on my correspondence. I mean, wow — talk about collapsing distinctions between life and art, between artist and audience.
[9]

And Tal Rosenberg correctly sez, "It certainly feels like no art I’ve come across in recent memory has dealt so plainly with such elemental sources of happiness."

(Way better than Destroyer's Kaputt.) (You know, if we're talking suave R&B vamps and such.)

Worth It in 2011: #37 - David Banner & 9th Wonder

2011-11-13T14:06:00.001-08:00

I'll persist in calling this late 2010 album Christian rap because that's what it is, although I wouldn't be comfortable playing it around most people at church, or my parents, or my children, etc. The album's Christian-ness isn't just a matter of David Banner using Christian imagery in his raps. Throughout Death of a Pop Star, Banner grapples with his position as a Christian in a non-Christian world of urban poverty, flashy rap stars, and strip clubs. The results wouldn't please everyone, but that's hardly a Christian's job, is it? An honest mess from a faithful brother.

David Banner & 9th Wonder
Death of a Pop Star
(b.i.G.f.a.c.e./eOne ‘10)

From Sheep & Goats:
In the best song, Banner prays that he might lead his people to “The Light” over a slinky funk bounce built of barks and grunts. He starts the soulful “Slow Down” talking smack to a stripper, and ends up humanizing her — not in any real deep way, but we learn she’s a single mom working two jobs, which is more than you’d get from the Ying Yang Twins. Banner can also sound idiotic — he equates rappers trying to sing with “preachers touchin’ the kids”, and attributes homosexuality to rape-by-stepfather. But that hardly makes him the first Christian blowhard, and anyway, he can rap rings around most such yaks, burrowing deep into 9th Wonder’s inspired grooves. It’s a confounding possibility for what Christian rap can be: dope, spiritually naked, socially perceptive, occasionally stupid and offensive. And hey — if Ludacris wants to offer a hilarious sex rap instead of a testimony, at least Banner got him in the door.

From The Singles Jukebox, where "Be With You" scored a collective 7 out of 10:
Luda’s verses are laugh-out-loud funnier in the context of Death of a Pop Star, one of the more confounding and entertaining Christian rap albums I’ve heard, because he strings his random church and sex images together with such obvious glee, he makes me believe he’s getting away with something. It’s as though Banner invites him to church to give a testimonial, and instead Luda regales the congregation with a blasphemous blow-by-blow account of his Saturday night, and everybody ends up loving him anyway. As a single it’s just a straightforward pick-up/sex rap with some inexplicable God talk thrown in, but 9th Wonder’s track and Banner himself are warm and loose, and Luda’s “offering”/”oxygen” still makes me grin.

Listen to "The Light"!

(Way better than the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.)

Worth It In 2011: #38 - Heavy Winged

2011-11-09T17:40:00.001-08:00

One of my better writing efforts from the past year, originally at PopMatters:

#38
Heavy Winged
Sunspotted
(Type '10)

Heavy Winged conjure visions of massiveness. Imagine all the MASSIVE things you can: THE SUN, of course, and MOUNTAINS, and NORSE GODS, and DIVINE HAMMERS, and all that kind of stuff. From an instrumental noise-metal group, this is pretty much what you expect. Bands like Heavy Winged don’t often aim to evoke things like mice or fairies, not even the really mean and big kinds that wear boots. But these guys are impressive—they sound pretty massive even during their sparser, quieter moments, which occur intermittently across the 45 minutes and two songs that constitute Sunspotted.

20-minute songs are the norm for Heavy Winged, whose discography consists largely of improvised CD-Rs and LPs released through tiny labels. Recently, they’ve been using studios and overdubs more. Sure enough, Sunspotted often boasts two mightily rad guitar figures assaulting both your ears at once, with noise connoisseur Ryan Hebert laying down two-chord motifs over sheets of haze and squawl. If you do a guided meditation to this album under the persuasive influence of Yukon Jack—and you should, it’s got a flavor big as all outdoors—you’ll eventually find your mind wandering into expanses of desolate tundra, winds howling and locomotives running amok, door buzzers ringing insistently to no answer (that one doesn’t exactly fit, but it sounds freaky coming out of a guitar), and eventually you’ll come across THE PENDULUM SWING. That effect comes 16 minutes into “Breathe Life” (Heavy Winged usurp the divine!). It consists of Herbert scraping a tone cluster worthy of late downtown composer Morton Feldman, over and over, as though snuffing out existence itself.

