Pretty Goes with Pretty

My Listening Hours: The Rest of April–June

With so many albums purchased in a short amount of time, you can imagine that some albums spent less time in my iPod than others. These are the albums—some quite good, others mediocre—that for whatever reason simply didn't latch onto me all the way. As for the worst of the bunch, come back a little later today and I'll run down that list too.

The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City
Kim Gordon put it pretty well when she was asked for her current playlist by the New York Times a couple weeks ago:

“Widow City” feels like a song cycle, the way some things repeat themselves. One song seems to lead to the next, almost like an opera.... This record is incessant, it’s so wordy and dense, it wakes you up. It’s almost annoying and irritating to listen to, but it’s also compelling. The lyrics seem kind of obsessive. It pulls you along with it. The lyrics are fragments of meaning that you could maybe relate to, but I don’t mind that I don’t know what the heck she’s talking about. The lyrics are very filmic. There are images that don’t make sense. It’s kind of an act of suspended disbelief listening to it...

Really, there's not a whole lot else to say. Okay, I'll say this: I think Widow City is bordering on totally brilliant. I would say I was obsessive about this record except for the fact that it is (intentionally) a little irritating and a lot difficult. It's not an easy listen. I actually have interior arguments with myself about whether or not I want to put it on: "I can't get 'Philadelphia Grand Jury' or 'Clear Signal from Cairo' out of my head! I should put this album on!" "Jesus, don't put this album on. It is exhausting; it doesn't know if it wants to sit or stand." I've only had the album for a couple weeks now; perhaps if I'd owned it longer it would have made into yesterday's batch of albums. It's difficult for me to tell, at the moment, whether I'll keep coming back to this album or whether, ultimately, I'll never go back to it again.

• The Fiery Furnaces, The Philadelphia Grand Jury

The Little Ones, Terry Tales & Fallen Gates
I like this album—I swear!—though I do wish it were just a hair better. I still eagerly look forward to the full-length, to be released some time this summer, supposedly. I am confidently optimistic that their best tunes are still ahead of them—hopefully just a month or two ahead of them.

• The Little Ones, Unlock the Door!

The Byrds, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde
The Byrds are probably my #1 favorite pre-1980s band. (Getting into all-time rankings, off the top of my head, they gotta start wrestling with R.E.M. at the very least.) They’re a relatively new discovery for me—my brilliant wife turned me onto Younger than Yesterday about four years ago—but in the last couple years I’ve slowly been picking up their albums in chronological order. Hence last year you've seen me going on about The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Now I’m officially out of the original-lineup territory. Dr. Byrds was the first album for which Roger McGuinn assembled an entirely new band—and rather hastily, I might add. Their resulting first outing is… okay. The title of the album refers to constant shifting between the country direction they’d been heading in over the last two albums and a more psychedelic sound closer in intent to Fifth Dimension. The genre-jumping isn’t too jarring—that’s not the flaw. It’s just not that special. I hear it gets better (then worse). Untitled is next on the list, as soon as I see it used at Amoeba.

• The Byrds, This Wheel's on Fire

R.E.M., Accelerate
So, given what I just said above, you can imagine I was in line for the new R.E.M. My expectations were in check, though. I’d heard “Supernatural Superserious” and thought it was okay but not amazing. It’s difficult to talk about a new R.E.M. album without addressing the albatross that is everything post-Bill Berry, so just for the record: I like most of the post-Berry stuff just fine. Sure, Around the Sun was 90% turd, but Up and Reveal—especially Reveal—get a huge bum rap. So my approach to a new R.E.M. is not “will they ever halt their downward slide?” but rather “I hope their one and only crap album was just an aberration.”

That said, Accelerate. It’s perfectly solid and totally mediocre. I won’t skip the songs when they come up on shuffle—does that count for anything? It gets HUGE props for avoiding anything resembling “The Outsiders,” the trainwreck of a collaboration with Q-Tip from the last album which by the way was the lowest point in the band’s history. At the same time, there’s nothing on this album that is better than “The Ascent of Man,” which was the high point of Around the Sun. Points for rocking, but I’m not convinced they mean it. The suit doesn’t quite fit like it used to.

• R.E.M., Houston

The Beau Brummels, Triangle and Bradley’s Barn
The Beau Brummels were a group of also-rans from the the 60s California scene. Perhaps if they'd moved south from San Francisco to Laurel Canyon they might have had a little more success. Their music fits in well with that scene—a mixture of rock, folk, and country (the latter more apparent on Bradley's Barn than on Triangle). Sal Valentino's voice is the defining trait of the band's sound; it's a deep voice with a natural vibrato (think a more masculine Devandra Banhart), up front in the mix and seldom layered with any harmonies. It's a unique voice but iit can also become a little wearying after a full album. I'm finding that I like the BBs most when I hear single tracks pop up on shuffle, rather than listening to ten in a row.

