Pretty Goes with Pretty

My Listening Hours: The Rest of January–March

Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
When this album came out last year I was mildly interested in hearing it but also felt that I was kinda done with Wilco. Then all the reviews I read said it was boring, and the two mp3s I downloaded didn’t put up much argument. Five or six months later it seemed to be on everyone’s best-of-07 lists, so I gave it a shot all over again, this time the whole album. My ultimate reaction is somewhere between “boring” and  “best of the year.” The album starts and ends with some of the band’s strongest songs ("Either Way" sticks in my head for days at a time). But the middle sags, to the point that I rarely feel the urge to put the whole album on. I cherrypick my favorite tracks onto playlists instead. Part of what bothers me is that transparency of the influences on some of these tracks: the chorus of “Hate it Here” screams Beatles, and Jeff Tweedy’s delivery on “What Light” is like karaoke Dylan.

Neu!, Neu! 75
Neu!'s third and last album is just six songs, split down the middle between what Michael Rother wanted to do (synthy pseudo-ambient, a la "Seeland") and what Klaus Dinger wanted to do (guitar-driven punk riffing). Somehow it feels cohesive anyway—probably because both approaches still utilize a kind of tunnel effect—the songs move in one direction, little digression in terms of dynamics or structural shifts. Whether relaxing to the first half or waking up to the second, all six tracks on Neu! 75 envelope you. A little dated, but also a little of what I've wanted/needed lately. Like Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green," I've been drawn to songs that create a kind of sonic effacement. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense; but it will require a longer post to explain.

Vashti Bunyan, Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind
Standing in the record store, my wife and I held this collection in one hand and Bunyan’s debut album in the other. I think we were beguiled by that white coat she’s wearing on the cover, and the fact that there were twice as many songs on this album. There are a lot of great songs here; she's got a fantastic voice and often great lyrics (I find the sentiment in "Leave Me" refreshing for a pop song). But perhaps because this wasn’t a composed album, rather a collection of demos and outtakes from the same era and just after, it becomes a bit overwhelming. Twenty tracks of Bunyan’s morose lo-fi laments gets a little tiresome. One at a time, great, but tough to take as a whole.

Panda Bear, Person Pitch
I like Person Pitch, but I’m at a loss to figure out how it was at the top of so many lists last year. On the list, sure—but the very top? I think there are far fewer ideas happening here than it gets credit for; I don’t really hear what Person Pitch is trying to accomplish in forty-eight minutes that "Bros" doesn’t do in toto in twelve minutes.

The Mae Shi, Hlllyh
My full review of the album (including mp3) can be found here. My brilliant wife, after listening to the album herself, called me out: “you don’t really like it as much as you say you do, right?” The answer is I don’t know, maybe. A great deal of what I like about Hlllyh is tied less to the actual music and more to my memories of going to shows every weekend in a warehouse in downtown Phoenix or a house party in Tempe—just a crowd of smelly dudes watching their friends go apeshit in front of them (no actual stage, of course). Truth be told if I hadn’t gotten this album for free I wouldn’t have bought it. Now that I own it, I skip it as often as I let it play when the songs come up on shuffle.

Os Mutantes, s/t
I’ve had an album’s worth of Os Mutantes songs in my iTunes for years now, though it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that I finally bought a proper release. Where better to start than this, their debut 1968 album? It doesn’t contain my favorite OM song—that would be the Rita Lee-sung version of “Baby,” rather than the version here—but there's plenty else to love, like the jubilant "Senhor F."

LCD Soundsystem, 45:33
To be honest I've only owned this album for a couple weeks, and probably listened to it three times since picking it up. So my opinion is not fully formed. I'll say this though: it's not my ideal workout mix.

