Pretty Goes with Pretty

Fleet Foxes: s/t

I had one of those moments with Fleet Foxes: the ideal first impression. The last time I had one of those was hearing Midlake’s “Roscoe” back in late 2006. It’s a moment where you hear a band for the first time and within the first minute of that song you say to yourself I need this. I listened to “White Winter Hymnal” on a Thursday morning and spent the rest of the day at work just buzzing around at my desk, staring at the clock like a schoolboy, waiting to leave so I could go directly to the record store and buy the album.

I don’t know that Fleet Foxes is quite up to par with Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, which I listened to religiously for most of last year and is easily one of my favorite albums of the last five years, but it’s damn good. It’s easily secured a spot as one of my favorite albums of 2008.

To the last, each song on this album is cast in pastoral light, with luminous harmonies throughout, Robin Pecknold’s robust voice coated in reverb, and the roomy sound of the drums and guitars.

Still, it’s not a perfect album, if only for the fact that the band shares a glaring surface similarity with My Morning Jacket. Pecknold’s voice occupies an identical range and tone as Jim James; that alone is no fault—hey, you sound how you sound—but Fleet Foxes’ additional aesthetic choice of adding all that reverb, thereby making the sound all the more similar to early MMJ, deserves at least some penalty. As I said to my brilliant wife, you can have the same eyes and nose as Jennifer Aniston, but why then would you make a point to get her haircut? My wife, herself not a big fan of later-period My Morning Jacket, welcomed the sound, making the point that Fleet Foxes sounds like the album MMJ might have made after The Tennessee Fire had they followed that album’s folk influences rather than going the southern rock route.

Fleet Foxes is, after all, a more sophisticated album than a My Morning Jacket comparison might lead one to believe. The harmonies, upon which nearly every song here seems to effortlessly float, owe more to choir practice than to 70s rock; the songwriting is sparse, letting the voices fill the air instead, and the song structures are often more complex than typical pop. Take album highlight “Ragged Wood,” which is essentially two songs conjoined at the middle, or opener “Sun it Rises,” which is bookended by a self-contained a capella intro and a simple solo guitar and soft-voiced finale.

Ultimately Fleet Foxes shakes off all comparisons to other bands, contemporary or otherwise, with repeated listens. Pecknold’s lyrics evoke a lived-in, authentic topography—both geographic and psychological—against a cohesive sonic backdrop and simple, old-fashioned songcraft. Highly recommended.

• Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal
• Fleet Foxes, Ragged Wood

My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges

Z was a polarizing album for My Morning Jacket fans. A left turn from the expansive and indulgent It Still Moves, Z was concise, accessible, largely free of noodling, and more playful—not to mention the reggae influence. It seemed to baffle and irritate a segment of the band’s jammier fans. Me? I thought it sounded like a rebirth. It reconfirmed my faith in a band I was ready to write off once it seemed like they were content to be a jam-rock band. (Sorry, I think It Still Moves is a chore.) Z’s risk-taking paid off, and My Morning Jacket surprised me by making the best album of their career thus far.

Enter Evil Urges. Again the polarizing reviews. Again the baffled fans. All of it had me excited all over again. If Z was a reboot, then my anticipation for Evil Urges mirrored the way I looked forward to At Dawn after the outstanding debut, The Tennessee Fire. And like my reception to At Dawn, I feel with Evil Urges like I’m listening to a band that is growing, is enjoying their growth—but is also stumbling along the way.

The album gets off to a fantastic start. Both the title track and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Part I” continue the trend of the band pushing its own envelope. The opener is all falsetto vocals over rhythms that again have a vague island feel, before breaking into a guitar freakout in the last third. The gorgeous “Touch Me” follows with propulsive, dancelike rhythms—“part II,” which closes the album, is an outright dance track—belying MMJ’s ongoing ambition to transcend whatever category you might think to put them in. It might be the highlight of the album. Two tracks in, Evil Urges is shaping up to be the best album MMJ has ever done.

Then “Highly Suspicious” comes in and fucks everything up.

Like a bad Faith No More parody, “Highly Suspicious” sounds like a novelty song that might’ve been funny if I were listening to Green Jello or, for that matter, Faith No More. But the electro rhythm section, the clownish falsettos—it’s an insult to Prince to say Jim James is aping Prince; and it’s an insult to the quality of the vocals on “Evil Urges,” too—not to mention the unforgivable lame chorus, make this the worst song MMJ have ever put to tape. It nearly derails the entire album.

Thank god we live in the age of iTunes, where fixing this album is as simple as deleting the track from the library, so that the lush “Touch Me” segues perfectly into the perfectly crafted “I’m Amazed,” with its sing-along verses, guitar hooks, and bluesy solo. For fans that like MMJ most when they embrace their southern rock roots, this is the jam of the year.

The song feels like a single, like a real attempt to capture an even bigger fanbase than they’ve already got. Nothing wrong with that—but from here on Evil Urges starts to feel like every song is making the same grab. The treacly “Thank You Too!” is a sap-filled attempt to get on every wedding DJ’s permanent playlist; “Sec Walkin’” has a nice pedal steel but is sabotaged by its early-90s keyboards and syrupy strings, while it and “Two  Halves” both feature garish backing vocals. For pretty much the whole second half of the record, James seems to lose the plot altogether as he gets muddled up with hack pop structures and clumsy lyrics (did he really say "interweb" and “Karen of the Carpenters” in “The Librarian”?).

Most criticisms I see of this album seem to fault the band for all its left turns—the falsetto, the less–southern rockin’ moments. That’s really a critique of the first few songs (and the closer), ignoring the rest. (What fan of MMJ’s more traditional sound isn’t happy with the heartfelt ballad “Look at You,” one of the few high points of the album’s second half?). My problem with this album has a lot more to do with the risks they don’t take. James is at his best when he pushes the boundaries of his songcraft—“Wordless Chorus” and “Off the Record” on Z, the first few tracks here—or when he pours his aching heart into his lyrics and delivery—all of The Tennessee Fire and the best bits of At Dawn and It Still Moves. But for most Evil Urges, MMJ seem to be making an anachronistic radio-ready record. All clearly telegraphed verses, choruses, breakdowns, and neatly fitted guitar solos. If only radio mattered any more, and if only there were a station that actually wanted contemporary southern rock, My Morning Jacket would be ready for their close-up. It’s strange that this album is getting slagged in some quarters for sounding so different, when in fact only four of the thirteen tracks really push any boundaries. The rest is sadly generic and ultimately disappointing after such a strong start. There’s enough here—about half the tracks—to make the album worthwhile for most fans, and I still feel optimistic about MMJ’s overall trajectory. They are still capable of surprising me, and I make no guesses about there they’ll go next.

• My Morning Jacket, Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, pt. 1

Beck: Modern Guilt

 
I would call myself a casual Beck fan at best: Sea Change is the only album of his I’ve ever fully embraced; everything prior felt like schtick to me. Post-Sea Change, Guero found its way into my collection though I never got into it, and I haven’t heard a single song from The Information. So I’ve got nothing at stake as a listener or fan when it comes to Modern Guilt. That might explain my ambivalence to the album.

There are no bad songs here; nor are there any songs that jump out and shout classic. I keep coming back to the album with the suspicion that it might be a grower, but instead it just sort of passes by me. At a little over thirty minutes, it comes and goes quickly; within that span of time, the ten tracks all run at relatively the same pace and tone: upbeat but not busy, fun but without punch. The album was produced by Danger Mouse, who I suspect is getting more overrated by the album. Some of the tracks here—“Gamma Ray” in particular—sound like cast-offs from a Gnarls Barkley session. The beats shuffle rather than kick and the bass lines have more indebted to pickers like Paul McCartney or Brian Ritchie than the kind of rhythmic funk that has held down previous Beck albums.