• The Beau Brummels, Are You Happy? (from Triangle)
• The Beau Brummels, Deep Water (from Bradley's Barn)

Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos
When I became enamored with Big Star’s #1 Record, I had no idea just how much of that was due to Chris Bell. I guess I just didn’t get how much of a presence he was on the album (it doesn’t help that his and Alex Chilton’s voices are not that distinct from each other). Thankfully a few of you commenters steered me to Bell’s one and only solo album. Any Big Star fans out there who, like me, love #1 Record but are cooler on Radio City and Third/Sister Lover, seek this one out. It’s by no means a perfect record—there’s a lot of religiosity that puts me off, and some of the 70s-isms just don’t work—but when Bell goes soft, as on “You and Your Sister,” it’s like returning to the best ballads of Big Star’s debut. Over the long haul—I’ve had the album for almost three months now—I don’t feel drawn to keep putting it on; but I’ve made a little Fantasy Big Star album, made up of my favorite tracks from this, Radio City, and Third/Sister Lover, which does a good job of simulating the ideal follow-up to #1 Record.

• Chris Bell, I Am the Cosmos

Bob Lind, Since There Were Circles
I came across this album via a post by Brendan at The Rising Storm, where I fell in love with the country-inflected "Loser." Lind's voice occupies similar territory as Neil Diamond or Lee Hazelwood—which I'm inclined to describe as "sandpapery." Lind isn't as creepy as Hazelwood or as robust as Diamond, though. He's got a little more ache in his delivery. The majority of this album is solid if not spectacular, with both "Loser" and the title track being the biggest standouts. I get a real kick out the chorus to the latter: "How long have I loved you? Since there were circles." Wow. That's a really long time. In all seriousness, though, I think the song has a real gravity to it. His love is not lighthearted, nor is it stalkerish; he's simply not joking around. 

• Bob Lind, Since There Were Circles

Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking
This was my first Fairport Convention album, though they've been on my radar for quite a long time. I'd been advised in the past to begin with Liege & Leaf, but darn it if the library didn't have that one. So Unhalfbricking it had to be. No matter: I quite like the album, or half of it at least. To some degree it's still sinking in with me; I don't feel like I've fully digested it yet, despite I-don't-know-how-many listens. The freer, looser material resonates with me a lot more than the Ye Olde Traditional stuff. Hence I think "A Sailor's Life," with its rustling rhythms in the beginning morphing into a guitar/violin jam are fantastic, while the more traditional folk style of "Cajun Woman" is, for me, less compelling.

• Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where the Time Goes

The Tough Alliance, A New Chance
Not a bad record, though a little repetitive (and cheesy as all get out). I wish the singer had a little more range or knew a few more melodies, as the tracks get harder and harder to differentiate as the album goes on. That said, not a bad workout record, though it's really just not where my head is at right now. Can you tell I'm not the one in the family that picked this album up? I'm ambivalent.

• The Tough Alliance, Looking for Gold

 

PGWP's Greatest Guitar Songs (That I Can Think of at the Moment)

Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time captures the typical idea of a great "guitar"—for the most part thick, chunky, riffs and howling, blues-jam solos. But what I think of as excellent guitarwork has little to do with anything the likes of Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn have ever done. The best guitar songs to me are muddy, textural, more concerned with atmosphere and aesthetic than with technical proficiency. No, I don't mean punk—in fact sometimes it still means a jamming solo. Other times it means a simple chord or progression, played to fragile perfection. Here's a dozen tracks (in almost chronological order) that, on a cursory look through my collection, totally kill me from a guitar-playing perspective (including some overlap with RS's list).

• The Byrds, Eight Miles High (1966)

The genius of this song, beyond the Coltrane and raga influences, is the way Roger McGuinn took the quintessential Byrds instrument—the twelve-string—and applied it in a wholly different way. This isn't the ringing arpeggios of "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; this is the lead. Despite having the exact same instrumentation as any other Byrds song, "Eight Miles High" sounds unlike the rest of their material, and it's all due to that twelve-string lead, which sounds like the aural equivalent of a scribbling crayon.

• 13th Floor Elevators, Slip Inside This House (1967)

This epic track is hardly stunning for its guitar solo, which lasts less than thirty seconds near the end of the eight-minute track and is comprised of all of five notes. Yet this song, to me, is all about the guitar. The tone of the guitar is just fantastic—not much treble, and the distortion sounds like there is literally just a tear in the amp’s speaker. Then there’s the riff that carries the song, that propulsive slide up the neck over John Ike Walton’s marching beat. The song is ominous in its repetition.