Terry Riley, In C
Because you know what is my ideal workout mix? In C. I swear, I plug in my headphones, get on the treadmill, and start jogging my ass off to In C.  Who needs a house beat when you have Riley's patterns and clusters? If only my body had the stamina to run for an hour fifteen. I poop out around, uh, 45:33. I get completely lost in this piece. I've only got a handful of contemporary composers in my collection—Glass, Reich, and a 3CD compilation tracing the origins of electronic music which hits a lot of the well-known twentieth-century avant-garde composers. A few months back I mentioned that this was an area of music I knew was in my future. In C might be the piece I needed to hear to make that future come a little sooner. (You can download all of In C for free from last.fm.)   

Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
I'm actually surprised that I dislike this album as much as I do. I don't hate it, but based on how terrific I found Satanic Panic in the Attic, you'd think I'd be taken by the obvious aesthetic leaps the band is taking. I can respect the growth—there's even songs, like "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger," that I really like—but as often as not I find Hissing Fauna to be terribly grating. The harmonies are almost abrasive on "Suffer for Fashion" or "Faberge Falls for Shuggie," and "The Past is a Grotesque Animal," all twelve minutes of it, just sounds like Kevin Barnes had the studio time so he indulged himself.

Buckingham Nicks, s/t
In another My Listening Hours post from a few months ago, I went on about Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which sparked a lot of comments as to the worth of the group. My feeling on the band was that Lindsey Buckingham’s songs are far and away the best of the bunch, both on Rumours and on Tusk. Stevie Nicks’s voice is of course distinctive and, when her songs aren’t tainted by pop-cultural oversaturation, her songs can be great too. Really it’s just bland Christine McVie that weighs down the albums. So it seemed logical that searching out the out-of-print (but easily gotten) Buckingham Nicks—which the duo recorded prior to joining Fleetwood Mac—might yield great results.

Turns out this is a pretty perfect encapsulation of my post from a couple months back, “Do I Want to Go There,” in which I wondered aloud when, exactly, my jones for music from the 70s would steer me wrong. The vast majority of Buckingham Nicks is bona fide MOR schlock. Some good melodies here and there, but frankly the album cover should rightly scare you away.

George Harrison, Dark Horse
On a similar note, George Harrison’s Dark Horse was also disappointing. A couple good songs—particularly "Simply Shady"—but most of the album showcases Harrison’s weak voice, directionless songwriting, and bad sax, none of which I expected from George.

Tomorrow, I'll take a look at the albums coming out in the next few months that have me most excited.

My Listening Hours: The Best of July–September

New Pornographers, Challengers
Curious critical trajectory, that of Challengers. When “My Rights Versus Yours” and “Myriad Harbor” started circulating in June, I heard only rabid praise. Those that bought the album via Matador’s Buy Early Get Now program seemed similarly enthusiastic. Then when the album hit bricks-and-mortar stores in August and the reviews started hitting officially, the response seemed to get a lot more tepid. Suddenly I was reading that it was their worst album, that it lacked all the energy that made everyone love the New Pornographers in the first place.

I read all this without hearing the album, which I didn’t actually pick up until two weeks ago. I’ll admit that on first listen I was slightly disappointed—it doesn’t sound like Mass Romantic or Electric Version—but on repeated listens I’ve come to find Challengers to be the most rewarding NP album thus far. That’s not to say it’s the best album—the immediate gratification of the first two albums is hard to deny—but it is a composed album, with peaks and valleys, left turns and home stretches. The band obviously took tentative steps into new territory on Twin Cinema, and Challengers sees them occupying that space with greater confidence.

Appreciating this album is an exercise in analyzing your own expectations. Shortly after buying the album, I read Rob Mitchum’s Pitchfork review, which I think sums up the tone of disappointment I’ve heard in other quarters. It’s been nagging at me each time I listen to Challengers, mostly because it claims that Neko Case is “wasted” on ballads and seems to think the only truly successful songs are the rocket-propelled “All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth” and “Mutiny, I Promise You,” both of which are terrific and, not coincidentally, the only two tracks that could be placed seamlessly within any previous NP album.