Song two, “Vapor Trails” (Heavy Winged usurp the FAA, or at least Rush!), starts with noodling guitar-windchimes blowing in the breeze, then evolves into crackling electrical scritching. Drummer Jed Bindeman starts gettin’ antsy and everything escalates, the guitars threatening explosion ‘mid bassist Brady Sansone’s roiling clouds of doom and gathering sandstorms. (He sounds huge throughout.) After passing through various phases of instrumental war, the whole thing comes to a pastoral close with a darling little filigreed pattern like the end of some Strauss tone poem. Both songs change texture every five to ten minutes, so they’re more like two extended suites. This adds to the overall feeling of largeness; though the two songs initially seem monolithic, they’re stuffed with so many sounds that it takes a while to register them all. (For some reason my notes label one such sound “BIG OLD ELECTRICAL PLANT”, but that may just be the Yukon Jack talking.)

You can’t call ‘em “hooks”, but Sunspotted certainly has landmarks, memorable sonic areas that you can recognize and bask in with every listen. The guitar riffs tend to be simple, built on fourths; the bass is a monstrous looming beast; the drums rock. (At one point, Bindeman sounds like he’s smashing melons with a club.) This is accessible noise that delivers the goods. Four minutes into “Breathe Life”, the low end achieves a sound that resembles the moon bouncing off a tarpaulin made of whale skin. Before hearing this CD, I wasn’t even sure what a tarpaulin was! This shit will expand your mind.

(Way better than Prefuse 73's The Only She Chapters.)

Worth It In 2011: #39 - Blind Boys of Alabama

2011-11-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

The Worth It scale of unfair value judgments is fiendishly simple: if an album doesn't feel like a chore to sit through again, it's Worth It. If it's anything other than that, I just forget about it. Well, I don't totally forget about it, because I keep a list of everything, but there are several highly-placed Not Worth Its that I wouldn't hate you for liking, and that are probably quality music in the Objective and Godly scale of fair value judgments. But I wouldn't go around repping for them.

(A Worth It album basically equals a Sheep over at my "Sheep & Goats" column at the Burnside Writers Collective, though I occasionally grade a tad easier there. It seems to equal a high 6 or above at PopMatters. If I had the exact same taste as Robert Christgau, B+ and above would probably be Worth It. Everything I'm talking up in this Top 40, though, is A- at the lowest, or 8 out of 10 on the PopMatters scale.)

This criterion is useful to remember when it comes to an album like Take the High Road, which isn't the most ambitious or exciting thing in the world, I'll grant you, but which never doesn't sound good and always feels like a pleasure to listen to again. And there are little surprises, chief among them Lee Ann Womack being a total beast on the mic. I think I'm most surprised that I haven't gotten tired of this album yet, no matter how often it comes on.

#39
Blind Boys of Alabama
Take the High Road
(Saguaro Road)

From Sheep & Goats:

Smooth countrypolitan piano and organ over a forthright shuffle, and some Blind Boys come in: “I was a burden…” Impossible! “I was a burden…” You’re national treasures! “I was a burden ‘til the Lord laid his hands on me.” Over the past 72 years(!) the gospel singers have perfected a blend of passion, good humor, gentleness, shouting, rhythmic acuity, and mile-wide vibrato that delivers songs as naturally as plain speech or breathing. Somehow all the vast enormity of the Christian walk resides in their voices. And THEN Lee Ann Womack comes in, looks us in the eye, and admits, “I was a burden to my motherrrrrrr / And to my fatherrrrrrr / My sister and brotherrrrrrrrr”. What, for being too perfect? No, she was on “dope, whiskey, and wine”, hopeless, losing her mind, until the Lord laid his hands on her. I’m no Dr. Drew, but I do wonder if the elements of her vocal performance that make it so incredibly sexy, her vibrancy and authority, are related to her past addiction. Maybe she tried to feed the vibrancy with chemicals, which worked OK until she became a burden, at which point she and God mustered up all her authority to get sober. Womack is brilliant here, pushing through unstated vulnerability up to her final triumphant “HA!” …Um, I suppose I should mention there’s 11 other country songs on this album, all good, loosey-goosily co-produced by the shaggy Jamey Johnson, some with different guest stars. Vince Gill! He sings real good. OK, I’ll go back to being smitten now.

