Author Archive for Joe O'Brien

Sharon Van Etten: Tramp

Joe O'Brien, January 30, 2012 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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Sharon Van Etten’s voice is one of the loveliest things in music right now, a bright October sunset with a teaspoon of grit.  (It’s even better when she does harmonies too.)  Her voice would feel right at home on a wobbly stool in an East Village cafe, or on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, or sprawled atop a grand piano like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

One thing Van Etten’s voice does really well is sigh, and I love that about it.  I sigh a lot myself, mostly out of fist-clenching frustration, but also, of course, from fatigue, satisfaction, melancholy, and bemusement.  Yet Van Etten’s latest album Tramp sighs way too much, even for me.

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Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas

Joe O'Brien, January 29, 2012 in Music Reviews. 2 Comments Tags: , .

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Every lyric’s a gruff whisper, like he’s uttering dying words.  “I’ve got no future/ I know my days are few/ the present’s not that pleasant/ just a lot of things to do.” He carries each tune fine enough, though he needs his shooby-doop backup singers to show just how sublime those tunes really are.  Like so many old men he can be happily stubborn, but unlike so many old men, he sounds legitimately virile.  He lounges amid the kind of shamelessly artificial, occasionally cheap-sounding synth-pop and lite jazz backdrops that sounded dated even in the ’80s, and he instills them with dignity simply by being Leonard Fucking Cohen.  “Old Ideas” indeed, but they still work wonders.

They work their wonders mostly because Cohen’s at the top of his game poetically, his words embodying every adjective we should all hope to be should we live that long: tender, crabby, romantic, dirty, mournful, grateful, spiritual, irreverent, humble, rugged, needy, ready-to-die, and willing-to-live.  Wouldn’t be shocking if Old Ideas wins Cohen his “Time Out Of Mind” Grammy for Album Of The Year.

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First Aid Kit: The Lion’s Roar

Joe O'Brien, January 23, 2012 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

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There’s something uncanny about The Lion’s Roar from the very beginning, when there’s nothing more than minor-key acoustic guitar and a will-o’-the-wisp flickering between the trees.  A tender yet hardened young woman sets the scene (”The pale morning sings/ of forgotten things”), and the air’s already thick with mythology.  It’s the feeling you get when you look to the west- so beautiful it’s profoundly unsettling, and so profoundly unsettling it’s beautiful.  There’s witchery afoot, and slavery, and plagues.  Can’t blame us too much for being such goddamn cowards and fools, but God damn us anyway.  And while God’s at it, God can damn itself for taking so much of our innocence before we could muster enough courage and wisdom to fill the void.

*   *   *

“Swedish Americana” makes a lot of sense.  Sweden totally gets America when it comes to pop, at least more so than other countries where English is a second language.  America may not always get what Swedish pop has to offer us, like Robyn for instance, but Swedish pop sure gets us, all right.

First Aid Kit (sisters Johanna and Klara Soderberg) highlights just how kindred our nation’s Country Western & Southern Gothic spirits are to the land of ABBA.  It’s not surprising that Flannery O’Connor’s friends thought she’d enjoy the films of Ingmar Bergman.  So how great would it be if Loretta Lynn covered “Knowing Me, Knowing You”?  And wouldn’t it be cool if Linda Ronstadt did an album of Jens Lekman songs?  “Swedish Americana” ought to be a slightly bigger sub-genre than it currently is, and The Lion’s Roar ought to be a cornerstone of that sub-genre.

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Classic And Unappreciated: Latyrx’s The Album

Joe O'Brien, January 20, 2012 in Classic. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The Album

The year’s 1997, and the future’s just starting to sip its second cup of coffee.  Rock’s still reverberating with the echoes of grunge, but its quantum mechanics are oscillating to a mind-blower called OK Computer.  Pop’s gone back to bubblegum in a big way, thanks to The Spice Girls and The Backstreet Boys.  Over in hip-hop, the zeitgeist has glided into a glammier style of gangsta.  Meanwhile, tucked away in an underground Bay Area scene, rappers Lateef The Truthspeaker and Lyrics Born, collectively known as Latyrx, drop an amazing debut LP simply titled The Album, which manages to sound old-school and avant-garde, very much of its time and yet very much against its time.

The Album wastes little time showing off its progressive ambitions as Latyrx introduce themselves, fittingly, with a track called “Latyrx.”  The smoky, sci-fi beat by album co-producer DJ Shadow is menacing and enticing, like a rabbit-hole that leads to an opium-fueled cyber-orgy.  Then Lateef & Lyrics Born barge in and buck your brain like it’s probably never been bucked before.

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Guided By Voices: Let’s Go Eat The Factory

Joe O'Brien, December 27, 2011 in Music Reviews. 4 Comments Tags: , .

