No Direct Line From My Brain To My Heart

or
Langhoff Unpublished: Proposal to write a 33 1/3 book about Half Japanese's 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts (Even in rejection, they are very pleasant and polite, and Jad has been very kind.)

The album starts with a cymbal and a snare -- on the beats, keeping the pace, firing off a martial 16th-note rhythm, funk as though conducted by a drum major. Second time around someone -- a cat? a vibration in the air? -- starts messing with a guitar. Third time around the guitar explodes.

Not literally; that’d make for a very short song, and Half Japanese’s “No Direct Line From My Brain To My Heart” lasts all of two minutes. No, there’s definitely a human manipulating strings here. That said, David Fair’s guitar explosion differs from, say, Jimmy Page’s riff in Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown”, or even from Ron Asheton’s elongated howls in the Stooges’ meltdown “L.A. Blues”. Those explosions intimate a chaos in the air, threatening, storm clouds gathered and relative humidity 100%, but our faith in the players’ skill keeps the storm right on the edge of possibility. In the hands of a skilled player, guitar chaos can maintain 100% humidity for minutes at a time, threatening torrents without actually breaking down into a deluge. Such implied chaos is thrilling and it makes your hairs prick up.

David’s guitar on “No Direct Line” washes away any threat or thrill. The guitar part doesn’t know what it’s doing, so it tries to do everything, changing too much to be a riff but repeating itself too much for a solo. Notes land on the beats or maybe not, mostly as anticlimactic fills in the spaces between David’s shout-singing. Though the decisions governing David’s note choices remain obscure, he keeps droning back to a G-sharp and its lower A. These two notes would outline a lovely four-major-seven chord in the guitar beginner’s key of E, but here’s the thing -- we have no idea how, or whether, David tuned his guitar. To be fair, David’s got music theory on his side. From his manifesto “How to Play Guitar”: “Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it.”

To end the song, David and his funky drummer, younger brother Jad Fair, speed up and play a barrage of fast, dry notes. (David again: “If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower.”) David’s grand finale is that same G-sharp we’ve been hearing throughout the song, followed by the low E an octave down. Resolution! Although in context the note sounds just as random as all the others; only the spaces around the E tell us this is the end.

If the guitars of Page and Asheton were sustained storm warnings, David’s guitar is your damp and crummy life after the deluge. A while back, after a summer storm had knocked out most of our county’s power for days, people began to notice that McDonald’s had its lights on. The place was soon full of cranky refugees, tramping mud and jockeying for outlets and Wi-Fi. If anyone bothered making eye contact, it was the blank expression of a sociopath jonesing for your seat. A revelation from the Global North: this is how the world will end. Not with neighbor helping neighbor, not even with thunderdomes or hunger games, but with slop, tedium, self-absorption, and breathtakingly inadequate customer service.

You say you want a communication breakdown? Listen to Half Japanese.

----

Specifically, listen to the Maryland band’s first album, ½ Gentlemen/Not Beasts. It’s a monument of DIY music, notoriously the only debut album that was also a three-album box set. It’s also unfathomable as a consumer product. Released in 1980 on the British upstart label Armageddon, ½ Gentlemen compiled 48 songs plus two hard-to-parse live sets from a virtually unknown band. Up until that year, the Fair brothers had recorded, taped, pressed, and sold short bursts of music through ads in places like Trouser Press and NY Rocker, rock magazines friendly to the underground. Their label 50 Skidillion Watts was basically synonymous with “self-released”, and Half Japanese was its only act. Though the band reached a surprising number of people through magazine ads, it’s not like they were part of a distribution network or sold in stores. Who did Armageddon imagine would buy their box set?

Especially when they sounded like... what? “One-take learning-our-chords musicianship and vocals that make Jonathan Richman sound like Vaughan Monroe,” suggested Village Voice critic Robert Christgau in a C+ review. “Noisesome, wild, nude, and more basic than toast... the decade’s first essential document,” remembered early supporter Byron Coley in a 1988 SPIN. “I still haven’t been able to listen... all the way through,” said the Voice’s Lester Bangs in his piece “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise”, right before he praised Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music yet again. All true except the C+!

About Bangs’s taste in horrible noise: For its reputation as unlistenable water torture, Metal Machine Music actually fades into the background very nicely. I’ve played it as a sleep aid, and an early listening experiment with my infant son did not end in tears. People are used to accepting sustained noise as art. We might not put on Krzystof Perderecki’s albums too often, but we’ve heard his music play the role of “disturbing squawl” in enough movies that it seems intentional. If your job has ever included a dot matrix printer or an espresso machine, microtonal noise violence starts making a whole lot of sense. Bangs said of MMM, “Sounded great in midwestern suburbs, but kinda unnecessary in NYC.” Take it from me -- midwestern suburbs have gotten louder.

Even so, when I first heard ½ Gentlemen in a midwestern college town, it refused to fade into the background. Refused to do much of anything, really. The album’s whole sound was one big refusal: to engage, to terrify, to learn instruments, to create a compelling reason to listen. Tripping through the canon with the aid of the SPIN Alternative Record Guide, I’d recently fallen for the guitar noise of Sonny Sharrock and Glenn Branca -- beautiful anguished jazz skronk and massed droning guitar choirs, respectively. The guide told me to buy ½ Gentlemen; the Fair brothers “seemed to take more pleasure from the acts of singing and playing than any rock band before or since,” wrote Craig Marks. So at my first opportunity I snatched up the 1993 CD reissue on T.E.C. Tones -- impressive enough, though not the original gorgeous vinyl box set -- and became thoroughly confused.

This was partly T.E.C.’s fault. My copy mixed up the labels on the two CDs, with disc A labelled “B” and vice versa. I didn’t figure this out for at least a week. At first I was never certain which song was playing. The cover of Springsteen’s “10th Avenue Freeze Out” kept yelling “I’m sorry!” Was that part of the point? Was it even supposed to be a cover?

Even after it registered that, oh yes, there was a song on disc B yelping “10th Avenue freeze out!!!” over chicken scratch guitar, confusion lingered. I also blame Education. See, I was a music student, and that junior year I’d read two mind-altering books, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train and A Guide to Schenkerian Analysis, a textbook synopsis of the theoretical work of Heinrich Schenker. Both thinkers made me cry -- Marcus for his visionary affirmation of the rock music I loved, and Schenker because he was a didactic asshole who convinced me I was wrong about life. (Life, music, what’s the difference?) Both also made a lot of sense. But neither had anything to do with Half Japanese and all their refusals. I couldn’t imagine reading the myths of America in this anti-music, let alone deriving a convincing Ursatz.

I couldn’t even imagine deriving that most fundamental musical hook, pleasure. Sharrock and Branca may have been out there, but their guitars sang with tangible beauty and they evoked ideas beyond themselves, whether tumultuous sadness or steely superstructures. Half Japanese evoked nothing beyond two guys switching off on guitars and drums, moving their hands fast when they wanted to play fast. Their guitars sounded drab and unadorned. Maybe most important for music student me, you couldn’t tell whether they knew what they were doing. My peers didn’t always share my affection for John Cage and Public Enemy, but at least we could all agree their anti-music intended its refusals. Half Japanese made anti-music because they couldn’t make anything else. If amateurism was the point I couldn’t relate.