It’s a legitimate fanboy urge to wish the band would just keep making Mass Romantic over and over again, but in the long term that’s a losing proposition. Personally, I need only need look at my longtime favorite of favorites, the Pernice Brothers, who have churned out album after album with diminishing returns because they refuse to take new risks. With album #4, the New Pornographers were on the verge of taking the same path. Instead they turned in a record more varied than anything they’ve ever done, and contrary to Mitchum’s critique, I’d argue further that Challengers might feature some of Case’s best work with the group, and further that "Challengers" is possibly the best song on the entire album. It strikes me as the most lyrically mature thing the band has ever done, and the trajectory of the song itself, which Mitchum feels suffers because it has “no peaks,” fits perfectly the melancholy lyrics and Case’s spot-on delivery.

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Speaking of, Spoon is a band that faces the similar, ahem, challenge as the New Pornographers and the Pernice Brothers. And for better or worse Spoon made another Spoon album. For worse: it kept me from rushing out to buy it because I knew what to expect. For better: it’s a great Spoon album.  Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is one of my favorite albums of the year, though that doesn’t change the fact that Spoon albums have become different from each other only by degrees. The band is in danger of painting themselves into a corner—sounding like no one else but sounding like themselves too often. Songs like the excellent "The Ghost of You Lingers" hint that there might be a truly challenging album inside Britt Daniels; I hope he commits it to tape some time soon.

[Related, I liked a lot of what Green Pea-ness had to say about the album. In fact I like a lot of what’s being written at that blog, though it seems to have gone into hibernation as soon as I discovered it. Here’s hoping new posts come along soon.]

The Byrds, The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo
I first got into the Byrds a few years ago, and have been casually picking up the rest of their albums as they appeared in the used bin at Amoeba. After a long period of finding only miscellaneous collections of repackaged singles, I hit upon The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo within just a couple weeks. Now that casual interest has become a full-blown obsession.

The Byrds' evolution from folkies to country-rock fusionists on Sweetheart is no secret. Much has been said about the lasting influence of that album. But in the context of the Byrds’ own evolution in sound, apart from their effect on future generations of alt-country bands, I find The Notorious Byrd Brothers to be a much more interesting album. Unlike their previous albums, there is no standout track, no obvious single that anchors the rest of the record. Rather, the whole album moves from track to track very fluidly, in a way that sets an overall mood more so than previous efforts. So the peaks are not as high, but the album works much better as a piece in itself. It’s not just a collection of songs.

Previously I gave you “Draft Morning,” probably my favorite song on the album. Today, give "Change is Now" a try. It's a song that is usually considered to be foreshadowing of where the band was headed with Sweetheart of the Rodeo. In fact I think the country elements on Notorious are a more interesting type of country fusion, in that it fused country elements with the Byrds sound more subtly than on Sweetheart. Sweetheart is a great album, but it is such a break from the previous records that it’s hard to love it coming from the perspective of being a Byrds fan—as opposed to coming to the album as a fan of Gram Parsons, or looking for the roots of alt-country, or in any other way into the the album that doesn’t put the pre-Sweetheart Byrds first. Parsons's voice and songwriting are so distinct from Roger McGuinn’s or Chris Hillman’s that many of the songs feel wedged in. He just doesn't feel like a Byrd; when he sings lead, no one is singing harmony. And what is a Byrds song without harmonies? Perhaps unsurprisingly then, my favorite songs turned out to be the Dylan covers:  “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and "Nothing was Delivered."

Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom
I’ve long been under the impression that I should love Elvis Costello. I have My Aim is True, which I like, and I have a greatest hits package, which I like. Like, not love. In both cases I’ve found Costello to be fantastic song by song, but too many in a row just tires me out. I assumed I just had the “wrong” album to really make it click for me. So a friend of mine gave me This Year’s Model and Imperial Bedroom to try out. Like a magnet, I was pulled to This Year’s Model; something about Costello’s oeuvre has bred me to believe that the earlier the album the better, that you just can’t go wrong with the 70s stuff. But the same thing happened. Track by track: like it; like it; like it; like it. Album? Exhausted by the middle somewhere. I set it aside and was about to accept Costello for what he obviously was: someone I liked on shuffle, on mixes.

