Indie Rock Singers

A complaint I hear sometimes when I play something a little too "indie" at work is that the singer "can't sing."  I also hear this when I play Bob Dylan, so I don't take it personally, but this is one criticism I actually agree with sometimes - often, they can't sing.

Over the course of the nineties, the inability of certain indie rockers to sing underwent a transformation - it started out with people who we all acknowledged, yeah they can't sing, but so what?  Not being able to sing didn't matter.  As the decade moved on though, people started to emulate those bands, and not being able to sing became the point.  At some point in there, some of the bands lost me.

I like Dylan, and I can handle a singer without a great voice.  But you have to draw the line somewhere.  I mentioned a post or two ago that Daniel Johnston is on one side of that line for me.  I'll put Neutral Milk Hotel on the 'Dylan' side of the line.  Johanna Newsom; over.  Bright Eyes - usually on the right side, but sometimes...

Over time my tastes (or ability to deal with bad singers) have shifted.  I used to love Elf Power, but they're on key no more often than by random chance, and the 'harmonies' can kill otherwise great songs.  I've never managed to get into On Avery Island.  Etc.  The problem is, I can handle great songs hampered moderately by a not-great singer.  I can't handle a singer who takes the genre as an excuse to sing badly.

Breakups

I'm lucky, in that I've never had a band I love break up while I'm a fan.  I've had a couple of close calls, though - when Ross Childress quit Collective Soul in 2001, I thought they were done; then Youth came out.  Also, Neutral Milk Hotel never really broke up (as it's all basically Jeff Mangum) but it's gradually become apparent that they will never record another album.

For some reason, we think of band breakups like we think of romantic ones - every one of them seems tragic, despite the fact that clearly for bands, breaking up is normal.  Think of your three best friends, think of working with them every day, being with them twenty-four hours for months at a time, and having serious disagreements about something you love, all the time.  Of course bands break up.  I'm amazed as many as do make second albums.

Still, I remember when I was seven and my dad told me about the Beatles breaking up, and how they could never get back together because John was dead.  I don't know if I cried, because I didn't really know the Beatles at that point.  But how many people did, for either event?  I can't really blame them.

I don't know where the expectation of permanence comes from - there are so few bands that last for any significant period of time, and so many fewer do so without lineup changes.  The Rolling Stones have three of the original members; Jethro Tull has one.  Clearly we need to change our expectations, see bands as an entity in the now without any expectation of permanence.  Adopt a Zen Rock and Roll mindset, maybe.

When I heard about the Beatles, I didn't really differentiate between what happened to the band, and what happened to John.  Clearly the gulf between the two events is vast, but to me (at seven) they meant the same thing - there would never be any more of this music.  When bands break up, it feels like something dying, which is ridiculous, but still true.  I don't know why that is.

Curtis Mayfield

Ah, random shuffle.  A Curtis Mayfield song that I apparently downloaded one day and then forgot about came on, and it has overtaken my brain: "Move on Up."  A fantastic piece of mid-seventies funk - not as heavy as say, the O-jays, it has some truly frenetic drumming, and a killer horn hook.  Mayfield's falsetto is worming it's way into my brain, and I've listened to the song several times today, before people at work started to complain.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine gave me a box set - "The Funk Box" - that has four discs worth of classic funk music.  It's a Whitman's sampler of funk.  This is sort of an in-joke between us, because a couple of years previously, I'd decided to try and assemble 100 songs in every genre (and thus become truly well versed in music) and decided to start with funk.  Ergo, the box set, and the (half-)mockery that ensued.

It's actually a great box set, too, if you want to get into funk.  It has the best Rick James song that isn't "Superfreak" ("You and I"); it has some Parliament/Funkadelic/George Clinton; it has many great James Brown songs (but not "Get Up, Get Into it, Get Involved" which I now nominate as the greatest horn line ever); and, best of all in a box set, it has a ton of stuff from bands you've never heard of that fits in perfectly.

I really like box sets, in general.  I got my dad a Motown box set once, that had something like every top ten single Motown had between 1962-1970.  Rather than have to track down the one Marvellettes song you want ("Mr. Postman") it's there, right between two early Miracles songs.  Etc.

The other thing my funk immersion taught me, besides the fact that the Temptations had great songs after 1970 ("Shakey Ground"), is how to appreciate rap.  I used to hate rap, on principle, but it's really not too different from funk - the emphasis is on the groove, and if it's less melodic, it's only slightly.  It wasn't until I fell in love with Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" that I could really get into the Beastie Boys "Car Thief". (Yes, I know it's "Eggman" where they actually used Mayfield's bassline, but "Car Thief" actually sounds like an old funk song, with its background singers, wah guitars, etc.)

It's this path that led me around to Danger Mouse's mashup album of Jay-Z and the Beatles.  Which I guess brought me full circle.

Why I haven't bought a New Release in a while

So the Them Crooked Vultures album is now out, and as excited as I was about it's release, I still haven't bought it.  I've listened to most of it - we downloaded it at work via the magic of the Zune pass (which is the only way Zune manages to compete with iTunes, and kind of shameful, really, that Apple hasn't attempted to match it) and I found myself somewhat underwhelmed.  The thing is too, if they'd just sort of slipped it out there, it might not have been a disappointment, but the band hyped it - in a really astute, clever way, via facebook announcements of surprise shows and the like, but still - and so you end up realizing that there's maybe three or four good songs on there.  "New Fang" and "Scumbag Blues" are both terrific, but everything else is basically a jam.

I have to be honest, I wasn't ever really thinking of buying the album the day it was released (I still might get the album at some point - it's susceptible to impulse now, and we never know where that's going to go).  There are very few bands that people buy the albums the day they come out, and those are almost without fail your favorite bands.  Buying an album the day it comes out is something a band earns, over time, and the list is short.  For me, Radiohead, Spoon, the Shins, maybe Iron and Wine.  That's probably it.  Smashing Pumkins lost it a while ago.  Collective Soul used to be on the list, but for whatever reason they aren't anymore (I do have the new album though - Collective Soul isn't my number one band anymore, but I still own every studio album they've ever produced.)

It's a trust issue, really, is what it comes down to.  I remember when In Rainbows came out, and they'd announced that you'd be able to buy it online for whatever price you wanted, a guy on the radio (a real obnoxious one who not coincidentally is no longer on air) said that Radiohead fans would buy anything Radiohead put out.  Thom Yorke making noise on an oboe for an hour; anything.  I remember thinking at the time that it was true, to a degree - I can't think of a band with more fans who'd buy the new album, sight unseen - but that it wasn't the point.   Over seven albums, they've earned it now.  It's not so much that they're a known quantity, but I trust them not to put out crap.

I love Queens of the Stone Age, and was excited to hear they have a new album coming out.  Based on that, I'd probably have bought Them Crooked Vultures no questions asked.  But I heard some of the songs, and didn't fall in love with them, and I remembered that Dave Grohl was involved, and that Foo Fighters have not earned, for me, what QOTSA have earned.

This is why I find it hard to get excited about New Releases.  Vampire Weekend has a new album coming out, but I'm not jumping up and down because I know I'll approach it with trepidation, listen to one or two songs (I already do like "Horchata," though) and slowly make up my mind.  This is how I treat old albums that I'm just discovering - why should it be different with new albums?  I'm still not sold on Dirty Projectors.  I've bought half of The Idiot one song at a time (I just barely bought "China Girl").

Still, new Spoon in January.  That, I'm excited for.

Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston is a name that comes up a lot when you start digging around in indie rock.  Just about everybody has dropped his name in an interview at least once; Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with his name on it.  And he's written some killer songs: check out Yo La Tengo's cover of "Speeding Motorcycle," or M. Ward's version "I Go Home"; Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips teamed up (as SparkleLips) to cover his song "Go" for an album of cover songs called The Late Great Daniel Johnston.

You might have noticed that all the songs I named were cover versions.  There's a reason for this.  I can barely stand Daniel Johnston's music.  His (original) version of "I Go Home" is lo-fi - it sounds like it was recorded on a boombox (a la the Mountain Goats) - and is just him singing over a very percussively played piano.  His voice has a Neil Young-like whine to it, and lasts about thirty seconds on the stereo at work.  Not that it's without its charms - there's a sweetness to the way he sings the chorus that is disarming - but this is my favorite of his recordings, and I can barely stand to listen to it.  He version of "Speeding Motorcycle" sounds like it was played on a cheap Casio keyboard - it honestly sounds like a child's toy.  I probably wouldn't like these songs at all if someone with more patience than me hadn't sifted through his catalog for the true gems.

I don't mind lo-fi, honestly.  I like Sebadoh (in fact I think "Flame" is one of the best indie rock songs ever) and the Mountain Goats.  But I don't understand it as an aesthetic - where you like a song because it's lo-fi.

There are a lot of people like Johnston in my collection - Syd Barrett, Skip Spence - and others who I should have but don't - Roky Erickson, Jandek - and they all have one thing in common: they're outsiders.  For a long time there's been an obscurist streak going through the serious music fan community, and so you find records of schizophrenic or bipolar semi-hermits thrust into your hands with the assurance "listen to this, it's great."  Often you're told you can "hear their pain" but even if not, there's some attraction there.  The most dangerous word, though, is honest.  I don't know what honest means in this context, but lo-fi is "honest" and so is outsider rock.

All of this is fine.  I own Madcap Laughs and there's a couple of songs on it I really enjoy, so I certainly won't begrudge someone whose tastes venture a little farther out than mine.  But I think there is a group of people who don't like this music, but keep trying to, because they're supposed to like it.  Because it's "honest" and "real" and not like (to pull an example out of the sky) Kings of Leon.

Some people genuinely like Daniel Johnston, and I hope he keeps making records that they love.  But I, for the most part, just can't take him unless he's been filtered through a layer or two of M. Ward or Yo La Tengo.