I’ve got tickets to see Beck in a couple of months at Hollywood Bowl, with Spoon in tow. The pairing is apparently no accident, as the title track makes it obvious that Beck is a Spoon fan. If only Mike McCarthy and the band got behind Beck in the studio rather than Danger Mouse, Modern Guilt might have been a more sonically interesting record. (Seriously: if you haven't noticed how flawlessly produced Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, you're missing out on that record.)

Not to lay an unfair amount of blame at Danger Mouse’s doorstep. Production and songwriting are really trotting hand-in-hand down the middle of the road. The album sounds good, and the songs themselves are good too—but that’s kind of it: they’re good. Not great, not unpredictable, not essential. Modern Guilt never sinks below whatever bar Beck has set for himself, but it never really rises above it either. What we’re left with is a “pretty good” record that never disappoints nor thrills; ten albums and fifteen years into an artist’s career, maybe that’s not so bad. I’ll leave it to bigger Beck fans than I as to whether they think merely good is forgivable or not.

• Beck, Modern Guilt

Peter Morén: The Last Tycoon

Peter Bjorn & John's Writer's Block was easily one of my favorite albums of last year. Those of you who never heard anything beyond "Young Folks" missed out on an album that was layered, varied, and at times surprising (in addition to being packed with earworms). So count me among the fans looking forward to Peter's solo outing, The Last Tycoon. Also, count me among the disappointed.

It is apt, perhaps, that the album is named for F. Scott Fitzgerald's final novel—which was published despite the fact that Fitzgerald died before completing it—because Morén's album feels similarly unfinished. The Last Tycoon sounds like a "solo album" in the truest sense of the phrase: it literally sounds like Morén wanted to make an album free of his rhythm section and co-singers. Missing from the album is any bounce whatsoever, nor harmonies, nor variation of song style—not to mention Bjorn Yttling's production abilities. Way up front in the mix, instead, are Morén's guitar and voice.

The album is driven almost entirely by its lyrical content rather than its melodies. Listening to "This is What I Came For" or "I Don't Gaze at the Sky for Long," you can envision that Morén  penned the lines well before picking up his guitar. That process isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster—just ask Leonard Cohen—and the lyrics to The Last Tycoon are noticeably more sophisticated than anything on Writer's Block. But rarely have I ever loved an album based only on its lyrics. Meanwhile, The Last Tycoon's melodies and arrangements just aren't that compelling. 

Often Morén's musicianship is top-notch—the guitarwork on "Missing Link" is reminiscent of Elliott Smith's gently fluid finger-picking—but without anyone in the room to tell Morén to get his nose out of his journals, the album never once picks up any kind of momentum. Each of the ten songs feel inert, leaden, self-obsessed. Taken individually, each song is perfectly fine, though rarely much more than that; in a row, The Last Tycoon becomes a chore to get through.

The Little Ones: Terry Tales & Fallen Gates

“Sometimes being happy means being corny.”
                                                        —my brilliant wife

It’s nice to hear from the Little Ones again. Their debut EP, Sing Song, came out in 2006 and seemed to be re-released two or three times over. When I picked it up at the time, I said it was great, straightforward indie pop, if nothing groundbreaking. A year and a half later, it turns out I still put Sing Song on pretty regularly. Last week my wife and I tooled along the PCH from Malibu to Manhattan Beach blaring the six songs out our open windows, car-dancing the whole way. You just can’t help but clap in time to every breakdown and chant along with every Oh, La, and Hey. [Actually, looking at what I wrote about Sing Song back in early 07, you'd think all we ever did was listen to the Little Ones while driving up the coast. Pure coincidence.]

The Little Ones have a full-length slated for release this summer (care to place your bets on who’s gonna have the indie rock summer jam?), but in the meantime they’re serving up one more EP. My first impression was similar to my first impression of their debut—sounds like pretty straightforward indie pop. The real question is whether Terry Tales lodges itself in my pleasure centers as comfortably as Sing Song.

In other words, this time around I’ve got higher expectations, and the first few listens forced comparisons to the debut. Terry Tales is still high-energy, though all those fun-filled breakdowns are gone. No handclaps! No chanting! No—wait a second: was that a steel drum?

I listened to Terry Tales at home on my computer, not totally feeling it. I listened to it on my iPod while taking the bus to work in the morning—again not feeling it, to the point that I started creating negative associations. My wife accuses me of lapsing into negativity with nearly everything I listen to; nevertheless I started envisioning Terry Tales as the soundtrack to some kind of ABC Family made-for-TV movie. "Boracay"—yes, with its steel drum (!)—or the similarly tropically inclined “Unlock the Door!” could play over a montage of Zack and Cody living up the suite life while on a Hawaiian vacation.

And then I listened to it again, this time—where else?—in the car, with my brilliant wife, windows down, tooling along the PCH. Suddenly Terry Tales was the funnest album in the world. My wife shouted over the music—completely free of cynicism—“It’s like Radio Disney!” I said to her how the album was having a completely different effect on me here in the car, with her, car-dancing down the coast. “Of course!” she said. “The Little Ones are like the soundtrack to total happiness!”

In other words, she had the same reaction as I did—family friendly, perfect for montages—only she embraced it on first listen and it took me four or five spins to warm up. “But the steel drum is pretty corny, right?” I said. To which she replied—well, you know what she said. It is kind of missing the point to critique the Little Ones for appealing to the most childlike pleasures—it’s right there in their band name, on their album covers, in their gleefully wide-eyed stage show.

In the end, Terry Tales has completely worn down my cynical side and won me over. We’ve learned the lyrics, we're singing along. The windows are down, the PCH is jammed, and the lady in the car next to us is wondering what the hell has got my wife and I bouncing around like teenagers.

Beach House: Devotion

Beach House could be the quintessential example of my song vs. sound post from a few months back. The duo have set up a kind of sonic template for each of the eleven songs on Devotion: drums (or programmed beats) serve only to keep time, while Alex Scally plays minimal leads on his clean-toned guitar and Victoria Legrand holds down the song with her organs and plaintive vocals (covered in the requisite amount of reverb). As premeditated as Beach House's sound is, though, they are paying equal attention to song structure, vocal melodies, instrumental hooks, lyrical substance. Unlike, say, Sigur Rós, who are one or two notches up on the ethereal dreaminess scale, Beach House are still operating in the realm of the song.

Okay, sure, it's more or less the same song eleven times over. Fair enough. It's always a risk for a band to stay, uh, devoted to their template, whether it's Sigur Rós, Bedhead, or Iron & Wine (particularly The Creek Drank the Cradle). Creating an entire album out of one kind of song puts a special kind of pressure on that song—it's gotta be fucking good. Lucky for Beach House, it is. Check "Gila" for one of its best instances. The song succeeds because it has all the requisite pop requirements—great guitar hook, catchy melody, earworm-quality chorus ("Giiiiiii-la-ah-ah-ah-ah"—it's the sequel to "Umbrella"!)—all wrapped up in reverb and a moody aura.

Somewhere just beyond the album's midpoint that moody aura starts to give the feeling of being lost in a haze. Not every track has melodies on par with "Gila," though just enough do to serve as beacons, drawing you further and further in. Even when things do start to feel a little samey, the gauzy sound envelopes you in a luxurious kind of tedium.

