Detail from a Works Progress Administration poster, 1937
Reading back over my write-up of the Pretty Things' Philippe Debarge record from a while ago, I realized that I never mentioned that it was my first real exposure to the Pretty Things (beyond the singles I've enjoyed from '60s psych comps). So, yeah - I bought a weird one-off project first, instead of going for one of their popular late-'60s pysch-rock albums. (I do that a lot for some reason.) I liked Philippe Debarge a lot, though, so I decided I'd track down more of Pretty Things records. I didn't really have their 1965 record Get the Picture? in mind, but when I saw the now out-of-print (I think?) Original Masters version of it in a used CD store, I had to get it.
I knew that Get the Picture? had the derivative R&B sound that a lot of rock bands favored in the mid-'60s, but I was curious to see how the Pretty Things had sounded in their early days. The album starts out with several originals from bandleaders Phil May and Dick Taylor, and I took to these songs immediately. The jangly opener "You Don't Believe Me", the stomping title track and the hazy psych/R&B of "Can't Stand the Pain" were all promising, but the album takes a real nose-dive once it gets into the bog-standard R&B covers. Phil May tries too hard to sound like Mick Jagger here, and that's no surprise - the Pretty Things were vying for the title of Britain's baddest bad boys at the time. But soulful R&B doesn't play to May's strengths - he sounds much better in the more melodic and harmony-oriented stuff they did later on. The problem is especially evident on their single "Cry to Me" because everyone is familiar with the excellent Solomon Burke version, and the Rolling Stones released a superior version the same year the Pretty Things covered it.
The real redeeming feature of the Get the Picture? CD is the bonus tracks, which include all the singles and EP tracks recorded at the same time as the record. A lot of the Pretty Things' best early singles are found here, including "Midnight to Six Man" (a song that benefits greatly from some Nicky Hopkins piano), the rocking "Come See Me", and the controversial "L.S.D", a song that featured the chorus "I need LSD, I need LSD" a full year before anyone knew enough about the drug to make it illegal. If some of these bonus tracks had replaced the weaker R&B covers on the actual record, Get the Picture? would be stronger and seem a lot less dated.
Unsurprisingly, my favorite song of the whole lot is the one that points to the more interesting psychedelic stuff the Pretty Things would do on the albums that followed Get the Picture? - "Can't Stand the Pain". The song pairs a folky guitar lead and wood-block arrangement (reminiscent of the Beau Brummels) with some pretty heavily reverbed vocals chanting the song's title. At times, the song tries to exert some R&B muscle, especially on Taylor's excellent solo section, but the way that it goes from hazy to focused and back again is the most interesting thing about it. This song makes me think that I really need to go out and find the essential Pretty Things albums Emotions, S.F. Sorrow, and Parachute.
Illustration by Austin Briggs from the Saturday Evening Post, December 1957
The additional evidence I promised pointing to my burgeoning psychic powers has finally arrived, in the form of a sequel/prequel to last year's official Wires and Waves Album of the Year, Yes Boss by Kleenex Girl Wonder. This record, titled Mrs. Equitone, is a thing of beauty, its only commercially-available tangible format being a 7"x7" CD edition (the outsized packaging contains a regular-size CD) with an accompanying essay and extensively annotated lyric book. Anyone who's anyone will remember that my wish of all wishes was to have a fully annotated lyric sheet to Yes Boss, so the new album taking on this form can only mean that I have managed to establish an embryonic psionic link with Kleenex Girl Wonder mastermind (and NY-based songwriter) Graham Smith. Congratulate me at your earliest convenience.
I'm pretty happy about this record. It's hard to talk about how Mrs. Equitone relates to Yes Boss because the chronology is confused - I think that it was recorded in 2008, before last year's album, but was only released last month. It also has a somewhat different agenda to the verbosity-as-extended-metaphor grandeur of Yes Boss. The Mrs. Equitone book's Foreward explains pretty clearly how this is an attempt to evoke Smith's earlier, funnier works by recording the whole album at home with an "emphasis on holistic songwriting, avoidance of repetition in choruses and song structures in general, and a focus on creating meaningful, appreciable lyrics and vocal melodies which prioritize multi-syllabic rhymes."
As a devotee of classic-period KGW (i.e. Ponyoak), this was good news to me. And Mrs. Equitone does have some similarities to Ponyoak in its song structures, arrangements, and melodies, which are paired nicely with the impressive humor and lyrical denseness that made Yes Boss great. The songs on Mrs. Equitone reveal that Smith has been spending a lot of time (1) watching HBO and (2) looking up random things on Wikipedia - references to Deadwood and The Sopranos butt up against Japanese poet Ikkyu, pre-Christian Gnosticism, and the dubious Howie Mandel comedy Walk Like a Man. The annotated lyric book can be referenced casually or not at all and the lyrics are still poignant and funny, but close attention to the words pays off as well. Here are some favorite lyrical excerpts:
You said that you could never see yourself with almost anyone else - I guess that was technically true.
