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.

There was certainly plenty of sighing on Van Etten’s previous record Epic, which I enjoy as much as ever.  But I enjoy it largely because, aside from Van Etten’s pipes and some really good songs, Epic also has spritzes of piss and vinegar among the sigh-clouds, and it refuses to take itself too seriously for very long.  Tramp, on the other hand, wants to do little else but take itself way too seriously.  (Should’ve seen this coming back when Van Etten drained all traces of joy from Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy.”)  Saddest of all, the songwriting tends to be downright uninspired.

A few songs offer flashes of greatness, then resign themselves to mediocrity about halfway through.  “Warsaw” kicks things off promisingly, with a verse full of enticing melody and jangly-dangly guitar.  By the time Van Etten starts singing “I want to be over you,” however, it’s apparent the song’s treading water just like its protagonist.

“Serpents” feels like it’s gonna be a killer for about a minute, only to flat-line around the chorus.  There’s a bunch of ratta-tat-tat snare fills, perhaps designed to propel the song into the stratosphere, though it’s more like they’re nail-gunning the track to the carpet.  The lyrics aim for acrid indignation (”you enjoy suckin’ on dreams/ so I will fall asleep/ with someone other than you“) but the music and the spirit hardly summon a sneer.

“We Are Fine” is occasionally catchy and pleasant, yet it never quite overcomes the abundance of humdrum foreshadowed by its title.  The beauty of “All I Can” gradually fizzles, Coldplay-like, into something that could score an episode-ending montage of a sappy TV hospital drama.  You know, where we see how all the characters are still suffering heavy emotional turmoil, but they each have these faint gleam in their eyes like by golly, we’re gonna get through this, one day at a time. Worse yet, it all builds to a climax where a lyric like “we all make mistakes” is framed like some kind of epic revelation.

Not every track is a melodic, rhythmic, and emotional bummer.  “Leonard” offers some bona fide self-deprecation (”I wanted to try for you/ wanted to die for you/ dramatic things…“) and rises to a swirling, celestial bliss that starkly contrasts its refrain of “Well/ I am bad/ at loving.”  The sultry “Magic Chords” also provides some relief as it shuffles with dark, jazzy allure- though it could use a 10% reduction in sluggishness.

Alas, most everything else on Tramp could be summed up by the part in “Ask” where Van Etten repeatedly sulks, “It hurts too much to laugh about it.”  Now sure, everyone’s allowed to be in that place now and then, that point where tragedy’s still too fresh to become comedy yet.  That place isn’t usually fertile ground for songwriting, though.  Poetry comes from emotion remembered in tranquility, as Wordsworth said, and to that Stephin Merritt added, “You have to be scientific about it. Never try to write a song when you’re actually feeling the emotion.”  I have no idea whether Van Etten actually wrote Tramp’s songs from deep within her sad place, but they sure do sound that way.

Look, it’s fine if an album wants to be spun on rainy afternoons, but a rainy afternoon album can and should still have life in it.  Sharon Van Etten’s voice insures that all the songs on Tramp sound pretty on the surface, but inside, most of those songs are awful homely.  These aren’t merely “sad ballads.”  They’re more like woeful dirges exhaled by meek, passive mope addicts.

I really wanted to like Tramp.  That’s why I gave it 10 listens in the first place.  But it was obvious by the 3rd listen that I’d probably never like Tramp; by the 7th listen, it started making me angry how bored I was.  Especially in the penultimate song, when Van Etten sings “Tell me I’m funny/ even when I’m not.”  As a listener, that line just felt like a slap in the face.  I’d be like, No! That’s one of our biggest problems here, Sharon! Once upon a time you were kind of funny and really cool but now you’re just floating in a swamp of despondency! Well, what’s done is done.  Tramp is done.  So OK, fine: Sharon, you’re “funny.”  Now would you please snap out of this funk and go back to writing wittier, more dynamic songs?

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.

Out of 10 tracks, only the faintly-charming but forgettable “Anyhow” fails to leave much of an impression.  A couple of light-hearted songs flirt with slightness but manage to stick thanks to memorably surreal imagery: “Banjo” has its “broken banjo bobbing/ on the dark infested sea,” while “Lullaby” has “the mouse ate the crumb/ and the cat ate the crust/ now they’ve fallen in love/ and they’re talking in tongues.”