Yeah, it does get a little tedious, despite how in love I am with most of the songs. For a band that so naturally warrants descriptors like "dreamy" and "autumnal,"  I do wish that they'd have included one song that really stretches out a little—something longer than "Astronaut"'s five minutes. Whether epically dramatic or minimally ambient, it might have been a nice touch of variety without sacrificing what they're best at. In the album's favor, however, I'll say this: my desire for that epic, and/or for a smidgen more variety, has diminished each time I've put it on. Devotion rewards repeated listens. Sort of like Low, the more you spend time with Beach House, the more you get the sense that their boundaries are a special kind of freedom. I don't know that Devotion is as good as any of Low's best (i.e., early) albums, but I do get the sense that the group is capable of similar aesthetic explorations within the parameters they've set up for themselves. Devotion is worth seeking out, and Beach House is worth keeping an eye on.

The Mae Shi: Hlllyh

The Mae Shi find themselves in the same lineage that might have begun with the Birthday Party in the ’80s and continued through the likes of Crainium or Arab on Radar in the ’90s. That is: quick and spazzy. It’s a variety of music that thrilled me back when I was in college—caught up in house parties and DIY punk spaces—though I can’t say I spend a lot of time with it anymore (probably why I can’t think of any other acts more recent than Arab on Radar). Like those bands, it’s easy to tell from Hlllyh that the Mae Shi would similarly thrive and impress in a live setting—just listen to "Boys in the Attic." Most of their songs get in and get out quick, progressing linearly rather than verse-chorus-verse. And nearly everything is moving at a breakneck pace—no time for repetition! You’re a good six tracks in before you get an honest chance to catch your breath on “Leech and Locust.”

The spazziness is largely successful and usually interestingly done, although sometimes the singer’s high-pitched, almost pre-pubescent voice gets annoying. But after seven songs—about seventeen minutes—it starts to wear. The band themselves seem to be aware of that, because that’s when the gorilla instrumental “Kingdom Come” drops in. At nearly twelve minutes long, it makes up about a third of the entire album. Essentially a dance track—it alternates between something Morr Music might put out and a straight-up raver—the song happens to be the best track on the album, partly due to the fact that it is so unlike the rest. Yet it’s also the reason Hlllyh doesn’t succeed as an album—because it is so unlike the rest. Midway through the track, you sort of forget what you’re listening to as you just let the track carry you on. It segues perfectly into the mid-tempo “I Get Almost Everything,” another high point; and it is at this point that I think the Mae Shi might really be something great. To begin with frenetic punk but to move into more expansive territory is dramatic and exhilarating—but then things crash into “Party Politics,” back to the spazz. The last four songs basically return to the playbook of the first half of the record.

Ultimately Hlllyh is, to these ears, a bit disappointing. But there is enough going on to display the Mae Shi’s potential. I wish the bag of tricks used on “Kingdom Come” could be better integrated into the other songs, rather than sounding like an intermission in an otherwise samey album. Each song on Hlllyh, taken on its own, is unpredictable and explosive, but hearing them in succession, a pattern develops—angular guitar lines, punchy synths, instruments drop out at some point (usually the end) for a big group vocal—thus sabotaging the unpredictability that should be the band's greatest strength. Knowing that they have the ability to introduce a whole other layer of sounds, tempos, and atmospherics as they do in the middle of the record, highlights the limits of Hlllyh and the potential for limitlessness of the Mae Shi.

Life-changing Albums: Low's Songs for a Dead Pilot

A while back I promised a post on Low—the third in my series of “life-changing albums” (part one, part two). I fumbled on the post because, among other excuses, I couldn’t figure out which Low album to talk about. Everything from I Could Live in Hope to Secret Name—four albums, two EPs, innumerable 7”s and compilation appearances—might be worth calling life-changing.”

Then the topic of Low’s best album came up elseweb. I picked The Curtain Hits the Cast and immediately regretted my choice, realizing in a moment of epiphany that my favorite Low album, all along, has been their EP Songs for a Dead Pilot. That was the album that proved Low had more gas in the tank than expected, and that they truly had made an aesthetic leap. No other band, and no other album, better illustrated the idea of setting up parameters as a special kind of freedom.

I discovered Low by chance. I picked up their first album solely because I liked its cover. This was some time in 1994 or 1995, when I was getting out of my metal years and looking for something else. Coming from metal, it doesn’t get much more “something else” than the eleven lullabies that are I Could Live in Hope. It was a beautiful record—probably the first album I’ve ever owned that could be described as such. I listened to it unendingly and really felt a kind of ache in songs like “Words” or “Lazy.”

In a way my embrace of Low could be seen as a direct reaction to my love of Drive Like Jehu. As I said about that band, who I also consider life-changing, they killed rock music for me. They executed my idea of rock music so perfectly that I simply had no need for other bands treading in loud/fast territory. Where else to go but Low? Over the next three years the band perfected their approach to their sound, with the colder, darker Long Division and their masterpiece, The Curtain Hits the Cast, in which the band’s lyrics gained added dimension and their musical continuum seemed to reach its plateau in the somnambulant epic “Do You Know How to Waltz?”.

As good as Low was—and despite their steady perfection of their sound—it was becoming difficult to imagine remaining a fan beyond that album. Reviews, even the good ones, were routinely dismissive—“Low is really slow!”—as if nothing more needed to be said. Lines like that got my dander up but at the same time, how many more Curtains did the band really have left before the whole thing became redundant?

And so we come to Songs for a Dead Pilot, a statement of intent if ever I’ve heard one. By ditching their producer (Kramer), the band eliminated the pristine sheen that was draped across each of their other albums. Staying true to their explicitly stated parameters—play slow—Songs for a Dead Pilot nevertheless broke the band into new emotional territory: tension, anger, disappointment, resentment. These feelings lurked under their previous songs (such as “Mom Said” from Curtain), but they were hidden beneath that sheen of perfection. Perfect harmonies, delicate musicianship. Maybe it's a subtle shift, but Songs moved from delicate to fragile.

Beginning with Songs, the band chose to expose their flaws. Mimi stopped double-tracking her vocals, making her voice sound more human, less angelic. Alan stretched his vocals further (“Landlord”), practically flaunting the fact that he is hardly as good a vocalist as his wife. You can also hear the band paying closer attention to every small sound their instruments make. Listen to "Born by the Wires," and how Alan plays that one chord over and over for nearly ten minutes. Every strum of that muddy chord is just a little different, calling attention to each individual note and the way his pick hits the strings. No song better illustrates the band's progression. They made a conscious decision to become more raw and more explicitly minimalist, as opposed to merely minimal, as their prior albums could be described.

Perhaps this was always the band’s intent. But it was Songs that allowed me my personal epiphany. Low’s approach to music is like Zeno’s paradox: no matter how small the space, there is always further to go. They’re not interested, like Slint for instance, in expressing themselves through dramatic dynamics. This becomes a kind of limitation that sets Low free. In a sense they're like a musical embodiment of Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was damned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom each time he reached the top, for eternity. Where one might view that as a kind of hell, Camus made it a metaphor for the aburdity of life; accepting his fate, Sisyphus eventually would have no expectation that his boulder would do anything other than fall down that hill. Locked into his routine, he certainly must have come to know any variety of emotions beyond despair. As Camus wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Songs for a Dead Pilot, while certainly not a happy record, nevertheless finds Low embracing a similar philosophy. Knowing that their sound is limited to certain rules, they must now find aesthetic fulfillment within those parameters. Songs for a Dead Pilot took a slight left turn from the trajectory Low had been on; just enough to show that they could go anywhere they pleased.

Life-changing Albums: Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime

One of my criteria for a “life-changing album,” as I outlined on Monday, was that the album permanently alters the course of everything you seek out going forward. In other words the albums of your life are necessarily shaped by your life-changing albums because the latter influence your overall taste directly. Talk about altering the course of my tastes: Drive Like Jehu destroyed rock music for me.