It doesn't take much to make an idiot out of an autodidact.
Tell me what have you got in your mandible now? A kitten or a midwestern cow or a hyperbole or a sweet little sound?
Most of the songs on Mrs. Equitone are about love and relationships, with rich metaphors comparing love to time ("Months at a Glance"), waitressing ("Coming Around"), and, best of all, the failed HBO comedy and Robert Wuhl star vehicle Arli$$ (the album's single "Heartle$$"). My favorite song may be the most lyrically impenetrable, titled "Telempathy Training Seminar Saturday" - according to the annotations, the title is a reference to Deanna Troi fan fiction, and the lyric is about a self-help group distributing pills that grant supernatural empathic powers. The song's middle section is a transcript of a telempathic session and features some of the album's most biting lyrics, reminiscent of the more acidic portions of Yes Boss. The song's sound, however, is straight out of Ponyoak, especially the outro, which clearly quotes the coda of "I Cut Myself In Half".
The best thing about Mrs. Equitone is that it melds Graham Smith's new-found lyrical ambition with the lo-fi melodicism of his old records. If you want to get better acquainted with the Kleenex Girl Wonder songbook, go to kgw.me, where you can listen to most of Smith's old-school recordings and his most recent work. Of particular interest is the version of Smith that is found there, a reinvented version the 2001 album, paring its original 41-track length to its essential fifteen songs, removing the terrible skits and detritus that made it seem inessential at the time and revealing some of the tightest and catchiest songs Smith wrote during that period. This new version is, in fact, almost identical to a CD-R distillation of Smith that I made when it was released. Coincidence or evidence of a psychic connection? You make the call.
"Telempathy Training Seminar Saturday" by Kleenex Girl Wonder
Illustration titled "Cerbere et Leonard" by Bataille from Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, 1895
You know who I always felt bad for? John Ritter. Poor guy died on the same day as Johnny Cash and, as a result, his passing was largely overlooked. The star of Problem Child and Problem Child 2 deserved better. Weirdly, Sky Saxon, the frontman of the Seeds, the archetypal American garage rock band, was not even John Ritter in yesterday's news cycle. That was Farah Fawcett, but I have trouble connecting with her passing on a personal level - I was a little too young to have any formative experiences involving her nipples.
I mostly know the music of the Seeds through garage comps I've collected (both their hits are found on the Nuggets discs), but I feel like recognizing Saxon's passing because so much of the music I listen to has descended directly from the garage rock tradition that Saxon was a part of. Moreso than, say, Michael Jackson, who was such a big cultural force that the word "influential" doesn't really apply. For now, I'm enjoying the Seeds' "other" hit song, "I Can't Seem to Make You Mine". Sky Saxon sounds really great here - definitely America's premiere Jagger imitator in his day. The keyboard bit is nice, too - try to listen to it without seeing images of the recent Lynx body spray commercial it was used in.
Photo by Gabriel Moulin of the Court of Pacifica at the San Francisco World Fair, 1940
I think you can make the argument that Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding of XTC understand the British Invasion and UK psychedelia better than anyone. For evidence, you don't have to look any further than 25 O'Clock and Psionic Psunspot, the recordings they made under the name Dukes of Stratosphear. These releases were composed primarily of songs that the XTC boys deemed to be too derivative to be released under the band's name, but the Dukes' songs taken all together (as on the collection Chips of the Chocolate Fireball) reveal an intimate knowledge of the songwriting and production of '60s psych-rock. They pull off impressive rip-offs of Pink Floyd, the Hollies, the Yardbirds, the Move, Manfred Mann, and even some non-UK bands like Love and the Beach Boys. And even though the songs were treated as cast-offs by the band, they represent some of XTC's best work. I think XTC understands this, as they have just released deluxe versions of both 25 O'Clock and Psionic Psunspot.
The Dukes' recordings include a lot of "We Love the Beatles" material - in fact, you could argue that each of the Beatles is represented in the Dukes oeuvre. "The Mole from the Ministry" is the Lennon song - it's a sludgy, dark "I Am the Walrus" remake. George Harrison can be found in Moulding's "Shiny Cage", with its Revolver-esque Eastern touches and guitar solo. And there's at least a little corny Ringo in the pub-psych "You're a Good Man Albert Brown", mixed with a Kinks delivery and a loping tempo taken from the Small Faces' "The Universal". And then there's "Brainiac's Daughter", the Paul song.