Banjo

The banjo has a ridiculous reputation these days, bringing to mind for most people the Beverly Hillbillies.  The fact that the banjo is associated almost totally with bluegrass is probably because of Earl Scruggs, the first great virtuoso of the instrument.  But, in the last decade or so, the banjo = bluegrass association has faded.  A little.

It probably started with Dave Matthews' occasional associations with Bela Fleck.  Bela is one of the most amazing musicians I've ever seen - I once watched a video of him playing "Cripple Creek" with an Indian tabla drummer, and it ranged from old-timey folk, to bluegrass, to raga, to ...  His music has very little to do with twangy bluegrass, and he's shown that the instrument is capable of being a lead instrument in a rock or jazz context.

Then Iron and Wine came out.  Sam Beam's fingerpicked guitar and slide guitar playing were wonderful, but on his debut album, it was his use of the banjo for what would traditionally have been guitar solos that was the most revolutionary.  He eschewed bluegrass rolls, or clawhammer rhythm playing entirely, and played melodic lines on the banjo, using it to cut through the guitars, and showing it to be a perfect foil to the guitar.

Soon it became clear - Indie Rock was reclaiming the banjo.  It turns up in a Feist song, "1234," which itself became a minor radio hit, and reached a wider audience.  Sufjan Stevens uses it all the time, in a weird kind of dissonant clawhammer style.  Listen to, for example, "All the Trees..." from Seven Swans or his version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

I think the banjo might soon become not a bluegrass instrument, or a country instrument, but a "folky" instrument.  My favorite banjo music has always been the older mountain folk music - my all time favorite of theose songs is "Shady Grove."  "Shady Grove" shares a melody with the old English folk song "Matty Groves" (with vastly different lyrics) which was done definitively by Fairport Convention on Liege and Lief.  "Shady Grove" was most recently recored by Tom Petty's band Mudcrutch.

My hope for the next folk instrument to be appropriated by young indie rock kids: Appalachian dulcimer.

Sometimes literal is better

I think English teachers, well meaning all, have destroyed people's ability to understand song lyrics.  I came to this realization when I looked up the lyrics to TV on the Radio's "Wolf Like Me" and found a raging discussion about what the song was 'about.'

To me there is no mystery what the song is about: it's about werewolves.  Don't believe me?

Got a curse I cannot lift
shines when the sunset shifts
when the moon is round and full

and later:

We could jet in a stolen car
but I bet we wouldn't get too far
before the transformation takes
and bloodlust tanks and
crave gets slaked

 It ends with the singer repeating: "We're howling, forever" over and over.

So what did the internet discussion board decide?  The song is about sex.  I'll give them this much - the werewolves are having sex.  But it isn't a song with the werewolf as a metaphor for sex - it's a song about a werewolf.

Perfect Songs

I love the movie The Princess Bride.  There's something about it; the funny parts are funny, but it's not totally a comedy; the romantic parts are romantic, but it's not a romance.  It's serious and sweet and way funnier than most straight forward comedies.  But more interestingly to me, there's literally nothing in it that (to me) doesn't work.  There is nothing extraneous in the movie - it's like a finely tuned machine.  For this reason, I've said (to people who will listen) that The Princess Bride is a perfect movie.

I feel the same way about the song "New Slang" by the Shins.  The song is perfect - the melody is haunting, the lyrics brilliant, but not overwrought, the two guitar solos just exquisite, and everything else - it's perfect.  When I first heard the song, I thought that the intro sounded like a Raffi song.  The folky guitars were there, after all.

Few bands ever get to write a song as good as "New Slang" and almost never get to do it twice.  The Shins are a terrific band without "New Slang" - you almost feel sorry for them, having everything they do compared to something they can't possibly match.  When I saw them live, they seemed to understand this, and resent it a little.  They took it out on the song, trying to bring it down from it's pedestal a little.  The almost reverential tempo was played faster, and looser.  The singing was a little ragged, and the phrasing tried to break free of the song a little bit.

William Goldman never wrote another book as good as The Princess Bride and knew it.  This kind of thing actually happens all the time.  It's more than the one-hit wonder thing.  Ben Folds is no one-hit wonder, but he'll never top "Brick."  It took a cover version, but Leonard Cohen finally got the "Hallelujah" he deserved. 

Sometimes, rock musicians write hymns, it seems.

New Release Eve

I haven't discovered many new bands in a while, and seem to be temporarily out of new music in general, so I'm doing what I usually do in these circumstances - dig into old bands.

Because of the song-at-a-time habit I developed a long time ago due to bandwidth issues and Audiogalaxy, I tend to have bands that I would describe as 'great' or bands that I'd say I 'love' that I have a total of half a dozen songs on my computer.  Usually, all six are killer.  But I have that weird fear that the next song of theirs I hear I won't love, and so I steer clear for a while.

So then, every once in a while, I go back, find a band like that, and timidly check out a seventh (or in this case, third) song.  Thus, I go back to my Super Furry Animals collection of two songs (for the record, 'At Least It's Not the End of the World,' and 'Something for the Weekend,") and look at iTunes offerings.  I also discovered that my once sufficient Oasis collection is completely gone, and decided that I can no longer live without "Acquiesce."  Etc.

Music consumption, for me, is a strange hybrid of Thrill-of-the-Hunt (why I own a Treepeople, and Throwing Muses album) and ridiculous timidity (I just barely decided to go for a fourth song off Iggy Pop's The Idiot, an album I know perfectly well I'll love).

Still, a new Spoon album looms large, and I know I'll come down on the Thrill side of the equation for Them Crooked Vultures tomorrow.  Which is ridiculous, because I've heard the single, and think it rates no better than a Queens of the Stone Age B-side, or a Foo Fighters album track.

I will say though, anytime I find my music collection without Robyn Hitchcock's "The Bones in the Ground" I remedy the situation.  And then forget about him for years at a time again.

Loudness, pt. 2

I got to thinking about Loudness v Volume after the last blog post, and had some thoughts in a different direction.  In the late sixties, guitarists started using feedback as a part of the electric guitar repertoire.  It's useless to say anything other than 'guitarists' because the number of people who've been credited with inventing intentional feedback includes: John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, and so forth.  So sufficeth to say that 'guitarists started using feedback.'

The reason it all happened simultaneously (or close enough) is that as we moved into the late sixties, musicians were looking for ways to play louder and louder, amplifier manufacturers were building bigger amplifiers, for musicians to play larger clubs, and people just started turning them up.  At some point, feedback becomes inevitable, as does the idea of using it rather than (hopelessly) trying to suppress it.

Now, this is a pretty standard explanation, but I got to thinking.  Rather than just trying to play with more volume, the musicians mentioned were almost all of them playing louder music - louder in the sense of yesterday's post.

Listen to the guitar in a song from the fifties, or even the early sixties, and it sounds pretty tame by today's standards.  For example, the Beatles song "I Feel Fine" has a scream right before the guitar solo - a pretty credible scream, by today's standards - and it leads into a very tame and laid back guitar solo.  Even the blues guys, who were turning it up and using distortion before just about anybody, weren't playing with the same sort of abandon and loss of control that typifies, say, a Jimi Hendrix solo.

Now listen to the music that was coming out in '67, '68.  The Who.  Hendrix.  Cream.  Even the Beatles, a la "Helter Skelter" - the music itself is louder, and they had to turn up the volume to match it.  It's one of the reasons Chuck Berry sounds dated in a way the Stones don't.  He was just a little too early, and for a lot of reasons, couldn't play as loudly as the Stones later did.

Feedback has kind of been subsumed into the mainstream now, and the thing that replaced it - Hip Hop's block rocking beat - is going the same route.  But I remember the first time I heard the Smashing Pumpkins song "Soma" which explodes halfway through.  The centerpiece of the song is a solo, and four notes in, it sounds like the guitar is being fed through a shredder.  The Pumpkins are one of the last times a band really sounded loud to me.  That solo in "Soma", the riff in "Pissant."  Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution."  But now that I think about it, I guess the White Stripes still manage it pretty regularly.  So maybe there's hope for the future.

Loudness

The other day at work (how many blog entries start this way? Anyway) I put on some Radiohead.  Radiohead is difficult for me to judge on the whole, can-I-get-this-past-the-censors scale - some songs are just fine, and everybody likes.  Some ("Bodysnatchers") get the reaction I got the other day - "Change that. (a few seconds pass) Sorry, I just can't take that. It's not comforting."

It was the "not comforting" that I found interesting.  I know my opinion is slightly skewed, but I don't consider "Bodysnatchers" all that cacophonous a song, especially for Radiohead.  If it had been "My Iron Lung" or something, sure.  But "Bodysnatchers" is just a heavy riff, with a little of their trademarked theremin guitar noises going on.

It reminds me of a quote I heard someone (maybe Peter Buck?) say about Nick Drake.  He said "even if the volume is all the way up, Nick Drake still sounds quiet" and this I absolutely agree with - I've never once been asked to change Nick Drake, unless it's three o'clock and we're all falling asleep.  Loudness, it seems, is only tangentially related to volume.

Unplugged

I'm not positive when it became required for every two-bit one hit wonder to record an acoustic version of their hit song, but I'm going to blame MTV unplugged.  A couple of months after a hit song comes out, radio stations inevitably start playing an acoustic version, which is almost inevitably recorded live at the station, and features the lead singer and one or two guitarists, playing the song exactly the same as if the guitars were electric.  And people eat it up.

Acoustic versions of songs can be great.  Look at the last decade of Johnny Cash's career.  But he (and Rick Rubin) understood that an acoustic guitar is a fundamentally different instrument from an electric one, and changes the song.  Listen to his version of "Rusty Cage" for example - he doesn't even try to match the opening riff from Soundgarden.

