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.

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 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.