• The Electric Prunes, General Confessional (1968)

This is probably my favorite Electric Prunes song, and it would be unfair to say it succeeds purely because of the guitar. Every component of this near-instrumental is flawless: the organ, the drums—the drums!—the strings, and the guitars. As far as that guitar goes, again like the Elevators I just love the tone, which sounds as if it were made of glass during the rhythm portions and then becomes a sharp, tinny spike during the solo. Interestingly, looking at the wikipedia page for this album, it’s no wonder every player on this track kills it—they were apparently all session musicians and not actually the Prunes themselves!

• Fairport Convention, A Sailor's Life (1969)
• Neil Young, Down by the River (1969)

Both of these tracks (and the albums they come from) are fairly new to me—purchased within the last three months or so. Listening to them at different times, I had the same thought pass through my head: “I bet this blew young Tom Verlaine’s mind when this came out.” Both albums were released in 1969, when Verlaine was 20. He’d go on to throw down the gauntlet eight years later with his own guitar classic, “Marquee Moon.”

• Television, Marquee Moon (1977)
• Drive Like Jehu, Luau (1994)

Likewise, hearing “Marquee Moon” for the first time only about two years ago, I had the immediate understanding of what made John Reis’s mind tick when it came to Drive Like Jehu (who I've gone on about before—including more about this song in particular). Sure, Jehu was a lot noisier and more chaotic, but the germ for their aesthetic is there.

• My Bloody Valentine, To Here Knows When (1992)

Any song from Loveless belongs on this kind of list (Rolling Stone picked the opener, “Only Shallow”). Without understating the impact of the entirety of the album, I picked “To Here Knows When”—the song in which the guitars are at their most abstracted. The whammy-effected warping is there, but the whole notion of hitting a string with your pick seems to be absent. The guitar sound is totally effaced; it could very well be all synthesizers or samples. The song is MBV at its least rocking, least melodic, most blurred, most lush.

• The Dirty Three, Distant Shore (1998)

Like the MBV pick this is one song to illustrate the overall greatness of Mick Turner. His delicate chords are the heart of the Dirty Three’s sound—he keeps each song grounded while Warren Ellis’s violin takes center stage. But listen to those chords! Turner’s fingers sound as if they can barley stay on the fretboard long enough to let the notes ring out. Stray notes sneak into every Dirty Three song and they’re all the more beautiful for it. It’s an extremely subtle playing style but he absolutely raises the level of every song he’s on. I’ve said this before, but Turner is precisely the reason why Cat Power’s Moon Pix is her best album. Listen to any of the songs from that record—take American Flag, for instance—and listen to the guitarwork, how fragile it is. That’s not Chan Marshall playing guitar. That’s Mick Turner.

• Low, Born by the Wires (1998)

I’ve written about this song before, so you may know my feelings already. Suffice to say I could listen to that single, beautifully moody chord for hours. At their best, Low make you listen; they make you appreciate the smallest changes. I like to play this song loud, and one of my favorite parts comes in the last minute of the song when Alan Sparhawk has stopped playing the chord, instead letting a low, humming feedback build—and he just touches a string. It’s a short, taut sound and it makes my ears twitch every time I hear it. To me that one moment is the whole point of the song, and it’s a guitar lesson in and of itself.

• Sigur Rós, Svefn-G-Englar (1999)

The breakout track on Sigur Rós’s breakout album has never been topped by the band. It is pure transcendence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a track that evokes the feeling of floating quite so perfectly as this. Not to mention that sudden, brief chord change midway through. This song is a lesson in dynamics, in tension and release—put to use in toward beauty, which is not often the intent for post-rock bands—that I think not even Sigur Rós has quite grasped ever since.

What do you think? What are some of your personal favorite guitar songs, or guitar moments?

Great Post Alert: Setting the Woods on Fire

Paul at Setting the Woods on Fire has an excellent beginner's guide to the roots of "country-rock," rightly digging deeper beyond Sweetheart of the Rodeo. A great collection of mp3s from the Byrds, Gene Clark, Buck Owens, and many more. Start exploring.

Drawing a Line

As an addendum to Tuesday's post, I've had this post, again from the Existence Machine, bookmarked for an obscenely long time, meaning to respond to it. Richard's post is about unexpectedly liking a Stephen Stills album, and he goes into the idea of "drawing the line" as far as what roads he can or will go down in terms of his taste and/or purchasing decisions. He wrote the post partly in response to one of my posts about the Byrds. Here at pgwp he commented “I was perfectly happy not bothering with the Byrds. You can't listen to everything, so you have to make decisions, even unfair ones. The Byrds got dropped from serious consideration years ago."  He elaborated at his own site on both the Byrds and Stills:

I confess that I never expected to have the slightest interest in a Stephen Stills solo album. For one thing, the music he'd been associated with didn't thrill me: the ubiquity of "For What It's Worth" obscured its quality, and I didn't really like Crosby, Stills, & Nash. Another reason is that you have to draw the line somewhere. ... Early encounters consigned [the Byrds] to the effective dustbin in my mind (I hated "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and wasn't fond of their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man"), though later I suspected that if I took the time with them, I'd find a lot there to appreciate. With Stills, I found it easy to completely ignore not just his solo material, but anything related to Crosby, Stills, & Nash (other then Neil Young)...