Way better than Buddy Miller's The Majestic Silver Strings.

Worth It in 2011: #40 - Gucci Mane

2011-11-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

Surfing In Babylon celebrates The Year In Music with our typical blend of largesse and hubris! You're welcome. Like you, I'm concerned about these year-end best-ofs appearing earlier and earlier each year; like you, I haven't fully absorbed the new Buraka Som Sistema CONCEPT ALBUM yet. Here's my excuses for jumping the gun:

1. I've heard a lot of stuff this year -- not as much as most people who write about music for a living, and not as much as plenty of folks who write about music for kicks, but more than I've ever heard in any other year of my life. SO.... this evolving list may point out things YOU'D like that you'd otherwise have missed, thus enabling you to formulate more perfect year-end lists of your own.

2. I don't have all the time in the world! Especially around Christmas. As one of the local PTO officials put it when someone challenged the date of our local Scrapbooking Event, "I have to schedule this when it works for ME."

3. This'll probably wind up including more than 40 albums, because I'll wind up inserting other things I hear in the meantime. Like the new Buraka Som Sistema CONCEPT ALBUM.

4. I'm not going to put much effort into it.

I'm not sure how that last one's a point in my favor, but we'll see. In the meantime, may I direct you to:

#40
Gucci Mane
The Return of Mr. Zone 6
(a mixtape on Warner Bros., however that happens)

Still have a sneaking suspicion I liked this so much because I missed the Waka Flocka Flame boat last year. (I spent a delightful January day blasting Flockaveli, watching Black Swan, reading Proust, and debasing myself and others with bizarre psychosexual mind games.) (PTO holla!) Gucci's not as magnetic as Waka, who still shows up on a couple trax here, and these beats lack all that crazy Waka barking in the background -- a song like "Reckless" is anything but. But there still comes a time in every Gucci song when feel like I'm floating away on a sea of midtempo -- "bliss"? Maybe not, because in "bliss" women are generally loved and respected as equals, but you get the idea. It's like a form of hypnosis or sedative: repetitive and soothing, allowing you to notice enough details and idiosyncrasies to maintain interest, and a relief when you contrast your Gucci-filled life to the Gucci-less world that existed before the music started playing. Or when you look up and suddenly realize you're operating a car.

You should listen to "This Is What I Do", ft. Waka.

Way better than Tyler the Creator's Goblin.

This Dinky New Album By Gospel Music is NOT Worth It.

2011-11-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

You can give him money for a razor, but he'll just spend it on booze.

Gospel Music makes twee pop, and there is better twee pop out there; I'm sure of it! If I didn't believe that, I couldn't go on. In my PopMatters review I have attempted to spell out why. An excerpt:

I think this guy Owen Holmes isn’t as clever as he’d like to be. He’s the man behind the moniker Gospel Music, an act whose output doesn’t have anything to do with gospel music, but does have plenty to do with jaunty acoustic pop and twee love songs. Holmes has this annoying habit of pausing before his “laugh lines” (I use the term loosely), as though he’s smirking at you, eyebrows wriggling, promising that THIS is going to be the wittiest thing you’ve ever heard. “Don’t call me a bore, don’t say I’m a mess / I’m not drinkin’ any more but I’m not drinkin’ ... any ... less”, and so on. That particular line graces the song “This Town Doesn’t Have Enough Bars for Both of Us”, from Gospel Music’s full-length debutHow to Get to Heaven from Jacksonville, FL. It’s an album-length ode to hangdogs, the women who settle for them, and the extremely long titles that ensue. As you read this, Holmes is probably scoring a Michael Cera movie.