I heard both Jehu albums around the same time, must have been 1994 or 1995. And to my mind they had perfected rock music. Post-Jehu, whenever I heard a new band that was trying to play fast and/or loud, it felt limp. I just turned it off and put on Jehu. For about a decade—literally!—I never once felt the need to purchase albums by rock bands (particularly new ones). Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the most typical brand of indie rock during those ten years was the nascent genre of emo, which was ridiculously in debt to Jehu, among other bands (too, all those spazzcore bands, largely hailing from San Diego, who also owed much to Jehu). Lots of people credit Rites of Spring as being the original emo band, and I won’t argue against their influence; but Jehu had a significant impact as well, in the form of the octave chord.

Much like Slint inspiring a myriad sub-par post-rock acts to abandon upstrokes, Drive Like Jehu neutered the power chord. The crunch of the power chord felt almost amateur compared to the sharp-edged attack of the octave. The worst (and most prevalent) emo bands took as their template the inward-looking lyrics of Rites of Spring, the song structures of Orange County pop punk, and the octave chord of Drive Like Jehu.* You might see, then, why I felt this music paled in comparison to Yank Crime. These bands missed everything else.

And it’s the everything else that made this album so important to me. Like Spiderland, Yank Crime’s brilliance did not dawn on me immediately. I had a nearly identical experience with “Luau” as I did with “Washer.” I owned the album for more than a year already. I knew that I loved it—its pure adrenaline was undeniable—but one day I was on a long drive, alone, listening to “Luau” for the umpteenth time when I noticed that, hang on a second, this song has a guitar solo! It kicks in at the 7:35 mark and it is 90% feedback. In the 1960s I guess Hendrix was giving people the same epiphany, and in the 80s (and 90s) I’d guess Thurston Moore was doing the same, but it was John Reis’s solo in “Luau” that blew my mind, and I can pinpoint that revelation as the exact moment I figured out what kind of guitar player I wanted to be. The epiphany was two-fold: 1) that noise can be manipulated into melody, and vice versa; and 2) that making music is a lot more primitive than I’d ever truly grasped. Technique, in the traditional sense of the word, doesn't mean much. Scales, speed, dexterity—it's irrelevant. That's not to say that a Ramones-like approach to punk is  some kind of ideal. What Jehu taught me is less naive, more intuitive. The great guitar players in my book concern themselves with the sound that comes from their instrument, and the emotion evoked by that sound. To try and parse that concept any further is to undermine what the instrument is capable of. If you're Drive Like Jehu, you can do a guitar solo that is nearly all feedback and sounds like gamma rays from a 1950s sci-fi flick. If you're U.S. Maple, you can detune your guitar and play whatever fucked chords you want. If you're Mick Turner of the Dirty Three you can leave the flash to your violinist and set the tone of each song through your fragile, muddy chords. (For further proof of Turner's brilliance, listen to Cat Power's Moon Pix and ask yourself why that album is still her best: it's those fragile chords, and it's Turner, not Marshall, playing them.) These are some of my all-time favorite guitarists, and to my ears what they all have in common is an approach to the guitar that respects the sounds it is capable of creating, rather than any kind of presumptions about their technical skills as guitarists.

Slint taught me something sophisticated about songwriting—how to apply sound to song in a meaningful way. Drive Like Jehu taught me something much more primal but no less significant: how to relate to one’s instrument; how to extract sound from an instrument rather than simply “play” it.

Next up: Low.

[*Caveat: I know Jehu didn’t invent the octave chord. In fact the template for the entirety of Jehu’s sound seems to have been set by a 30-second snippet of Television’s “Marquee Moon”—tune into that song at 8:10 through 8:40. But Jehu took that single moment and turned it into their driving aesthetic; and it’s that aesthetic that influenced everyone post-Jehu.]

Life-changing Albums: Slint's Spiderland

Belatedly picking up where last Monday’s post left off, my list dwindles significantly when trying to think of albums that changed my life, as opposed to those that were the soundtrack to my life. First of all, what does it even mean to have an album “change your life”? It's not like a person, who can encourage or influence you. It's not a change of location, which can present you with new opportunities. It's not even like a book, which can articulate ideas or philosophies in profound ways. The more I think about it, “life-changing” might be a phrase too hyperbolic for music.

But an album can profoundly change your relation to music, and in effect set a new course for all those “albums of your life” that are so much easier to rattle off. That’s no small thing, and in some sense that could be considered life-changing if your world (like mine) revolves so heavily around music. It’s the albums that taught you to hear music in new ways, and shaped your overall taste.

No surprise, then, that the biggest life-changing albums for me came during high school. Probably the same can be said for you. For me, the holy trinity of life-changing albums, all bought within a year of each other, were Slint’s Spiderland, Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime, and Low’s I Could Live in Hope (actually, I often think of both of Jehu’s albums and everything by Low through Secret Name as of a piece, but for this post’s purposes I’ll stick to the first albums I heard by each.)

I heard all of these albums at a time when I was actively looking for a new musical trajectory, as I mentioned in last week’s post. I had no real guidance, no roadmap to indie rock. I was hungry for something new but really had no idea what that meant. Each of these albums were unique epiphanies. Not just in the way that I said “yes, this!” to something vaguely called “indie rock”—though that did happen; not just in the way that I said no to “heavy” and said yes to “quiet” or “dramatic” or “dirty” or however you want to describe these bands. I wasn’t merely trading adjectives: I was discovering nouns: tension, nuance, adrenaline. Each album showed me how to articulate feelings, ideas, and emotions through sound—and in turn how to hear all other music at this level, and determine whether a band (to my ears) was successful at what they were attempting. This week I’m going to try to dig into each of these albums and try to explore this in more depth. We’ll begin with Slint.

None of these albums were lightning bolts to my brain. I owned Spiderland for months, simply liking the album, before one night in my bedroom when “Washer” came on and I quietly stopped what I was doing and listened, from the first note to the last. Though I’d heard the song numerous times already, this was the first time it had become exhilarating. Never had a song’s dynamic shifts seemed to resonate so perfectly with its emotional content. The genius of “Washer” is that it attempts, three times, to reach some sort of sonic release. But it doesn’t hit: just as it feels that it’s about to climax, it gets quieter instead. The lyric “I’m too tired now” seems to apply directly to the song’s ability to reach its payoff. Finally at the end it blows its lid, huge chords and squealing guitars—but it only lasts a few seconds. It was all the energy the song could muster after building for six or seven minutes.

So many of Slint’s imitators got it wrong, and listening to “Washer” you can see where they erred. It’s not about the juxtaposition of loud/quiet. Mogwai’s Young Team, for example, is a good album but not nearly so great as Slint’s modest effort. Young Team takes the polarity of loud/quiet to a dramatic but elementary extreme: things get really, really, really quiet, to the point that you need to turn your stereo up just to hear it, and at the drop of a hat the band becomes ear-splittingly loud. Dramatic, sure, but it doesn’t earn its drama the way “Washer” does.

And don’t even get me started on downstrokes. Spiderland nearly ruined indie rock by encouraging people to abandon upstrokes altogether. “Don, a Man” is the only song on Spiderland that employs this guitar style, yet for most of the late 90s it seemed to become the template for hundreds of forgettable bands trying to get more facile ideas across. But again, the bands that applied this technique to their guitar playing missed the point of a song like “Don”: tension. “Don” had a palpable sense of foreboding and anxiety, both lyrically and musically. It’s the subtle difference between a tense song and a song concerned with tension.

Slint weren’t the first or last band to understand the kind of thought that must go into the details of songwriting, but they were the band that opened my eyes to nuance in song craft. Hence Spiderland may well be the most life-changing of any album I’ve ever owned. This goes back to what I was saying the other day about the song vs. the sound. Spiderland taught me that more needs to go into one’s music beyond “that sounds cool,” and that, beyond lyrics or vocal delivery, a song can explore feelings more subtle than love or anger purely through how the instruments are played.