The rest of the tracks could claim rightful places among the Greatest Hits, or are at least worthy of slots on future set lists.  “The Darkness” might be the most fun of the lot, with Cohen strutting to a lithe, bluesy groove.  The minimal, acoustic “Crazy To Love You” most closely resembles his early work, and probably has the most potent mix of sweetness and bluntness (”Had to go crazy to love you/ You who were never the one/ whom I chased through the souvenir heartache/ her braids and her blouse all undone“).  “Show Me The Place” endears against incredible odds, considering Cohen appears to treasure his own slavery.  In “Going Home,” he channels a cheeky, puppet-master god and has some self-referential, third-person fun with the idea of The Prophet Leonard Cohen (”He will speak these words of wisdom/ like a sage, a man of vision/ though he knows he’s really nothing/ but the brief elaboration of a tube”). “Amen” drifts from kindly-pleading gypsy-jazz shuffle into a softly approaching apocalypse, led by a red-fog trumpet and brief premonitions of horror (”Try me again/ when the angels are panting/ and scratching at the door to come in…tell me that you need me then…”).

Most beautiful of all is “Come Healing,” which, at the risk of hyperbole, is what I think God’s Love might sound like if God’s Love exists.  A thousand more Jeff Buckley disciples could very well turn this song into another “Hallelujah.”

It’s a great relief that Old Ideas ends with a track like “Different Sides.”  For most of its running time, the album feels like a gracious goodbye to a life well-spent.  And while that gracious goodbye is rich with humor and happiness and other pleasures,  it’s bitingly bittersweet.  The closing track, however, shows Cohen frisky and utterly unconcerned about things like numbered days.  “You want to change the way I make love,” he grunts. “I want to leave it alone.”  Atta boy, Leonard.  He won’t go gently into that good night, but just in case, he thought he’d drop off this exquisite Thank You Card.

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.

Inspirations are flaunted relentlessly throughout The Lion’s Roar. First Aid Kit are still Co-Presidents of the Fleet Foxes fan club, as well as subscribers to the Joanna Newsom newsletter.  They love Bright Eyes so much they end the album with a very Bright Eyes-like ditty featuring Conor Oberst himself.  They reference Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, June Carter and Johnny Cash in a single chorus.  Wearing all these influences so boldly on their Paisley dresses could potentially be cloying, distracting and self-sabotaging.  But First Aid Kit are so ridiculously good at singing and songwriting, they can get away with it every step of the way.  Much credit should also go to Mike Mogis’s tasteful production, which sharply spotlights the Soderbergs’ voices and knows exactly how to surround them with centuries of American folk.

Seriously, this album is stunning, even if you don’t dig Fleet Foxes.  The first time hearing it, I felt like I knew each song was gonna be good before the first measure had finished, and I was right every time.  More than a dozen spins later, The Lion’s Roar is still as beautiful as the night we met- every toothsome melody, every scintillating harmony.

*   *   *

When you love someone for years and years, inevitably you’ll take that person for granted a bunch of times.  Occasionally you may even forget why you loved them in the first place.  The reassuring part is, sometimes you can just look at someone and instantly remember why you love them, and you treasure them more than you ever did before, at least until the cycle starts again.

When Johanna (born 1990) and Klara (born 1993) voice these sentiments in “This Old Routine,” they sound like they know from decades more experience than they could possibly have.  Their voices are emotional yet subtle, favoring restraint and reaching for the stars only when the tune calls for it. Also, their twangs are suspiciously convincing.  I wouldn’t rule out that these young girls are the reincarnations of obscenely graceful Southern-American women, blessed and grizzled by lifetimes of love.

Then again, the Soderbergs aren’t totally immune to the charms and follies of youth.  “I know I am naive,” they sing, “but if anything, that’s what’s going to save me.”

*   *   *

One of my favorite things about The Lion’s Roar is the kind of moments when they make you think you totally know what word is going to end the lyric, and then at the very last second, they screwball you.  “Now I guess sometimes I wish you were a little more predictable/ that I could read you just like a book/ For now I can only guess what’s coming next/ by examining your timid…” Look?  Nope!

“…smile!“

]]> http://10listens.com/2012/01/23/first-aid-kit-the-lions-roar/feed/ 0 http://10listens.com/2012/01/20/classic-and-unappreciated-latyrxs-the-album/ http://10listens.com/2012/01/20/classic-and-unappreciated-latyrxs-the-album/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:17:53 +0000 Joe O'Brien http://10listens.com/?p=2787

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.