The idea of "drawing a line" stuck with me. We all draw the line somewhere, choosing not to go down a road however worthwhile it may or may not be. For instance, I flirted with hip hop (underground and mainstream) when I was in college working at a record store, but I've since left that avenue unexplored and have fallen way behind (anyone care to update me one what's gone on in hip hop since, say, Black Star's album? Whatever happened to those guys?). The idea of even trying to get back into hip hop is daunting, both in terms of the number of albums I'd need to pick up to feel caught up and the sheer number of dollars that would require. So, I've drawn the line.

On the other hand, there are other genres I'm equally unfamiliar with beyond the surfacemost knowledge, which in a way I'm saving for later. While I own a few Philip Glass and Steven Reich albums, and a box set with material from Stockhausen,  Cage, Riley, etc., I've never truly immersed myself in contemporary composers.  The entire genre is like a continent I haven't been able to get to yet. But I know it's in my future and I will savor the experience when I get there.

This sort of goes to sroden's comments in my previous post:

single trajectories are the path of the anal... multiple trajectories are for the messy. i think that the deeply personal messy connections that are born where multiple trajectories meet, keeps us human and full of musical loves.

It's a sentiment I agree with. As I said in my response to that, also in the comments: I'm not wholly obsessed with Laurel Canyon. I do listen to other stuff. But I think all of us (right?) have little phases or mini-trajectories within the bigger picture of our personal life-long musical consumption. In the sense that I listen to "everything," I have reggae, latin, punk, rap, soul, doo-wop, folk, contemporary composers, and plenty else in my collection—at my fingertips, thanks to iTunes. But I hardly know all those genres. And for me there's few better feelings than knowing a music.

Do I Want to Go There?

Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there?

I asked myself this question, at least a little facetiously, in a post a couple weeks back. If you've followed this blog at all in the last year, you know many of my listening hours have been spent with the Byrds, which led in turn to more groups from the late-60s/early-70s Laurel Canyon scene. I've slowly been following that trajectory into the 70s with mixed results—Joni is great, Fleetwood Mac has many great moments, America is offensively awful. Despite some misfires, I'm still undeterred in exploring this area of pop music (with the help of the Rising Storm, among others).

The thing is, I know where this ends: The Eagles. The Fucking Eagles. Connecting the dots, the line doesn't get much straighter moving from the Byrds to CSNY to the Eagles. The bands sprang literally from the same landscape, separated only by a few years.

And I know it just ain't gonna happen for me. I've loathed the Henley et al. ever since I was a wee lad watching Henley's ugly old face sullying my MTV. At some point, as I mine this period of pop music, I just know I'm going to come to a point where I say "enough." (Eagles aside, I know that many of my beloved Byrds went on to make some pretty crap records.)

Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there? In the context of Laurel Canyon it's easy to mock that question. It's easy, as Richard did in the comments to that original post, to presume that I'm "worried" about where my tastes are going. (Granted, I've worried in the past.) But the fact is that with any sub-genre in which one gets thoroughly immersed, the answer, sooner or later, is no. No, you don't want to go there.

This simple truth occurred to me when I was having a discussion elsewhere about post-rock bands from the 90s—the many bands that were coming out of or inspired by the Louisville/Chicago axis: Slint, Rodan, Tortoise, June of 44, Rex, Him, the For Carnation, Shipping News, Ativin, A Minor Forest, Ui, Dianogah, To Rococo Rot, Kriedler, et alia ad infinitum. These bands were everywhere for a long time, including my own collection, and now they've largely fallen out of fashion both at large and in my personal estimation. Sure, I still have a soft spot for certain songs here and there (Ani-sette! Anisette!), but in general I cringe at the idea of listening to a band with two bass players or a baritone guitar playing angular riffs with all downstrokes, stark drumming playing in odd time signatures and stop-start beats.

Can't the same be said for any sub-genre? To love the harmonies and easy feelings of the Byrds must mean an inevitable loathing of the Eagles. To have your mind blown by Tortoise's blend of Ennio Morricone, Steven Reich, Can, and Miles Davis is to be inevitably underwhelmed by Ui's moody funk.

Some sub-genres go deeper than others, depending on your taste. One could spend years with "alt" country before noticing a vague sense of boredom with the latest Jay Farrar release; or maybe get one's fill of, I don't know illbient or dubstep, after just a couple albums and artists. There's a distinction to be made between genres and sub-genres (or even sub-sub-genres), of course. One could devote one's lifetime to the larger umbrella of country or electronic music. Despite not being very interested in post-rock, I'm still neck deep in indie rock (including a liking or at least awareness of bands like Battles or TV on the Radio, who are obvious descendents of 90s post-rock). It's the difference, I guess, between the interstate and the access road. You can travel on the latter for a stretch with some success, maybe passing by the gridlock of the genre at large; but eventually you run out of road.