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Music writers keep referring to the current Guided By Voices reboot as the “classic” lineup, almost always with that word “classic” in quotation marks, like they need to remind us that “classic” is just publicist-speak.  I prefer to distance myself from that “classic” label as well, if only because “classic” feels like such a mundane way to put it.  “Classic” is for blue jeans and Coca Cola and Treasure Island and radio stations that play “Whole Lotta Love.”  Not that those things can’t be cool, but the 1993 – 1996 lineup of Guided By Voices is a peculiar animal, and therefore it needs its own adjective.  I think John Wenzel is on the right track when he talks about GBV’s 1994 album Bee Thousand:

It is perfect, in the same subjective and tautological way that all great works of art are perfect.  Its quality cannot be overstated, but it can certainly be overanalyzed, and that I usually try to avoid.  Let its mystery lie, like the alien corpses rumored to exist in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Hangar 18.  Perhaps that’s where the album’s magic came from, some toxic alien blood infiltrating the water table of Northridge, somehow birthing a modern classic in the mind of a beer-fueled ex-jock schoolteacher.

from Marc Woodworth’s 33¹ ⁄ ³ book on Bee Thousand

John can’t avoid using that “classic” word near the end, but the “toxic alien blood” phrase is what I’m talking about.  From here on, I’ll refer to the recently reunited version of Guided By Voices as the “Toxic Alien Blood” lineup (that’s lead singer/songwriter Robert Pollard; assistant captain Tobin Sprout on guitar, piano, and occasional lead vocals; guitarist Mitch Mitchell; bassist Greg Demos; and drummer Kevin Fennell).

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The Black Keys: El Camino

Joe O'Brien, December 1, 2011 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

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…a broken heart is blind.

The Black Keys, “Little Black Submarines”

When it comes to love and music, I’m a big, gooey romantic.  The only difference is that in love, I’ve basically been a serial monogamist, rarely hesitant to jump into a new committed relationship even if I just had my heart wrecked by an old committed relationship.  With music, of course, I’m free to swing.  Radiohead won’t get jealous if I also fall in love with Clinic, just like I won’t get jealous sharing my love of The Fiery Furnaces with some of my bros.

When I fell in love with The White Stripes though, it was something extra-extra-special.  I was hearing them for the very first time through a pair of puffy listening-station headphones in the 4th Street & Broadway Tower Records, and as “Fell In Love With A Girl” finished whupping my ass and screeched to a halt, I felt like I had found The One. I had loved many other bands before then, but the first 4 tracks of White Blood Cells felt like practically everything I loved about American music rolled into one ultra-wonderful Voltron that I never realized I always wanted.  Jack & Meg continued to be my main musical squeeze from that moment on, and when they called it quits last Groundhog Day, it crushed my tender music-loving heart.

It’s not fair, perhaps, yet unavoidable, far as I’m concerned, for me to talk about The White Stripes so much when I should be reviewing the new Black Keys album.  Thing is, I never got into The Black Keys before precisely because of The White Stripes.  I’d hear The Black Keys now and then, watch them play a tune on a late night talk show, and I’d think, These guys rock all right, but I guess I only have room in my heart for one duo that stands in the shadows of Motown with warped blues guitars and cave-stomp drums. But now that The White Stripes are gone (at least until the inevitable reunion), it’s The Black Keys that have done the most special thing a band has done for me in a very long time.  Maybe not extra-extra-special, but special enough.  But first, back to The White Stripes.

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Urge Overkill: Rock&Roll Submarine

Joe O'Brien, May 9, 2011 in Music Reviews. 8 Comments Tags: , .

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The rock n’ roll was perfect.  The rock n’ roll was excellent.

- Wesley Willis, “Urge Overkill”

What the heck happened to Urge Overkill?  I mean, aside from the drugging and the feuding?  More specifically, what the heck happened to public opinion of Urge Overkill?  Their fingerprints are all over some of the biggest rock bands of the past 15 years, whether those bands meant it that way or not: Queens Of The Stone Age, Foo Fighters, Guided By Voices (after they went hi-fi) and The White Stripes to name a few.  All these bands made huge, arena-ready, Camaro-friendly rock that was as fun as ’80s party metal but not nearly as dumb, and as cool as early-’90s grunge but not nearly as suicidal.  Urge Overkill nailed that formula on 1993’s Saturation, which boasted a couple of buzz-worthy tracks (”Sister Havana” & “Positive Bleeding”) at a time when humorless mope rock was all the rage.  Then came ‘94, when Kurt Cobain shot himself and the kids decided maybe fun wasn’t so lame after all.  Urge hit the Billboard Hot 100 by covering Neil freaking Diamond in Pulp freaking Fiction, and by the end of the year the kids had officially anointed the mud-flinging jesters of Green Day as rock’s Next Big Thing.  In ‘95, Urge released Exit The Dragon, a slightly darker, more emotional follow-up to Saturation that nevertheless brought more than enough sharply-written songs with kick-ass riffs and brilliant hooks but bombed anyway.  The kids ultimately decided that Urge Overkill wasn’t for them.  Perhaps the band wasn’t pogo enough for the punk revivalists, wasn’t heavy enough for the metalheads, wasn’t gloomy enough for the grunge holdovers, wasn’t hard enough for the industrial goths, wasn’t lovably dorky enough for the Weezer geeks, wasn’t scrawny enough for the Matador Records collectors, wasn’t mellow enough for the H.O.R.D.E. festival circuit, wasn’t beige enough for whoever was patronizing The Gin Blossoms and Collective Soul, was too American for the Britpop buffs, was too mainstream-sounding for the art-school junkies, was too cheeky for the Classic Rock purists.  Who knows?  But for whatever reasons, Urge Overkill fell through the cracks and hasn’t been a significant part of the conversation for more than a decade and a half now.