But there was Imperial Bedroom, with its awful early-80s album cover, timidly asking to be given its own fair shake. I put it on my iPod and listened to it straight through on a long walk. Suddenly, the key turned in the lock.

Maybe “suddenly” isn’t the right word: my first listen was tentative enjoyment. There are some screamingly 80s moments on this album—check that fretless bass on “Shabby Doll,” for instance—but at any rate this was a different Elvis, one that encouraged me to keep coming back to it. Many long walks later, Imperial Bedroom has become one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Like Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apochrypha, the album was a grower. On first listen I immediately loved the first two songs; on the next listen I loved the third song; and so on. I don’t love the entire album—I had to deselect “Long Honeymoon,” “Almost Blue,” and “Town Crier” in order for the album to have the kind of momentum that suits me. Those few tracks aside, I’ve been singing “Tears Before Bedtime” (which I gave you before) “Pidgin English,” and "The Loved Ones" regularly for two months now.

The best part about Imperial Bedroom is that it’s allowed me to return to This Year’s Model and My Aim is True and find a way to appreciate them in a way I wasn’t able to before. I’ve found my point of entry: I needed to find the Elvis that was a confident songwriter, able to uncurl his lip and knock the attitude down a notch or two. The songs on Imperial Bedroom are really allowed to speak for themselves. That’s not to say the earlier songs aren’t confidently done; but there is a certain sheen to that early stuff—was it merely his youth?— that kept me at arms length.

David Bowie, Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
Though Ziggy Stardust didn’t have quite as profound an effect on me as Imperial Bedroom, it did provide a nearly identical epiphany for Bowie as I had for Costello. Previously I had Hunky Dory and a greatest hits album. Same as Elvis: I liked all of it but didn’t feel any sense of urgency in picking up more Bowie albums. The same friend that proffered the Costello records threw in Ziggy Stardust as a bonus—an album I’ve always meant to get and just never got around to. That’s the problem with so many “blind spot” albums—they feel so familiar, it’s difficult to put the money on the counter when you’re at the record store looking for something new. But like I said last week, something about hearing a classic album in the order as it was intended opens new doors. I saw Bowie in a new light, not least because Ziggy opens with the fucking epic "Five Years"—a song so dramatic you’d think it more fitting as a closer. Instead it sets the tone for an album that, while never getting as dramatic as that opening song, is still full of daring material. (Incidentally, in the context of the other albums I’m listening to concurrently with this one, this whole album just makes Roger McGuinn’s “Space Odyssey,” the closing track on The Notorious Byrd Brothers, look like pathetic amateur tripe. Truly one of the worst Byrds songs recorded.)

The Beatles, Help! and Magical Mystery Tour
You might have gathered from my post last week that, among other things, I’ve recently picked up a couple Beatles albums. Yes indeed. Both Help! and Magical Mystery Tour illustrate one point I was trying to make in that post—the idea of understanding a band not only through an album but through a discography. Help!, for one, captures the band in transition from their Chuck Berry-inspired early albums to all those that came later, when the influences of their contemporaries started filtering in. The title track, "I Need You," and  "Another Girl" are all straightforward pop, but both Lennon and McCartney also contributed songs that went for emotional notes never before hit on a Beatles album, Lennon with “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and McCartney, of course, with “Yesterday.” They give Help! a depth that simply didn’t exist on prior albums.

Meanwhile Magical Mystery Tour is a curious album for showing how much better the band was getting, yet also showing how tiresome their absurdity was becoming.  Magical Mystery Tour is, to these ears, better than Sgt. Peppers, yet it suffers for coming second. Lennon in particular turns in some terrific work. "Blue Jay Way" was the surprise on the record for me—a rare Beatles song I’d never heard before, and one that is equal parts earworm and experiment.

Those are my best purchases of the last few months; what were yours? Let me know what's been keeping you occupied this summer.

Tomorrow, the rest of July–September; Wednesday, the worst of the bunch and the best of the year so far; Thursday, a look at what's coming out before the year is over.