Everyone has ruts: some impression that, well, music sucks. I just can't find anything interesting right now. But of course it's not music that sucks; you've just run out of road and it's time to get back on the interstate. Where are my tastes taking me? Do I want to go there? Yeah, for a while longer.

My Listening Year: Best Discoveries of 2007 (Blind Spot Edition)

2007 was a great year for new releases, but even better for all the blind spots I filled in. I unintentionally had a very 70s year—seventeen out of my twenty-eight blind spot purchases were released in that decade. That's a good thing. Talk about blind spots: as a whole, I think the 70s were one of the least represented decades in my collection until this year.

Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom [mp3: "Human Hands"]
Hands down the biggest surprise of the year for me. I'd already made my mind up about Costello—I like him, but I don't like him like him. So when I picked up Imperial Bedroom and This Year's Model, it was really a matter of "eh, why not?" I was so ambivalent about it that I didn't even listen to Imperial Bedroom right away. Good thing I finally did, as the album turned out to be among my most-listened-to albums of the year. Like I said about Armchair Apocrypha last week, this is one of those wonderful albums where every song, at one point or another, is your favorite song. For the first time I consider myself a fan of Costello's, and will likely pick up more of his albums in the near future (starting with those from the same era as Bedroom.)

Big Star, #1 Record [mp3: "The India Song"]
As with Costello, I had no real expectations for Big Star, and picked up #1 Record/Radio City on a lark. Based on Third/Sister Lover, I thought I'd already made up my mind. I'm so thankful I gave these guys another chance! I've been listening to #1 Record pretty obsessively since getting it a couple months ago. My sense is that this might be the only Alex Chilton album I really need, however. The other Big Star albums, to my ears, descend in quality (Radio City is pretty good, not great, and Third/Sister Lover is unfocused). Somebody help me out—does his solo material change tack?

The Byrds, The Notorious Byrd Brothers [mp3: "Wasn't Born to Follow"]
Going into 2007, I knew it was going to be a year for the Byrds.  And it was: I picked up three Byrds albums total, in addition to the three I already owned. They were all great, each in their own way, but The Notorious Byrd Brothers sets itself apart in my eyes. For all the accolades Sweetheart of the Rodeo gets, Notorious is a far more interesting fusion of country and rock because it is more subtle. Gram Parsons's contributions to Sweetheart are fine, but they're also totally transparent, in that they simply are country and bluegrass, sharing album space with McGuinn's folk-rock tunes. Notorious is, from beginning to end, a Byrds album which has integrated the lapsteel and largely set the twelve-string acoustic aside. Crosby's excellent harmonies are still there, and neither Parsons nor Dylan's fingerprints are anywhere to be seen. It's not the perfect Byrds album (in fact, I don't think there is one), but it's the most interesting. It's still the Byrds, but you can hear, quite obviously, that the band was growing artistically. Sadly, it was the swan song for the original lineup, so there's no telling where the group would have gone if they'd stuck it out.

Joni Mitchell, Court & Spark [mp3: "Free Man in Paris"] and Blue [mp3:  "Carey"]
If anything, my Byrds fascination has grown to a near untenable obsession with their entire scene. in addition to steadily tracking down all of their albums, I've begun delving into the Laurel Canyon scene of the 60s and 70s. That's brought me to Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell so far, with a long list of others I want to pick up. Mitchell in particular has turned out to be a terrific discovery for me (actually it was my brilliant wife who picked up Court & Spark).  I didn't fall immediately in love with this album, or with Mitchell in general. The first half was immediately engaging, but it sort of fell off after the midway point. Mitchell, left by herself, has some tics that were/are repellant to me, particulalry on first listen. Mostly it's the way her voice jumps into the upper register almost at random, or the way she seems to squeeze as many syllables into her lyrics as she damn well pleases, meter be damned. It's offputting. Nevertheless I liked enough of Court & Spark to give another album a chance. So I bought Blue. On first listens I was disappointed to find that this was a sparser album, none of the full-band treatment as on "Help Me" or "Free Man in Paris." But as time goes by I'm finding Blue to be the stronger album, and I'm coming around on all of Mitchell's quirks. There's still something kind of antagonistic in my listening relationship with Mitchell, but that's precisely what keeps me coming back to her.