After listening for a while, confusing myself, confusing my roommate (who called them “those Japanese guys”), and getting totally into Rent, I filed the album away. Not for me, not now, I figured. In the years that followed I’d see ½ Gentlemen while rearranging my CD shelves and it’d remind me of college, sort of like the Schenker textbook or geopolitical board games. And then, 13 years after I’d given up on it, I played ½ Gentlemen out of curiosity for one of my favorite music fans, as another experiment, and he taught me to fall in love with it.

By then Zack had outgrown Metal Machine Music; he was four years old.

------------------

“I don’t wanna go to preschool!”

Zack and I had a routine while we drove a half hour across the county. He’d scowl out the window, sucking his thumb furiously, and repeat his refusal like a mantra. I’d ply him with questions about what he did at preschool -- “Do you eat delicious food? Do you get to ride bikes? Do you play with Logan?” -- and then ask him whether he could expect the same today. He could, we agreed, but that didn’t settle the matter.

“I don’t wanna go to preschool!”

The whole thing became a ritual of discontent and reassurance, our way of grasping the universal human realities of suffering, insecurity, and boring commutes. We had other mantras. We’d count buses; we’d remember that “IHOP” meant pancakes and “OTB” meant horses. And we’d listen to music. At the time, I was following my wife’s system of listening to my albums alphabetically, letter by letter, which had led to some surprises. Zack really liked Diamanda Galas’s hard-rock shriekfest “Skótoseme” -- “that crazy lady,” we called her at first -- but dismissed the Holy Modal Rounders, who I’d assumed (hoped?) would be a big hit.

One morning we listened to ½ Gentlemen. I’d postponed Half Japanese for as long as I could, but the H’s were drying up and my I’s were a wasteland. (Even I wouldn’t subject a preschooler to Ice Cube, and Orfeo Records’ Idolos del Rock Argentino comp isn’t as cool as you think it’d be, trust me.) Once again I’d forgotten that A was B and B was A, so instead of “No Direct Line” we heard “Funky Broadway Melody”, which has no melody. Some sources change the “Melody” to “Medley”, but it’s not one of those either.

Jad plays a muddy, mutating riff, as though he’s heard Wilson Pickett’s “Funky Broadway” and is trying to sop up every instrument’s part with his guitar. It’s a claustrophobic sound, no space anywhere. Dissonant high notes squiggle over the droning A minor riff, David hits the drums hard on the fours, and Jad yelps about dancing with a bunch of stoners, until the police show up and arrest everyone for disturbing the peace. In court, Jad tries to reason his way out of a hundred-dollar fine by explaining, “JUDGE, it’s JUST FUNKY!” The song ends with random scritches and thumps, as though guitar and drums are tumbling down a giant Plinko board. I considered turning on NPR, but curiosity got the better of me.

“What do you think of these guys?”

“Good.”

“They sound kind of silly, don’t they?”

“Can we hear it again?”

This was unexpected, but sure, we could hear it again. The second time raised some questions: “Why does Papa got a brand new bag?” “Why can’t he stand himself?” “What’s a mojo?” (The answer to each: “He’s saying what a good dancer he is.”) And during that Plinko-board ending, “What are they DOING???” (“They’re figuring out how to end the song.”) He wanted to listen to it again. Pretty soon he wanted to listen to the next song, “I’m Sorry”, and then just those two songs in a row. This lasted the rest of the car ride, and the car ride home, and then we listened to those two songs on repeat for the next few weeks, whenever we were in the car. Sometimes we’d move on to the other songs -- he insisted we endure those two interminable live sets, programmed as a track apiece -- but we always returned to “Funky Broadway” and “I’m Sorry” and our litany of questions and answers.

I didn’t understand this new ritual. Like any NPR-listening first-time parent, I tried psychoanalyzing my son. Did Half Japanese, like Where the Wild Things Are, allow him to live some vicarious savagery? Did they give him something unique to hold onto during the loneliest stretches of preschool, the nap times during which he could never fall asleep, hoping I’d appear at the door to pick him up early? My probing questions (“Why do you like these guys?”) unearthed appropriately profound answers (“I don’t know,” “Good”) and more thumb-sucking. My normally vivacious son shut down around preschool, and Half Japanese’s refusals seemed to speak to his refusals, but figuring out their shared language was like deciphering cave paintings. So we listened again.

The more we listened, the more I heard. For amateurs who didn’t know what they were doing, the Fair brothers made their songs sound wildly different from one another. If “Funky Broadway” was beginners’ funk, “I’m Sorry” was beginners’ new wave, its spiky monotone stomp evoking skinny ties and robotic dances. But here’s the other thing: after repeated listens, I was no longer certain the “amateur” tag applied. The brothers had a way with words, especially Jad, whose “It happened on a MONday! / On a MONday!” tag in “I’m Sorry” was as catchy as anything on oldies radio. The brothers’ guitar maximalism made up for what they lacked in precision -- Jad’s riff plus lead lines in “Funky Broadway” reminded me of Robert Johnson only, you know, dissonant. (Which may have made them more interesting, actually.) As we ventured into the rest of this vast album -- into covers of Dylan and Buddy Holly, minimalist electro-acoustic instrumentals, multiple versions of the same songs -- it felt unfathomable again, but musically unfathomable. Was there a bottom to this thing?

My boy eventually graduated preschool. He loves school and Star Wars and Lady Gaga, but he still likes to put on ½ Gentlemen from time to time. Me too. His fandom gave me the great gift of appreciation, and like any monumental artwork that we learn to appreciate, ½ Gentlemen has altered my outlook on music and life (what’s the difference?) in a bunch of little ways, maybe even in some big ways, but certainly in unpredictable ways. No direct line from my brain to my heart, indeed. This is appropriate, since ½ Gentlemen is itself a work of and about fandom. The Fair brothers wrote songs about their favorite musicians -- Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, the Shaggs, and, in a very conflicted way, the Beatles. In fact, you can read this album as an ode to fandom, an epic about coming to terms with the tropes and heroes of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s got father-killing, anxiety of influence, and lots and lots of girls.

First, though, you have to learn how to read it.


Chapter 1: Battle of the Bands
(The Songs)

Chapter 2: Bogue Millionaires/Cool Millionaires
(Selling Noise Pt. 1)

Chapter 3: Till Victory
(Selling Noise Pt. 2)

Chapter 4: Shy Around Girls
(Indie Rock Romance)

Chapter 5: Rave On
(Fandom)

Chapter 6: No More Beatle Mania
(Punk and Tradition)

Chapter 7: Tangled Up In Blue
(Finale)

This My Darkest Days Album is NOT Worth It.

Hang loose, Satan.

Some lines from the PopMatters review, unread by millions, of a wanton band of Canadian boredom-rockers:

This album isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but then, My Darkest Days don’t really do “imagination.” 