This is why so many acoustic songs are mediocre - they don't change the song one bit.  I heard an acoustic version of "Sweet Home Alabama" on the radio once, and for three seconds I was excited.  A country blues version of a classic southern rock song? Then the singer said "turn it up" exactly like he does on the electric version, and they lost me.  Turn what up?  It's an acoustic guitar - there's no volume knob!

The all-time great example of how to do Unplugged right comes from Eric Clapton.  Remember, in the early nineties, Clapton was a has-been - imagine Jeff Beck releasing an acoustic album now - and this album almost singlehandedly turned his career around.  He used the opportunity to reinvent his music as acoustic blues - half the songs on the album are covers of old blues songs, from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters.  He teases the audience "See if you can spot this one" before launching into an almost unrecognizable "Layla," (which for years was the only version of the song I'd ever heard) - but my favorite on the album is "Running on Faith" - it's a beautiful blues hymn, and Clapton's slide playing has never been better.  That's how you unplug.

Counterpoint

I'm a huge White Stripes fan, so naturally I bought the Raconteurs album when it came out.  I was expecting, basically, Jack White-punk with some Brendan Benson powerpop elements.  What surprised me, therefore, was how much more texture the album had than a typical Stripes album.  The addition of keyboards especially was revelatory.  My favorite song on the album quickly became "Intimate Secretary."  It's an unusually structured song; instead of verse-chorus-verse it's more ABAB.  There are two melodies, and it goes back and forth between the two sections (a little like the Beatles "We can work it out") - but the prestige is the coda, where everything drops away except a bubbling keyboard part, and then they bring the full band back little by little, with both the A and B melodies over the same part.

Two melodies simultaneously is called counterpoint, and Bach was basically the master of it (see, this, for example).  It remains more a classical thing than a rock thing, which is too bad because it can be breathtaking, as in the Raconteurs example.

Still, it got me thinking of other songs that do the same thing.  Sure enough, Mates of State "So Many Ways" does - Kori Gardner sings the first verse, then Jason Hammel sings the same melody (and lyrics) on the second as she sings a new melody (and new lyrics).  The gradual addition reminds me of canon - in classical music, where a single melody plays, then another takes over, and more and more voices are added on, until the limits of sanity are reached.

I've only ever encountered one rock canon - "Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space" by Spiritualized - and it is textbook canon.  A simple instrumental backs up a vocal - "All I want in life's a little love to take the pain away, getting strong today, a giant step each day-y-y" which repeats while another vocal comes in on top "Wise men say, only fools rush in, only fools rush in." and then a third voice enters, and they swirl around each other while the background music builds.  One of the things about recording in a studio, rather than with an orchestra, is that you can manage an effect Spiritualized has here - the various voices come to the foreground, drop away, etc. in the mix.

There's one other Counterpoint Rock song I can think of, and it's also the only rock song I ever played to a certain classical friend that blew him away.  Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair".  They actually took the folk song "Canticle" and worked it in with the melody to "Scarborough Fair" in counterpoint - and then as a bonus they had the instrumentation build from guitar to include drums, harpsichord, and so on.

What was interesting to me, thinking about these songs, is that every one of these songs is my favorite song for the various bands.  I wonder why.

Morphine

Morphine has to be the best kept secret in indie rock.  For a decade, they existed, quietly making fantastic music; then their singer died.  Still, no one knows them.

I got into Morphine because Collective Soul covered them - they passable cover of "You Speak My Language" on the massively underrated Blender album.  So I checked them out.  Downloaded a few songs.  Liked what I heard.  Downloaded a few more.  Etc.  I have dozens of Morphine songs on my computer now, and several albums.  I'd have more, but you might have picked up that I acquire songs slowly - rarely an album at a time.

One of the things I like about Morphine is a minor technical thing, but it still matters - their lineup was weird.  Drums, slide bass (like slide guitar, but bass) and a baritone sax.  That was basically it.  It goes back to something I've thought for a while - we get so locked into the guitar bass drums sometimes keys rock band lineup, that we ignore a lot of good possibilities.  How many bands would have prospered if they'd thought to put an ad up for a saxophone player?

Morphine concentrated almost entirely on the low range of the instruments - the slide bass would play these slippery riffs, the horn would bubble up, but never higher than mid-range, and Mark Sandman's baritone would sing these bizarre, almost Beat poetry lyrics.  The whole vibe was like jazz club full of menace.  My favorite line from a song of theirs: "Found a woman who was soft but she's also hard/While I slept, she nailed down my heart."  Second favorite: "She had a smile that swirled, she had a smile that curled, she had a smile that swerved all over the road."

Every once in a while I'll put Morphine on at work - it's mellow enough to usually make it past the radar, but still sometimes a pounding groove like "Eleven O'Clock" will raise an eyebrow.  The only problem with Morphine is that they had a tendency to go over the same ground a lot - they were one of those bands that had a unique sound, and stuck with it.

Still, to dip into every once in a while, it was a great sound.  That's one of the reasons I love indie rock - you find these weird bands, with their own sound, and you can sample them - add a little of their spice to your collection, dip in, and then head off to something else.

Built to Spill

Every once in a while I put my Zune on shuffle, and Built to Spill comes on and blows me away again.

A lot of the bands I got to know over the last decade or so, I got to know in a strange way, because I came of age musically at the height of the whole file-sharing thing.  So every band I got to know, I got to know one song at a time.  I didn't discover Magnetic Fields, I heard "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" and came back for more.

The best site of all was Audiogalaxy which was like Napster cross-referenced with Allmusic.  So I'd browse through the newly discovered genre of Indie Rock, and one day came across a band called Treepeople.  I think I'm one of very few people who got into Built to Spill by way of Treepeople, but I will say, when they wanted to be, they were a tremendous band.  They had this dueling guitars thing that put every other dueling guitar band to shame; Allman Bros., the Stones, Television - none of them hold a candle to the Treepeople's best stuff.  Their version of "Bigmouth Strikes Again" is the textbook for duel lead guitars, and by far the best Smiths cover ever.

So anyway, Treepeople had Doug Martsch as one of their two guitarists, and he (and Audiogalaxy) led me to Built to Spill.  Which leads me to the song that came up randomly on my Zune today, "Distopian Dream Girl" which should go down as one of the great songs ever.  The guitar riff is sort of reminiscent of "Electioneering" but for a power trio, the guitar work is sublime, from that Neil Young school of guitar playing.  The song is weird; the most famous line is "If it came down to your life or mine/I'd do the stupid thing/and let you keep on living" - but, and this is crucial, the line isn't played as an emo pity fest, but as a singalong.  It's bizarrely joyous.

I've got maybe ten or fifteen Built to Spill songs (I only bought one album, but for some reason, Built to Spill works for me best on a song by song basis.)  The first one, actually, I ever heard, was their song "Strange" which is, under it all, basically call and response guitar playing.  It's an excellent showcase of Martsch's lead guitar ability - one of his fills is literally nothing but two notes, an octave apart, with rhythmic variation.

The top five Built to Spill songs, ever, are: "Dystopian Dream Girl", "Strange", "Car", "You Were Right", and "I would Hurt a Fly."

Isis

Any serious music fan has probably gone through that phase where the number of band names you know is greater than the music of those bands you've been able to absorb - i.e. you know Sonic Youth and Pavement and Yo la Tengo, but you only know maybe two songs each from these bands that you've been told were groundbreaking, and you are supposed to revere.

I sought out and listened to a lot of bands I was supposed to like: Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground - etc.  Of those bands, I usually like a couple of songs from each of them, but for none of them can I remember a time where I put on a whole album and just listened to it.  Almost inevitably, I like more bands that I discover through a song or album, and only later discover how influential they were.  The only person I can think of that's been an exception to this rule is Dylan.

I love Bob Dylan, without being one of those Dylan freaks who reveres everything he's ever done - he's definitely put out his share of crap.  I'm also different from many Dylan fans by not liking large sections of his most famous work - the early protest songs, for example, which are so preachy as to be almost unlistenable.  It wasn't until he decided to start playing Rock and Roll that I really start to like his music.

The song of his that has haunted my brain the most is the relatively obscure track "Isis" from his Desire album.  Desire is most known for "One More Cup of Coffee" and "Hurricane" - both great songs - but I think "Isis" stands up among his best work, period.  First off, there's the violin, which was all over Desire.  Second, it's in this waltz-time, and the drums just have a heyday with it.  But it's one of Dylan's weirdest stories - there's all this mystical imagery, but it never gets in the way of the story.  It talks about pyramids, and is equal parts Egyptian and Mexican in the reference.

The lyrics, man, where to begin:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May,
But I could not hold on to her very long.
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

Cinco de Mayo, Samson, cowboy narratives, and that's one verse in ABAB rhyme scheme.  (Not to get real English Major, but that ABAB scheme is amazingly effective - the rhymes keep coming at you from angles you're not expecting.  So when he sings: "Said I got no money he said that ain't necessary" you remember that he's rhyming with the word "ordinary" two lines ago.)

He never sang better, for my money, than on this song.  His voice is a little nasally, like all his best work, but there's an expressiveness to how he wraps his voice around the words.  Seeing on paper the line "That's when I knew that I had to go on" does not do justice to the way he sings it.  Let me put it like this; some singers are tremendous interpreters of songs, and can breathe life into a song that you thought was DOA.  That's how Dylan sings this song, as if he's trying to prove to us that he's written a masterpiece.

I love Dylan for being able to write a song about an Egyptian god and making it sound like "Tangled up in Blue" the sequel - it's like how he can write something as bizarre as "The Mighty Quinn" and still have everyone singing along with the chorus.  Everyone talks about his lyrics, but to me, it's the storyteller in him that keeps me coming back to his music,

Out of Town

I'm leaving for the bustling metropolis of Farmington New Mexico first thing in the morning, and will be without internet access until Sunday evening.  Please forgive me the hiatus.