My Listening Hours: The Rest of October–November

The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
I'm not sure why it took me so long to pick up Fifth Dimension. Back when I first realized how much I liked the Byrds I went on a downloading spree, and everything I picked up from this album was excellent—"Mr. Spaceman," "5D," "Hey Joe," and of course "Eight Miles High," arguably (and a great argument it'd be) the best song the band ever did. Unfortunately my expectations were dashed when I finally picked up the album. Turns out this is the most inconsistent of the Byrds albums I've heard (i.e., all the albums prior to Roger McGuinn taking sole ownership of the band). There were a couple of great tracks to be had in addition to those I already owned, especially David Crosby's songwriting debut, "What's Happening," but otherwise Fifth Dimension probably has the largest quantity of questionable tunes—particularly the ghost-of-Hiroshima-narrated "I Stand at Every Door" and the nosediving trio of tunes closing out the album, "Captain Soul," "John Riley," and "The Lear Jet Song."

That this album could have some of the band's best work as well as some its worst is interesting to me. This is the first album without Gene Clark, who was the primary songwriter on the first two releases. For most bands this would have been a bigger blow, but the Byrds' overall sound was too strong.  This goes back to my post from last month, "the song vs. the sound." I was watching a documentary about 60s bands on VH1 Classics the other day and McGuinn explained the Byrds' vocal sound on the first two records: although Clark wrote most of the originals, he and McGuinn would double the lead vocal. Crosby was the only one singing harmony, but he did so in a way that he floated between thirds and fifths, not sticking to one harmonic area as, say, a Beach Boy would. Thus what was essentially a two-part harmony sounded much fuller. It makes sense then that Clark's absence, sonically, is barely noticable on Fifth Dimension, but that 5D is also the weakest of the Byrds albums in terms of songwriting (it's worth noting that "Eight Miles High" is chiefly Clark's song, too—though it's McGuinn who's playing that brilliant guitar solo, which sounds like the aural equivalent of scribbling crayons). On the other hand, since the Byrds had always loaded their albums with covers, most of which were interpreted by McGuinn, they ultimately survived Clark's departure, apparently, without too much trouble. (And on their next album, Younger Than Yesterday, bassist Chris Hillman, who'd been there all along, suddenly blossomed into the best songwriter of the bunch!)

Gene Clark, No Other
As Gene Clark was the first Byrd to go solo, it seems right that his should be the first solo album I check out. Based on a lot of good things said at ILM, I assumed No Other was the place to start. Settling in to hear some post-Byrds folk rock, I was surprised to find that this was more along the lines of bloated 70s MOR rock—full band replete with a bevy of backup singers, meandering seven-minute epics mostly concerned with rivers and ravens; even a near-Vangelis closer. There are a few songs I like—the opener, "Life's Greatest Fool," for instance (the end kinda reminds me of Bowie's backup vocals on Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love")—though most of the album is just average. My error was assuming that this was an early Clark album. In fact he'd done four albums prior to this one—two folky solo albums and two country-influenced albums with Doug Dillard. Based on the strength of his contributions to the Byrds, I'm not done with Clark; I just need start over, in chronological order.

Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue
Speaking of 70s MOR... I had a twofer this month. I had a few songs from Dennis Wilson's out-of-print Pacific Ocean Blue lying around my iTunes, but after reading this Popmatters article I sought out the rest. Don't believe the hype: this album isn't bad, but it hardly deserves to be mythologized. It's ambitious, it's not commercially viable, it's by a troubled Wilson lad—the one who died, no less—but it's just not that good. There are some serious bright spots—"River Song" for instance—but POB also suffers from too much navel-gazing, no real hooks, and Wilson's gravelly, often downright shitty voice. It's actually hard to believe that this voice belongs to a Beach Boy. I'm glad I heard the entire album, especially because I do like a handful of the tracks, but there's nothing truly illuminating here.

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
What does it say about me that I'm a huge Byrds fan yet I’ve never found my way into Dylan? Something about him—maybe it's his voice, maybe his delivery, maybe the way his cultural importance has been forced on me since I was a child—has kept me from enjoying his work. A few years ago my wife bought Blonde on Blonde and I just couldn’t feel it. Thinking it was time to try again, I picked up Blood on the Tracks. For a few minutes there—“Tangled Up in Blue”! “Idiot Wind”!—I thought I might have finally found my point of entry. Alas, after a few days the urgency calmed down and I haven’t really gone back to digest this album any further. It made a dent—I don’t dislike Dylan—but I’m still not crazy for him.

Fleetwood Mac, Rumors
I want to like Rumors more, but the fact is many of the songs here simply don’t belong to me. “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way”: these belong to my parents and their generation. They belong to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. They belong to a bunch of assholes who think they don’t make music like they used to, cluelessly not understanding that a lot of their music sucks. What gets me about Fleetwood Mac though is that they do just enough songs that I like—usually thanks to Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham is really the saving grace of this band; songs like "Second Hand News" and "Never Going Back Again" are interestingly crafted pop songs. I’m curious to hear the Buckingham/Nicks album that preceded their joining FM, though it’s out of print. And in the comments to yesterday's post I'm told by blckdgrd that Buckingham's post-Mac albums are also worth checking out.