MDD’s hook, the thing that sets them apart from similarly industrious Canadian rasp-rock bands Theory of a Deadman and mentors Nickelback, is their embrace of electronic and R&B music. It’s a tentative no-homo embrace, sure, but MDD dabble in textures you might find on darkwave label Metropolis—sinister keyboards and programmed beats against thick walls of guitar, occasionally sounding sort of like the Birthday Massacre. Also they cover Joe’s “Stutter”.


Joe’s original was all stutter, with the beat and Joe and special guest Mystikal caroming off one another, spinning a tangled web of paranoid hypocrisy. MDD just play the song. It’s got a backbeat; they can’t lose it. Scratchy-voiced Matt Walst stutters like he’s reading the stutters off notebook paper. There’s not even a guitar solo, the rock equivalent of a Mystikal verse. These guys are so meat-and-potatoes they sometimes skip the potatoes.


There’s nothing sick or twisted about Sick and Twisted Affair, which manages to make wild sex sound about as wild as carrying seven-dollar beers back from the concession stand.


Most of the songs work grungy variations on Nickel-backbeats. There’s a ballad. I’m sure My Darkest Days tour the seediest underbellies of society guided only by loins and id, but their music sounds like sandpaper—and not the sexy kind!

This Balkan Brass Best-Of is Sort of Worth It

The PopMatters review of Golden Horns, by the Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar, who I've seen live and they were very good... but you'll see:

More swerve!

Maybe you have to see them live. In Chicago back in 2008, the headlong rush was incredible—virtuosic but off-kilter, like flying along in one of those Indiana Jones mine cars only perfectly, surrounded by control and chaos all at once. Whatever musical devices they used to get that effect—percussion perched on top of the beat? horns going slightly sharp? certainly the solos were more unhinged—the rush comes across only occasionally on Golden Horns, a compilation from the Boban i Marko Marković Orkestar, Serbia’s premier brass band led by father Boban (flugelhorn) i son Marko (trumpet).

This is frustrating, if not unexpected. After all, “you gotta see ‘em live” is one of the biggest clichés of the recorded music era. (Maybe people said the same thing about unsatisfying sheet music—“This Mozart aria reads OK, but you gotta hear it live, man.”) Album opener “Khelipe e Cheasa” promises adventure, excitement, thrills, chills and sljivovica: somebody wolf-whistles, tenor horns blat and men shout “Hep!” on the offbeats, saxman Erol Demirov calls ducks, and the horn tuttis are surrounded by little warbling countermelodies. A party! But for all its promises, “Khelipe e Cheasa” doesn’t thrill. It’s a very pleasant song; the band switches from hook to ingratiating hook with professional ease, and their chops should make us proud to be human beings. The song closes with an aggressive shimmering cacophony, some horns trilling away while others interject melodic lines, and it’s all very impressive, but it’s hard not to feel like something’s missing.

Much brass band music, whether Balkan or banda, straightlaced Sousa or downtown New York, walks a particular sort of high-tension wire. The prevailing texture of this stuff is homogeneous. It’s got counterpoint—a few horns work the melody, some other horns work the harmony, and maybe someone else throws in a countermelody—but everyone’s working together towards a unified musical effect. What keeps things interesting is the threat of heterogeneity. The more musicians you get together, the greater the probability that something will go wrong intentionally or otherwise. The parts will diverge and someone’ll start playing an unexpected counterpoint that doesn’t quite fit, even as it ratchets up the excitement. This is simple math, the arithmetic of obnoxia.

On record at least, the Orkestar isn’t obnoxious enough. In the formulation of writer David Wondrich, they’ve got a lot of drive but not enough swerve. (Wondrich: “Whenever there’s a proper, legit, ‘dicty’ way of phrasing the tune in question and a musician plays something arbitrary, irrational, spontaneous, unexplainable, that’s the swerve.”) Partly this is a matter of expectations. You listen to most brass band music, including Balkan brass, with the expectation of craziness. Fanfare Ciocărlia plays chewy staccatos that threaten to become pure rhythm. Yolanda Pérez’s banda goes so fast and sharp you fear it’ll topple over. Something’s bound to go wrong. Indeed, the Orkestar plays up these expectations, rapping a song called “Sljivovica”, shouting “Hep!” and “Hey!”, subtitling the 2007 album that contributed several of these tunes Brass Madness. Not Brass Skill or Virtuoso Brass or Brass Who’ve Worked Really Hard to Cross Over. No, these guys claim to be mad crazy; they just don’t sound like it here. Their largely instrumental songs are about parties, but they don’t bring the party itself. They’ve premeditated every “Hep!” and “Hey!”

That’s not to say I couldn’t listen to them for a while. Golden Horns compiles some fine moments, from the ‘70s car-chase tribute “Dzumbus Funk” to the burnished spaghetti Western vibe of “Obećanje”. Besides their trademark polkas, the Markovićs and their drumline touch on all sorts of rhythms: funk, reggaeton, ska, swing, you name it, and that’s not counting the two limp dance remixes tacked onto the end. They throw in winking touchstones like Mozart’s 40th Symphony (you know: “dunaNA dunaNA dunaNAHNA! dunaNA dunaNA dunaNA!”) and, in the album’s most thrilling moment, a live version of “Hava Naguila” whose swerve comes from its playful tempo changes. Their tunes are catchy and their burbling arrangements always carry plenty of momentum. Balkan brass could do worse than these genteel ambassadors.

The Orkestar sort of reminds me of two rock groups I love: Sonic Youth and Lightning Bolt. They’ve fashioned unique styles for themselves, you could imagine them working minor variations on those styles until the world ends, and they all nod to a transgressive craziness that, at this point, you know they’ll never actually deliver. For all their noise, Lightning Bolt basically play groovy dadrock, and all the Markovićs’ party promises amount to enjoyable family music for public lawns. Go see ‘em live. The adults drink, the kids dance, sometimes vice versa, and everyone has a fine time before driving home in their SUVs. The group’s virtuosity is never in doubt. If it was, they might sound more exciting, but they’d have trouble getting gigs and you’d be way less likely to hear them.

This Adam Lambert album is NOT Worth It, unless you are a SUPERFAN

Hola, partidistas del Glamberto! If you are moved to comment, please do so with etiquette and decorum. I LIKE HIM, REALLY. AND I DON'T THINK HE NEEDS TO BE MORE GAY OR LESS GAY. (And really, why is nobody calling me on the terrible Ed Lover joke? Just godawful.)

My PopMatters review of Glambert's Trespassing has been a fruitful commentary magnet, so you should definitely click on over there and read all the passion one man can inspire. But here's the review in full:

"Trespassing"? Yeah, my ass.