This only scratches the surface of my feelings for this record—I could post all week about it, at least. Nevertheless, next up: Drive Like Jehu.

Radiohead: In Rainbows

I may well be the last person on earth to review In Rainbows, but what can I say? It took me a while to find a toehold. The first few listens seemed to whiz by, with little repetition and, for lack of a better adjective, a lot of sound. This album is produced to within an inch of its life. Only in the first minute of “15 Step” does it feel like there is any air in the record, as Thom Yorke sings over the shifting drum n bass–influenced percussion. Once Johnny Greenwood’s guitar comes in, this album gets busy—as in, there is constantly, constantly something going on. Strings, samples, washes of synthesizer or guitar, bass punching in and out. Each song is sonically nimble, with fluid production: but the effect is that the dynamics are washed out. There is not an ounce of silence from the first note of “15 Step” to the last of “Videotape.”

Instead, the peaks and valleys of the album are only found in the whole—this song is high-energy, that song lethargic, that one languid. No individual song seems to explore more than one area (like, say, “Paranoid Android” does). Only after repeated listens did my ears break through all the aural wallpaper to grasp that there was more structure to each song than first perceived. In “Bodysnatchers,” for instance, Yorke sings in a verse-chorus-verse arc but the guitars don’t follow. Instead they take a riff—one that wouldn’t be out of place on a Pearl Jam record, incidentally—and let it mutate from beginning to end, linearly. Similar approaches to pop song structure abound—the band may nod to a hook, but they’re just as likely to look the other way.

Yet, in the context of Radiohead’s discography, In Rainbows is decidedly not experimental. They squeeze curious noises from their equipment and show total disregard for pop, but neither trait seems to be their intent (as it was on, say, “Like Spinning Plates” or “Kid A”). Those sounds and structures are now utterly integrated into their arsenal, so the band is putting them to new uses; they are applying their sonic aesthetic to new emotional territories. Gone is the paranoia of the last four albums. And that’s probably for the best; to remain out on the bleeding edge of dread would have made In Rainbows stale, if not a self-parody.

By choosing to branch out in this way—in tone, not in sound—Radiohead are rewriting their own history. The band’s notoriety is based upon their trilogy of game-changing albums: The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A. What other band took such giant steps between every album? Radiohead have been so successful at pushing their envelope that anything less than complete redefinition might be viewed as failure. But that was the first half of their career. This century the band seems to have settled into a much more typical trajectory. Everything after Kid A has been a refinement, a soft exploration of an overall aesthetic. Radiohead are one of the few bands—maybe the only band—to blend electronica and rock so deftly that the end result is neither. In Rainbows finds that integration at its most organic: it’s not too electronic, like Kid A, and not too rockish, like Hail to the Thief.

Most interesting, the longer Radiohead remain in this aesthetic territory, the less OK Computer feels like the bridge from The Bends to Kid A. As Radiohead 2.0 evolves, OK Computer’s sonic resemblance to The Bends becomes more and more apparent, while its thematic similarities to Kid A and hints of the experimentalism to come seem almost quaint. Although In Rainbows is not, on its own, nearly as satisfying as OK Computer, it does re-locate that album on the band’s overall trajectory. Radiohead seems to be finished taking giant steps from album to album. If that really is so, then the post-Kid A output is poised to dwarf the classics that came prior.

Feist: The Reminder

My wife and I were first exposed to Feist in 2004 through her two guest spots on the Kings of Convenience album Riot on an Empty Street. We had no idea who she was but we fell in love with her voice. A little research led us to Let it Die, which was at the time available only in Europe. Lucky for us—here’s something you can’t often say—we happened to be going to Europe that month. So we bought it in Paris.

Associating Feist with that trip to Paris, as well as with our final year in New York, makes for a certain sentimental attachment. But sentimentalism aside, Let it Die deserved all those spins. It has become one of those albums that has remained in steady rotation for years, not months or weeks.

My anticipation, you might imagine, has been pretty high for The Reminder. Particularly because Let it Die, in fact, was not a perfect album. “Inside and Out,” “Leisure Suite,” and especially “One Evening” veered too far into adult contemporary territory. These were the only songs in my collection I could describe as “silky.” But all indications from the press I’d read at the time was that Let it Die’s popularity was something of a fluke, that Feist did not really intend to “compose” a real record (hence so many covers). She promised the next album would be closer to her originals, closer to “the good songs.” As far as I was concerned there was a high chance for perfection the second time around.

So now The Reminder is upon us, and pretty much every review I’ve read seems to make that claim. The hyperbole is nearly unanimous—which brings me to an awkward position. I like this record. I wanted to like this record and I do like this record. Nearly song for song, The Reminder is better than Let it Die. The album will very likely remain in rotation for much of the year and will probably show up in my year-end top ten list.

Yet I can’t be hyperbolic. I have a nit, and I must pick.

I’ve read grumblings here and there that if The Reminder is flawed, it is because there are too many slow songs and not enough upbeat songs. That might be true—I wouldn’t object to one more track as joyful as “1234” or “I Feel it All”—but on the other hand there are no bad songs. I think a more precise criticism is to note how frequently The Reminder kills its own momentum. The album is sequenced really curiously, to its detriment.

The album kicks off with “So Sorry,” a mild, folky ballad similar in mood to Let it Die’s opener, “Gatekeeper.” It’s a nice song, but it’s also the most modest of the dozen tracks. Meanwhile “1234,” which both lyrically and musically seems like such an obvious opener, is buried in the last third of the album, long after its buoyancy can really save the record’s pacing.

“So Sorry” almost feels like a false start—oops, meant to begin with the upbeat twosome “I Feel it All” and “My Moon My Man.” Okay then! Now we’re cookin’! Except, we’re not. Much of the album is a weird collection of couples; the two peppy tracks are followed by a pair of morose songwriter’s songs—lots of verses, not a lot else—“The Park” and “The Water.” The songs are very similar, and they add up to about ten minutes of downtime that kills all the wonder of the previous songs. The energy comes back with “Sea Lion Woman” and “Past in Present,” yet this is a curious pair too: higher energy, yes, but it feels like Feist’s genre-skipping interlude—the first has the feel of an indie rock tent revival; the second is the sole country-influenced track. Halfway through The Reminder, none of the songs feel comfortable within the skin of the album. “1234” tries to turn things into a party, but it’s surrounded by so many downers that there’s really no hope of saving the momentum.

Yet every song is good! And that’s what makes this a strange album. Even though they chop the album off at the knees, both “The Water” and “The Park” are fantastic songs. Even though the pairing of “Sea Lion Woman” and “Past in Present” belies a certain self-consciousness, taken individually they’re both a lot of fun. And despite reaching a certain level of exhaustion and frustration two-thirds in, the final quartet of songs are some of Feist’s best.

It is the quality of each individual song that keeps me coming back to The Reminder. I was hoping that the logic of the album would reveal itself to me the more I listened to it, in the manner that Andrew Bird’s latest did. But countless listens in, I’m still frustrated. I've been hesitant to even post about this album because I know that this single irritation, on paper, seems to outweigh my pleasure, which isn't the case. If I were rating it on the Pitchfork scale I'd probably put this in the high 7s to mid-8s. I recommend all thirteen of the great songs on The Reminder, even if I can't really recommend The Reminder.

How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Center of Andrew Bird's Armchair Apocrypha?

One
Though Armchair Apocrypha is Andrew Bird’s seventh album, I’ve managed to never hear him before. My first exposure to him was while my brilliant wife and I were having breakfast at our friends’ house over Thanksgiving.  I liked what I heard but never did get around to picking up one of his albums.