That’s because Lyrics Born’s flowing through the left speaker and Lateef’s on the right, each one spitting his own separate verse simultaneously.  On paper, “Latyrx” should be a frustrating cacophony, but it’s not.  While both verses are sick enough to warrant unobstructed, single-headphone listens, the song’s far more fascinating when heard as a whole- just tune out the language and surrender to the pure music of the 2 flows phasing and snaking around each other.  (Fun Fact: 1997 was also the year of The Flaming Lips’ 4-disc, multi-stereo experiment Zairkeeka.)

The rest of The Album doesn’t get quite that futuristic, aside from some robotic blips and bloops peppering the margins.  Generally, the remaining tracks are forward-thinking lyrically, but musically, they tend to treasure the traditions of hip-hop’s party-minded golden dawn and pop’s unabashed love of fat, juicy hooks.  Like the gangstas, The Album revels in dusty blaxploitation funk-soul, gloriously simple basslines, and a view that the world can be a dark and slippery realm.  That’s about where the similarities end, though.  Latyrx adapts to the slippery darkness not with crack-slinging and bitch-slapping and cap-popping, but by amping up the positive vibes.  (”Peace and Love and Happiness/ If faced with love, please acquiesce.”)  And yet it still sounds very cool, not terribly hippy-dippy at all. It must be damn near impossible to sound bad-ass when you’re spitting a line like, “love is the room/ and the heart is the entrance,” but Lyrics Born figured out how.  It helps that he has that husky rasp in his throat, and that he has that charismatic dancehall flow he swings into now and then.  But it’s mostly the attitude, all puffed up with bravado- but a sober and respectable bravado.  Macho pacifism.  Like a man who would never start a fight, but if he absolutely had to step to some evil motherfuckers, he would.   (”I kicked the devil in his neck/ without my rosary on.”) The Album’s backlash against gangsta glam is never explicit, and no one ever gets dissed by name.  Yet it’s easy to imagine that some rhymes are aimed at, say, the No Limit crew, or perhaps certain non-Biggie members of Bad Boy.  Take, for instance, the scathing conclusion of Lateef’s second verse in “The Quickening”:

They trying to keep it real, but compared to what?
When there ain’t even no backing to their passing buck
When you skip from the material shit, they get stuck
Trip, they gonna slip, they’re up the creek, in the clutch
All because they really just don’t give a fuck…

If The Album commits any flagrant party fouls, they’re merely matters of sequencing.  One involves track 4, “Balcony Beach,” where Lyrics Born stands before the ocean, letting the rhythm of the waves conduct the tempo of his everyman stream-of-consciousness.  Lyrically, it’s vague and mundane, but everything else on the track makes up for that.  Between Lyrics Born’s charmingly stoned delivery, the intoxicating chill-bro beat, and Joyo Velarde’s seductive, Sade-style hook, “Balcony Beach” is a gem that perfectly encapsulates the state of mind where you leave the party for a moment, go outside by yourself for a quick smoke in the brisk night air, tipsily contemplate your life, and maybe even reach a small epiphany before you go back inside and grab another cold one.  That’s why the song feels so out of place so early on The Album, when the party’s just getting warmed up.

Then smack in the middle of the record, we hear “Funky Granules,” a voicemail to Lyrics Born from his grandma.  Apparently Grandma Born saw something on TV about a doctor (”a psychologist or a psychiatrist or something”) who used rap to help treat troubled kids and try to keep them out of gangs.  “Maybe you can do something on that order, if you’re not already,” grandma suggests.  “Funky Granules” is undeniably amusing, especially for anyone who’s ever received a rambling, well-meaning, semi-oblivious message from an older relative.  Problem is, as the 7th track, it hobbles The Album’s momentum yet again; it would probably work far better as an ironic asterisk at the end of The Album rather than as an interrupting interlude.

Still, even a couple of minor speed bumps can’t tarnish The Album’s majesty.  Thousands of rappers have trumpeted boasts like, “I spit flows that’ll rock past the 21st Century,” the way Lateef does in “The Quickening.”  Unlike Lateef, however, most of those rappers don’t have any records as timeless and evolved as The Album to back up their claims.

]]> http://10listens.com/2012/01/20/classic-and-unappreciated-latyrxs-the-album/feed/ 2 http://10listens.com/2011/12/27/guided-by-voices-lets-go-eat-the-factory/ http://10listens.com/2011/12/27/guided-by-voices-lets-go-eat-the-factory/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:00:13 +0000 Joe O'Brien http://10listens.com/?p=2683

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).