Let’s get something straight: Trespassing is not Adam Lambert’s “big gay dance-club album” (as one illustrious publication put it) any more than Savage Garden was Savage Garden’s big gay pop album or Songs from the West Coast was Elton John’s big gay roots album. With Trespassing, Lambert becomes the first out solo artist to score a number one album—cigars all around!—but queer identity barely shows up in the songs themselves. The pronouns are mostly “you”, and the innuendos pretty much top out at “straight jacket” and “Such a beautiful release / You inside of me”. Everything else—ignoring “no trespassing” signs, partying all night, enjoying naked love—is hedonism available any day of the week in Pink or Ke$ha songs, on classic rock radio or blues clubs or wherever. This isn’t a knock against the album; that’ll come in a minute. But taken at face value, Trespassing reads straight or gay: however you want it. Take the subject of “Kickin’ In”, the one who puts her shot glass down and asks for another round. If you hear her as a drag queen, you probably read about it on Twitter.

Screw Twitter. I’m too busy trying to figure out whether the drag queen’s friend Eddie, who’s got words that rhyme and a dirty mind, is some outdated Ed Lover reference.

Anyway, heard at face value, “Kickin’ In” is the best song here—produced by Pharrell Williams in strutting MJ knockoff mode, with mysterious synth percussion that makes me laugh like his Britney jams did more than a decade ago. (Remember “Boys”? Now, don’t you think Glambert should cover it? Let’s start a petition.) Lambert sings in octaves, his party starter tenor laced with the menace of his impossibly clear falsetto. There’s a cool breakdown with a kaleidoscopic array of Glamberts leering and shouting, as though you’re viewing him through the bottom of an empty tumbler. Pharrell also produced the opener “Trespassing”, a funky march with handclaps and a bassline that swings like a Chic-y monkey. Speaking of Chic, guitar hero Nile Rogers shows up on “Shady”, a reasonably funky Lester Mendez production that inhabits the same freak-infested clubs as Ke$ha, with salacious vocal swoops out of the Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons”. These songs are all on the album’s first half, seven uptempo dance tunes ranging from really good to pretty good (“Cuckoo”, “Naked Love”) to forgettable (“Pop That Lock”, inexplicable second single “Never Close Our Eyes”). The kick drums stomp; the synths are state-of-the-charts; song lengths fill a narrow range from 3:00 to 4:08.

Here’s why I mention song lengths. Almost from the start of American Idol, fans and critics speculated about which contestant would use the show’s format to break molds and shift paradigms, or to rebel against the format itself. To date on Idol, only two contestants have fit the bill: Sanjaya Malakar, who demonstrated that the public has terrible taste, and Adam Lambert, who proved the opposite. Even Joshua Ledet, Season 11’s insanely talented gospel-soul screamer, fits the Idol mold: an attractive person singing a song well, usually in a way we’re accustomed to hearing it sung, and receiving a reward. In contrast, Lambert took over Season Eight, mentoring the other contestants, doling out his own rewards (“Mad World”) and punishments (“Ring of Fire”), and using the format to establish himself as the country’s most vital entertainer. Despite his second-place finish, he owned the show; he was bigger than the Simons. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield: “Having Adam around seems to cheer everybody up, including the other singers, who know the pressure’s off. Hell, even Simon looks happy.”) If Season Eight—or Idol itself—is remembered artistically centuries from now, it’ll be for Glambert’s performances.

After the season ended, the question—the worry—became, “How does he translate this persona into a recording career?” Idol gave Lambert the gift of constraints; he kept his songs to a certain length so the producers wouldn’t give him the stiletto boot, because what fun would that’ve been? He sang MJ and Johnny Cash because he had to, upending audience expectations in the process. On-stage, Lambert was a big-hearted rebel, but the show’s narrow parameters gave him something to rebel against. As my wife feverishly downloaded his singles, there was something disappointing about hearing “Black or White” apart from the Idol stage—it simply sounded like a really good singer’s cover version, but not like the world historical chokehold of the previous night.

So unfortunately, the answer to that worried question remains, “He hasn’t figured it out yet”. Like his first album For Your Entertainment, Trespassing disappoints because it’s Lambert playing on pop’s terms and sometimes narrowing the terms unnecessarily. He hires the same big-name Top 40 writers and producers that everyone hires—heck, even Entertainment featured pomp-rock guys from The Darkness and Muse alongside Max Martin and Shellback. His songs all run about the same length—yes, pop singles are supposed to be short, but pop albums from Erasure to Big & Rich to Madonna have been unafraid to stretch out musically. Trespassing deviates from the big beat formula on its second ballad-heavy half, notably on the lite industrial groove of “Chokehold” and the Wainwright-y falsetto warbling in “Outlaws of Love”. But “Outlaws”, like its neighbors in Ballad Land, isn’t much of a song. The second half gets pretty dispiriting, especially if you shell out for the version with three “bonus” tracks, which are like ending the school year with some bonus homework. 

Most worryingly, for all their talk of trespass and release and lock-popping, Glambert’s songs unleash very little Glambert. On the solemn ballad “Underneath”, Lambert sings, “Underneath, under my skin / Underneath the depths of my sin / Look at me, now do you see?” Well, no actually, we don’t. Not that Lambert needs to provide a blow-by-blow account of his “sin”, but most of his lyrics amount to workmanlike clichés. “Tower of Babel has fallen down again”; “Let’s just stay awake until we grow older”; “I’m swingin’ off of my hinges / I’m cocked and I’m ready to go”—these ideas have been expressed better elsewhere and could’ve been expressed by anyone. I should also point out that the Five Man Electrical Band came up with more creative “No Trespassing” signs.

So while I’m rooting for the guy and his amazingly versatile screeches, he still doesn’t know how to make pop music work for him, rather than the other way around. Other people do. Take the big gay examples from up top. Elton John’s “Original Sin” and Savage Garden’s “Santa Monica” are both strange and beautiful songs that become more poignant if you hear them as gay monologues. Lambert’s songs don’t work that way—“Outlaws”, his closest contender, is too flatly written to achieve strangeness, beauty, or poignancy. But it’s not just old music that’s showing him up. This year in mainstream pop, fun., Graffiti6, and Dev have all packed their albums and singles with more weirdo personality than Glambert’s self-proclaimed “world of truth”. Whether his songs would improve with more queer self-expression is anyone’s guess, but he clearly needs to do something.

This PO PO Album is Totally Worth It!

POPO
Dope Boy Magick
(Mad Decent)

Zeb Malik makes ramshackle little indie rock tunes, snatches of riff presided over by a wafting tenor that suggests Marshall Crenshaw chanting a liturgy of slack. Lucky for Malik his instrumental timbres are catchier than most people’s tunes -- cf. “Let’s Get Away”, a suicide drink of Van Halen’s synths, Sonic Youth’s white noise, Kate Bush’s Fairlight flute, and Phil Collins’s drums. (Did you know “Phil Collins” is the technical term for a familiar drum rudiment?) The ‘80s will ALWAYS be back. “Losn My Mind” features a sound I desperately wish was an electrified oboe but probably isn’t. Malik also includes several ingratiating “mood” pieces; their mood is the totally relatable “I feel like messing around with this button on the keyboard.” Pick hit is “Bummer Summer”, an evocation of summers past that gets by on its guitar treatment. Though actually, the tune’s not bad either.