Only time will tell if Rock&Roll Submarine will correct this injustice, but it damn well should.

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Brian Eno: Small Craft On A Milk Sea

Joe O'Brien, April 20, 2011 in Music Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , .

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Last October, back when we used to offer quick first impressions of albums before our full 10 Listens reviews, I offered one such first impression of Brian Eno’s Small Craft On A Milk Sea.  But although I immediately enjoyed the album, after a couple of listens I decided to wait a few months to absorb and appraise it.  See, I had a theory about this album.  It initially struck me as a very wintry album: icy, barren, desolate, dark, menacing.  I figured I should hear it in that kind of climate in order to fully appreciate it.

Then the more I listened, I started to think that maybe this album wasn’t merely a “winter” album, but was more like a mood ring: that its colors would change significantly with the temperature.  Now I’m not saying this is a particularly original theory, at least when it comes to many other Brian Eno albums (or ambient/electronic albums in general), which are often designed to be Rorschachy enough to assume different properties depending on the setting in which they’re experienced.  I just thought that this would be extra-specially true of Small Craft On A Milk Sea.  And now that I’ve listened to it in various environments and climates, I think my theory was fairly accurate.

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Dominique Young Unique: Glamorous Touch

Joe O'Brien, March 30, 2011 in Music Reviews. 2 Comments Tags: , .

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At this point in her budding career, Dominique Young Unique embodies some of the worst facets of both modern mainstream hip-hop and modern American youth.  She plays Double Dutch over the fine line between “effervescently confident” and “smugly pleased by the sound of her own voice.”  She seems to care about little more than money, fashion, dancing, partying, sassing haters, and dropping brand names.  And yet, I gladly gave her Glamorous Touch mixtape 10 listens, and I eagerly anticipate hearing what she’ll do next.

Because this girl can spit, no joke.  She rides each beat like she owns the motherfucker- and those David Alexander-produced beats are no joke either.  They’re mighty fresh and a bit progressive, yet still Top 40 enough to kick-start the dance party at your aunt’s second wedding.  They’re a whirlwind mash-up of Auto-Tune reggaeton, demented dubstep, new wave kitsch, step crew on Red Bull, VIP lounge grind, senior prom limo jam, Justin Bieber and “Tom’s Diner,” all of which morph into one another with dizzying elasticity.  All the while, Dominique never stumbles or loses command of the room.

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Classic and Unappreciated: Television Personalities’ And Don’t The Kids Just Love It

Joe O'Brien, March 24, 2011 in Classic and Music Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

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SPIN: Who would you say were the ultimate punk band?

Joe Strummer: The Television Personalities.

SPIN: Really?

Joe Strummer: Well, they’re second place.  First place are The Ramones.  They’re the daddy punk rock group of all time.  The Television Personalities, they’re slightly obscure, but they brought a severe sense of intelligence to it, just at a time when punk needed the piss taken out of it.

- from SPIN’s “25 Years of Punk” Issue, May 2001

If you really wanted to, you could certainly classify The Television Personalities’ And Don’t The Kids Just Love It as a punk rock record.  Most of its songs are short, catchy, energetic, ramshackle, and irreverent.  Yet TVPs frontman Dan Treacy probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a prototypical punk.  He seems like he wouldn’t last 3 minutes at a late-70s Sex Pistols show before there was nothing left of him but a tattered sweater and a red stain on the floor.  It’s not simply because he’s the kind of lad who’d sing about spending his days writing silly poems for a girl who doesn’t love him back.  The Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, for instance, sang about hopeless romanticism, but his voice had an edge that suggested he could still hold his own amid a horde of slam-dancing hooligans.  Dan Treacy, on the other hand, frequently sounds like a younger, wimpier version of the chap from Wallace & Gromit.  And his guitars sound not like methamphetamines and barbed wire, but like shattered dreams and reluctantly obedient schoolchildren.

But despite his feeble demeanor, his songs often were, as Joe Strummer said, intelligent and piss-taking.  While I can easily imagine Treacy trampled to a bloody pulp by a crowd of angry punks, I can also imagine he’d unleash some pretty sharp bon mots even as he was getting his teeth kicked in.  Probably some jibes about his assailants being phony part-time punks with trendy emotional complexes, followed by a lament so depressing it’s hilarious.  (”Just like life, there’s a good beginning/ but there is no middle/ so you might as well skip to the end.”)

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