Kings of Leon

Something happened in the Indie Rock world when I wasn't looking.  Back in, say 2001 or 2002, a young indie band called Kings of Leon came out, with a southern rock, punky, Strokesy sound.  I liked their single, "Molly's Chambers" and left it at that for a few years.  I checked out that song, based on recommendations from sites like Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork Media.

A couple of years later, I decided, on a whim, to buy their album, Aha Shake Heartbreak.  It was brilliant.  Every song was fantastic, they'd refined their sound - everything you hope a new band does between albums one and two, they'd done.  A couple of months later, I bought their third album, and was blown away anew.  They'd progressed by leaps and bounds - their songwriting now had a grand ambition sometimes, the guitars were bigger, etc.  I started to hope that I might hear them on the radio; Death Cab for Cutie had recently made the jump.

When I read, though, reviews of the last two albums by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media, I was confused if we were talking about the same band.  Rolling Stone put them in the category of arena rock/indie also-rans, and gave them 3, or 3.5 stars - good, but not great.  Pitchfork, however, hated them.  They compared the band, unfavorably, to 3 Doors Down, and gave them an out of ten rating in the mid four's.

What is going on?  By the way, Kings of Leon's fourth album, which I bought the day it came out, continues their exponential progression - they've somehow managed to merge southern rock, U2, the Strokes, and something else (call it x factor?) into an amazing sound.  The songwriting is often brilliant, and always good - every song on the album is good.  They've become, in a very short amount of time, one of my favorite bands.  And Pitchfork continues to invent lower numbers for the reviews, while Rolling Stone is lukewarm.  I don't understand it.

Actually, with Pitchfork, I do understand it.  They've committed the unpardonable sin, see, of cleaning up their sound.  It no longer sounds recorded in a garage, and to the Committee of Public Safety, that means they're trying to sound commercial, which means they're selling out.  Plus, Pitchfork accuses them of the most unpardonable of sins - sexism.  I've listened to the Kings' lyrics, they're no more sexist than any other rock band.  They occasionally sing about girls.  But this becomes frat-boy sexism, and you are allowed to hate the album.  Jay-Z, on the other hand, is still allowed.

"I don't hear a single"

..."The future was wide open" sings Tom Petty, in "Into the Great Wide Open."  It's the line in the title, though - "Their A&R man said I don't hear a single" - that interests me.  It's a common complaint of record executives, that neverending need to bow to the commercial.  Record executives seem to live to find great bands, and then ask them to make music that will sell, rather than whatever music it is they are making.  It's like every Hollywood cliche.

But I wonder if sometimes these guys get a bad rap.  Sure, there are a number of masterpieces that wouldn't exist if the record company got its way, but I have to think that those guys, every day, deal with some young garage band that thinks they're the next Radiohead, when the executives know that they'll be lucky to break even on the album.  "Please guys, just give us something we can sell" and the musicians write an acerbic song about sell-outs.

Because let's face it, it's not good for people to get everything they want.  Artists given unlimited time and resources often produce self-indulgent crap.  Artists want to be left alone, but losing the sense of urgency to create an album is rarely good.  For example, look at Chinese Democracy - it's testament to Axl's talent that the album is listenable at all. But if he'd had someone breathing down his neck, someone with the power to pull the plug, isn't it possible that he would have committed to some decisions earlier, been content with only fifty different takes of the guitar solo, and produced the album in a mere, say, five years?

I think the ultimate example is Boston.  Boston started out as a couple of guys recording songs in their garage, in stolen moments when they weren't working, desperately trying to make a record great enough to get noticed.  Boston is called "arena rock" today and usually dismissed with Styx, Kansas, and so forth, but there are some stunning moments on that first album.  The back and forth between the bass and piano on the bassline to "Foreplay" with the guitars doubling it a minute later - this is music a band poured themselves into.  It was a such a success that they became one of the biggest bands in the world, and when time came to make their third album, they were essentially given a blank check.

Eight years later, they came out with a truly epic lousy album.  Why does this come as any surprise?  We understand that mindless self-indulgence is bad for rock stars when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or groupies - why are we surprised that when they indulge their "artistic" side, it isn't a work of shining brilliance?

The Shins: live

I saw the Shins a couple of years ago, after Wincing the Night Away came out.  I was and am an enormous Shins fan.  I got into them before the whole "Garden State" thing, but ironically, that was the movie that made me fall in love with "New Slang" - before then it was their second album I adored, and especially "So Says I" which remains one of my favorite songs.

So I took some friends to the concert.  They ranged from Shins fans to total newcomers.  The opening band got caught in bad weather, so it was an interesting experience - could they rise to the challenge, and deliver a killer set?

Unfortunately, they didn't give a set that converted anyone not already sold that night.  One of the reasons is that James Mercer, though a talented songwriter, is not a tremendously compelling frontman.   He said little between songs, and in fact most of the chatter to the audience was from the guitarist and bass player (who switched instruments a number of times during the show).  At one point, someone was tuning up, and there was a pause between songs, and the two of them started goofing around, and ended up playing the first verse of "Holy Diver."  This is not a song that lends itself well to the kind of crowd that the Shins attract.  There were a couple of weird audience-interaction moments like that, that night.

But by and large, the biggest problem seemed to be the fact that Mercer was uncomfortable with the Shins being the Shins.  He'd given interviews about how all anyone associated with them was "New Slang" and how he wished people would see the band for more than one song.  So when they played "New Slang" that night, they played it up tempo, and the harmonies were a little ragged, and a number of small things that in themselves aren't important, but all contributed to a sense of trying to pull the song off of it's pedestal, a little.

What it all comes down to, I think, is this: there are Rock bands, and there are Pop bands, and that concert was the Shins, who on record are a terrific Indie pop band, trying to be a rock band.

Simon and Garfunkel were a Pop band; so were the Beach Boys, and Oasis.  The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Cheap Trick were all Rock bands.  Bob Dylan is Rock.  Billy Joel is pop.  Etc.  There's nothing wrong with being a pop band, but there is a difference.  So the Shins played their songs harder, looser, and louder than they recorded them.  Some of the songs benefitted: "Caring is Creepy" and "So Says I" came alive under this treatment, so it wasn't an entirely misguided move.  But as a whole, it seemed artificial, and put on. 

It was this artificiality, or uncomfortableness, that meant that it was a concert for the faithful only, I think.

The Wah Pedal

I'm hesitant to talk about this, because even though I'm a musician, I've tried not to make this a musician's blog; I'm definitely not a gearhead, and don't want this to be a gearhead post.  But one of the things that happens when you play guitar for a while is you notice guitarists, guitar playing, etc.

I know for me, it was a revelation when I could pick out individual guitar parts in a song.  Up until then it had all been this big wash of sound.  But I think most people still recognize a wah-wah pedal, and almost everyone associates it with Jimi Hendrix.

Effects pedals in general are controversial, and seem to fall along the punk/prog party line.  Punks tend to think of most effects as flashy, and flash without substance is their nemesis.  Prog bands, on the other hand, tend to have rigs that look like the central defence computers of middle eastern nations.  Dave Gilmour, especially, tends to have a rig with forty some-odd effects, half of which are echo or delay pedals.

But punks tends to love their distortion pedals, so the arms race continues.

Liz Phair

It's hard sometimes, when a band has released a brilliant album - like, say, Exile in Guyville - to accept the fact that the following decade of uninspired and occasionally terrible music is not slow spot, or an aberration.  Sometimes, you keep listening to the Pinkerton's of the world, and tell yourself that a band with an album this good in them must get lucky again sometime.  But sometimes, you just have to accept that someone got lucky, and it's never going to happen again.

Exile in Guyville has some truly brilliant songs in it.  "Fuck and Run" knocks me out everytime, and I find "Flower" running through my head more often than appropriate.  But we all need to accept the fact that Liz Phair has devoted her life to destroying our ability to love her music.


One of the things that the last decade has shown us about her is that a lot of the things that were praised about Guyville - the bracing, profane confessionalism, for example - was really a gimick.  I don't know any other way to interpret "Flower" now that she has released two albums of mall-teen shock-rock.  It used to be possible to hear "Flower" and think that it was an extremely naked and honest look at sexual fantasies from a female perspective, but when Phair writes a song as obvious and clumsy as "H.W.C." there's no other conclusion - this girl is now, and has always been trying to sell records.  The lo-fi thing, the indie rock thing - it's all been an angle.

Another way to say it - "Flower" was, maybe, an honest song about sexual fantasies.  "H.W.C." is about what she thinks people want her fantasies to be - it is exactly as calculated as "I Kissed a Girl", just with a less effective hook.

I'm sorry to say all this, because "Why Can't I" isn't actually a bad song.  It's not a great song, but it's no better or worse than your average pop song - it has a hook, not a bad guitar riff, etc.  But Phair hasn't committed career self-immolation with "Why Can't I" - it's all the other crap she puts on the album.

I actually find it's best to imagine it's someone else singing, who happens to be named Liz Phair.  Otherwise, everytime I hear her sing "I want a boyfriend" I won't think of the plaintive, hurt, and sad voice singing it, but of a hipster girl trying to play every hipster guy at once.

Was Liz Phair, now Olafur Arnalds

I was totally going to talk about Liz Phair tonight, but I listened to the BBC on the way home, and think instead I'm going to talk about an Icelandic ex-thrash metal drummer turned classical composer, named Olafur Arnalds.

Some of his music was played on the radio, and I managed to track it down when I got home- he apparently released a song a day for a week, and it's collected on an album called Found songs.