One of the great things about the Dukes is that they are so obviously homages to XTC's favorites, but they are still very XTC. There's nothing really McCartney in the lyric to "Brainiac's Daughter" - that is all Partridge's comic-book obsession. But with its references to Superman, his nemesis Brainiac, the Daily Planet, and the Bottled City of Kandor, it's a great topic for a psych-rock song, and they've paired the lyric with a melody and arrangement that is pure "Yellow Submarine"-era McCartney, down to the bubbling sound effects on the bridge. The little-girl spoken intro is actually derived from Traffic's early single "A Hole in My Shoe", but the rest of the arrangement has the key elements of McCartney psych-pop.
Partridge said, "Banana fingers piano, descending chord changes, falsetto vocals, nonsensical lyrics . . . it's got the lot! We tried to make a McCartney psychedelic soup." The proof of the Beatles love is in the caring recreation of the sound, especially the bass sound and melodic borrowing, which never rises to the level of all-out theft. If you love the Beatles and haven't heard the Dukes, track down the new re-releases or Chips from the Chocolate Fireball ASAP.
"Brainiac's Daughter" by the Dukes of Stratosphear
Page from a book on fish from the rare book section of the Japanese National Library, c. 1880
Harry Nilsson is best known for his cover of Badfinger's "Without You", which still gets played on the radio a lot, evoking the common response, "Whoa, who did this awful cover of that one Mariah Carey song?" But the songwriter is also known for his Grammy-winning cover of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" and for his palship with John Lennon.
Yeah, "palship" is a real word - look it up.
But before he was a friend of former Beatles, Nilsson was a HUGE Beatles fan. You don't have to look any further than Pandemonium Shadow Show, his 1967 debut album (not counting an earlier singles compilation). The album contains a cover of "She's Leaving Home" from Sgt. Pepper's, an album that had only been out for a couple months at the time. The album also has a "cover" of the Beatles' "You Can't Do That", but the track is actually a medley of all the Beatles' best hooks smooshed into two-minute pop songs. It's a fun but headache-inducing listen.
Nilsson's Beatles love continued with 1968's Aerial Ballet, which has some very Beatles-esque songs like "Good Old Desk". That album also featured the single "One" (later a hit for the excellent bands Three Dog Night and Filter), and "Sister Marie" was the single's non-album b-side. "Sister Marie" is another excellent Beatles pastiche, an attempt at "Lucy in the Sky"-style hazy psychedelia. It also sounds a lot like "I am a Tangerine" by Tommy James and the Shondells, but this is We Love the Beatles, not We Love Tommy James and the Shondells.
And I was totally kidding about Filter, by the way. Those guys were terrible and I hope the soundtrack to X-Files: Fight the Future goes straight to hell for featuring their cover of "One". Execrable.
Playing cards from a special deck by Maximilian Frommann commemorating the first German Shooting Festival, 1862
So Chris Knox had a pretty serious stroke a couple weeks ago. The New Zealand musician and cartoonist is apparently doing a lot better already - according to a recent report from the New Zealand Herald, he sang "Happy Birthday" to his wife this week in the hospital. I hope this is the beginning of a quick recovery. Chris Knox is a key figure in the history of kiwi pop, having been involved in Flying Nun Records from the label's very early days. He signed and recorded many of the label's bands when they were first getting started. I get the impression that he is a little bit of a divisive figure - some of the musicians interviewed in the documentary Heavenly Pop Hits had some less-than-nice things to say about him. I'd guess that, especially in the early '80s, his strong opinions and commitment to the DIY aesthetic probably rubbed a lot of people in the wrong way. But he was instrumental in getting some of my favorite music released, so I'm grateful to him for his part in getting the early music of the Chills, the Verlaines, the Bats, the Clean, and the Sneaky Feelings from his bedroom 4-track to the world.
I don't know Chris Knox's solo work very well, but I'm a big fan of the Tall Dwarfs, his collaboration with Alec Bathgate from the '80s. In 1987, they released the Dogma EP, one of their best recordings. I'd feel bad posting the EP's best song, "The Slide", since it's about euthanasia, but I like "Cant" a lot as well. Like many Tall Dwarfs songs, it starts with a shuffling percussion loop, with Knox and Bathgate singing/caterwauling over the top. The song includes the odd invocation, "Heal me Satan!" - I don't know if Satan will have anything to do with Knox's convalescence, but I hope he continues to get better and is able to return home soon.
Poster titled "Building for Health" for the Bureau of Social Education by Marie Danforth Page, 1918
Something weird happens when you read a lot of books by an author (or listen to a lot of albums by an artist) without ever seeing a picture of them. You end up with a pretty specific picture in your head of what that individual looks like, and, ultimately, you are going to be disappointed when you see a picture of them and say, "THAT'S what she (or he) looks like?" That's why I'm not trying to find out any information about the band Black Moth Super Rainbow - in a way, I already know too much. I know that they're from Pennsylvania, the current incarnation of the band has members of both genders, and they use kooky pseudonyms like Tobacco and Father Hummingbird. But the music of Black Moth Super Rainbow is so good at creating its own world that I don't want any real-world images interfering with it.