The Toxic Alien Blood lineup of Guided By Voices must have known they were lofting their fans’ expectations when they announced they wouldn’t just go on tour playing their mid-’90s highlights, but that they were also going to release a new album of original material.  The pre-’93 and post-’96 lineups released some good albums and scores of great songs, thanks to Pollard’s gifts as a songwriter and talent scout.  Any of those lineups- perhaps even a fresh new lineup- could have re-established the Guided By Voices brand and generated buzz, as long as Pollard was involved.  Getting the Toxic Alien Blood band back together, however, seemed to offer an implicit promise that they were feeling the same kind of alchemy that forged Bee Thousand and 1995’s Alien Lanes, and to a lesser extent, 1996’s Under The Bushes, Under The Stars.  As if the Toxic Alien Blood hadn’t totally evaporated, and the band had found some traces left in a vial in Robert Pollard’s cellar, and they were able to synthesize a few more pints.

Let’s Go Eat The Factory is the result of this promise, and it doesn’t disappoint.  Yes, it’s a blatant attempt to recapture the Toxic Alien Blood magic of days long past.  But it never sounds desperate, sad, or stale.  Sure, there’s plenty of what we might expect from these guys.  We get songs with melodies so gorgeous and voices so tender they warm the heart despite their poppycock lyrics (”Doughnut For A Snowman,” “My Europa,” “Chocolate Boy”).  Tobin Sprout’s at the bottom of a manic-depressive well, singing to a pinhole of sunlight, just like Alex Chilton on Big Star’s third album (”Who Invented The Sun,” the second half of “Spiderfighter”).  The 90-seconds-or-less song fragments that had been completely phased out by the time of the band’s 2004 break-up are back with a vengeance (”The Head,” “How I Met My Mother,” “Go Rolling Home,” “The Room Taking Shape”).  A few triumphant pop-post-punk anthems amp up the sing-along factor (”Laundry And Lasers,” “God Loves Us,” “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” “Either Nelson”).  Occasionally everyone staggers about like they’ve been hypnotized by German Expressionist villains (”Hang Mr. Kite,” “The Big Hat And Toy Show,” “We Won’t Apologize For The Human Race”).  The tunes often fade into each other like channel-surfing daydreams, and the sound quality is only slightly better than a waterlogged 4-track.  In other words, just like the good old days.

Yet amid all the familiar hallmarks, pleasant surprises abound.  Like the organ that comes out of nowhere in the middle of “The Head” and joyfully smothers everything in its path.  Or the chilling power of the neon-noir synths & violin combo in “Hang Mr. Kite.”  Or the didgeridoo pulse of “Waves,” cozy and toasty like an old flannel quilt, yet cool and refreshing like a late April convertible cruise.  Or “Old Bones,” apparently some kind of Irish folk ballad filtered through nitrous oxide and Brian Eno’s Another Green World.  Or my personal favorite, “Imperial Racehorsing,” which bursts with destruction, fanfare and “Helter Skelter” voodoo.

I still have a hard time believing that Let’s Go Eat The Factory is as wonderful as I think it is.  While I eagerly awaited this album, I also tempered my anticipation with what I thought was cold, practical wisdom.  Lightning doesn’t strike the same bottle twice, I told myself, especially after 15 long years.  I thought I’d be lucky if I enjoyed this album a fraction as much as I enjoy Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, which, if I haven’t made clear by now, are two of my all-time favorite things.  Now when I listen to Let’s Go Eat The Factory for the 25th or 26th time, I love it so much I think it must be trickery.  I assume I must be under a powerful and deceitful spell cast by the Toxic Alien Blood lineup.  This can’t possibly be my third favorite Guided By Voices album ever.  It just doesn’t make sense.  I’m in utter disbelief.  Then I remember the end of “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” when Pollard orders us to “Make disbelief unthinkable.”  Then I listen to Let’s Go Eat The Factory for the 26th or 27th time, and I realize it must be true.  It’s simply too good not to be true.

…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.