The music is deceptively simple, usually a piano, and a couple of strings - a violin, maybe a cello.  I'm not sure if he recorded it himself, or what, but judging by the constraints imposed (song a day) it seems likely.  What's interesting to me (besides the stark, haunting, beautiful music) is how this music is kind of punk version of classical music.

Arnalds said in the interview that he left his composition program in college after a year, partly because of his career taking off, and partly because they didn't like his kind of thing.  He sees modern classical music as too complex, as trying to be so complicated that it's only written for other music students; he on the other hand wants to make music anyone can listen to.

In some ways, this is the reverse side of my pro prog rock argument.  He champions music that isn't challenging, isn't too complex for people to listen to.  But I don't think so, actually - this is exactly what prog rock is about: taking classical music and putting it in a context that is more accessible.  This is still about the genius of the amateur, and while not too challenging, it isn't punk.  This is instrumental, still somewhat classical music.  It is, in fact, much more "classical" than much of what gets labeled as such.  The Classicists saw the Baroque period as overwrought, and were trying to bring some starkness and simplicity into the picture.

I thought for a long time that more classical musicians should take rock music seriously, and one of the things I thought they should try is simpler melodies, and shorter songs - embrace the rock attention span, in other words.  These songs on Found Songs are two to three minutes long, and the lyricism of some of the melodies is breathtaking.

So, a classical musicians tries to buck the classical trend, and records simple, accessible music.  I'm still trying to figure out if this is highbrow or lowbrow.

A Pumpkins history of the Alternative Revolution

I spent a while last night on Wikipedia reading about Nevermind, and the article stated that Nevermind was the album that launched the alternative rock explosion.  I don't disagree with this by the way.  Credit where it's due, it's a phenomenal album, bursting at the seams, and manages to make a lot of other music look ridiculous.

Two things, though.  First, I bought Nevermind in the same spirit I bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits - because it was a band I thought I should get to know.  I'd been reading a lot about music, and Nirvana was one of those bands that you have to know, so I bought Nevermind.  Like Dylan, I came to really like the album, but from the start for me, it was an "important" album - this helps explain why I still don't own In Utero.

Second, I got thinking - if Nirvana hadn't broken through, for a variety of reasons (say, radio stations hadn't played "Smells like Teen Spirit", or they never made the jump from sub pop and decided to be an indie band forever, or maybe if they just hadn't been a band that had a Nevermind in them, and had released a string of Bleach's) would the alternative revolution have happened?  There were a lot of great alternative bands that only got signed, or got major airplay, or whatever because alternative was big - where would Stone Temple Pilots be if Nevermind had flopped.?

To that second question, I realized that the alternative revolution would still have happened.  I don't mean that there was this huge scene full of brilliant music waiting to burst forth, because that doesn't matter - Dinosaur Jr. are still nobodies, and it doesn't matter how great Yo La Tengo has been over the last decade, most people probably think they're a Mexican band.  No, what would have happened was Siamese Dream.

Nirvana being the greatest band of the nineties is such dogma it doesn't even seem useful to question it, but think for a second.  Siamese Dream is every bit as good as Nevermind, and in many ways a good deal better.  Jimmy Chamberlain was one of the few drummers alive who could give Dave Grohl a run for his money, Billy Corgan could do the tortured teen angst lyrics every bit as well as Cobain, and Siamese Dream would have hit like an atom bomb if it had come in a vacuum.  As it was, it proved that alternative had staying power - this was about more than one great band.

But not only could the Pumpkins do everything Nirvana could do, they could do more.  They could do the trademark loud soft loud dynamics - but Corgan could do both at the same time, practically whispering the vocals over "Cherub Rock"'s surging riff.  They'd drag that loud soft loud thing out to be a song structure - instead of Verse Chorus Verse, the soft section would be a bridge; in "Silverf***" that bridge would be half the song.  Corgan was under the same pressure Cobain was to deliver a killer album (and the same pressure a generation earlier that had led Springsteen to create "Born to Run") but he wasn't tortured by the prospect of being a rock star - he wanted to be a rock star.  Of all the alternative bands, Smashing Pumpkins ran most enthusiastically toward stardom.

I once played "Silverf***" for a cousin of mine who was studying classical music in college.  I said, "This song has only one chord" and played the intro.  She was intrigued, but bored, until the main guitar melody came in - it blew her away.  "Nothing harmonically at all, just this drone, and then that lyrical melody over it!"  

Okay, I know I'm kind of trying to sell the idea that the Pumpkins were a better band than Nirvana, and in the end that comes down to everyone's tastes.  But to me, what I get out of Nevermind is a punk band that loves the Beatles, and is filtering pop through a twisted punk lens.  Siamese Dream is an album that is trying to take everything the band loves about the last forty years of rock - spaced out interludes, bone crushing riffs, metal solos, acoustic ballads, punk, metal, Hendrix, Beatles - and funneling it all through a thousand guitars.

I like Nevermind, but I love Siamese Dream.

The Lost Art of a Cover

I put my Zune on shuffle at work today, and Aretha Franklin's cover of "Let it Be" came on.  My boss hated it; remarking, among other things, that she was "singing it too fast," and that "this isn't the Beatles."

I complain about my boss a lot on this blog, because he and I have very different tastes in music, and even different basic ideas about what good music should be like.  For him, the more mainstream music is, the better, and I don't mean better as in more to his tastes - the more mainstream it sounds, the more he feels that it represents good quality.  He truly believes that bands that aren't on the radio aren't getting play because they aren't as good - conversely, if they were as good, they'd get played on the radio.  I don't subscribe to this view.

Anyway, back to Aretha.  I will say, her cover of "Let it Be" is ... idiosyncratic.  Her phrasing is either before or after the beat, and the the whole song is uptempo.  Basically she sings it like you might hear in a gospel choir.  I like it, but it's a very different song than when Paul McCartney sings it.  Now, part of what my boss didn't like about this music was its unfamiliarity - this can be especially unnerving for someone when it sounds kind of like something they know, but is clearly also very different.  Kind of a musical uncanny valley.

But it got me thinking about cover songs in general.  They tend to diverge in two different directions.  Some people want a cover to be as transformative as possible (this partially explains the popularity of the punk-cover subgenre) and if the song is nearly unrecognizable, the better.  Tori Amos Strange Little Girls is the perfect example.  On the other hand, a lot of covers try to be very "true" to the source, and differ from it only in the attempt to put a performers fingerprints on it - i.e., the Beatles own cover of "Mr. Postman."

I don't think either of these is right or wrong, (even though sometimes toward the Tori Amos end of things you start to wonder why you even bother calling it the same song.) but it seems like most artists shoot for the middle - i.e. Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower".

To me, the truly great covers make you realize something about the song you didn't know before - Aretha's gospel "Let it Be" does this to a degree, but Hendrix's "Watchtower" made Dylan change the way he'd been performing it in concert.

Two of the modern examples I can think of come from Iron and Wine: "Such Great Heights," and "Waiting on Superman" - he truly transforms both songs, but it's in a way that it feels like he's stripped something out of the way - there was something in the songs that he discovered, and pulled out to show us.

New Collective Soul Album

I bought the new Collective Soul album today.  It the first album of theirs since Dosage that I haven't bought on the day it came out - it's rough, because they're still my band, but I can tell I've fallen out of love with them.

The first song on the album sounds like classic Collective Soul - well, maybe Blender-classic.  It's got a terrific riff, anyway.  The songs just aren't as memorable as they used to be, though they still sound phenomenal.

That's one of the things about Collective Soul - they always had this massive guitar sound.  They could fill up space like the Smashing Pumpkins, even though they weren't in the same league (and seemed to know it.)  When I was in a band, Ed Roland was actually my dream producer if we ever cut a professional album.

In fact, it's surprising he hasn't done production work for other bands.  He reminds me of Ric Ocasek, in a weird way - they both have this talent for pop hooks, and this pristine sound.  Very few producers really have that sound they're known for - Mutt Lange, or maybe Butch Vig come to mind.  Most great producers are more famous for pulling great songs or performances out of bands - Rick Rubin's bread and butter, for example - but if anyone wanted to sound like a 21st century ELO, it seems like Ed Roland would be the one to call.

Anyway, I now once again have every Collective Soul album, except for that live orchestral one.  I also have every Ross Childress side-project album, which takes considerably more work.

Prog rock kick

I found a video of Yes playing "Siberian Khatru" on youtube - it's okay, not great, but shows what they must have been like back in the day.  And this has kicked off what I'm sure will be a bit of a prog rock kick for me.

First off, I think "Siberian Khatru" is one of the best songs to introduce people to prog rock.  It kicks off with a killer guitar riff, and Steve Howe's guitar work is fantastic throughout.  Scratch that, he's always fantastic.  What makes Siberian Khatru different is that it's a bit flashy, and a bit more mainstream - he has a slide guitar solo that truly screams for example; the guitar isn't as hard to get to know as say, anything off Relayer.

My favorite moment in the song though, is where it breaks down to a keyboard bass and drums part, and Rick Wakeman is playing this superfast harpsichord part, and Chris Squire matches him, playing a bassline in perfect counterpoint.  It sounds like a rock band playing baroque music, but it also rocks, and that is a very difficult balance to acheive.

So anyway, thinking about this got me looking up Rick Wakeman on allmusic and that led, strangely enough, to the Strawbs.

I haven't really gotten into the Strawbs, even though I sort of know that they were another prog band back in the day - most of the prog I listen to is the stuff my dad listened to in high school and then turned me on to - Yes, Jethro Tull, ELP, early Genesis.  I've ventured a little into King Crimson territory, but the Strawbs were a bit of a different beast.

But I need to check them out.  I love Fairport Convention, and the Strawbs were the next best English folk rock band with Sandy Denny as their one-time singer after fairport.  Actually, and ironically, one of the few Strawbs songs I know is from when Sandy Denny was their singer, called "All I need is You" - it's a totally great song, but it sounds nothing like later Strawbs or Fairport Convention.