I've heard that, in the beginning, Black Moth Super Rainbow were trying to recreate the music memories of their early childhood, primarily the synthesized music of children's television in the '70s. You can hear this approach in their early albums like Start a People, but something interesting has happened since then. Their new album, Eating Us, reveals that, in trying to evoke the past, they have created a world all its own. The world of Black Moth Super Rainbow is like the set of a '70s children show that has been overrun by the shamans of an ancient god, and their rituals have turned the pastel-colored studio into a forest glade, with saplings springing up through cracks in the flooring and moss covering the analog synthesizers. Eating Us has more organic elements than previous BMSR albums, but these additions mesh well with the broken-sounding synths and eroded loops of their earlier work. The album has three songs that are as close to pop hits as they are likely to ever make ("Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise", "Twin of Myself", and "Tooth Decay"), as well as some darker songs that match the album's monochrome cover. "Iron Lemonade" has a heavy groove and a sing-song melody (heavily Vocodered as always)with the disturbing refrain "Iron lemonade / wash my friends away / na na na na / neon lemonade / eat my face away/ na na na na." "American Face Dust" manages to be just as creepy with a banjo-based arrangement.
One highlight of the album is "The Sticky" - it's probably the song on Eating Us that is most like the sound of their earlier albums. But "The Sticky" has a great vocal hook and some nice flute sounds that make it more memorable than their early recordings. It builds nicely as well, from a muted intro to a big crescendo of crashing percussion at the end. A lot of people prefer the last BMSR album, Dandelion Gum to the new one, but I think that either of these records is a good way to get a look inside the weird world being conjured by Black Moth Super Rainbow.
Detail of photo from Lee Jeans advertisement, 1975
I'm a corny sentimentalist, so of course I love songs with names like "Look Up". Two great songs have this title, and it's weird that I haven't had them face off yet. This is one of the match-ups I had in mind when I decided to do the "Title Fight" feature.
The first "Look Up" is by Chris Bell, the Memphis-based songwriter who was a key player on the first Big Star record. After leaving Big Star, Bell traveled a lot and made a set of solo recordings while dealing with drug addiction and depression. Only one single was ever released before Bell crashed his Triumph into a light-pole and died in '78, but the songs were compiled as I Am the Cosmos in 1992. This collection is great, and "Look Up" is one of my favorites. With a mellotron-and-guitar arrangement, the song begins with a thin, distant vocal from Bell. When the multi-tracked backing vocals kick in, the song really takes off with a beautiful rising melody line. The lyric seems to be an uplifting spiritual message, like many of Bell's later songs, but one line is puzzling: "If you look up you'll see him / you know we're all alone." Bell's yearning vocal and the song's lullaby-like sound make this one a real heart-breaker.
Toronto band Stars go for a similar vibe with their "Look Up". Instead of a mellotron, their song begins with a lovely English horn melody sampled from Berlioz. Drum machines and pulsing bass are added to this sample as Amy Millan begins to sing, and horn swells add to the great chorus hook. My favorite part, though, is where the instruments all drop away after the chorus, leaving just the chugging bass and horn sample. The lyric here is also an uplifting one, but on a more romantic and personal level - the chorus ends, "Look up rain is falling / Looks like love." Weirdly, this song was not a breakthrough single for the band - it should have been a hit.
At least they got to see their songs get released. I'm going to have to give this one to Chris Bell because his story is just so sad. As much as I love Stars, they should have known better than to go up against a member of the 27 Club.
Detail of a political photo-montage titled Appeasement by John Heartfield, 1939
So I'm not sure why this cover of the Magnetic Fields' "Born on a Train" is on the Jukebox at all, since I don't usually hang on to low-quality mp3's of stuff that circulates on the indie blogs (and I'm pretty sure that's where this Arcade Fire track came from). Listening to it now, I'm not that psyched about it. It's not that I buy into the pervasive Arcade Fire backlash - I was a little disappointed by Neon Bible when it came out, but I still think that Win Butler and co. are talented musicians with a lot to offer. They just don't really play to their strengths on this track. And the last thing I want to visualize when listening to the Arcade Fire is Stephin Merritt, seething and grinding his teeth in impotent rage while stroking a chihuahua.
The original version from the Magnetic Fields' 1994 album, The Charm of the Highway Strip, is a thing of real beauty, pairing the album's themes of highway travel and the undead with a classic pop melody and synth-country arrangement. Win Butler doesn't do the melody justice here, croaking melodramatically in a key that doesn't suit his limited range very well, and he doesn't even get the lyric right, flubbing a key rhyme at the beginning of the third verse. I'm sorry, guys - the Probabilistic Jukebox let us all down today. I'm tempted to purge this track from my hard drive for once and for all.