Then a few weeks ago "Heretics" started popping up on the blogs [for that reason I'd post something else, but I'll respect Bird's wishes as indicated in this post]. Coincidentally I came across a new song from the Sea and Cake’s new album on the same day. They were a fitting pair, since both Bird and Sam Prekop share a similar ease of delivery. In fact that pairing colored my first few listens of Bird’s album once I made the purchase. Armchair Apocrypha sounds a bit like what Prekop might be up to these days if he had followed the template he set out with Shrimpboat and early Sea and Cake records—a looser, more acoustic variety of airy pop—rather than following the fork in the road that was the John McEntire–influenced electronics of The Fawn.

The Prekop comparison faded soon enough. For one, Bird’s got pipes. The first half of Bird’s album culminates in the one-two punch of “Armchairs” and “Darkmatter”—the first a mini-opus that stretches Bird’s voice into an emotional territory Prekop has never explored, the second a dynamic rocker of the sort Prekop has never attempted.

Two
By the time I’d picked up the actual album, I’d committed most of “Heretics” to memory. It makes sense that every blog I saw referenced the same song—it’s the most immediate, with its violin hook, catchy chorus, and half-spoken/sung lyrics. The rest of the album on first listen was a bit of a mush. Bird often mumbles his lyrics, and the songs don’t always follow a simple pop structure. Small motifs pop up throughout the album, too, making the whole feel pleasurable yet not quite tangible.

We bought the album just before my wife and I headed out of town for a drive from Los Angeles to Big Sur, most of which is the winding PCH, lush mountains on the left and the Pacific Ocean crashing on the right. Tooling up the coastline on a weekend afternoon may well have been the best way to take in Armchair Apocrypha. It’s not an album you can easily process while doing other things. Not because it’s dense, but because it will pass right by you if you’re not paying attention. Best to relax, enjoy the scenery, and let Bird soundtrack your life.

In fact a Sunday drive is the perfect metaphor for many of the songs and the album as a whole. Bird, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, winds through his songs without much noticeable effort, not always feeling the need to repeat a melody or follow a standard song structure. The opener, “Fiery Crash,” is a good example. After an intro, verse, and chorus, the song pauses for an overlay of pop-syllables (ba ba ba, etc.); then some whistling—one melody, no repetition, for just a couple bars; too short to be a solo, too singular to be a motif. Then he returns to the verse and chorus. It’s just a little detour. Many other tracks follow a similar path, weaving this way and that without worry for pop structures. As a whole the album is structured with the same ease. The first four tracks are short shots of pop, followed by the emotional peaks of “Armchairs” and “Darkmatter”—either of which (especially “Armchairs”) could function as the album’s closer, if Bird was interested in making the whole thing a steady build to a dramatic climax. But instead we climb the tallest peaks at midpoint, take a break for a short string interlude, then wind back down with the second half, all of which is just a touch slower than the first.

Three
This structure, in the first few listens, makes the album feel longer than it actually is. Actually on one of my first intent listens my iPod malfunctioned and I thought the brief instrumental “The Supine” was the last track. I thought: short, concise album, perfectly plotted. It wasn’t until I returned from Big Sur and I listened to the album again while I took my morning ritual walk that I realized I’d missed four tracks. So I had to process the album all over again, knowing the first two-thirds much better than the last. Suddenly the album began to feel more exhausting. “Armchairs” alone swings up and down emotionally over the course of seven minutes that it really sweeps you up; by the time Bird laments “You never write, you never call / It never crossed your mind at all,” you’re drained. The remaining third of the album, quiet as it is, causes a small amount of discomfort considering how little it moves you compared to the middle of the record.

But that changes. Like the rest of the album, the songs simply take a few listens to reveal themselves to you. It wasn’t long before I found myself looking forward to the lovely chorus of “Scythian Empires,” but reticent to skip past anything lest I miss another lyric I hadn’t heard before.

Four
And that’s the final stage: the lyrics. Outside of sitting down and reading the lyric sheet while the CD plays on my bedroom boombox—frankly something I haven’t done since high school—it takes real concentration to follow Bird’s lines. Not every chorus repeats the same lyrics, not every verse the same melody, and enunciation is not Bird’s primary concern. But after enough of those morning walks with the full album, the content of “Imitosis” starts to come into view; “Plasticities” too, and the rest. You start to see that Bird is having fun with turns of phrase and that most songs wrestle with existential issues (“The fiery crash / is just a finality / or must I explain / it’s a nod to mortality” [“Fiery Crash”], or “Do you want to know where the self resides? / Is it in your head or between your sides?” [“Darkmatter”]).

After a week of listening—in my world, that’s about five to seven spins—the album has gotten fully through the processing stage and now I’m simply enjoying it the way a great pop album deserves to be enjoyed. I’m singing along, whistling along, imitating the violin sounds and nudging my wife every time a lyric comes up that I think is especially cherce. This album was the epitome of a “grower”—but it’s officially grown. Huge thumbs up. You’ll hear me go on about this album more in the future, I’m sure.

Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

I was all set to write my own review of the new Arcade Fire, but David M. Goldstein over at Coke Machine Glow pretty much hit every point I wanted to make. So I encourage you to read his review instead and just know that I agree with nearly everything he says. By the way, it’s funny that he should start his review off recollecting when he last namechecked the Violent Femmes in a review; coincidentally, the last (and only) time I used a Coke Machine Glow review as a jumping-off point for my own was when I went on about Belle & Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit. Go figure, that was Goldstein talking about the Violent Femmes curse.

The only point on which I’d quibble is that “No Cars Go” is not even close to a career highlight; I actually find it to be one of the more laughable portions of the album. First verse: “I know a place where no cars go, I know a place where no planes go”; second verse: “I know a place where no spaceships go, I know a place where no subs go.” What is this, kindergarten? Do you know a place where no helicopters go? How about catamarans? Then, to top it all off, the last line of the song is “I don’t know where we’re going!” Meanwhile, again contrary to Goldstein, I think the album closer, "My Body is a Cage," is the most arresting song on the album.

But otherwise, like I said, Goldstein’s got it pretty much spot on. Funeral was a nearly perfect record and in retrospect it had a lot to do with the play between personal despair and rallying optimism. It’s apt that the first half of that album was about “neighborhoods.” Win Butler and co. did a great job of making a record that roused the community. But Neon Bible is the equivalent of the City Councilman making a bid for the  presidency. Awkwardly, though, it’s a Councilman from Montreal running for President of the United States.

The paranoia and anxiety running through this War on Terror–obsessed album fits Butler like a thrift-store suit. He can almost make it work but it doesn’t quite fit. When Butler laments in “Windowsill” that he “don’t wanna live in America no more,” I want to remind him that he never lived here in the first place. (Incidentally, there are a lot of things Butler “don’t wanna” do on this album, to the extent that his list of things he don’t wanna do annoyingly carries from one song to the very next.) That's not to say you have to be an American to criticize America, but nevertheless when Butler says he doesn't want to live here "anymore," or later that he "don't wanna work in a building downtown" because "the planes keep crashing always two by two," it sounds like dress-up. He's not taking on American policy from a perspective he can truly own. [Update: my brilliant wife has schooled me. Apparently Butler is originally from the U.S.; so in fact he's walkin' his talk!]