In the immediate aftermath of the break-up, I was sad, of course, but I found ways to ease the pain a little.  I sought solace in the arms of old flames that first sparked in my adolescence: PJ Harvey’s dark, twisted embrace comforted me for a time; then, to a lesser extent, so did Radiohead’s; I even spent some blurry weeks partying with the dudes in Urge Overkill, which I never thought I’d do again.  For a while I chilled with Kurt Vile, a more recently-borne infatuation of mine, but it was a hazy, bemusing month.  I also got to know a teenage phenom named Dominique Young Unique, but I decided to keep my distance, lest I turn into a skeezy old man.  By the time summertime rolled around, though, the Stripes-sized hole in my heart didn’t feel any smaller.

The more I realized this, the harder I tried to fill that hole with new, exciting sounds.  I flirted with The Weeknd’s free downloads, but their post-ecstasy-fueled-one-night-stand-comedown-R&B quickly filled me with an unbearable lightness of ennui.  Most of my friends said Bon Iver was moving them, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that they just wanted to dig Justin Vernon as much as Kanye does.  When a lot of those same friends raved about M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, I soon discovered that record was basically my least favorite shades of Animal Collective, Passion Pit, Phoenix, and several other bands I’m ambivalent about, all pulsating through a strobe light that doesn’t know the party’s been over for like half-an-hour already.  The breezy power-pop of Real Estate’s Days sounded pleasant enough as I listened to it, but ultimately, to my ears, the songs had the sticking power of damp Colorforms.

So I ran back to more long-time loves, only to remain unfulfilled.  Eleanor Friedberger’s solo debut left me with a couple of memorable tracks, but overall the album felt like a safely quirky late-summer fling.  The Ivory Tower Penthouse vibe of Watch The Throne left me cold after a couple spins.  The first 4 tracks of Wilco’s The Whole Love reminded me why I love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, then the last 8 tracks reminded me why I didn’t pay much attention to Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album).  I gave Wild Flag a chance, but ever since Carrie Brownstein became a sketch comedy star on Portlandia, I can’t really listen to her wobbly, affected singing voice without thinking she sounds like someone she’d make fun of on her show.  Worst of all, 2011 turned out to be the year where Jack White, instead of writing and releasing dynamo rock n’ roll, focused on producing comedic novelty singles by Stephen Colbert, John C. Reilly and the Insane Clown Posse.  Not that they didn’t mildly amuse me, they just left me feeling like a die-hard Bulls fan must’ve felt when Michael Jordan retired to play minor league baseball.

Just when it seemed like my mostly-cloudy year of music was going to end in a long, frustrating drizzle, along came a technicolor rainbow in the form of The Black Keys’ new Danger Mouse-co-produced album El Camino.   I can’t tell you how El Camino compares to other Black Keys albums, ’cause like I said, I never really got into them before now.  But I can tell you that every morning this week I’ve woken up psyched that I can strut around listening to this album again.  (And again and again.)  This album makes me choose listening to my iPod and doing nothing else during my 45-minute subway commute- not writing, not reading books, not solving crossword puzzles, not attempting to meditate in spite of the obnoxious mariachi band that nobody invited.  It’s been a while since that’s been the case.

I get giddy every time I start up “Lonely Boy,” hearing that mid-tempo see-saw riff that ends like a reel-to-reel tape drooping to a pause…hearing Patrick Carney’s drums slam on the gas and abracadabra, that very same mid-tempo riff is now a speeding shiny red go-kart, setting the pace for the non-stop 37-minute shindig to come…hearing those Danger Mouse trademarks in a whole new context: the dusty, crackling keyboard licks; the joyful, gospel-esque chorus awesomely elevating Dan Auerbach’s husky soul-blues vocals; the boiling sense of urgency propelling everything headlong into the future.  (The phantom synthesizers and plinky glockenspiels and sprightly hand-claps will be arriving shortly.)

The rest of El Camino’s first half rocks just as hard as that excellent opening track, if not harder.  I still can’t get over how “Gold On The Ceiling” starts like any old ZZ Top Texas blooze stomp, but then the zippery riffs start taking weird little left turns until we end up at the hippest strip club in town.  When the lovelorn, acoustic first half of “Little Black Submarines” gives way to an arena-rattling second half, it may be a trick at least as old as Led Zeppelin, but damn it gets me every time.  Whenever I hear the talkbox solo of “Money Maker” I can taste the spittle splattering all over the mouth tube, and I savor every fleck.  “Dead And Gone” and “Run Right Back” may not have any extraordinary features, they’re just exactly what they need to be: simple, catchy, sweaty, radio-friendly rock songs.