Illustration from the miniature book Adventures of the Flighty Old Woman by Robert E. Massman, 1966
I've seen a lot of dumb "guy" movies, and I've even reviewed a couple on this site (e.g. Observe and Report and I Love You, Man) but I am still willing to assert that I'm not a fan of the genre. I am a fan of some of the actors that work best in this medium, though, and I saw The Hangover because it had two of my favorites, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis. I've liked Ed Helms since he was a correspondent on The Daily Show, and his weird, desperate insecurity works just as well on The Office. I've mostly seen Zach Galifianakis do stand-up, as in the documentary The Comedians of Comedy, and I've always found his delivery, which alternates between blank recitation and unhinged agitation, to be the funny kind of unusual.
In The Hangover, Helms and Galifianakis are joined by Bradley Cooper as three friends who have a really bad night in Las Vegas. They've gone to Vegas for a bachelor party celebration for their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) but find in the morning that he's gone missing. They also discover evidence that, during their celebratory blackout, they've been to a hospital, acquired a live tiger and an infant, stolen a police car, and done at least a dozen other c-c-c-crazy things. The severely episodic plot has the three friends trying to piece the night together to find Doug, moving from one awkward situation or violent encounter to the next and getting increasingly desperate as the time of the wedding draws closer.
I'm guessing that this was a pretty dire draft script when director Todd Phillips got his hands on it. Luckily, his knack for funny but unapologetically fratboy-ish humor and his ability to get the right cast together saved this project. The Hangover works because the three principles work. Cooper brings just the right amount of self-loathing to Phil, the unhappily married, douchey schoolteacher. Helms plays Stu, a henpecked dentist, with the right amount of tense insecurity and bottled-up rage. And Galifianakis is the key to it all. As the odd man out, the future brother-in-law invited along with three longtime friends, he's the unknown factor. A bearded man-child with a startling combination of bravado and naivete, Galifianakis delivers at least 90% of the movie's laughs. He brings a lot of nuance to the character, too - halfway through the movie, he says, "Sorry guys. I fudged up," and I suddenly realized that his character had managed to seem creepier than his foul-mouthed companions but had never uttered a single dirty word.
Because it is made up of a string of vignettes that don't really build in intensity, The Hangover runs out of juice a good half hour before its ending, an ending that tries to milk a little too much sentimentality out of the crass humor that has preceded it. But I'll admit that I laughed pretty hard for the movie's first hour, and I'll cheer for any movie that will make Zach Galifianakis a known commodity. For a glimpse into the unadulterated weirdness of Galifianakis' own projects, watch some episodes of his interview show Between Two Fernshere.
And check it out - I managed to find a song that alludes to the plot of The Hangover pretty well, too. How about that?
Comic panel from "Grin And Bear It" by George Lichty, 1937
Robyn Hitchcock never really went away, but lately things have been going really well for him. He is currently on tour with the Decemberists (and played on their most recent record), and his touring band includes longtime friend/fan Peter Buck of REM. He played a song in Rachel Getting Married. His last two albums in Yep Roc Records have gotten good reviews. And, best of all, the best albums of his post-Soft Boys career are now back in print after years of being unavailable. In 2007, Yep Roc rereleased his solo albums from the '80s, and these records show Hitchcock's surrealist-folk side at its best. Last year, they put out the first three albums he made with the Egyptians, a band composed primarily of former Soft Boys.
It's great to finally have access to all these records, and I've been most impressed with 1984's I Often Dream of Trains and 1985's Fegmania! The former is Hitchcock in his starkest, stripped-down folk mode, taking the listener through a singular and creepy dreamworld of nightmare imagery and bizarre whimsy. The latter is Hitchcock at his poppiest, delivering a Technicolor splatter of hooks and instruments and embracing a variety of styles all at once. It's amazing that he made these records back to back. Fegmania! appeals to my sensibilities more, and it may be my favorite Hitchcock release. It has plenty of straight-up pop songs, from the eastern-tinged "Egyptian Cream" to the transcendent album closer "Heaven". It also has a handful of creepy lyric-oriented songs as well, like "I'm Only You", "The Fly", and the menacing "Goodnight I Say". The best songs on the record, though, are the ones that combine the pop hooks with Hitchcock's creepier surrealist tendencies, like "My Wife and My Dead Wife" and "The Man with the Lightbulb Head".
My new favorite Hitchcock song, though, is "Strawberry Mind" - this song blew me away the first time I heard it. Robyn Hitchcock doesn't usually go for genre experiments because his music comes from a unique personal place - at times, it seems like his throat is a doorway to a world where language functions very differently - so a zydeco-style pop song was the last thing I expected to hear on Fegmania! The lyrics are Hitchcock doing what he does best, conjuring vaguely sexual imagery that just seems a little off, and the chorus hook is a lot of fun. It's a stand-out track on an amazingly consistent and fun pop record from one of the UK's best songwriters.