This Batida Album is Totally Worth It!

Designer Lewis Heriz deserves credit for creating my new wallpaper.

From my review at the PopMatters, some sentences about an album that's in the same ballpark as Buraka Som Sistema, only lusher. (Real grass as opposed to artificial turf?) (No; more like a beautifully landscaped terrace in the midst of all that concrete and steel.)

Near the end of Batida’s vaguely sinister song “Ka Hueh”, some guy helpfully sneers the word “Freestyle!” Frankly, it’s hard to tell what he means by that.

Batida mastermind DJ Mpula tricks out the beat with a kaleidoscope of echo and FX, including what sounds like a bunch of oversized resonant fork tines jangling together in space.

Like Baltimore house and Brazilian baile funk, kuduro music can intimidate and punish, but it can also tantalize you with touches of beauty that gain power from their harsh surroundings. You appreciate when kuduro at least tries to make you happy.

The Angolan MCs, on the other hand, are tense and tight, their chewy voices taunting the beats and competing for attention with the DJ’s laser sounds. Dama Ivone, Ikonoklasta, and Sacerdote—a woman and two men, it’s worth noting—tear up their tracks and deserve to be heard far and wide. And hey, even The Economist just ran an article on Angolan rap, so you know it’s hot.

More often, Mpula fundamentally transforms his source material—as in “Allegria”, when sample dissolves into sample, choirs appear out of nowhere, and the textures shift like a dream. It’s an uneasy early-morning dream full of noise and relentless beats and freestyle, whatever that means. 

This Counting Crows Covers Album is Worth It!

The story continues...

The Counting Crows aren't the only band to veer from very very good songs ("Hangin' Around", "Mr. Jones") to embarrassingly unlistenable cringe machines (anything they did for a soundtrack?), but I fear they're underrated because the dreck isn't a huge sonic departure from the good stuff. They always sound like themselves, as evidenced by this fine covers album, reviewed at PopMatters, excerpted herewith:

Genghis Khan's brother Don is sadly absent.

You gotta hear this new Counting Crows album, they sound like a BAND!

They’ve recorded 15 covers with as fine a sense of group interplay as you’ll find outside the jazz world.

“Covers?” I hear you say with some alarm. “Isn’t this the band who blighted the Two Weeks Notice soundtrack with a terrible version of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, itself a pretty bad song?” Yes, over the course of their respectable 20 year career, the Crows have left behind them a smattering of cloying idiocy for which they’ll one day have to answer. Not here, though.

For example, lead single “Untitled (Love Song)”, a floppy Romany Rye song that could’ve easily been titled “Throw Your Arms Around My Neck” (or maybe just “Neck” if they were Brad Paisley), starts with a plain old electric guitar riff over which Duritz starts singing, then another electric saunters in, along with the drums and piano, until finally the whole band is lurching around with their three chords. This additive maneuver is one thing you can do with a band, particularly a band containing three guitarists; in musical parlance it’s known as the “Hotel California”. (Enjoy the colitas!)

And sometimes the strategy is simply to smoke the pants (and metaphors) right off the song, as in their blistering rendition of Dylan’s Big Pink staple “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, during which Duritz collapses into fits.

He's a very good singer, you know? Reminds me of his contemporary Garth Brooks; there’s always the danger they’ll rely too much on their trademark vocal tics, in Duritz’s case oddly-shaped warbles and wordless scatting nonsense. Throughout this album, though, Duritz delivers the songs with unmannered ease, saving his Duritz stuff for key moments like the meltdown section of the Dylan song.

If you want rock ‘n’ roll to be galvanizing rebellion or something, Underwater Sunshine isn’t the place for you. But if you want your rock ‘n’ rollers to offer a feasible career option that sounds great, the Counting Crows do. Is it still rock ‘n’ roll? What else you gonna call it?

Recent Jukeboxing

Now that Easter's over and book proposal's turned in, I've had a little bit more time to write for The Singles Jukebox, the extraordinary site that discovered both Gotye and Carly Rae Jepsen before you (or I) did.

Le bien:

fun. - "Some Nights":
About two thirds of the way through, right after Nate Ruess gets sucked into his nephew’s eyes and flips into his little Autotune cadenza, I realize I have no idea what or who this piece of music stands for. It builds a stadium singalong out of insular incoherence, like the verses of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” only even more embarrassing. Who wants to sing along to a 7th grade notebook line like “What do I stand for?” Especially around other people? All this business about martyrs in beds and lips building castles is icky icky icky, “jack my style” is Train-unforgiveable, and this guy can’t expect us to care about his sister if we only just met her. But, yes, this is a singalong, if only because I’m sure I’ll be singing along to it the rest of the year. If anything, the glorious drums and guitar ostinato and Ladysmith Black fun.bazo voices make me wanna get to the bottom of Nate’s narcissism, surely an impossible task, but more exciting for that.
[8]


Eric Church - "Springsteen":
“Every time I think of you, I always catch my breath” … that’d make a lot more sense, but this song isn’t about that song. “That song” — the one that means freedom, lust, masculinity, tattoos, a Jeep, amateur astronomy, and a girl not wanting Eric to go — seems to be “Born In the USA,” which isn’t necessarily weirder than “Jack and Diane” for Kenny Chesney or “Sweet Home Alabama” for Kid Rock. Guitar sounds and unnamed drummers evoke what they will and who can understand the connections? Eric doesn’t try, just as he avoids forcing his specific reverie onto his listeners, sneaking the name of the song into the second verse. As an audio madeleine, “Born In the USA” would seem incongruous to most people, but “Springsteen” the song doesn’t even have to be about Springsteen, really, or sound like him — he’s just big and mythical enough to fade into the scenery of a song whose real subject is a night when every listener was seventeen.
[8]


Santigold - "Big Mouth":
Why are you so petrified of silence, Big Mouth? Here, can you handle this? (Cue wordless vocal fx building to EXCRUCIATING LOUDNESS YAWP!) Tick tock tock that shit nonstop — you’re such a shit talker, RUN! yaMOUTH! MORE! THANANYONEI’VEEVERKNOWN! You’re everywhere I go, thinkin’ that you know, O Big Mouth, Big Mouth, mymymy you’ve said enough. You talk too much; you even worry my pet! (Cue wordless chirps and shrieks.) GaGaGa all slighty off; not me, I’ll take the loss, I’ll never talk again, you’ve left me speechless, so speechle-ye-ye-yes. (Boobooboo, boobooboo, boobooboo, boobooboo…) Hey, um, Big Mouth… why you so speechless? 
[9]


Le mal:


Kanye ft. Khaled - "Theraflu":
DJ Pharris! Hometown! Power 92 is way better than WGCI! That said, best case this is Kanye feathering his nest, worst case it’s Kanye as immaculately self-absorbed cat obsessing over the minutiae of his own asshole(ry). I will not give a definitive answer because that’d require listening to it again.
[3]


et le mot juste:


Teedra Moses ft. Wale - "Another LuvR":
Nexuses of meaning are embedded in Mickey Bass’s 1973 bassline and its use in hip-hop, and someone should explore them thoroughly. They could examine whether A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘91 “Excursions” now signifies the same elder statesman classiness as Art Blakey’s “A Chant for Bu”, if indeed that’s what Blakey signified for Tribe. (Yes — but that’s not all he signified.) Or how by looping just the first two chords, which happen to have the same relationship as Miles Davis’s “So What” chords, Tribe showed how modal jazz anticipated such loops back in ‘59. Or how the mystical connotations of the “Chant” rub shoulders with the practical, both in Blakey’s famous work ethic and in Q-Tip’s punchline, “If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin’.” This song won’t be a very big part of the story. Moses hands us all these possibilities on a platter and then floats off to worry about something else.
[6]

This Gene Watson Hits Album is sort of Worth It

From my PopMatters review, whose every paragraph begins with the suck-'em-in gambit "If you're," some thoughts:

If you’re a fan of country hitmaker Gene Watson and you’re considering buying his new collection Best of the Best: 25 Greatest Hits, you should know all 25 “hits” are re-recordings. They’re faithful re-recordings, slavish to the original arrangements and even keys, so it probably won’t make a huge difference to you. All the same, the gentleman Watson might have warned consumers somewhere on the album’s packaging.


And if you listen to Best of the Best in a certain way, Watson and Johnson’s meticulous re-creations become impressive pop-art endeavors, like Gus Van Sant’s nearly-shot-by-shot remake of Psycho or Damien Hirst’s extensive series of spot paintings. What constitutes an “original” work of art? When is a greatest hit not a greatest hit? When we plunk down money to relive a song, do slight differences reinvigorate that song or suck the air from our memories? Since Watson remade these songs for blatant financial reasons, does that somehow invalidate the songs as art?


If you’re skeptical, if slick turn-of-the-’80s Nashville doesn’t do it for you, you should still check out this album’s sequencing. Seriously, if the Grammys had an award for Best Album Sequencing, Best of the Best would be the one to beat. Watson and Johnson have grouped the songs into little thematic units, so that Gene Watson songs from different years converse and comment on one another. Watson made this album with money on his mind, but he opens it with a suite of songs discussing the evils of money and the virtues of poverty. “Fourteen Carat Mind” goes into the gentle “Paper Rosie”, where Watson idealizes a little old lady who sells paper roses and touches lives. (He also enjoys wine in both songs.) From there we move to the racy “Nothing Sure Looked Good On You”, Watson’s lament that his current gold digger isn’t satisfied with life like Paper Rosie. Offended, she engages in wanton behavior, so he sings “You’re Out Doing”, and… you get the picture. We hear diptychs on big themes: Loneliness (“Got No Reason Now For Going Home” and “One Sided Conversation”); New Orleans (“Love In the Hot Afternoon” and “The Old Man and His Horn”); Cheating and Insanity (“Should I Come Home (Or Should I Go Crazy)” into “What She Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Her”); and Hot Sex, or its absence (the aforementioned “Cowboys” slides wickedly into “This Dream’s On Me”). Watson closes the album with songs of memory, infidelity, and home, until he cheerfully falls off the wagon in “Drinkin’ My Way Back Home” and neatly loops back to the album opener “Fourteen Carat”. It’s like The Dark Tower with more honky-tonks.


If you’re up to it, though, you could explain to me the appeal of the brutal waltz “Where Love Begins”, in which the gentleman Watson pressures a virgin to give it up. “What’s that? What’s the matter? What’s making you cry? / You say it’s the first time for you? / LEEEAVE if you’d rather not lose what you came for! / Walk out the same door that I let you in!” Number five in ‘75, a precursor to Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night”; what a cad.

This Dennis Rollins Album is sort of Worth It

From my PopMatters review, some sentences. (They are the reviewer's bread and butter, you know.) (If we're comparing "writing record reviews" to "building sculptures out of bread and butter"?) (#dancingaboutarchitecturewhilecoveredinbutter)

Rollins plays his trombone with a beautiful burnished tone, bouncing and swooping into his notes on little catenaries of sound, reaching out to listeners with a grin and a handshake. He’s also got an Aquarian numerological thing going on. Motéma had the spiritual wisdom to release The 11th Gate on 11/11/11, the day Rollins turned 47, and you’ll notice that four plus seven equals 11. (They released it digitally, that is; the physical CD had to wait until January.) Naturally the trio has included 11 tracks here, the better to usher in Rollins’s “universal paradigm shift, an emergence into our authentic selves”.

My authentic self tells me they had to pad this album to reach 11 tracks.

Opening song “Samba Galactica” punches out of the speakers with a tricky rhythm, Segundo skittering around the beats while Rollins uses some electronic device to harmonize with himself. The apparently ambidextrous Stanley handles the bassline with his left hand; his right hand either harmonizes closely with Rollins’s trombone, plays remarkably fluid solos, or stretches out on thick washes of sound that make you say, “Ooh, Hammond organ!”

This is all fine, accomplished stuff, but The 11th Gate is ultimately too tidy to set anyone’s world on fire. Solos are inventive but never outlandish; the chord changes go to unexpected places, but they never astonish. The album sounds immaculate, and you get the sense these guys knew what they were doing every step of the way. They’ve made a solid and professional straight-ahead jazz record. That’s not exactly a universal paradigm shift, but it’ll at least keep you awake until your enlightenment kicks in.

This '09 Flexible Music CD is Worth It!

The green room was a disgrace.

From my PopMatters review of Flexible Music's fm album, a few sentences:

[FM] favour modern classical music squarely in the downtown NYC tradition of bucking tradition, blending atonality with gestures out of minimalism and soundtracks, and pushing complex syncopated rhythms right out front.


The album opens with Louis Andriessen’s 1991 “Hout”, one of the few pieces written prior to this millennium for FM’s instrumentation. The Dutch composer wrote “Hout” as a nearly-strict canon, with saxophone leading the melodic charge and the other instruments following at 16th note intervals. The resulting piece sounds like a long, jazz-influenced melody getting dragged through a lake, sending out ripples of echoes that threaten to swamp the tune but never do. As a musical experiment, it’s cool; as a piece of music it’s something more, given Andriessen’s talent for mixing the instruments’ sonorities into indelible blends. Though the notes move constantly, with saxophonist Timothy Ruedeman’s fingers clacking away, the piece swells and breathes with a large-scale shape all its own.


[In "Sustenance Variations"] pianist Eric Huebner lulls you with a delicate music box melody, and then, out of nowhere, Lippel and percussionist Haruka Fujii start smacking their instruments around. The effect startles, and it achieves the grab-you-by-the-throat physicality that’s one of FM’s goals.


Musicians of all genres would do well to realize that James Brown was one of last century’s smartest musicians, up there with Stravinsky. That doesn’t mean you can’t imitate him. But simply copping a couple mannerisms reveals a shallow understanding of his chief innovation, a precise rhythmic pointillism that coalesces into free-floating grooves. Don’t condescend to the Godfather. (OK, I’m done.)