Hmmm...Maybe I'm actually going to go on a kick of listening to Liege and Lief.  It's hard to tell now.

Recommending Music

My cousin came over today, and brought her laptop, which meant my brother and I sat over her shoulder for an hour telling her music to steal from our computers via the magic of iTunes homesharing.  Inevitably, she'd come across a band she'd never heard of, and say, "would I like this band?"

While this is a completely reasonable question, it's also one I have no idea how to answer.  Her music collection had Radiohead, and BBMak, Beastie Boys and Backstreet Boys.  I'm hard pressed to describe those tastes (although college girl with a computer that still reflects she was once fifteen comes close).

The problem is, I don't like music by genre, and so I have a hard time recommending music by genre.  I try: another cousin who likes country music found me recommending the Band, Neil Young, and Wilco.  She didn't like any of them, and I'm at a loss as to what I did wrong.

So I did what I always do - I just recommended my favorite music, regardless of tastes or genre.  I recommend by awesomeness - so I said, you should try out Iron and Wine, even if you don't typically like haunting acoustic ballads; you should listen to Vampire Weekend, even if you're not a fan of chamber pop; and you should definitely take Aretha Franklin, even though she's a little before your dad's time.

I really lack the ability to listen through other people's ears; I listen to "A-Punk" and I literally can't understand why people don't think it's the catchiest song they've ever heard.  My boss gets annoyed if I put on too much "weird stuff" which I interpret as Radiohead and anything loud (definitely not Queens of the Stone Age, and last time I put on Smashing Pumpkins (!) I got a lecture asking me why I'm so angry, and what I have to be angry about.)  So I put on Mates of State.  I love Mates of State, and to me, they are pure indie pop; singable melodies, catchy eighties keyboards, etc.  But his reaction was "they've got a ways to go before they'll make it" which is his way of saying they don't sound mainstream, i.e. good.

This is the weird contradiction: all he hears is polish, all I hear is melody.  And we get to have this argument all the time.

Hurst

I don't know if I've mentioned that I'm a huge Collective Soul fan, but I am.  They were that first band I got into, and even though part of me recognizes that there are better bands out there, I will never change the radio station when "Shine" comes on.

There's being a Collective Soul fan, though, and being a Collective Soul fan.  When Ross Childress quit the band in 2001, I was heartbroken thinking they'd broken up.  I've seen the band twice since, and the new guitarist is great, but he ain't Ross.  But then, a couple of years ago, I found a website for a project called Early Moses, with Ross as the guitarist.  Nothing ever seemed to materialize, but a couple of years later (still a few years ago - I'm trying to sum up like eight years of backstory here) I tracked it back to an album called Hurst.

Hurst, it turns out, is Trevor Hurst, singer for Canadian alt-rock band Econoline Crush.  I'd never heard of them.  But he was the singer for the project with Ross Childress, and they put out a seven song EP.  I own this EP.  I think that alone gives me more obscure-album points than owning either a Treepeople album, or Metal Machine Music.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, but the album is really good.  (For super fans, some of the songs off of Childress's new project Starfish and Coffee's album started on the Hurst EP).  It's not terribly groundbreaking, and the lyrics are too vague to really mean anything, but Trevor Hurst has a real presence as a singer, and a song like "Tin Cup" or "Clear Blue" work basically on sheer personality.  That, and the guitar work.  The reason I loved Ross in Collective Soul was for the guitar arrangements he came up with sometimes - he wasn't always a flashy guitarist, but he had a talent for layered parts that could be pretty stunning (think "Tremble for my Beloved").  He makes his guitar sound like a string section on "Clear Blue", and on "Not Broken" he gets to pull out all the stops just before the chorus.

The album is pretty good, all round, and I'd recommend it to any Fuel fan, for example, but I think Econoline Crush is a band unknown enough in the US that not many copies of their singer's side project are going to exist.  But on the plus side, I have a new band to check out.

iTunes

iTunes is my nemesis.  It's partly my fault - ever since I went legit with my internet music, I've been buying from iTunes, and so I have to admit that I'm buying what they're selling.  Still, the things iTunes is, and the things I want it to be are so similar and yet so different that it drives me mad.

This came up because I was thinking about a couple of old Kinks songs I used to have on my computer before it crashed.  "All Day and All of the Night" which is my "You Really Got Me" (seriously, how can anyone prefer "You Really Got Me"?  "All Day..." is vastly superior) and Dave Davies solo song "Death of a Clown."  Dave Davies song has always gotten to me, even though in many ways its obvious and clumsily written, just for the piano opening with the weird effect on the notes.

So I decide to buy those songs, rekindle a little nostalgia.  I find them, buy them, and then (and only then) discover that these are not the songs I thought I was buying.  Actually, they are, but it's complicated - they are rerecorded versions of those classic songs, because whoever owns the Kinks catalog (definitely not the Kinks) isn't selling the songs online.  For reasons unknown.  (Seriously, what Luddite is going, "The way to maximize the earnings from this back catalog is to not sell them over the most popular music service ever."

So I get "Death of a Clown" but not the "Death of a Clown" I remember, with the bittersweet piano intro, but a rough acoustic version (which honestly isn't bad, but it's like taking pistachio ice cream when you really wanted chocolate) and a live version of "All Day and All of the Night" performed in the eighties.

Compound this with the fact that I bought a used Zune cheap a while back (I'm poor) and a large proportion of my songs I bought from iTunes won't play on it.  I purchased the songs, and they won't let me play them on a competing platform.  Instead, they are charging me $80 to update all of my old songs to the new iTunes Plus format without DRM.

This business model strikes me as weirdly as the not-Kinks model - "We'll sell people music, but trick them into buying music they didn't mean to buy, and then charge them extra if they want to play the music they bought and own on another piece of hardware."

I'm holding out, but I don't know for how much longer it makes sense.  They're never going to budge, and if I buy from Zune, I'm in the same bind, but backwards.

Too bad no one else has gotten into digital music, someone without a history of abusing their customers.

Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields were one of the first indie bands I discovered, back on the old beloved Audiogalaxy site.  It was a beautiful cross between Napster and Allmusic.com, that site - everything was organized by genre, with descriptions of the band, and then you could download the most popular songs.  Completely illegal, alas...

The Magnetic Fields, more than a lot of bands, hooked me early with their lyrics (alright, it was the cello hook in "All my little words" on the chorus, but it was also the words of the chorus, and then "All the Umbrellas in London").  But at the time, I wasn't a fan of electronic music, and so the early Magnetic Fields stuff where they had a more eighties pop sound I ended up avoiding.

I was listening to my Zune (yes, I know) today, and cycling through MF stuff, and it occured to me how many of my favorite songs are their early songs, now.  "Desert Island," "Why I Cry," and "When you were my Baby" are all right up there.

I don't know what caused this change - at what point I forgave the eighties for being the eighties.  I do know, that gradually I've decided I can't simply write an entire decade off, and have discovered that a) there was a lot of great non-electronic guitar based pop in the eighties, i.e. the Church, the Smiths, and b) that there was a lot of great electronic pop in the eighties.  I've come way around on New Order, and I think it's because of new bands like MGMT, Mates of State, and Franz Ferdinand.

Also, I don't think I could hate a song for long with the lines "I'll be your desert Island, where you can be free/I'll be the vulture, that you can catch and eat."

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

I touched on him tangentially yesterday talking about Jazz, but I don't think I've mentioned how much I love the music of Charles Mingus.

Partly it's because Mingus came along at a point in my life where I was desperately trying to like Jazz and desperately hating it.  I wanted to be an open minded bohemian, and so I was listening to a lot of Free Jazz - Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, etc.  Eric Dolphy came up, and I read he'd played with Mingus, so I check him out, and it basically broke Hard Bop open for me.

"Better Git it in Your Soul" is the quintessential Mingus for me, but I also love "Jump Monk" and basically all of Roots and Blues.  I don't know how to describe it, but I think the best way to describe it is that it swings.  No, that's insufficient.  It swings; the rhythm is so hard and powerful, it almost rocks.  The horns don't sound like Kenny G, all rounded off and smooth, but they aren't Ornette Coleman either - it's almost Stonesy, at times.

Mingus opened up Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and while he gets out there, I love "A Handful of Fives."  But nothing for me in Jazz will ever be as good as the solo horn break in "Better Git it in Your Soul" when the other instruments drop out, and it's just sax and hand claps.  This is what jazz was always supposed to be about.

Jazz

I'm going to take a minute to talk about Jazz here, not that it has anything to do with my main thesis, or whatever, but just because I do like Jazz.  We'll also be going off topic in a minute.

I heard some Jazz on the radio tonight, and it was one of my favorite instruments that you never hear anymore; the clarinet.  It used to be a big Jazz instrument, but with Bop, everyone went brass, and the woodier tones went away.

I own the Django album Douce Ambience and it is terrific, from start to finish.  It's his electric album, after he did all those acoustic jazz recordings with Stephane Grappeli.  So instead of just playing electric guitar over a new version of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, he put together a backing group that had a killer clarinet player.  Seriously, listen to the opening to "Blues Primitif" - there's this scorching run that knocks me out.  Plus, the album has a seriously shredding version of "Minor Swing" so, that's pretty cool too.

I really, really hate Wallpaper Jazz.  Kenny G, etc.  You know it.  But unlike most of my friends, this hasn't ruined Jazz for me.  I love love love Charles Mingus - listen to the solo sax break on "Better Git it in your Soul" - jazz literally never hit harder than this.  So there's some good stuff there.  But I think one of the reasons I like good jazz so much is that you get to hear instruments that don't make it into Rock all that much.