"Strawberry Mind" by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
Illustration from Bill the Minder by W. Heath Robinson, 1912
I am an unapologetic fan of kids' movies, and nobody makes movies for adult fans of kids' movies like Pixar. Pixar films have a way of presenting stories with style, humor, emotion, and theme that make them worthy of multiple viewings. And they are fun to talk about, which is not something that can be said for a lot of other kids' fare. Pixar movies are always at least a little ambitious, and I find that my enjoyment relates directly to how ambitious they get. Cars and Finding Nemo are fun, but I get more from the controversial politics of The Incredibles and the unique vision of Ratatouille and Wall-E. So, obviously Up appealed to me as a concept - a movie for children about aging, death, and regret!
The trick to Up (and there will be some very minor spoilers here) is getting Carl, the film's main character, to where he needs to be at the beginning of the story. Carl is a recent widower fed up with his life who decides to fulfill his wife's dream of travel and adventure. For the movie to work, you have to know how Carl gets to this point, and writer/director Pete Docter pulls this off with one of the best opening montages I've seen (Up is actually structurally similar to this year's Watchmen in starting with a sequence that makes promises the movie cannot possibly live up to). The key is making the viewer fall in love with Ellie, Carl's wife, a character that by necessity must be "present" without being on-screen for the remainder of the movie. By pulling this off with masterful editing and a beautiful musical score, Docter connects the viewer to Carl in a very short time. The rest of the movie exists only in the context of the opening sequence, as all of Carl's adventures and interactions are motivated by his relationship with Ellie.
So Carl takes off for South America in his flying house, and his adventures in the sky seem ripe for an episodic series of encounters, but Up is focused on a single linear thread of plot, almost to a fault. Carl's journey is fairly abbreviated, and the movie's second and third act play out a rivalry between Carl and his childhood hero, the explorer Charles Muntz. Muntz is not a particularly compelling villain - a typical Howard-Hughes-style monomaniac - but he doesn't really drag Up down. In his struggle to make Ellie's dream come true, Carl encounters a neglected Boy Scout, Russell, a talking dog called Dug, and an exotic bird named Kevin. Each of these supporting characters brings a youthful energy to the film that compensates for the geriatric axis of Carl and Muntz, and they also represent aspects of Carl's relationship with Ellie that he needs to confront to find peace. In different ways, Russell and Dug represent the children that Carl never had as well as the innocence and wonder that drew him to Ellie in the first place. Kevin is a symbol for the "sense of adventure" and the discovering of new things that was a big part of his early friendship with Ellie.
Some of the symbolism is a little heavy-handed, like the obvious baggage that Carl is carrying around with him, represented by a huge floating house tied around his waist. But it's very satisfying to see Carl figure out what he's doing with his life as he lets others in to fill the gap that Ellie left. I'm not sure how kids will connect with this theme - I honestly think it was presented in a clearer and more direct way in Toy Story 2 - but it made the movie very enjoyable for me. And Pixar has already proven that they are willing to make kids stretch a little to connect with a movie - they'll tell a story about an Epicurean rat would square off against a repressed food critic and expect kids to figure it out.
I didn't see Up in 3D, but the visuals are good enough without the additional effects (friends have told me that the 3D version doesn't add much.) The movie has plenty of funny moments for kids and grown-ups without ever stooping to body-function humor, and the score is as good as any Pixar music I can remember. I'd put Up in the middle to upper echelon of Pixar movies, above Monsters Inc. and Cars but below Toy Story 2 and Wall-E. And that's pretty good company to be keeping.
Illustration from The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, 1856
I first heard about the London band Hefner around the time of the release of their final album Dead Media. Guys I knew that were Hefner fans were so disappointed by the direction the new direction of the band thought I should check out the earlier stuff to see what the ruckus was all about. It turned out that Hefner was right up my alley - nerdy indie pop with a singular songwriting style and interesting voice, courtesy of frontman Darren Hayman. Since Hefner split up, Hayman has jumped between different projects. The one that has sounded most interesting to me is the Great British Holiday EPs project - it turned out that it wasn't available except as an import, but I splurged and bought it anyway, ostensibly as a gift for my special lady friend.