This New Wiley Album is Totally Worth It!!!

He'd rather be working.

Select sentences from my PopMatters review of Wiley's Evolve or be Extinct:

Now he’s back with the double album Evolve or be Extinct, basically a tribute to his workaholism.


After the so-so introduction “Welcome to Zion”, Evolve slams into your brain with its title song, a boxing match between track and rapper. Wiley’s track mainly consists of a double-time riff repeated over and over, while his flow is a hyperactive syncopated wonder that darts in and out of the spaces in the production, elaborating and playing off its rhythmic possibilities. A hypeman declares, “If you’re not spittin’ this way on the 140 bpm, you are not evolving, rudeboy,” and you don’t doubt him.


The beat for “Link Up”, by name-to-remember Nana Rogues, is mostly implied, with a huge snare on the fours, a shaker and chime twinkling unpredictably, and a bass vroom that swells and throbs the rhythms of seduction. 


Also great is Most Wanted Mega’s mega electro racecar roar “Boom Blast”, which makes Wiley’s heart stutter like “voodoodoodoo dadadada voodoodoodoo POW!” At several points during the song, he touches the ceiling.


As a varied production showcase, Evolve impresses like DJ Quik’s The Book of David and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives.

In the sparse meditation “This is Just an Album”, Wiley reveals that he maintains his breakneck schedule to connect with the public and provide for his family. But his big dance song, “I’m Skanking”, is all about dancing alone. The atonal loner anthem “Weirdo” asserts “You ain’t in the same planet as me / They ain’t in the same planet as me”. And in “No Love Lost”, Wiley acknowledges that he’s lost touch with many homies: “We started together / Now we move solo,” an appropriate motto for a guy who apparently vacations in Barbados by himself. Blame his fans, who double as his enablers: “People ask me every day, ‘Wiley, what you workin’ on?’” No wonder he wants to see what the sea’s like.

Still, this guy’s so good at his job, it’s hard to imagine him lazing on a beach somewhere, with or without Rihanna. Evolve or be Extinct succeeds as both a collection of songs for public use—dancing, drinking, celebrating Christmas, protesting customs officials—and as a complex portrait of the artist who’s sacrificed his sleep and sanity to create them.

This Old Bachata Comp is WORTH IT!!!

Can you spot The Lawless Goat?

I didn't point it out in my PopMatters review, but Bachata Roja was Robert Christgau's 45th favorite album of 2011. Hey, mine too! Here is the review:

¡Qué grande es el amor!

Bachata music has lately threatened to take over Latin pop radio. Turn on your local station for a half-hour and you’ll hear the romantic fibs and bereft longings of some bachata singer, like Prince Royce or Romeo Santos, handing you his still-beating heart over guitar arpeggios and ticky-ticky percussion. (Women sing this stuff, too, though most conspicuously in duets with men.) Back in the ‘90s, Santos and his band Aventura innovated traditional bachata by mixing it with R&B chord changes and vocal mannerisms. This proved a winning combination, since R&B singers also truck in romantic fibs and bereft longings, and Aventura achieved crossover success and began printing money.

Integral to bachata’s sound are its guitars. If you count modern bachata as an R&B subgenre—and you really should—it’s the most guitar-centric of any R&B that currently charts. When contemporary R&B highlights a guitar, it strums a ballad or throws in a novelty solo. (Think Lil’ Wayne’s “How To Love” or Beyoncé’s “1+1”.) The sound of bachata, though, is unimaginable without the guitars: bright rhythm and lead lines interlocking with the percussion, creating clockwork structures whose regularity and precision provide secure frames of reference for all the vocal emoting. The guitar solos can be pretty impressive, too; bachata still prizes virtuosity.

It’s always done so, on the evidence of these two recent albums of traditional bachata. Bachata Roja: Amor y Amargue compiles Dominican recordings from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, and The Bachata Legends gathers many of the same players, Buena Vista Social Club-style, to recreate old songs live in a modern studio. This traditional music resembles Aventura and friends in its abundant guitars, steady 8th-note rhythms, and bittersweet vocalizing. ButBachata Roja also betrays unexpected variety, both in beats and lyrics. It showcases a genre still in the process of being codified, and therefore looser and wider-ranging than its modern incarnation lets on. Listening to Roja is sort of like hearing about the wild early lives of your grandparents, before they settled into the predictable grandparentness you know and love.

The wildest guy on Roja is Eladio Romero Santos, who celebrates girls and knife fights in “Las tres muchachas” and wanders through a drunken haze in “A los 15 o 20 tragos” (“At 15 or 20 drinks”), which Eric Church should totally cover. Santos’s music is irresistible and closer to merengue; his guitar work is less intricate but more danceable than most bachata, and his percussion parts have more space and variety. For straight up bachata heartache, there’s Augusto Santos (no relation), who implores “Con el amor no se juega” (“Do not play with love”) and claims “Yo soy puro amor” (“I am pure love”). His voice floats like a feather while his guitar picking and background singers elaborate his anguish. “What springs from my chest is pure love”, he sobs. Eek.

Most of Roja’s songs fall somewhere between those two extremes. Indeed, most tracks are in major keys, and while very few evoke the most disgusting scene from the movie Alien, they do get their love and their pain all tangled together. The music gets tangled, too. Like lots of genres in the process of being formed, this early bachata borrowed songs and styles from other places: Ramón Cordero adapted Mexican rancheros; Ramón Isidro Cabrera drew from Spanish décima poetry, and so on. Cordero sings with a wonderful smoky tenor, a bit like Harry Belafonte. Cabrera, meanwhile, uses his braying timbre to appropriate a Spanish persona called “El Chivo sin ley” (aka “the lawless Goat”); he’d run with it the rest of his career. The hard-living Marino Perez laments never taking his mother’s advice over adventurous chord changes that try to escape their own song. (He’s rumored to have vomited up his own liver, but that can’t be true, can it?) And along with Augusto Santos, the great guitarist Edilio Paredes livens up many of these tunes with virtuosic lines that astonish and delight.

I have a theory, rejected by Science, that tone color is the strongest musical memory trigger—stronger than melody, harmony, or rhythm, and comparable to smell in its power to conjure forgotten places and feelings. Roja bursts with memorable tone colors in guitars and voices, the odd saxophone, and instrumental variety from song to song. It’s an expert compilation. Less successful is the newly recorded Legends, which features our friends Paredes, Cordero, El Chivo, and Augusto Santos, among others. Paredes remains a guitar hero—the warring rhythms of “Calzoncillo largo” dropped my jaw—but the men’s voices have lost some distinction and the overall sound is too homogeneous to maintain excitement. Still, when the Lawless Goat honks out the quick “Tirale bajito” with accordion and merengue rhythms, he proves that traditional bachata has some surprises left in it.

This New Cursive Album Is NOT Worth It!

My negative review at PopMatters has been a fruitful source of angry comments from the Cursive Army. (Did you know they had an army?) I admire the commenters for using their full names rather than pseudonyms. Below, the I Am Gemini review in full, followed by some of the choicer responses.

