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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Classic and Unappreciated: Marshall Crenshaw

Dan Mooney, September 7, 2011 in Classic. 0 Comments Tags: .

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The better heading for this essay is probably “Classic and Underappreciated,” because when Marshall Crenshaw’s self-titled debut was released in 1982, it sold pretty well, had a single that charted and made enough of a dent in the minds of enough listeners for Crenshaw to make an ongoing career out of it. Still, for all his talent and for all his good songs, Crenshaw’s is not a name that pops up as often in conversation as other tunesmiths’ might. Among glasses wearers of his generation – not the most scientific way to parse this material, but hey – he had more in common with Buddy Holly than Elvis Costello or Warren Zevon, both more biting in their wit, though not appreciably more intelligent, at least compared to the persona put forth in the songs on this album.

Several times, we hear the declarations of a young man grappling with love, often counteracting his vulnerability with his strong intellect. “There She Goes Again” kicks off the album, and introduces that mindset. He’s lost a girl who’s now going out with guy after guy: He acknowledges it’s a “sad situation” but knows he’s going to “find someone better” because he can live without her. Instead of wallowing and playing the victim, the bouncy major-key shuffle speaks to his being pretty much okay with this, his having moved on even this far. It’s the most polite kiss-off song I can think of. Later on, we hear that he’s going out looking for a “Cynical Girl” – the “he” is not necessarily the same character, of course, but whoever it is knows what he wants and it’s not foremost a Pleasant Girl or a Subservient Girl but one who’s been disillusioned, who sees the world as it is (even though the singer professes to want to be “lost in love” at this point – I guess someone has to take the wheel).

Crenshaw’s songs here are clearly not as political as those others’ I mentioned occasionally were – “Soldier of Love” is as close as it gets – but that approachable charm is why the music was especially refreshing. Even when it was released, some of the musical arrangements were less “outdated” than they were “classic” since they pulled in some of the best of what the previous 30 years of popular music had to offer. The Buddy Holly comparison is easy but apt, especially considering Crenshaw portrayed Holly in the movie La Bamba. Their songs are largely simple but elegantly so, with tight melodies over familiar chord progressions such that there don’t seem to be many extra moving parts. The 1950s homages/inspirations continue with the close Everly Brothers-style harmonies that shimmer regularly on here. Even “The Usual Thing” resembles a rockabilly version of “Rock and Roll Music,” especially towards the end of the chorus.

These connections, while clear, are never overbearing. And while they contribute to Crenshaw’s sound, it is more widely a mixture of clean guitars, moderate-to-uptempo songs, and a tight rhythm section featuring especially propelling basslines. “Someday, Someway” and “Mary Anne” are both well-wrought pop gems that also feature the band’s talent on full display. Not to be overlooked, “She Can’t Dance” and “Brand New Lover” are the kinds of songs that makes a sunny day feel sunnier.

It’s hard to figure why Marshall Crenshaw didn’t retain the success of his early career, but it’s certainly easier just to know that most bands don’t. That’s largely beyond the scope of this appreciation anyway. This album is an excellent collection of songs, and that’s all we need to know. While it’s now just about thirty years old, and some of its inspiration nearly sixty, the sounds are familiar enough and fun enough for it still to have a surprising amount to offer.

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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Popovers: Make It So

Jeff Laughlin, May 4, 2011 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Most people are unaware of the conditions in which an album come out. Gleeful ignorance, I like to think it. We hear what we want to hear: this song is about a  breakup, this one is about seeing some natural wonder, this one is about religion. Our assumptions go a long way toward the aura of songs– if only personally– while the constructions of an album matters more than we usually imagine. Take The Popovers’ first and forever only record Make It So! Each song is a simply crafted pop gem about exactly what you hear lyrically. Without the  vagueness and guesswork, the listener is completely in tune with what is happening in the song, rather than the external thought that usually conjures our aforementioned ignorance.