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, s/t
Spiritualized, Lazer Guided Melodies
Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
I can say the same thing about all three of these albums: they're all great, each in their own way. I know that I will go back to each of these albums continually. They're the kind of records I'll just keep putting on when I'm not in the mood for my personally more obvious choices. But in the meantime—maybe because I just had too much other stuff to listen to—these ultimately didn't stick to my iPod as much as I'd expect. I recognize that I like them but I'm not running out the door to tell my friends about them (anyway, my friends already know about them). I do intend to pick up more albums by each band, though (not Pink Floyd, but Syd Barrett).

Big Star, Radio City
Sorry Radio City, I just couldn’t stop listening to #1 Record long enough to give you a chance. And when I tried, I spent most my time wishing you were as good as #1 Record.

R.E.M., Around the Sun
I am a fan of post-Berry R.E.M. albums, honest. I think Reveal is vastly underrated and Up gets a little draggy toward the end but is still a worthwhile album. Thus I didn’t approach Around the Sun with the assumption that it would be total crap, as most mentions of this album would have me believe. In fact this album does have some very nice moments; it starts strong and has a compelling final third ("The Ascent of Man" plods a little but I like it anyway), but the middle of this album… ugh, it really does hit some of the lowest points in R.E.M.’s history. “The Outsiders,” with special has-been Q-Tip, has got to be the most misguided songs—certainly the laziest—in the band’s discography. It’s almost bad enough to ruin the entire album. As a completist, I’m glad to finally get this album, though I don’t feel bad for taking two years to pick it up. It is easily their worst album. Unlike a lot of other naysayers, however, I feel like this is an aberration in an otherwise strong catalogue, not further evidence of a steady decline. I remain optimistic for the next one.

Beirut, The Flying Cup Club
Despite my first impression, The Flying Cup Club turned out to be a fine album. It is certainly the best thing Beirut has done thus far in his brief career, and I remain optimistic for his next album, provided he heeds my advice.

Radiohead, In Rainbows
Here’s something weird. I listened to In Rainbows pretty much nonstop for two weeks straight. And then one day, I stopped. And I don’t feel the need to listen to it again. And I don’t foresee myself needing to listen to it again in the future, either. [previously: my full review]

Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
I have little to say about this one right now, as I just picked it up a day ago and haven't really digested it yet. I will say that it's immediately obvious that this is Iron & Wine's best album, and that it will likely make my end of the year list.

My Listening Hours: The Rest of July–September

Blonde Redhead, 23
Without trying, every single Blonde Redhead album has come into my possession at one point or another. I’ve managed to follow and assess their career with each release, though I haven’t truly felt compelled to do so since somewhere around their fourth album. That’s not to say I don’t like them, however—just ambivalent. At any rate, Blonde Redhead have been continually refining their sound with each subsequent album, shaving off their ragged edges long ago in favor of something more atmospheric and moody. 23 picks up where Misery of a Butterfly left off, getting even more atmospheric and moody. The album is good but not perfect. It’s biggest fault is its sequencing—three similar-sounding Kazu Makino-fronted songs lead off the album before Amedeo Pace’s voice finally makes an appearance. The interplay between the two voices is a major part of what makes Blonde Redhead so enjoyable to listen to; when one overtakes the other, the album suffers. Not to mention, Pace’s songs are the better songs this time around.  Aside from sequencing, Blonde Redhead have by now refined their sound so much that it’s become predictable: propulsive drums, minor-key arpeggios, blurry soundscapes filling in the white space. All that really sets one song apart from the other is who’s singing (best is when they both sing, as on "Publisher"). Ultimately the band has settled into a sound that has become inessential unless you’re their biggest fan, blind to their imperfections, or you’re a casual fan looking to be sated by one Blonde Redhead and one album only.

Elvis Costello, This Year’s Model
Picking up from yesterday’s post on Imperial Bedroom… once I went back to This Year’s Model after falling in love with the later album, it seemed, well, obviously good. Whatever it was about Costello that I was having trouble getting past had all but evaporated. Suddenly every track here was better; nothing was blending together as it had before. Everything from “No Action” to "Night Rally" was rocking my socks off. The only reason the album finds itself in with “the rest” is that, frankly, when I put this album on a part of me wonders why I’m not listening to the other album.

Buffalo Springfield, s/t
My Byrds obsession is spiraling out of control. Keeping up with the many lineups of the band, who came from where and went on to do what, requires some serious research. Mostly that’s been done by wasting countless hours on wikipedia and searching old threads at I Love Music. Now the universe of Southern California bands from the 60s and 70s has opened up to me. Previously I’d never really associated Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, et al. with any one location or era. Hence a number of the albums being outlined in this post all come from a certain time and place: thus we come to Buffalo Springfield’s first album. It’s good but not essential. Their biggest hit, “For What it’s Worth,” leads off the album and feels completely separate from the rest of the record. Its production values are different, its lyrics more direct, and everything about it feels more sophisticated than the other ten tracks. The rest of the album feels like solid but run-of-the-mill 60s rock. It is kinda fun, though, to hear lil’ Neil Young singing utterly straightforward 60s pop tunes. His "Out of My Mind" is the highlight of the album.