Between 2005 and 2007, Hayman and his wife went on a series of vacations to different UK holiday destinations. On each trip, he wrote an EP of songs intended to invoke the feel of the place. As a settling-down songwriter no longer as obsessed with the subjects of his earlier career (mostly booze, sex, and politics), Hayman used these holidays to ruminate on his current concerns and thoughts. The EPs make a nice collection addressing adult worries like disappointment, regret, and aging. Unfortunately, the EPs are presented chronologically, and the first EP, Caravan Songs, is easily the weakest of the four. I'm not sure whether Hayman actually had any fun in his wife's uncle's caravan in the northeast of England, but the songs themselves are not much fun. All the EPs were recorded with drum machine, ukulele, and keyboards, but this first set of songs is particularly stripped down, with some pretty bitter lyrics and a pointless instrumental track. The Great British Holiday EPs collection features some bonus tracks not on the original EPs, and the ones from Caravan Songs are superior, particularly Hayman's cover of "Holiday Road", the Lindsey Buckingham song from the soundtrack of National Lampoon's Vacation. It's a good choice of a song to cover - the collection's bonus tracks feature two other great covers, Connie Francis' "Vacation" and "Margate", a song from early '80s novelty act Chas & Dave (the song was best known as a jingle for Courage Beer).
The remaining three EPs on the collection are pretty excellent. Hayman's second holiday to the North Devon Coast is covered by Ukulele Songs from the North Devon Coast, and it might be the strongest EP in the collection. The songs are pretty personal, focusing on his thoughts on being married ("Rain All Summertime" and "The Only Kind of Light I Know") and getting older ("Hardcore No More" and "8 Bit World"). The arrangements are more sprightly and dynamic, and it has an optimism that was missing from Caravan Songs. In 2006, Hayman spent a couple days at the Seabeach House Hotel in Eastbourne making the EP Eastbourne Lights. I'm guessing that Eastbourne is a holiday destination for older folks, because this EP's songs have lyrics about old age and death. Highlights include include "No Military Man", which captures the suspicious tendencies of senior citizens really well, and "The Musgrave Collection", a song about living in a little room surrounded by memories. The series wrapped up with Hayman's trip to Butlins Holiday Camp in Minehead in 2006. These songs are typical wry ruminations on life in the Hayman style, but they have nice hooks and end the set on a high note.
The Great British Holiday EPs collection is worth tracking down if you like ukulele-based, literate pop music. Based on the songs presented, I'd be most likely to go to North Devon on holiday - Hayman really seemed happy there, even though the weather was apparently not great. You can hear about it in "Rain All Summertime", a song about how the right companionship can make any holiday a good one. Considering the stripped down arrangement Hayman used on this record, he got a good variety of sounds and dynamics out of the setup, and you can really hear it in the hooks on this song.
Photo titled "Unidentified one man band. Asheville, N.C." from the Alan Lomax Collection, c. 1938
There have been few good Beatles pastiches in recent years, and it's not really a surprise. For one thing, influences naturally become diluted with time - so much pop music these days is influenced in a small way by the Beatles, but it's a minor ingredient in the soup that is hard to isolate. Even today's power pop, a genre that thrived for years on Beatles-aping, has absorbed a lot of other influences over the years. I found one example from 1996 a while back - "Jumping Fences" by Olivia Tremor Control, but I've had trouble finding any songs from the last ten years that really yell, "We love the Beatles."
I did find another song from 1996 that is an interesting twist on Beatles love. The endlessly prolific Guided By Voices, a band obviously influenced by the British Invasion, must have a "We love the Beatles" song, right? I couldn't find one on my own, but it seemed so obvious once a friend pointed out that the song must be "If We Wait", a home-recorded song sketch from the Sunfish Holy Breakfast EP. Robert Pollard's singing style makes him sound British most of the time, but in the opening lines of "If We Wait", he sounds more like Lennon than anywhere else in the GBV discography. The song is a little rough production-wise, and the weird structure is not very Beatlesy, but the melody and overall feel make "If We Wait" a real "We love the Beatles" song.
Detail of cover illustration from The Funnies, October 1939
As usual, I'm using "We Love the Beatles" as a crutch because I don't have time to post something more interesting. I'd also like to finish up the series (I had about twelve in mind when I started) so that I can move on to "We Love the Beach Boys". So far, I've talked about the Rooks, the Spongetones, Olivia Tremor Control, Cleaners from Venus, and Off Broadway, but I have neglected to feature THE "We Love the Beatles" band - the only band to have recreated the Beatles sound so well that one of their songs was featured on Beatles bootlegs for years (listed as a rare Lennon demo.) The Rutles!
The Rutles started out as a one-off parody of the Beatles featured on Rutland Weekend Television, a BBC sketch comedy show with former Python Eric Idle. The brain behind the Rutles was Neil Innes, member of the Bonzo Dog Band, a great songwriter gifted with a good Lennon impression and a fairly intimate knowledge of everything Beatles (he was in the cast of Magical Mystery Tour!) Innes wrote a great Hard Day's Night-era sound-alike called "I Must Be in Love", and it led eventually to two mockumentaries and two albums of Beatles parodies. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that I like The Rutles as well as any Beatles album, but the songwriting and performances are really top notch. One detail a lot of people don't know is that Eric Idle is not on any of the original Rutles recordings - Neil Innes and his buddies recorded all the songs without him. Some of the rips of early annoying Beatles numbers like "Roll Over Beethoven" (with jokey titles like "Blue Suede Schubert" and "Goose Step Mama") are grating, but the parodies are presented in "chronological" order and get better as they go on, arguably peaking with the perfect "Cheese and Onions".