Miranda Lambert's New One May or May Not Be Worth It.

2011-11-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

Triceps!

It's called Four the Record. I now regret that I didn't include a whole string of terrible "four" puns at the end of my PopMatters review, fournication in the fourests of Fourks, WA, while fourmidable foes affourd no mercy and fourensic detectives fourget to fill out triplicate fourms, and whatnot. On second thought, maybe it's better that I didn't do that. Here's an excerpt:

Lambert is a rare country artist who’s become more popular even as she’s gotten alt-er. However you feel about alternative country vs. chart country, there’s something admirable about Lambert sprinkling her surefire Number One albums with the songs of Americana lifers like Fred Eaglesmith, Patty Griffin, John Prine, and, on this one, Gillian Welch and Allison Moorer. (It’s sort of like when Nirvana dragged the Meat Puppets onto MTV Unplugged.) No surprise, Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio” and Moorer’s “Oklahoma Sky” (nothing about Oregon?) are atmospheric and brooding, two qualities prized by alt-country fans. Lambert’s earlier ballads “More Like Her” and “Greyhound Bound For Nowhere” were prettier, less fussy, and better observed narratives. On the other hand, “Miss Ohio” never spells out its title character’s dilemma, so it arrives covered in a patina of capital “M” Mystery that manages to feel rootsy and sophisticated at the same time, a neat trick. If you enjoy dissecting the Anthology of American Folk Music over craft beers, Lambert might happily join you someday.

It Guettas Better: Erasure Once Again Forestall the Old Folks' Club

2011-10-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks in large part to my wife and her rigorous pre-marriage training seminar, I am able to speak with confidence and authority about the Erasure catalog. Including, in PopMatters, their new one that is pretty good but probably inessential. Way less essential than all-time great Cowboy, at any rate. From the review:

The winner of Most Cringeworthy Couplet on Tomorrow’s World is this bizarre little number, from “Then I Go Twisting”:

Think I’m going schizo / I bury my head in sand
I live in a disco / You’ve such a machismo hand.

Forget your everyday run-of-the-mill complaints about daft pop lyrics—“Who talks like that?”, or, “Since when is ‘machismo’ an adjective?” Such complaints cannot fathom the depths of meaninglessness in Erasure’s lyrics. I’d call those lines “decadent”, except decadence usually requires some work. Erasure’s lyrics make the Dave Clark Five’s 1965 club banger “Over and Over” (“Everybody there was there!”) sound like an ontological manifesto.

This Dead Cat Bounce CD is Worth It!

2011-10-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

Hey, they use music stands too!

It turns out I can review jazz, too, but it's more difficult. That said, this PopMatters review of hard-thinking sax quartet Dead Cat Bounce worked pretty well, even if I did have to mention Lady Gaga and the Foo Fighters for whatever reason. An excerpt:

Most of [the band's musical] whims come from saxophonist, composer, and liner-note philosophizer Matt Steckler, and his songs for the grant-and-commission-funded album Chance Episodes examine “memory’s haphazard way of bringing to the fore seemingly unrelated events, so that an episodic personal narrative is created, as if ‘by chance.’” Well, you gotta write something on your grant application, but someday Steckler should explain how that compositional approach differs from ANY OTHER MUSIC EVER MADE. Doesn’t all music, or at least all interesting music, incorporate seemingly unrelated events? Why, Lady Gaga’s most recent album recounts the actions of a government hooker, Bible people, and some guy from Nebraska! More to the point, music, simply because it’s music and it sounds intentional, creates narratives all the time, almost despite itself. Granted, most such narratives are listeners’ projections. I dare you to listen to an album and not hear it as some kind of “personal narrative,” even if the narrative is very simple—“this album is the Foo Fighters’ rockin’ return to form”, say. Music, like any artwork, challenges us to take up its disparate elements and make sense of them.

This new Chuck Eddy anthology is TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!