Coquettes in concupiscent dress bat their eyes. Seriously.

When considering the failure of Cursive’s concept album I Am Gemini, it may be helpful to ponder the words of Stephen Sondheim. Or Friedrich Nietzsche. Or noted aesthetic philosopher Phife “Go get yourself some toilet paper ‘cause your lyrics is butt” Dawg. Any words, really, that distract you from those of Cursive lyricist/singer Tim Kasher, because his words are butt. Terrible, terrible butt. You can open the script to any page—btw, THE LYRIC SHEET IS A SCRIPT, COMPLETE WITH STAGE DIRECTIONS—and find gems like, “When the cat’s away / It’s said the mouse will play”. We all remember Nietzsche’s dictum: “Prefacing a cliché with ‘it’s said’ renders it no less a cliché, while rendering its user more an ass.” Kasher soldiers on, still babbling about cats: “Now the cat’s out of the bag and someone’s got to pay.” Imagine, if you will, the terrible dialogue from the movie The Happening, where Marky Mark talked to the trees but they wouldn’t listen to him. Now imagine that same dialogue full of halfhearted attempts at rhyme and assonance (pun intended), and you’ll approach the cringe-inducing cleverness on display here. Also you’ll bang your head against furniture.

Gemini’s “plot” revolves around two estranged twins, named Cassius and Pollock by their smug hipster mother Edith Hamilton. (She’s not a character.) Cassius was that dude talking all the smack about cats. At the time, he was getting ready to kill his sleeping “doppelganger” with a knife. (Phife: “Sucker MCs go and use the word ‘doppelganger’ / Now their song won’t never be a banger.”) You can’t really blame Cassius. Pollock had earlier shackled his brother and cut his head open, a misguided attempt to delve into the secret world of twins. Most of this action takes place in a big old creepy house, though for imagination’s sake, there’s one scene at a creepy sideshow carnival, where creepy Siamese Twins teach our heroes about life. That’s after the brothers’ past crimes appear dressed as Skeletons, but before we learn that It Was All A Dream. At one point the brothers travel through a looking glass—THAT’s the dream!—“into a world similar, although somehow askew”. Sounds like a challenge for Art Direction.

In The Man Who Mistook His Show For a Hat, Stephen Sondheim praises Porgy and Bess, writing that lyricist DuBose Heyward “understood the difference between character and characteristics; the lyrics sounded like heightened natural speech rather than self-advertised ‘poetry’.” Kasher doesn’t understand the distinction. His line “Albatross necktie / Looks so dignified / But you gotta loosen it up!” fails both ways: it’s not poetic, nor does anyone talk like that. The line doesn’t even help to establish character, which would have been helpful since Kasher sings both brothers exactly the same. Without the script, it’s impossible to differentiate Cassius from Pollock; both just sound like facile indie-rock singers making awful allusions and puns.

This seems a good time to share the dodgiest line from I Am Gemini: “Out cold, run over by the boulder of Sisyphus / Doesn’t it seem to get a bit repetitive? / Overandoverandoveragain…” High school mythology students in Cursive’s audience grin knowingly.

Believe me, I understand: writing a rock opera is hard work. The Drive-By Truckers only attempted it once. Look, I like the Who as much as the next guy. (Next guy: “What’s an Eminence Front?” Roger Daltrey: “IT’S A PUT-ON!”) But nobody pretends like the lyrics to Tommy are good, with their painful exposition and their supple wrists. Tommy gets by on its songs, which have held up to decades of radio play, endless cover versions, and armies of high school students singing them on the bus to speech contests. I Am Gemini falls into every rock opera trap—even its title is exposition. But if Cursive had brought the tunes, all would be forgiven. (Well, except for “I’m gonna paint this bloody town black and blue”.)

Sadly, the band chokes on the albatross necktie of Kasher’s lyrics. From the press release: “Kasher… wrote album lyrics in a linear fashion, in order, from song 1 to song 13.” Hooks appear during Act One—the “Come out, come out” chorus of “Warmer Warmer” is pretty catchy—only to get chased away by the all-important storyline. The band alludes to rock music without fleshing it out into self-reliant songs. “The Sun and Moon” is probably the best, with its organ-driven New Wave momentum, but even that’s killed by Kasher’s mythological asides. And if Act One is where hooks go to die, Act Two is a wasteland. Kasher briefly tries to play the resurrector and give the dead some life, handing his band an actual EXPLOSION to play—“We’re gonna blow this unholy house to dust!”—but they just sound like some guys playing an explosion.

Back in 2006, Cursive released the extremely likable concept album Happy Hollow. Lyrically it was more transmissions from the Kasherian sphincter, something about religion and The Wizard of Oz, but the music had so much life and so many bizarre horn lines, the words hardly mattered. Realizing that storyline was their least important concern, Cursive built their concept from discrete hooky songs. I Am Gemini gets its priorities backwards and lacks horns. For all its tempo shifts and attempts at fun,Gemini sounds like the work of an ascetic band scared of pleasure. When Cursive attempts another one of these things—and you know they will—they’d do well to heed Sondheim’s dictum from his manifestoBrainyQuote.com: “If you’re dealing with a musical in which you’re trying to tell a story, it’s got to sound like speech. At the same time it’s got to be a song.” Just one of those goals would suffice.

In response, Cursive fan Erik sez:

First of all, you're not funny.  You're the only one laughing at your "quips."  You don't even review the album, you just show how many references you can make to either rock-opera albums or philosophers. Your review is terrible, one-sided, and makes poorly-supported (or completely uninformed) claims. Also, you obviously wasted a good portion of time writing a review on a website I've never heard of, probably for no money at all.  Continue writing negative reviews in an effort to feel superior, since you're a hip writer and all.  However, a writer should at least know that art direction shouldn't be capitalized.  I hate it when Writers capitalize Nouns when they're not supposed to be.  How about stick to being a church musician - sorry, I meant Church Musician - rather than write scathing reviews for an album that is in no way as bad as you say.  2/10 rating?  Wrong.  Just wrong.

And Glenn sez:

I read [reviews] to get an actual description of how good or bad an album is.  This album is an A+.  The time you spend analyzing every little word of the lyrics is quite tiresome.  The guy wrote a play, then set it to music.  It is a peice of literature and here is what you say: "Go get yourself some toilet paper ‘cause your lyrics is butt”".

So your critisizing someone's art while bastardizing the English language it was written in.

and this "Believe me, I understand: writing a rock opera is hard work."  Really when did you write one?

The words don't have to be poetic as you want them to be, like rock music is meant to be perfect prose, free of the cliche's that you don't like.

The fact is that this album is over your head.  Any person who appreciates music would recognize the thru composed nature of this cd, YES WITH KEYBOARDS, NOT HORNS, (sorry they didn't pick your favorite alternate instrument this time) and recognize that it is A) amazingly complex  B) Addictively memorable  C)something no other band could ever create.

This site is butt, I'm out of here.