Some bands have a horn line, but honestly, how many bands other than Morphine feature a sax (a baritone sax, at that) as a lead instrument?  You never hear a clarinet in rock music.  I think the guitar drums bass sometimes keys, very occasionally horns lineup has been working in rock for so long, someone needs to shake things up.  In short, I wish someone would expand the pallette of rock instrumentation.

There's been progress.  The Beatles added harpsichord, strings, and damn near got the sitar in.  But what about a guzheng? or a viola da gamba? Indie rock, especially Iron and Wine, seems to be trying to redeem the banjo, but there's a world of sounds out there, and we're content with very few.

Mash-ups

Someone commented to me that I've been really getting into mash-ups.  I didn't think I had, but I guess not being over them as a fad counts at this point.

What I enjoy about good mashups (and most of them are terrible) is the way they recontextualize things.  I heard a pretty good one of "Eleanor Rigby" (which is one of the most boring Beatles songs to me) with "Go with the Flow."  It added a real sense of menace to the Beatles, which let me see the song in an whole new way. 

I also love the Cirque du Soleil Beatles album "Love" - "Lady Madonna" and "Drive my Car" in particular.  Here, what George Martin has done is allow me to hear the Beatles with new ears.  I know the songs, but they can still surprise me - is this what it was like to be alive in '68, buying the White Album new?  Not knowing what was coming out of the speakers next, but knowing it would be brilliant?

Afro Pop

I've been listening to Vampire Weekend today, and thinking about all the interviews and articles about how they were influenced by Afro-pop.  My question is, would you please give some specific albums other than Paul Simon's Graceland?

Honestly, I'd love to listen to bands that sound like Vampire Weekend - the album is freakishly catchy, and I love Graceland too, and want to follow it all back to the source, but how?  Every article just says "Afro-Pop" as if I'm supposed to go, "of course, let me dust off all my Ghanan records and relive freshman year of college."

Complicating things is the fact that I actually have made some inroads on Afro-Funk.  I at least know who Fela Kuti is, I've heard a great band called Chopteeth, and there's this Ethiopian band on the soundtrack to Broken Flowers (you know them if you've seen the movie) that is sadly unavailable on iTunes. Unless I want to buy the whole album.

Maybe next time I'll talk about the things about iTunes that drive me insane, but for now, I'm on the hunt for great african music.

Muse

Got in a discussion with some friends today - one of them has become a big Muse fan, and he mentioned, as many people have, that they remind him of Radiohead.

Partly it's because I'm a Radiohead fan, but I don't see it.  Their singer's voice sounds kinda like Thom Yorke, but that's it.  It's like Creed and Pearl Jam - I guess the singers sound a little similar, but that's where it stops for me.  (My friends also say that Creed and Pearl Jam sound alike, and don't get how I don't hear it)

The opposite end of the equation is that the Silversun Pickups sound, to me, like early Smashing Pumpkins.  No one else hears it.  To me, "Rhinoceros" was the template for the Pickups - not that they aren't original, but the guitar tone, everything - it's all right there.

We decided that I just don't hear music like a lot of other people.  I think it has something to do with being a musician - you listen more to the guitar parts, and how the music is put together, and you don't hear more superficial aspects of the music.  Maybe.

Loudness

Apologies for yesterday - relatives in town, but that is not an excuse.

We have a CD player at work, which also gets radio, and can have an iPod or Zune hooked up to it.  What music plays is a constant battle - if you don't put something on, my boss will put on a Randy Bachman solo album or something, but if you put on something he doesn't like (i.e., anything more edgy than Matchbox Twenty) he will do the same.

So we get stuck in this 'least objectionable' rut.  Objectionable somehow means loud, and loudness, as we all know, has nothing to do with volume.  I can crank up Paul Simon with impunity, but if the Yeah Yeah Yeahs come on, at all it's getting changed.  We end up with a few of us trying to put on the most adventurous acoustic music we can find - this is almost inevitable Iron and Wine.

I love Iron and Wine - ever since I discovered this Southern Gothic version of Nick Drake, he's had a special place in my collection.  He's earned the right to have me buy any album he puts out, no questions asked.  So today, we put on the Shepard's Dog.  I'll admit, I didn't like this album all that much at first.  It's a very different album than his previous stuff, and the melodies take some time to sink into you.  This is why I think it would be terrible to be a record reviewer, and why so many reviews are terrible.  You don't have time to get to know an album - you get it, listen, review, and move on.

The first time I listened to Shepard's Dog, I picked out "Carousel" as my favorite, and left it at that.  I didn't listen to it for almost a week, when the riff for "Boy with a Coin" was going through my head - I also picked up "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" that time.  Then, a couple days later, "Wolves" started going through my head.  This is how I experience albums, and I don't think I'm alone.  I never love an album the first time (ok, occasionally I do, but I always like those less as time goes on) but a riff or line or bridge will stick and draw me back until I can't stop listening to it.  I can't be alone in this.  I hope I never have to review music any other way.

Girl Talk

I used to drive my roommates crazy with music - I lived with two really good friends of mine, and we all had pretty similar tastes in music, and I'd come home from work and spend two hours on the computer on Allmusic.com and Audiogalaxy, or Kazaa looking up new bands.  I discovered tons of great stuff, and I'd try to get them into the music, but I was always afraid their patience would run out, so I'd just play them the hook, or riff of a song, or the best thirty seconds, or my favorite lyrics, and try to hook them, and get them to listen to the whole song.  This ADHD approach drove them nuts, and they always wanted me to play a whole song, but if it had a slow intro, they were gone.  I was in a bind.

Girl Talk is like that for me.  The mashups are consistently brilliant: "Play Your Part, pt.1" for example, features someone (sorry, I really don't know hip-hop) rapping along to the Spencer Davis Group, and they fit perfectly.  He throws Salt-n-Pepa over Nirvana, and uses the drum beat from "Scentless Apprentice" and the piano to "Tiny Dancer" as the background for Biggie Smalls.

It's frequently great, but it's just as ADHD as I used to be.  Nothing lasts more than a minute or so - if you don't like what's going on, just wait, because the beat, rap, and everything else will change in a minute.  He can't stand to use more than a verse from a song, and so none of the mashups ever sound like a song - there's no sense of returning to a great hook, of building up a theme or melody, of a bridge returning to a chorus - it's like dipping into a club where a DJ is trying to use every record he owns once without having to backtrack.

Contrast Girl Talk to the Grey Album by Danger Mouse.  Simple concept - Jay-Z vs. the Beatles (yes I'm just barely getting into the Grey Album, but that's the thing this blog is all about - how often to you discover a band or a song from three, or five, or fifteen years ago?  It's new to you, even if it's not to everyone else.)  To me, the song that works best is "Change Clothes."  All hip-hop should be over baroque samples.  It's terrific.  And, and this is vital, it builds tension like a real song, until it finally has to break.

I haven't written mashups off - in fact I can't wait to see where things go - but I hope someone builds on Girl Talk soon and and plays me more than just the best parts.

Pinkerton

So today at work, we were feeling a little Power Pop, and so I put on Pinkerton.  It's almost too punky to be called power-pop, but it's the best album Weezer ever made, so I think those two things cancel.

Rolling Stone now acknowledges Pinkerton as a classic, which is funny because it made their Worst Album of the Year when it came out (ah hindsight.)  What's ironic about this to me is the fact that their last three albums have sounded like they were actively going for that award, and yet get respectable reviews.

I can't really blame them though, because apparently back in '96 it was a controversial album.  Some people loved it, reviewers panned it, and the band broke up.  I discovered it in probably winter of '01, and I was hooked from the moment the heavy guitars came in in "Tired of Sex".  I'd heard the Blue Album a year or so earlier, but this was raw - his scream at the end of the verse over those first power chords, the screamed lyrics in the second verse, and all of it building toward the best guitar solo ever in a Weezer song - it's the only solo they've ever done that doesn't feel like every note was written out beforehand.

I was afraid that going back to this album would be a disappointment, because Weezer's last half-decade has been so abysmal.  Honestly, songs like "Troublemaker," "Beverly Hills," and "Pork and Beans" strike me as a fan as insulting - it feels like a "let's see if they'll buy this" kind of a toss-off.  Rivers Cuomo no longer seems interested in actually communicating anything through his music, and so I feared that listening to their first two albums I might see a hint of that even back then.

Fortunately, it isn't.  Pinkerton is still a force of nature, and their songs were still inventive, rather than the formula-written soft-riff/loud-riff sound they've settled on.  The album still sounds unsettled, with tempo changes and chord changes that don't always work 100%, but that adds to the sense that this was new to them.  They were struggling to make a great record, rather than settling for a mediocre one.  I'm not surprised few people bought it, but I am constantly surprised that people buy their new crap.

Great Modern Bands

My last post turned into a rant, but I don't think I'm paranoid in the main thesis - there are a large number of people who think that the majority of the canon of rock and roll was established in the late sixties and early seventies, and has had only minor revisions.  They may admit to second or third waves occuring at the beginning of the punk revolution, hip hop age, or even grudgingly grunge/alternative, but these are always secondary to the first great wave.

This goes beyond bands like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin whose position in the upper echelons of the rock pantheon are well deserved.  The Kinks often find themselves in this illustrious company - I love the Kinks, but let me ask you, how many Kinks songs can you think of right now?  I bet I can think of more Oasis songs.  And yet this is heresy - to suggest that not only was Oasis a seminal band of the nineties but one of the great Brit-Pop bands of all time is somehow ludicrous.  Sure they had some great songs, but they weren't the Kinks.  Besides, the Kinks did it first.