2011-10-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned I'm a Chuck Eddy fan? Among the sentences I purged from this review at the L.A. Review of Books was something akin to, "The Accidental Evolution of Rock & Roll [Eddy's 1997 manifesto] served as my I Ching for, like, a decade." Thankfully, the L.A. Review of Books spurred me to better things. Like this tantalizing sample paragraph-and-a-half:

Because Eddy has turned me on to more good music than anyone else, I tend to look the other way when his writing exhausts me. This has worked out pretty well. He’ll obsessively quote and adapt lyrics, huffing and puffing his way through loooong paragraphs on Kid Rock and Eminem; he’ll insist that “Gina G breathily metronomes too-childlike-to-be-suggestive ‘ooh aah’s as if she were a Kit-Cat clock ticking and tocking its way to the bank, its Cheshire smile bursting with catnip.” As my derailed mind starts sinking under the weight of all that junk masquerading as energy, it’s saved by one pure, shining thought: This Gina G song is gonna be good. I know this not from the description, but simply because Eddy says so. Chuck Klosterman writes in Rock and Roll’s foreword, “[T]he music he likes makes him impossible to understand. If you want to understand Chuck Eddy for real, you need to focus on the music he hates.” But Klosterman is wrong. Eddy’s taste, as expressed in his writing and his lists of favorite music, is as internally unified yet uncanny as the actions of a Tolstoy character. You can predict what Eddy will think of something, and you’ll often be wrong, but what he actually thinks will always make more sense, will fit Eddy’s written persona better, than what you had in mind. Eddy’s taste has a deep coherence that’s close to unique among rock critics; Robert Christgau and Rob Sheffield come close, but I don’t share their taste nearly as often.

...Most current rock critics get paid peanuts-to-nothing for their writing, but when it’s not awash in petulant insults, our vast internet ocean of gatekeeperless freedom reads mostly like auditions for The Real Thing, or straightlaced ad copy, or studious analyses of Important Themes In Arcade Fire Albums. Exceptions exist, particularly across blogs that invite conversation. (Eddy’s ’87 critique of Forced Exposure reads like half of a Tumblr spat.) But holy cow — especially if you’re not getting paid for a review, why not write like you’ve got nothing to lose, and then have the courage to invite dissent? At his paid and unpaid best, that’s what Chuck Eddy has done for 25 years. He don’t give a damn what other people think. What do you think about that?

[That last bit, about the poor ambitions of free online writing, is a subject I've harped on before, in my review of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.] [Good book, go read it.] [Eddy's AND Atwood's, I mean. Given the choice I'd probably go with Atwood's, though it's not as long.]

Creatively Destroying Borders

2011-10-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Originally published at the Burnside Writers Collective: Here's an angry essay -- angry for me, anyway -- that was well-received. Maybe too well-received. I was actually prepared to argue with people about capitalism and such, but nobody picked that fight, so if you are that person, have at it! I receive so few comments. I'm lonely.

Then I took a good look at everything I'd done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing. (Ecclesiastes 2:11, The Message translation)

On occasion, working at Borders bookstore made me as furious as I’ve ever been. We’re talking white-hot trembling can’t-see-straight RAGE, which usually followed the inconsiderate words or nonsensical policies of yet another of my superiors. I yelled maybe twice; more often I kept my mouth shut. After absorbing whatever it was, I’d retire to my desk and stare at a blank wall until my eyes and brain regained their focus. And then I’d cheerfully help customers buy stuff.

Sometimes, usually while counting money at 11pm, working at Borders filled me with despair. Was THIS what I was doing with my music degree and boundless ambitions and painfully limited time on earth? Accomplishing tasks that could be just as easily done by robots or those sophisticated chimpanzees in Project X? Wasn’t I meant for better things than working in retail? And then I’d go back to accomplishing my tasks, deriving from them satisfaction and even joy.

At such low points, convinced of my own superiority and indispensability, I had the fantasy that’s common to every retail employee in the world, whether they’ll admit it or not: DESTRUCTION. Nothing so crass as theft or arson for me, but something that would undermine the business from the inside and show everybody who was boss. Since I was in charge of the overhead music, these fantasies often included recording a CD of unflattering comments about our regional manager -- or maybe about the company’s idiotic and humiliating “Make Book” policy, which required that we recommend the same trade paperback title to EVERY CUSTOMER -- and playing that CD on continuous loop, over and over, on a busy Saturday afternoon. I would also misfile a bunch of cookbooks.