I Think It's Time You Met the Beatles

I realized lately that for all my declarations, it’s been a while since I’ve really written about music (as opposed to the music industry). That’s partly because I spent most of this summer picking up more musical blind spots—albums I’ve never actually “processed” from beginning to end as the artist intended, despite knowing many or all the songs as filtered through thirty years of living on planet earth.

I was chatting with a friend of mine about this via email. We’ve known each other for fifteen years—we met in high school teaching each other different parts of “Holy Wars” in guitar class.  I was telling him about the many blind spots I’ve been filling in and his response was “You know, I always wondered if you were ever going to get into classic rock.” He was happy that we could talk about bands and albums that have been part of his musical language his entire life—it’s simply what he grew up with (me, I grew up with folkies). But at the same time, it’s a little shaming. I can’t help it: I’ve been a freak for music since I was a kid, but in the last few years I’ve really come to realize that much of my knowledge of pop’s history is more casual than I'd like.

The first record I ever owned was Meet the Beatles. A fitting first record, I think, and my parents had to have known that. (But why, when I was in kindergarten, did they buy Meet the Beatles for me, and not my older brother or sister? Did they see something in me at that young age? That album—purchased for me—was the only Beatles album in the house. But I digress.) Anyway, it was the only Beatles album I ever owned until I was a sophomore in college, when one of my roommates gave me Sgt. Peppers, again on vinyl, as a gift. The next Beatles album to land in my possession—Revolver—was a gift yet again, six years later, this time from my wife. Third time was the charm: I finally felt the need to fill in the entire discography (something I’m still working on, actually, though close to complete.)

There’s something a little poetic that my first three Beatles albums would come as gifts from these three people—parents to son; best friend to best friend; wife to husband. How's the song go? “Love, love, love?”

But still. I mean, it’s fucked up. I was 28 when I finally decided for myself that it was time to go to the record store and exchange dollar bills for an album by the greatest pop group of all time. Oh, and this was five years after my stint as a record store employee. Truly it’s unforgivable.

Of course it’s ludicrous to think I never “knew” the Beatles, despite never sitting down, alone—that part’s important—with one record from beginning to end. They’re simply too ubiquitous to not understand on a more than casual level whether you want to or not. Nevertheless it’s a significant experience to listen to Revolver and understand that “Taxman” came first, followed by “Eleanor Rigby,” and so on. To truly understand the Beatles beyond merely expert crafters of pop songs—to grasp each member’s role within the context of the album, how Lennon’s songs played off McCartney’s, how Harrison nearly steals the whole show in his rare appearances, even how Ringo’s one-song-per-album injects a necessary type of levity into each release (and importantly, to note that there is a variety of kinds of levity on each Beatles album)—can only be done through processing the album itself. Tracks out of context can be exquisite, but for the best artists a mere single is ultimately unfulfilling.

It was really a revelation though because here I thought I knew every freakin’ Beatles song ever written simply by dint of being alive. But it’s a whole ’nother experience when you hear them in proper order, as the band intended. Despite thinking there was nothing new to understand, even at age 28 it was like hearing them for the first time. As my friend said, “the first time is always like fucking Christmas!”

And for that matter it’s important not only to listen to an entire album from beginning to end, but to experience a discography, as I’ve been doing steadily for the Beatles—and many other groups—in the last many years. I’ll revisit this idea in the coming weeks (starting next week when I get into my quarterly installment of My Listening Hours).

I suppose I’m just navel-gazing. In fact I sat down to write this post not because I’m on a Beatles kick (I’m on a Byrds kick); and not because I wanted to even write about the Beatles (I was going to write about R.E.M.—boy, you should’ve seen the rough draft of this post!). Really what I wanted to get at is that thrill of discovery, so often followed by a bout of self-agonizing: why didn’t I know about this before?

There are a thousand bands or albums that can give you this feeling. My example of the Beatles is extreme, but surely we all experience this feeling regularly. Last year I heard Television’s Marquee Moon for the very first time and it had the same effect. What was your last revelation/humiliation?