El Camino’s poppier second half doesn’t rock as hard as the first, but it’s just as much fun.  “Sister” and closing track “Mind Eraser” are a couple of disco jams, yet the jagged guitars and punchy drums make them disco jams with teeth and muscle.  In between those, there’s three tracks (”Hell Of A Season,” “Stop Stop,” “Nova Baby”) that remind me how Gnarls Barkley had so many other great songs besides “Crazy,” and make me wish Danger Mouse would pull Cee-Lo away from The Voice and back in the studio.

So thank you, El Camino.  You’ve slapped on a happy to ending to my very gray year of music.  More importantly, you’ve helped me learn how to love new albums and new bands again.  I’m not just rebounding, I swear.  I’m not saying I love The Black Keys just yet, but I definitely could.  I’m already planning a hot date with their back catalog.  And I promise I won’t just be fantasizing about The White Stripes.

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.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, to be sure.  In fact, after a few seconds of underwater sonar blips (’cause we’re in a Rock&Roll Submarine, and no other reason really, especially since the title song isn’t until track 2, but sure, why not?), Urge picks up pretty much where they left off 16 years ago and simply does what they do best for the next 40 minutes.  But when it comes to consistency, they do it better than they’ve ever done it before.  Whether a song is led by Eddie “King” Roeser’s scorched snarl (”Effigy,” “Little Vice,” “End Of Story,” “Niteliner,”) or Nash Kato’s suave swagger (”Poison Flower,” “Thought Balloon,” “She’s My Ride,” “The Valiant”), or both (”Mason Dixon,” “Rock&Roll Submarine”) the band fills practically every measure with seemingly familiar yet novel licks and melodies that make me wonder either A) Did they steal that from somewhere? or B) How has no one else done that before? All the while, bassist Mike Hodgkiss and drummer Brian Quast (who admirably fills the massive drum throne vacated by Blackie Onassis) form a stalwart rhythm section that can flick on some extra pyrotechnics when the need arises.

Considering how Rock&Roll Submarine arrives in the wake of a hiatus that included a rift between Kato and Roeser, it’s fitting that strong undercurrents of resentment and reconciliation propel much of the songs.  Roeser’s songs in particular tend to smolder with the ire of long-borne scars.  When he roars “I don’t want an apology/ I want an effigy,” his voice and his Crazy Horse guitar rumble with bracing fury.  On “Quiet Person,” the album’s lone ballad, his pain is touching without wallowing in self-pity (”I was always a quiet person/ what kind of person could walk all over me?”).  Yet in spite of all the bitterness, Roeser and Kato’s undeniable, unforced chemistry seem to confirm that all is forgiven.  Of course, maybe none of these songs are about Kato and Roeser’s rift at all.  But wherever they came from, these sentiments give Rock&Roll Submarine substantial depth.  They provide some contrast for all the lyrics that are just there to sound cool (”Do I have to spell it out again/ this time with attitude?”), as well as anchoring the album’s bounty of instantly gratifying hooks.

Although while those hooks offer instant gratification, they also have a peculiar subliminal, phantom-like quality.  After the first listen or two, it’s like the hooks couldn’t quite stick, could never get past the tip of my tongue.  Like, initially after hearing each song I’d think, wow, that main riff and that chorus were excellent… wait, how did they go again? Then later I’d hear the album again and each song would sound 200% better when I reminded myself what all the great hooks were.  After 3 or 4 spins over a couple days’ time, though, the tunes had been emphatically branded into my eardrums, and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

I honestly enjoy every inch of this album, but I could probably single out a few favorites: the title track, especially with the way its guitars sound like they’re reverberating off the rusty hulls of an actual submarine; the fiery stomp of lead single “Effigy;” and “Thought Balloon,” where Kato makes the refrain “You could be my thought balloon” sound awfully sweet before plunging into a showstopping Who-style interlude with quiet acoustic guitars punctuated by exclamation points of power chords and drum fills.

Conceptually though, my favorite track might be the closer “Touched To A Cut.”  Musically, it’s nothing spectacular, just a solid track buoyed by a rigid, Devo-like bassline.  And lyrically, it’s rather disturbing, sung from the point of view of someone who’d kill you if it weren’t so painful to live without you.  The thing I love about it is that it’s short and anticlimactic, sneaking out the back door before you realize it’s gone.  In a way, it’s like these shameless showmen know enough not to hang around too long, even after a 16-year absence.  They don’t just leave me wanting more, they lead me to believe there most definitely will be more, with a closing track that all but whispers, “to be continued…”  I very much hope that’s a promise, regardless of how the rest of the kids welcome Rock&Roll Submarine.  Music is a conspicuously better place with a band like Urge Overkill around- a band capable of pumping out such perfect, excellent rock n’ roll.