“Yoga in the Morning” is hardly the best song on the album, but it is a good example of the songwriting on the album. Easily digestible lyrics with female backups drive a fantastic pop song. This song is the definition of infectious. And the onslaught continues on my favorite song on the album– a keyboard infused doo-wopper in “Sad State of Affairs.” A song about a sad-sack roommate sleeping around, the Popovers’ best intentions are here. The omnipresent lyrics are borderline creepy in their caring and realistic in their admissions. Meanwhile, the verse-chorus-verse mentality expands here– no need for fancy transitions or big solos, “Sad State of Affairs” is good without trickery.

“The Worst in You” qualifies as a slow jam, but it still drives home the point: this is style over substance. A building, swirling verse is subdued in nature, but just as driving and lovely as any other song on the album. Sure, the context is sappy sadness, but the song is as vulnerable and fun as it is saccharine. It moves well into “Do I Make You Feel Uncomfortable,” a return to the pop-rock the album boasts on most songs. Starting with a solo, the song is one of the only male-only dominated vocal patterns. It’s rewarding to stray a bit from the norm.

No song strays from the norm like “It’s My Right (To Fall for the Wrong Person).” With a backbeat that likens more to electronica and a back-and-forth argument between the vocalists on their “relationship,” “It’s My Right” proves that Make It So! isn’t just a flashy record, it’s a clever one. The substance creeps in, making ignorance to The Popovers’ obscene amounts of talent impossible. Surely, pop records can be ignored when they are all flash, and Make It So! rarely falters in flash, but it is not so easy to ignore the brilliance of a song like this one.

“Deck Chairs” is, quite possibly, the most melodic and poetic song on the album with guest vocals that allow singers Tim LaFollette and Catie Braly to accentuate rather than carry– again, deviance from the norm is a plus. “I Think We Make Better Friends and I Don’t Want to Be in This Relationship” is an anthemic rocker with slow verses and a champion-drinker’s stance on a failing relationship. The mentality of the album isn’t so much sagging as it is overloaded at this point. The bleeps and bloops of the middle of the album are fading and the big, full guitars take over. “I Think…” is the second-to-last song, the longest on the record and, realistically, where the listener is ready for loud crashes and big guitars. As “Happy Go Lucky Guy” introduces horns and scene-stealing simplicity to finish the record, the listener is re-inundated with the simple rhythms, the well-placed piano notes and the easy-going, hardly perfect lyrics that kept us listening in the first place.

Of course, there’s a bonus song and it’s so damned catchy it hurts. And it has a back story, seen here, of it becoming the Dan Savage Lovecast theme song. But, I’m sure all of these songs have back stories. Thing is, I’m cool without knowing them. I’m totally fine letting my gleeful ignorance pour over these songs and freeze them as moments in time rather than try and figure them out. There’s nothing complex here, but there’s certainly something more than simplicity. I’m not sure I care to ruin the craft by trying harder than the songs want me to. Make It So! wants me to bounce in my car, forget why the songs are sad at times, even forget who’s writing/performing them. They exist for the sole purpose of existence, to be good despite themselves and to prefect a genre of which most people already have longstanding favorites. The Popovers have done all that, and I’ll bet they’re totally fine with the obscurity that comes along with the gleeful ignorance the listener embraces.

Ed. Note: I’d be remiss not to mention that the link I provided in the final paragraph is a link to the OftenAwesome series in which Tim is featured prominently as he battles ALS. I can’t recommend it enough. At times, the ongoing documentary shows his bravery, at times his vulnerability, but it continually shows Tim as he is. If you watch the series, that’s enough for me, but feel free to join the army, donate, buy one of the records, shirts or just get involved. Please get involved. Also, the Popovers album is available for download/stream here, and donations– to directly benefit Tim– are strongly suggested.