At any rate, like Goldstein I find myself only capable of writing a lopsided review; it’s easier to find the faults than to highlight the great moments, perhaps because when they are good, it’s the same way they were good before, and it feels redundant to praise those aspects over again. If I handed out grades with my album reviews, I'd probbly give Neon Bible a B, B-. Arcade Fire are nothing if not rousing. And while I personally might find some of the lyrical content here a little heavy handed, there’s a sixteen-year-old out there who may not know just how to articulate his or her feelings about the state of the world and their place within it, and maybe this is the album they’ll blare out of their boom boxes—er, cell phone ring tones—the same way I got off on the righteousness of Rage Against the Machine or the paranoia of Radiohead. To that end this album may yet be a classic for a generation. Just not my generation.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder

Right out of the gate, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has been a love-them-or-hate-them band. Either you like Alex Ounsworth's yelpy David Byrnisms or you don't. With their second album, Some Loud Thunder, little has changed on that front. Well, one thing has changed: it's less fun to debate whether they're worth loving or hating. Their first, self-titled album was packed with hooks—that guitar line from "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth," the chorus from "Is This Love?"€, the whole of "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood"€; if your buddy told you he hated that voice, you could at least counter that the record was chock full of earworms. It was spare, brief, memorable. The band sounded unlike anyone else and didn't make a big stink about it. Sure, they had a lot of personality quirks, but not a lot of pretension.

The frustrating thing about Some Loud Thunder is that the quirks have been pushed further to the fore, putting the band dangerously on the line of pretense. The melodies are still there, but they seem to be intentionally suppressed beneath poor production or arrangements that seem unnecessarily tricky—not complex, not particularly interesting, just tricky. "Emily Jean Stock"€ is a good example€—the vocal melodies and multitracked backing harmonies are present from beginning to end but the rest of the instrumentation enters and exits throughout, never allowing the track to cohere into a song. The best compliment the song warrants is "interesting."€ It has the potential to be compelling, but it never actually is. More aggravating is that the album seems willfully underproduced. I have no problem with lo-fi—some of my favorite albums were recorded on 4-tracks—but Some Loud Thunder often sounds like the band went into a real studio and then purposely made it sound like shit. The most blatant offender is the first, title track, which sounds a notch above Real Audio quality.

None of this is to say that the album is a complete failure. "Goodbye to the Mother and the Cover," with its revolving arpeggios and sliding guitar lines, is one of the few songs to let the instruments offer something memorable beyond Ounsworth's vocal idiosyncrasies. The brief "Arm and Hammer"€ starts aimlessly before morphing into a sort of punk-acoustic mantra. And "Yankee Go Home"€ is the closest to the sound of the first album: the band is wholly present, the vocals aren't distorted, and the melody, with its one short falsetto note, is great. It feels natural; you can picture the whole band in a room enjoying themselves.

The same can't be said for the rest of the album. It's curious: I'm attracted to it, I do keep putting it on, but I never just sit back and enjoy it. It's like I'm listening to it just to figure it out. And I'm not quite certain that CYHSY have enough depth to really warrant being figured out. The last album I bought that seemed to beg to be analyzed—yet still pretended to have some kind of aspiration to pop accessibility—was TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain. The more I listened to it, trying to understand why it was so dense, why they insisted on piling on the vocal tracks and ambient sound, the more I resented it. It is possible, of course, to make an album that subverts or explodes pop tropes, that aims for texture as much as melody. Hell, the world would have stopped talking about Radiohead a decade ago if it wasn't. But CYHSY (and TVotR, for that matter), don't seem to have really thought it through. Distorting the vocals and allowing the drum tracks to fall in and out is not really subversive; it's sabotage.

All this sounds curmudgeonly, I know. I'm not really asking CYHSY to make their first album over again, nor to restrict themselves to a verse-chorus-verse structure. But Some Loud Thunder is nevertheless frustrating because a terrific album is in there—I can hear it, buried underneath the production. It's as if they made a great record and then, in a self-conscious moment of doubt, slabbed dirt all over it and half-obliterated the songs. What you're left with is something not very experimental and not very accessible. It's the worst of both worlds.

Pernice Brothers: Live a Little

The newest Pernice Brothers album, Live a Little, has been out for about a month now. And how is it, you ask? Perhaps the fact that it’s taken me thirty days to write an actual review is telling. Regular readers know that I’ve been looking forward to it ever since it was announced they would be returning to the same studio and producer (and string section) responsible for Joe Pernice’s two best albums, the Scud Mountain Boys’ Massachusetts and the PB’s debut, Overcome by Happiness. On paper, that sure looks promising.

In reality, though, the fact is that Joe Pernice is on the same trajectory he’s been on for most of this decade. Live a Little makes as big of a splash as his last album, Discover a Lovelier You, or the one before that, Yours, Mine, and Ours. That is to say, it’s a good record. It’s solid. The nice thing about the Pernice Brothers is that if you’ve never heard them before, you could pick any album in the bin at the record store, pop it in your stereo, and love it. For better or worse, Live a Little does nothing to argue against that compliment. It’s impossible to hate this record—but it’s also hard to love.

I seem to face the same dilemma every time Pernice puts out a new record: I’m loathe to give it a middling or poor review because he is such a good songwriter, in terms of both lyrics and craft, and he’s got such a great voice, always singing inescapable melodies. The question is: who am I writing this review for? If you’ve not heard Pernice before, or if you’ve only heard one album here or there long ago, it’s all I can do to urge you to pick up more of his records. He’s a master of his craft. But if you’re like me, this will be your tenth Pernice-penned album in about ten years. Frankly it’s nigh impossible to please me with an output like that, without taking a drastic change of course (e.g., a totally stripped down record, or all piano-based, or what have you). If Pernice is content to make a variation on the same album for the rest of his life, I’ll be content to buy it every time, though it will be less and less of an event with each passing record.

As with his previous two or three albums, Live a Little has its share of brilliant flashes. The album starts solidly but settles into a bit of samey blandness by track four. Too many songs have the same tempo and it makes the album a bit blurry. (It doesn’t help that the melody of “Somerville” is a dead lift of “Penthouse in the Woods,” from Massachusetts.) The album hits its stride in the middle, however, with the excellent “Microscopic View,” “B. H. Johnson,” and “PCH One” (the latter two easily ranking among his best work). Unfortunately it settles back into rote Pernice by the final third. The last four or five songs all feel interchangeable, and the album doesn’t really seem to reach any sort of natural conclusion. Worst of all, the closer is a reworking of “Grudge Fuck”—the highlight of Massachusetts, if not of Pernice’s entire body of work. This new version is bloated with strings, revised (and additional) wanky guitar solos, and loads of backing vocals. All the depth of the lyrics, about a stoned loser calling on an ex-girlfriend, are lost beneath the new glossy sheen. I’ve long suspected Pernice had gotten too comfortable with the current Pernice Brothers incarnation, but this track is the first time I’ve ever questioned whether he’s lost his way altogether.

Long ago, a friend of mine said of Elliott Smith that he would always buy a new Smith record no matter what, simply because Smith made his brilliant self-titled album. A work of such genius deserved life-long loyalty. I feel the same way about Pernice, personally. His early records hit me so hard when I first heard them that it was all I listened to for at least a year straight, and I’ve never tired of them all these years later. I’ve got my “Joe Pernice” playlist on my iTunes, where I dump every one of his albums. There are about 115 songs in there, with maybe two or three deselected. I just hit that shuffle button and I’m good to go for the rest of the day. That’s all well and good, but is it enough? I will always buy Pernice’s albums, I will always like Pernice’s albums—but will I ever be blown away again? Not this time, no, but maybe next time.

Second Look: Secret Machines' Ten Silver Drops

Ten Silver Drops came out back in April, which I mentioned at the time, but I shamefully admit to not actually purchasing it until just last month since it’s been streaming on the Secret Machines' website all this time. Finally I dropped actual cash for the real thing, and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since.

Why was everyone so down on this album? Was it residual disappointment from all the other tepid releases by noteworthy bands? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, and the Walkmen (among others) all put out fairly boring albums within two months of each other. Perhaps the prevailing mood among music critics caused them to chuck the Secret Machines in with the rest. This should be rectified: Ten Silver Drops will easily be in my top five of the year come December.