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.

Of course, my not-so-scientific results may very well be some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  But for what it’s worth, I was pretty amazed by how much brighter and sweatier this album sounded on a late-afternoon tropical beach, compared to how much more chilling and foreboding it sounded amid those brutal New York City blizzards.  What once sounded like starlight twinkling off glaciers later sounded like sunlight glistening off the ocean.  What sounded like icicles on frozen pipes at one latitude sounded like boiling swamp bubbles when played at a much wider latitude.  The milk sea of Milk Sea is Arctic tundra snow and white desert sand and liquid nitrogen fog and a thousand substances in between.

It’s the album’s contradictory constants, however, that make it exceptional.  It always sounds tastefully futuristic, yet guided by an intelligence older than the primordial soup.  A lot of segments, most notably the curious synth melody of “Bone Jump,” somehow feel both improvised and meticulously plotted.  And while there are a number of memorable melodies like that one, most of the album’s hooks come purely from the novelty of its ultra-crisp rhythms and textures.  (Even seasoned pros have trouble accomplishing this; see the murkier and less successful first half of Radiohead’s The King Of Limbs.)

For the most part, Milk Sea is also masterfully sequenced.  It opens with a trio of minimalist soundscapes inspired by frequent Eno muse Erik Satie (”Emerald And Lime,” “Complex Heaven,” Small Craft On A Milk Sea”), all of which are gorgeous and serene, yet camouflage a viciousness that gradually reveals itself, creeping ever so slightly from out of the shadows with each track.  Then starting with “Flint March”, the viciousness pounces and strikes and doesn’t let up for about 6 tracks’ worth of thrilling panic-level intensity.  After that, most of what remains falls back into the more minimal and serene style of the earlier tracks while maintaining their latent tension.  Like any worthwhile ambient music, the album’s bookends are both easy to ignore and enthralling when focused on.

That is, except for the closing track, “Late Anthropocene,” which seems to belong to an entirely different album.  It’s tame, muffled, boringly repetitive, and on an album where most tracks hover around the 3-minute mark, its 8 minutes seem to last eons.  More than once I checked to make sure this track belonged on the proper album and wasn’t some bonus track or outtake.  Considering how the few tracks before it already do a fine job of soothing the album to a close, I still wonder what on Earth it’s doing here.

Without “Late Anthropocene,” I’d be tempted to say this album is, pound for pound, practically on par with Eno’s best- including Another Green World, which is not just my favorite Eno album but one of my favorite recordings by anyone ever.  Even so, Small Craft On A Milk Sea continues to captivate me, regardless of time, place or weather, half a year after most reviewers gave it moderate praise and moved on.

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.

Dominique has such prodigious presence and fiery flow, I can’t decide if I should be frustrated or apathetic that her lyrics are so cliched and unimpressive.  They’re not embarrassing, exactly.  They’re not even all that bad.  They’re just horrendously mediocre.  There’s nary a metaphor to be heard on Glamorous Touch, unless you want to count the “heartbreak is murder” theme of “Dirty Game.”  I didn’t even hear any damn similes, unless you want to count facile examples like “hotter than a frying pan,” or, “I gotta whip my hair/ back and forth like Willow Smith.”  Or maybe there are clever, nuanced metaphors and similes to be heard here, but they’re either couched in unfamiliar slang or spat much too quickly for this geezer to comprehend.

Still, while I’m a little disappointed that someone as verbally nimble as Dominique currently shows little to no interest in using the English language beyond the most literal and superficial levels, I guess I can’t stay mad at her.  She could rap the indexes of health insurance pamphlets and I’d still blast her through my speakers.  Besides, who am I to judge?  When I was 19, I wasn’t nearly as talented at anything as this girl is at rapping, and I merely deluded myself into thinking I was remotely wise or profound.  To her credit, Dominique harbors no such pretensions, and she can surely get away with being all booty & bling for at least another 5 years/ 50 tracks before it stops being cute.

Dominique Young Unique’s Glamorous Touch mixtape is available as a free download right here

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.”)