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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Foo Fighters: Wasting Light

Dan Mooney, April 13, 2011 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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The subtitle of the excellent new Foo Fighters documentary is Back and Forth, taken from a song of the same name from Wasting Light. Looking at their career, which now spans seven full albums, plus other releases, the phrase “back and forth” also addresses their constant touring but more importantly captures a certain restlessness in the band’s music from album to album, even while acknowledging their classic sound. For every louder album, it seems that, singles aside, there’s oddly enough a lower-key one coming up next. I admire bands that try to stretch their sound but, honestly, I was also very much hoping that Wasting Light would be a return to form for these guys, coming home from a largely acoustic vacation and itching to play loud and fast, unapologetically, having some real fun again and, if you like, recapturing the excitement of youth before all this growing up got in the way.

My anticipation grew over the last few months as the band released bits of music, the attacking opening riff and line of the first track, “Bridge Burning,” and even the entire “White Limo,” a souped-up “Weenie Beenie” complete with a typically jaunty video. These songs hinted at Dave Grohl reincorporating some of the energy he let fly with Them Crooked Vultures and, almost ten years ago now, Queens of the Stone Age. Incidentally, that kind of bothered me in recent years, how he’d frequently slow down and soften the Foo Fighters’ music – often to a beautiful degree, mind you – while having louder fun with other bands. Whether those chances were taken elsewhere to protect the Foos’ brand, or Grohl was purposefully using his most popular platform to be widely, if more quietly, expressive, that anxiety has been thrown aside. Wasting Light thankfully shows these guys going with what brung them.

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Pharoahe Monch: W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)

Jeff Laughlin, April 12, 2011 in Music Reviews. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Note: I’m not sure what the actual order of these songs is. I have an early copy from the label, so I’m going with what I have.

I really don’t care much for the concept of Pharoahe Monch’s album as explained by the title. Instead, I care about PM’s ability to drop a consistently good, charismatic album. The album could be streamlined and the lyrics could be a little more concise rather than abstract or minutiae-laden. Pharoahe could have kept the R&B swells down and dialed up the intensity at times. Then again, he stars on a damn good album anyway.

W.A.R. begins (possibly– wikipedia has a different track listing) with the alternately astounding and inherently flawed “Assassins.” Jean Grae destroys the opening bars, Pharoahe follows and then, inexplicably, the mid-song skit kills the momentum before an otherwise fantastic verse from Royce Da 5′9″.  What could be the best track on the album gets too long, too outrageous and overly conceptual. Not to mention, Jean Grae? Not the best voice actor. The song is also preceded by a long narrative voiceover as pointless as the in-song skit. As much as I want to lambaste the production and lack of restraint, the next song completely changes the tone and effect of W.A.R..

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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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The Dodos: No Color

Dan Mooney, March 28, 2011 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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The insistent power of No Color sneaked up on me. Picking out the parts straight away, I heard acoustic guitar and some kind of percussion, not a typical drum set. The biography confirms it: Meric Long sings and plays mostly acoustic guitar, and Logan Kroeber handles those odd drums. Some guest spots and overdubs and electrics aside, that’s all the instrumentation there is. Other bands run with this minimalism, less being more, stripping down the sound for a more intimate approach. But on this record, the pair chases down something completely different.

I’d say that rather than trying to merely get a message across to the listener, these two are more interested in creating a mood, putting the listener in certain state of mind. And generally, they succeed. The music is quite often terrific. But also: the rhythm is more important than the specifics. Guitar chords seem to be repeated more than they are changed. Snatches of melody show up here and there and disappear, only to be brought back, or not. The songs aren’t really formulaic, especially on the first half of the record: Except for the awfully catchy sing-song refrain of “Going Under,” it’s hard to decipher which might be a verse and which might be a chorus. Honestly, for the first few listens, this strange structure frustrated me and my expectations. The nearly indecipherable lyrics didn’t help me understand the mechanics any better, and made me think wordless chanting might have been the better play. But after a while, I went ahead and gave up trying to think like that, and only then did I really begin to enjoy the bulk of it, turning off rather than turning on.

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