There are a number of albums that get listed in the best albums of the 90's kind of lists, but that I think belong in the best albums of all time category.  Siamese Dream, Pinkerton, OK Computer - people make the argument that the Smashing Pumpkins couldn't have existed without the previous twenty years of heavy metal, but the more important point is that they were better than any of those bands.  Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Judas Priest - none of them can touch "Silverfuck" or "Cherub Rock."  Cheap Trick is usually mentioned as the prototypical power-pop band (maybe the Raspberries, or Big Star, too) but I think the first two Weezer albums stand up against anything they did.

I'm not just trying to compare apples and oranges - to me, Weezer is the natural evolution of power-pop, just like the Smashing Pumpkins were, when they felt like it ("Zero") an absolutely killer metal band.

What I'm arguing for is a more dynamic canon - I think a chart of the greatest albums of the last fifty years should be relatively flat - approximately the same number of great albums per decade.  I actually think that with the number of bands that have been formed lately, compared to the number that used to exist, there is a correspondingly larger base for music, which means more total music being made.  With more total albums produced per year, if quality or great albums is a constant ratio - maybe the top 1%? - then it's not unreasonable to think that there will actually be more great albums per year than used to be.

I also don't think this is happening, and I have my theories why.

Old people

I've kind of danced around the edges of it, but I have to face it - one of the reasons I Hate Rolling Stone is that the editorial direction all comes from former hippies who think music peaked in 1969.  Yes, they have younger guys working there now, but it's the same vibe.  Nothing released today could possibly be as good as this reissued The Band with new bonus tracks, unless it's a band who wishes they were The Band.

The irony of this is that I love the Band.  I think "Makes No Difference" is one of the alltime great songs.  But I also think Primitive Radio Gods "Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Money in My Hand" is one of the alltime great songs.

This shouldn't be an argument, but I have it with stupid people all the time.  My boss loves Cheap Trick, but if I try to play Weezer or Fountains of Wayne, which to me are a pretty similar kind of music, he hates it.  He loves Neil Diamond and Jim Croce, but Iron and Wine?  Never.

Rolling Stone is a little more accepting, but you look at their list of the top 500 albums ever - something like half of them were released between '65 and '75.  There's this assumption that that was the Renaissance, and the last thirty years have barely equaled those ten.

It's late, and this is rant-y, but tomorrow I think I'll try to put some evidence, some band semi-equivalencies I think I see.

Missing Update

So, I was away from a computer last night.  I warned that updates would be light and irregular this weekend, so I won't apologize more than that.

I love a great lyric in a rock song, but ironically, I don't know the lyrics to all that many songs, even songs I love.  To paraphrase the movie "Music and Lyrics" (which I liked much more than I thought I would, mostly because the main song in the movie is an absolutely perfect pop gem, courtesy of Adam Schlessinger (and yes, I know that makes three days running with a Adam Schlessinger related post)) music is the first attraction of a song, infatuation; lyrics is when you really get to know someone, when you fall in love with a song.

Unfortunately, a lot of bands overreach, and we end up with heartfelt clunky lyrics, which is like dating the Green Peace Vegan - sometimes you want to let your hair down, you know.  The band that overreaches most egregiously, and yet still comes up with a handful of stunners, for me, is the Long Winters.  Half of their songs are just cul-de-sacs of cleverness, or Oasis level mixed metaphors.  But "New Girl" has lines like "America schools called you 'Starlight'/in fourteen point type" or "Twice, you burned your life's work/Once to start a new life, and once just to start a fire."  How can a band like that not knock you out?

Anyway, I'll have a few full, proper posts tomorrow.  Goodnight.

Someone to Love

So I got into a Fountains of Wayne kick last night after listening to Tinted Windows.  One of the first songs I came across on Youtube was "Someone to Love".  Watch it; it's a beautifully bittersweet video, and has Demetri Martin in it.

While this has become one of my favorite depressing pop songs, it got me thinking about common song titles.  "Someone to Love" or "Somebody to Love" pop up all the time, and they're often great songs.  Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody..." is my favorite song of theirs, narrowly edging out "Volunteers"; Queen did a "Someone to Love" which is pretty good.

How about "Dance the Night Away"?  Cream did a song with that title, and Van Halen's is my favorite of theirs.  Note I'm not talking about covers - these are all different songs with the same title; sometime a kind of unlikely title.  Wikipedia also brings up a Europe song and a Mavericks song called "Dance the Night Away."

"Fire" is a title that has been used time and again, and never seems to work quite as well as people thought it would.  You'd think a song called "Fire" would be this explosion of killer rock and roll, and somehow it always falls flat.  Hendrix's "Fire" is one of my least favorite Hendrix songs; Arthur Brown, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and U2 all gave it a shot, and I can't think of how any of them go.  Probably the best is Springsteens, which works mostly because he makes it a ballad rather than a scorcher.

The internet showed me a bunch of songs called either "Rock and Roll" or "Sunday Morning" but I've got to give the win to the Velvet Underground on both.

I had a thought, a long time ago, when I read that song titles couldn't be copyrighted, and that I could write a song called "Every Breath You Take" and Sting couldn't touch me (this is also back when most of my rich and famous dreams involved writing brilliant albums).  My thought was to take a famous album, like the White Album, and create an album where the track by track listing would be exactly the same, but the songs would be totally different.  You'd have your own song called "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" etc.  The idea being to use the titles as a stepping off point for creativity.

Tinted Windows

My cousin posted on facebook something about Hansen coming back, which pleased her.

Back in the '90's I hated Hansen, basically because I was required to by law.  Teen bands younger than you you just can't like, so even if  "Man from Milwaukee" was catchy, I'd never admit it.  A couple years ago, a poker buddy's wife admitted that she loved Hansen, and that they continued to write songs and tour.  So I checked them out.  I still wasn't into them, but there was nothing inherently wrong with them anymore - they were certainly no less talented than The Fray, just not my thing.

Then I heard about Tinted Windows.  I've liked Fountains of Wayne and Adam Schlesinger ever since I learned that he was the guy who wrote "That Thing You Do."  So that's one plus.  And they had James Iha, who I think shows just how much being rich and famous and a rock star can suck: to be one of the "other guys" in Smashing Pumpkins, despite being a talented guitarist and song writer - this must be how Noel Redding Feels.

So I listened to the Tinted Windows album.  It has precisely one good song on it, which is the stunningly catchy "Kind of a Girl."  Do not be fooled by this single.  It's like Matthew Sweet - there is one song that is perfection, and everything else - it's not bad, you just can't remember the melody or lyrics five seconds after it's over.

I firmly believe this is the test of a bad album - if you honestly have no feelings one way or the other after you hear it, or if you can't remember the melody as soon as the song ends, don't think to yourself "It's alright."  It's so much worse to be boring than bad.  My boss loves bands like this.  He'll put on one of several (!) Dishwalla albums he has, and even if it's the one with "Counting Blue Cars" it makes for a bad hour at work.  I can't stand it - there's nothing going on.  Technically, they're playing chords, and singing, but it's so smooth in the middle and bland that you forget about them instantly.  Next time he says he loves the album, I'll challenge him to remember one melody or lyric from it.  If he can, I'll shut up.

Anyway, buy the Tinted Windows single, but beware the album.

Finding Footing

Unlike Before the Ships I didn't have a real strong idea of what this blog was going to be when I started it.  It's about music, music I like, and which sometimes Rolling Stone or Pitchfork don't for what seem to me arbitrary and stupid reasons.  It's called I Hate Rolling Stone, and I kind of do, for reasons I've outlined.

I guess I wanted a place I could talk about music my way, and time to figure out what that was exactly.  I don't really know how to do Rock Criticism, except that everyone else seems to do it wrong, too.  They think it's about telling people what they should and shouldn't like, and I think it's about talking about music I like, and I'm not doing it well yet, but I can't really do it worse, so, oh well.

So if anyone is reading this blog yet, forgive me.  Give me some time, and I'll eventually say something about a band you like, and we'll be off and running.

David Bowie

So, right now I'm going through a David Bowie kick.  This is probably my second major Bowie kick.  My first started in high school when the classic rock station played "Ziggy Stardust" on the radio, blowing my mind, and sending me out to buy the album.  So early, glam Bowie staked out a piece of my musical heart early, the same time I was discovering the Smashing Pumpkins and Screaming Trees.

But the last year or so, reaching a fever point in the last couple of months, I've been drawn to the late-seventies Thin White Duke phase of Bowie's career.  I bought Low several years ago, and then took the plunge on Lodger but it has been Heroes and Iggy Pop's The Idiot that have really dropped my jaw.

Everyone knows the title song to Heroes (no I'm not going to do this "" marks, it's a pain in the neck.)  Almost no one can name a single other song on the album.  This album followed Low in having half the album dedicated to electronic soundscapes, and the other half to broken, weird pop songs.  I love Low; I love the weird cabaret "Be My Wife" and the weird pseudo-funk "Breaking Glass" and all of it.  The songs are so...broken; pieces of abstract songs that got stuck together.  Love it. 

Heroes the songs are more song-like, but Adrien Belew will keep anything from seeming conventional.  The guitar riffs end on weird notes and beats, the harmonies are weird, and he keeps popping up to falsetto in the middle of a phrase.  "Joe the Lion" is full throated, roaring rock and roll, and he keeps shouting "get up and sleep."  Or in "Blackout" in the middle of this cacophonous song, he croons for one verse "If you don't stay tonight/I will take that plane tonight/I've nothing to lose, nothing to gain/I'll kiss you in the rain..." and it's this beautiful minisong that he has no interest in returning to.

"Sister Midnight" though, knocks me out.  Neil Gaiman used it for a stripper in one of the "Sandman" comics, which is brilliant.  It's that menacing disco/funk thing that Bowie patented in the seventies, and Iggy Pop rides it for everything it's worth.  The only band that can do that same dark dance funk thing right now is Franz Ferdinand, whose last album was a beautiful late night rave in itself.