Back in 2004, when their debut full-length Now Here is Nowhere came out, there was an avalanche of hype courtesy their label, Reprise (previously they’d released just an EP, September 000, on the indie Ace Fu). The album was well-received but at the time I was suspicious and dismissive. 2002–04 marked the period when “indie” was aggressively co-opted by the majors and lines were really beginning to blur concerning what that term even meant. As the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol were jumping from indies to the majors and many other bands that might have felt at home on Saddle Creek or Touch & Go were bypassing the indie route altogether, I found myself second-guessing everything—residue from my high school and college days when “sellout” still meant something and corporate record labels were still synonymous with evil. Apparently in the twenty-first century “necessary” attached itself to that evil, as bands like the Strokes and Jimmy Eat World proved that you could get in bed with the suits and still come out in the morning with your soul (and bank account) intact. More and more bands followed suit, and I admit I was slow to believe it could be true; anything that was hyped at that time I pretty much rejected out of hand. Hence, I missed the boat on the Secret Machines.

A year later, amid a cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles, my brilliant wife convinced me that the Secret Machines deserved a listen. She picked up September 000 just before our trip because she had been blown away by the opening track, “Marconi’s Radio.” Somewhere on the highway between West Virginia and Tennessee my love for the Secret Machines was born. The song begins with a patient four and half minutes of a simple five-note piano melody repeated over and over until the guitars finally come crashing in for one bar, then Brandon Curtis’s vocals finally start the song proper (with backing harmonies that seem better placed in a Beatles song than a minimalist rock epic). What is so brilliant about this song is that, at nearly eight minutes in length, the only burst of energy comes halfway through, and briefly; the rest of the song, before and after that moment, is rising action. It’s a bold song choice for the first track on the first release, and is the perfect indicator of things to come, both on this EP and from the band in general.

On the surface the Secret Machines do not seem groundbreaking in the way that, say, Radiohead so obviously is in its marriage of pop, electronica, and high-falutin’ concepts. But at the same time there are few bands really operating in the exact same territory as the Secret Machines: musically they are loud, they eschew simple pop structures, they stretch out rather than keep things accessibly concise—but they diverge from their peers by relying just as strongly on melodies and vocal hooks. Whereas Radiohead began as a guitar pop band that subverted that genre with each album, the Secret Machines seem to be doing the inverse: they’re epic indie/prog on the surface but they chip away at the genre's underbelly with pop ingredients—melody and harmony, verse and chorus.

The adverse reaction to Ten Silver Drops is, I think, a result of two forms of backlash related to all of this. First, the inevitable hipster backlash against anything that was overhyped the first time around. People that didn’t think the Secret Machines were all that in the first place are now piping up. Second, the definitive difference between Ten Silver Drops and Now Here is Nowhere is the ratio of instrumental muscle-flexing to Curtis’s vocal presence. In other words, the pop elements, while far from taking over completely, have risen closer to the surface. Only the tail-end of “I Hate Pretending” has a noisy, free-form instrumental section, and even that is tempered by the first half’s story-lyrics describing a drug bust, which many critics have expressed annoyance with. (Personally they don’t bother me; story-lyrics are nothing new in pop music.)

So how could the Secret Machines win? In one corner there are those who either didn’t like them in the first place or, like me two years ago, are dismissive of them simply because hype engenders suspicion; and in the other there seem to be people that are really repulsed by the ways in which Ten Silver Drops differs from its predecessor—less instrumental sections, more lyrics. Neither party seems willing to listen to the album on its own terms.

On its own terms: Ten Silver Drops begins with a string of arguably the three best songs the Secret Machines have ever written. The opener, “Alone, Jealous and Stoned,” applies similar motives as “Marconi’s Radio” did on September 000—it is a melancholy, nearly seven-minute song that never really rocks the way Now Here’s propulsive opener “First Wave Intact” does so commandingly. For a band often given the faint praise that they should be playing in arenas, it is perhaps a surprising choice for an album opener. But the song segues into the best track of the album, “All at Once (It’s Not Important),” which introduces one of the album’s signature sounds, Ben Curtis’s soaring guitar melodies. Here and in a handful of other tracks, the guitar lines seem more interested in floating over the top of the songs rather than riffing as in previous releases; the heavy lifting for each track is shifted instead to Brandon Curtis’s vocals and Josh Garza’s drumming—which somehow call to mind simultaneously John Bonham and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger. His motorik-meets-arena-rock drumming is the heart of much of the album, especially the third track, “Lightning Blue Eyes.”

The album’s sole dip is the middle track, “Daddy’s in the Doldrums,” which is anchored by a monotonous, sludgy riff and rock-posturing lyrics. Even so the song is not so bad as to sink the entire album, and the group quickly rebounds with the second half of the record, culminating in the outstanding closer, “1,000 Seconds,” again one of the best numbers the band has released to date.

So if four of Ten Silver Drops’ eight tracks are among the best the group has ever done, then surely this album deserves a second look. (Happily, I’m not the first to think so: Chromewaves woke up the Secret Machines a couple of weeks ago.) Cries that the band has somehow fallen off are greatly exaggerated. Yes, I miss some of the instrumental stretches that really identified Now Here is Nowhere, but to claim that Ten Silver Drops has moved too far in the other direction is false. Their pop sensibilities are more apparent here than their previous releases, but at the same time the songs still lean to the long side and are structured in such a way as to keep them well off the radio. There is a sophistication at work beneath all of these songs that should be acknowledged. The entire album (as well as Now Here is Nowhere) is streaming from the band’s website, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself, and stop listening to the haters.

Attention Trainspotters: The Radio Dept. is Leaving the Station

In honor of the release of Marie Antoinette last weekend—which, by the way, is a great movie—I thought I'd repost this bit I wrote about the Radio Dept. back in July [slightly edited/updated], to tide over all you dedicated fans of pgwp—surely you are dedicated!—until my tangible life settles down a little. Enjoy.

Last weekend Sofia Coppola released her third film, Marie Antoinette. And with it, as with her previous two films, comes a killer soundtrack. She is one of the few filmmakers out there right now—Wes Anderson, too—that really puts serious effort into making the soundtrack simultaneously heighten the film and stand alone as a great album. (And I draw distinction here between the pop-music soundtrack and a more typical film score.)

Unlike Anderson, however, Coppola has an added (golden) touch when she makes her compilations. At least one band on each of her previous soundtracks got a serious career boost thanks to her selection. With The Virgin Suicides, it was Air; and Lost in Translation  sparked huge hipster lust for Phoenix. In both cases each group had previously released their debut albums, which met with a fair amount of success (more in Europe than the U.S.); then they appeared on Coppola’s soundtracks; then their sophomore albums hit stores and achieved much greater notoriety. I doubt Coppola’s endorsement was the sole reason for their spikes, but it was certainly a factor.

Next up is Marie Antoinette, and with it—if there is any justice in the world—Malmo, Sweden’s Radio Dept. will find the same destiny. Three songs on the upcoming soundtrack are by the Radio Dept. Their presence on the soundtrack is akin to Air’s in The Virgin Suicides, in which they blended seamlessly with an otherwise all-‘70s modern rock collection; the Radio Dept. should acheive similar results within the otherwise largely '80s tracks for Marie Antoinette. You might wonder, while watching the film, if the song playing in such-and-such scene is from that New Order or Jesus & Mary Chain album you never picked up.

But while it’s accurate to cite New Order, the Jesus & Mary Chain, or Roxy Music as influences (as well as some '90s shoegazer), the Radio Dept. deserve more credit than that. They are truly a great pop band in their own right. I discovered them a couple of years ago while writing for the (now-defunct) webzine Splendid. The promo for Lesser Matters showed up in my mailbox and I had no expectations—and it turned out to be one of my most obsessively listened-to albums of the year. (See my review