Well, OK, my plan wasn’t all worked out, but somehow I’d bring that company to its knees. But it didn’t happen that way. In 2009, after working at Borders for 10 years, I left on good terms, opting for the vastly different satisfaction and joy of child rearing, part-time church music, and nonprofit music criticism. People would ask if I missed Borders, and I didn’t. Not at all. Besides seeing my coworkers every day and listening to profane music in the car, a pleasure denied stay-at-home dads, there was no aspect of the job that I missed.

And then Borders closed.

My Borders closed on Friday, September 16. I happened to visit the day before, little knowing the end was nigh. I hadn’t expected to be affected by it, but a store in the throes of liquidation is a breathtaking sight. Gone were the shelves and overstock bins I’d stocked and browsed, along with all those rolling wooden ladders. I’m not a big advice-giver, but over the years I surely annoyed many employees by telling them, “Any day you get to climb a ladder is a good day.” From the tops of the ladders you could see the remarkable color and variety of a store full of books and the people who loved them. Now, not so much. Guys were climbing around in the ceiling dismantling the stereo system I’d programmed. The cafe where I’d played music was bare. The office area where we’d cracked jokes and talked politics was stripped, and the multimedia cage, where I’d prepped thousands of CD and DVD new releases -- and invented the staff walkie-talkie game “Tagline Trivia” -- had vanished. 10 years of memories scrambled around in my brain, and with them the abrupt realization that I’d never have any of it back. Unexpected absence plays a cruel trick: it sets and overturns the table at the same time.

So I enjoyed the only aspect of the job that was still around. I cracked up at John’s jokes, hugged a sad Shauna, learned that Ken’s son is way older than I’d remembered, and choked back tears alongside Kathy, with whom I’d opened the store. And, you know, I bought some books for 90% off. (Since I’m sure you’re wondering: new John Ashbery, old Peer Gynt, a guide to the Proust I’d bought for 60% off.) As Art rang me up, I mentioned that it was all very sad, and he shared his excellent coping strategy: “I just take that sadness and turn it into anger.”

I’m also not a big prayer requester, but please -- say a prayer for my friends, and for all the other Borders employees who are out of jobs.

***

Now, about that anger.

In 2003 my colleague O. H. Michael Smith, reading the tea leaves, produced a “Concept Paper” (i.e., a very sane-sounding manifesto) pointing out Borders’ increasing irrelevance and a way forward. The title was a mouthful -- Community-Focused Business Model: An Approach to Greater Customer Loyalty & Revenue by Creating Store-Level Group Incentives for Employees. He distributed this paper to everyone up the company’s chain of command, including, presumably, the Borders CEO. Whether Michael’s approach would have worked will forever remain a mystery, since the folks in charge didn’t acknowledge its existence. A few years later they laid Michael off.

The whole paper makes for good reading -- I still keep it in my “Manifestos” binder -- and its three most salient points were:

1. Borders wasn’t in the books-and-music business so much as it was in the knowledge business, and unless the company understood what the knowledge business looked like in an electronic era, we’d be doomed to failure. (At this point, the Borders website directed all traffic to our online “partner” Amazon, iTunes was two years old, and eReaders were still a pipe dream for everyone.) Michael cited “the often repeated story of buggy whip manufacturers going bankrupt because they did not realize they were in the transportation business.”

2. To maintain a bricks-and-mortar business, the company needed to create a customer loyalty program and a database of customer purchasing habits. (Done, a few years later! The Borders Rewards program managed the neat trick of pissing off customers while being completely free, thereby giving customers less of an incentive to actually use the program.)