Of course, neither Treacy’s on-record persona nor the other characters he sings about would spend much time at a punk rock club anyway.  And Don’t The Kids Just Love It is populated almost exclusively by tragically lonely souls.  The boy who narrates “This Angry Silence” is “scared to go out at night, it’s not safe on the streets;” instead he stays home and listens to his fed-up dad shout at his gin-soaked mum.  The title character in “World Of Pauline Lewis” spends every night alone in her room, until her escapist fantasies are no longer enough to pull her out of the abyss.  A couple of other melancholy girls simply vanish without warning, like in Haruki Murakami novels.  Mrs. Brown’s husband just died, Mrs. Davies’ kids were taken into custody, Jenny’s baby-daddy skipped town.  A young man picks up his diary, then realizes he has nothing to say.

Yeah, pretty much all these stories are brutally sad.  Only 3 of the album’s tracks actually sound brutally sad, however (”A Family Affair,” “Diary Of A Young Man,” and the instrumental “The Crying Room”).  One of the neatest tricks this album plays is how it disguises so much of that grey British gloom beneath Ed Ball’s propulsive bass, Mark Sheppard’s invigorating drum fills, and Treacy’s jaunty melodies.  Maybe this is the “intelligence” Strummer referred to; obviously, the first wave of British punks boasted its fair share of furious intellects, but making fury sound like fun is not all that difficult.  Making despair sound like fun (without constantly resorting to irony) is a tad harder.  Note how AllMusic’s review describes “World Of Pauline Lewis” as one of the “peppier songs” that lighten the album’s mood- a description that either overlooks or simply ignores the fact that it’s a song about a girl who commits suicide.  Not that I’m casting aspersions- the first dozen or so times I listened to it, I was so caught up in the triumphant feel of its anthemic chorus that I too missed the line about how “Pauline died alone/ they found her slumped on her bed.”

Even the songs whose lyrics aren’t so sad seem to acquire a sort of contact bummer, a sorrow by association.  “Geoffrey Ingram” tells of a charmed guy who “always gets home as it starts to rain,” a guy who can talk his way onto the guest list of a sold-out Jam concert.  In the context of the rest of the album, though, this track isn’t simply a lighthearted ditty about a happy-go-lucky chum.  The more I hear And Don’t The Kids Just Love It, the more “Geoffrey Ingram” sounds like the sigh of a sidekick who wishes he could get away with those sorts of things for once in his life.  Similarly, the underachieving office boy in “The Glittering Prizes” sings, “Pretty soon I’m gonna change…you won’t recognize me,” and at first it sounds like a self-motivational mantra that just might come true.  The driving bass and spirited drums seem to second the motion.  But with each spin, that refrain takes on more of a shrugging resignation.  As in, pretty soon you won’t recognize me…’cause I’ll either be a soulless sell-out in a 3- piece suit spending my weekends at lame engagement parties, or the world will have cracked me like an eggshell.

Perhaps the most painful part about listening to And Don’t The Kids Just Love It is knowing that eventually, the world actually did crack the real Dan Treacy.  After their full-length debut album, The TVPs kept on making more records, merely to become one of those cult acts that earn far more money and prestige for the bands they influence than for themselves.  Treacy succumbed to drug abuse, which led to health problems and criminal activity, which led to a lengthy sentence aboard a prison ship.  Since his June 2004 release, he seems to have taped his broken shell back together and maintained his good-humored spirit.  He’s even released a few more TVPs records.  But it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s been some serious damage done.  These days when I go back and hear Treacy sing, “I know where Syd Barrett lives,” I get the sense that he wasn’t literally talking about the ex-Pink Floyd leader’s little hut in Cambridge.  He was more likely talking about the fragile man-child’s drug-tainted state of mind.

Yet in spite of all that baggage, I keep returning to And Don’t The Kids Just Love It.  Not just because it’s such a splendid, fascinating, rollicking, poignant, strongly-realized record.  And not just because it’s a unique and very personal anomaly among its late 70s/early 80s punk rock brethren.  It’s also because while I want to think I relate more to the righteous rage of the Johnny Rottens and the Joe Strummers, deep down I think I know that I, and most of us for that matter, are never all that far removed from the World of Dan Treacy.  Most classic punk albums leave me feeling I wanna riot or I wanna be anarchy or I wanna be sedated. This one leaves me feeling There but for the grace of God…