Emmylou Harris, Elite Hotel
I bought this the same day I bought Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and that may have been this album’s downfall for me. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but my tolerance for the lap-steel was tested between the two albums. It was simply too much of the same instrument, played the same way and used to the same effect, in the span of one period of time spent listening to albums. I began unfairly comparing the two albums, and as far as my personal tastes go, when I’m forced to compare something to the Byrds, it’s an easy bet where I’m going to place my affection.

All that is to say that this album did not ultimately take up a great deal of my listening hours. The association with the Byrds album will fade in time, and I’ll begin to hear this album in its own context. My impressions thus far: it flips back and forth between yearning ballads and bluegrass stompers, with not a lot of nuance in between. I find that I like both categories (including her cover of “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and the raucous fun of "Feelin' Single, Seein' Double"), but no one song has fully embraced me.

Joni Mitchell, Blue
If you’d have asked me six months ago what I thought of Joni Mitchell, I’d have told you I could take or leave her, more likely leave her. But my wife became enamored with her and picked up Court and Spark. I was blindsided! I liked it way more than I expected to, and I went on about it in the last MLH roundup. Then a few weeks ago, wandering Amoeba all by my lonesome, ostensibly to buy the New Pornographers album, by golly I found myself leafing through the Mitchell bins and there was Blue, supposedly her best album, used for $7. I couldn’t pass it up.

I like the album but it hasn’t grabbed me the way Court and Spark did. It has a lot of the same elements as that album, minus one thing—all those great harmonies (though I do like "This Flight Tonight"—that little production hiccup partway through is wonderful). Blue feels much more like a “solo” album—it’s mostly just Joni and her guitar. Whereas my favorite tracks from C&S were those that had more of a full band sound. (Anyone reading this a Joni fan? Is there an album by Mitchell that picks up where “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” left off?)

Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Crooked Rain has had a weird effect on me. This album came out when I was in high school; I’ve had a casual familiarity with it in the last fifteen years from its airplay on Alternative Nation and the love my college roommate showered on all of Pavement’s albums (early stuff more than this one, though). Yet I can’t say I’ve ever spent alone-time with it, which for me is essential if I ever want to claim that I’ve “heard” a record. All that said, when I listen to Crooked Rain, I immediately become nostalgic for high school. I think of off-campus lunches, classmates with colored sunglasses and doc martins, driving my crappy 1976 Toyota Celica to my local Tower Records. Yet Crooked Rain was the soundtrack to none of that. Somehow it has insinuated itself into my memories, as if I bought it the same day I picked up Automatic for the People or the first Weezer album. That’s not to say I have negative associations with that era of my life, but I’m finding it difficult to simply enjoy this album on its own merits. All of my mental associations—fuck dude, I went to a renaissance fair in Tulare one weekend in 1994; why am I thinking about that?—are destroying my honest experience of this album.

Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days
I bought Sam Beam’s first album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, when it was first released. I liked it but felt sated—I felt no real need to continue following his work.  Then the mp3s for his new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, started floating around and I thought they were fantastic—particularly “The Boy with the Coin.” In anticipation of that album, I went for this one. It’s pleasant. I put it on when I want something mellow and nice and... pleasant. I can’t say it knocks me out. Part of that might be because this album, unlike most albums by most artists, takes a long time—half the record—to really get good. Beginning with "Each Coming Night," Our Endless Numbered Days is pretty outstanding. But there are seven tracks prior to that that float right by. There’s enough to keep me coming back to the album, though I’m not moved by it. That said, I can still hear growth from the first album to the second, and I remain optimistic about the third.

Iggy Pop, Lust for Life
Lust for Life has the opposite problem of Our Endless Numbered Days; that is, it's got an outstanding first half and then loses the plot at the midpoint. Each song here is really a vamp on one idea, so their success hinges on whether that idea is sustainable for more than a minute or two. You already know which songs do it well—they're the ones that have been used for Cialis commercials. But somewhere around the last few minutes of "Here Comes Success," the vamping gets tiresome. The last three tracks on this album are bluesy jams, each with nice moments here or there, but all ultimately lacking the inspiration of the first half of the record.

Velvet Underground, Loaded
Loaded is probably the spottiest of the Velvet Underground's four albums, though it does contain one of my favorite VU songs, "I Found a Reason." Personally, my favorite VU songs are the more somber ones; Loaded has its share, but it also has some questionable rockers ("Head Held High," in particular). There's some great stuff here, but when I'm in the mood for the Velvets—my Velvets—I'll probably choose their third, self-titled album over this one.

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.