3. Borders needed to cultivate a less disposable work force, which we could achieve through profit sharing.

About that last one: In the wake of Borders’ demise, people have made some unkind online comments about the Borders workforce -- about how we didn’t know anything about books, basically. This is largely unfair and untrue. I worked with plenty of people who read way more than I do, and I watched minimum-wage cashiers become expert merchandisers and supervisors, really learning the ins and outs of the book biz. BUT! As a former trainer, I also know that turnover was very high, and that Borders hired as cheaply as possible, aiming for part-time positions without benefits. As time went on, employees were less and less invested in the work of bookselling, and might as well have been selling stationery or grilling equipment or blankets. (Oh wait...) They certainly weren’t invested financially. Borders could have been any low-paying retail job, and without a union contract or a profit-sharing motive, employees had little incentive to do anything besides punch the clock, collect their checks, and quit when something better turned up.

From reading The Economist magazine on my lunch breaks, I know that Borders’ bankruptcy is called “creative destruction”. That’s a term coined by the late economist Joseph Schumpeter, and it means that, by eliminating Borders, our efficient economy is clearing the way for Something Better, and that all my unemployed friends will either get hired by a new wave of Something Betters or realize their entrepreneurial dreams. All this creative smack is laid down by the Invisible Hand of the Market, that self-regulating pseudo-deity first postulated by the economist Adam Smith. The Invisible Hand keeps our economy nimble and relevant, so that when a company slips into irrelevancy, that company goes the way of the buggy whip makers and the bookstores.

If you’re in charge of a company, you’ve gotta stay more creative than the Hand doing the destroying. The leadership of Borders did not. At the end of the ‘90s, the folks running Borders decided that rapid store expansion was the way to go, so they spent vast sums of money flooding markets with Borders stores, including sleekly-designed “stores of the future” and other such gimmicks. You can read the whole sad litany of bad decisions here. Of course, it’s easy to pick on Borders’ leadership NOW, with all the facts laid out before us. Doesn’t everyone make mistakes?

Well, yeah -- but when CEOs make mistakes that drive their companies to bankruptcy and eliminate thousands of jobs, the CEOs STILL GET PAID. For instance, a Borders CEO who presided over three years of downward spiral received a $3 million golden parachute. An earlier CEO received a $4 million golden parachute after only five months of work. The term “golden parachute” actually appears in this infuriating sentence from the Borders 2009 annual report, which allowed for future such payouts: “If [the then-current CEO] is subject to the golden parachute excise tax under Section 4999 of the Internal Revenue Code, the Company will make a tax equalization payment... to insulate him against the impact of the excise tax." If you want top-level “talent” to run your business, apparently you have to write this stuff into their contracts. Over the course of my 10 years, store employees paid for our leaders' mistakes and parachutes by gradually giving up payroll hours, pay raises, the company’s 401(k) match, a monthly merchandise credit, and FREE COFFEE AND TEA. (That one stung.) We were often reminded that Borders was in trouble because of OUR job performance. In the stunning and inevitable dénouement, which might have held some tragic beauty if this were a stage play, the most loyal employees finally lost their jobs. Meanwhile, CEOs were getting tax-free parting gifts for screwing up.

Sorry, I need to stare at the wall now.

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr tells us that this injustice, along with all the attendant anger and destructive violence, is built into capitalist society. This isn’t to say you can’t make improvements -- say, taxing the heck out of golden parachutes as a disincentive -- or that some other system, like socialism, is any better. Fair-minded voices like Niebuhr, Paul Krugman, and The Economist have made a sometimes reluctant peace with capitalism, and so can I. But if anyone tells you that capitalism runs the world as God intended, they’re idolatrous and fooling themselves. Either that, or they’re being played for a fool by the Koch brothers.

When I worked for Borders, I took a perverse pleasure in outlasting those well-paid nitwits. I’d imagine confronting them -- prophetically, ecclesiastically -- with the truth that their policies, their jobs, their company would not endure, that it would all someday crumble and amount to nothing. Well, the day is here and nobody feels any better, because the problem is bigger than one company, bigger even than one method of organizing an economy. It’s a problem of existence. So let’s also pray that we can endure until the Invisible Hand of the One True God creatively destroys it all -- capitalism, socialism, politics, the internet, 401(k)s, and whatever else we’re using to hang our earthly hats. Here’s to showing all us capitalist pricks a better way.Photos courtesy former Borders employees John Bishop and Sean Collett. Thanks, guys!