I think, though, that their first attempt sounds the best - "I Must Be in Love" is not exactly a ripoff of the song "A Hard Day's Night", but it captures the sound of that album perfectly.
Illustration by Al Parker for Cosmopolitan magazine, September 1954
Has this situation ever happened to you? People you know are all excited about something cool that they've discovered, and them sharing it with you gets you excited too. Then, when there's some news about this thing, those people have disappeared and you have no one to share it with. It's a weird feeling. My point is this - where are the people that introduced me to Emitt Rhodes?!? The lost albums of Emitt Rhodes have been like a Power-Pop Holy Grail or something for years. Now they've finally been remastered and released in a beautiful two-CD set by Hip-O Select. Why is no one talking about this? The easy answer that I hear a lot is that Emitt Rhodes is a second-rate McCartney imposter that never contributed anything new or original in his short solo career. My response to this is that Rhodes is not just A McCartney imposter - he is THE McCartney imposter to beat all others, and his songwriting talents and interesting story make his work different and worthwhile.
Rhodes grew up in Hawthorne, CA (known as the home of the Beach Boys) in the '60s. In an early brush with greatness, Dennis Wilson broke Rhodes' bass drum pedal at a school talent show. Rhodes was, of course, never a Beach Boys fan - he loved the Beatles, and by the age of fourteen, he was playing drums in the Palace Guard, an LA-area band that had a minor hit with the excellent garage-pop song "Falling Sugar". By sixteen, Rhodes was not happy behind the kit, and he had formed his own band the Merry-Go-Round, for which he sang, played guitar, and wrote almost all the material. The Merry-Go-Round specialized in sweet baroque pop, and their debut record for A&M Records had a regional hit with the song "Live" (later covered by the Bangles). Rhodes didn't thrive in the band dynamic, though, and the Merry-Go-Round was disbanded by his twentieth birthday.
And this is where the material on The Emitt Rhodes Recordings begins. Rhodes recorded four solo albums, presented in this set in the order they were recorded. The first of these albums, The American Dream, was made up of Merry-Go-Round leftovers and recorded by Rhodes with studio musicians to satisfy the Merry-Go-Round's contract with A&M. Rhodes' songwriting had already hit a new level, although the subject matter is largely abstract and hypothetical - understandable considering that he was just turning twenty and hadn't really lived much yet. The only problem with The American Dream is that the label slathered many of the songs in goopy string and horn arrangements that don't sound great. Rhodes completed the album in 1969, but A&M declined to release it right away. Rhodes decided it was time to do his own thing, so he set up a home studio in the shed of his parents' house in Hawthorne and started recording some new songs.
The new home demos were good enough to land Rhodes a deal with Dunhill Records, and these songs eventually became Rhodes' self-titled power-pop masterpiece. Emitt Rhodes featured Rhodes' most personal songwriting to date, and some of the overt McCartney-isms of his earlier work were fading as he found his own voice (ironically, his actual voice would always sound a lot like Paul). One of the very first true power pop records, Emitt Rhodes boasts twelve classic pop songs, including the bouncy tribute to alcohol "With My Face on the Floor", the wistful "Somebody Made for Me", and a brief lullabye titled "Lullabye" (which some may know from its appearance in The Royal Tenenbaums.) "Fresh as a Daisy" was an obvious standout as well, and Dunhill pushed it as a single - it reached #54 on the pop charts and the album sold well too. Not bad for a home-recorded debut record. The album probably would have done even better if A&M hadn't decided to finally release The American Dream around the same time, causing confusion among fans. "Fresh as a Daisy" was the single on the radio, but Rhodes' most recent release in stores was a record that didn't even have the song.
This was just the first of several bad turns that destroyed Rhodes' career. The second was that Dunhill was already asking for a second record within months of Emitt Rhodes' release. It turned out that Rhodes' recording contract required him to turn in a new record every six months, which is basically impossible for a guy writing and recording entire records at home. Rhodes started working on his next record, Mirror, right away, but Dunhill sued him when he didn't have it done on time for an amount of money exceeding the total he'd made from all his music combined. Rhodes finished the record anyway, but Mirror is definitely a product of the tension under which it was crafted. It doesn't sound sloppy or rushed, but the baroque style is thrown out entirely in favor of a more muscular and (oddly) piano-based sound. The songs are more bluesy and don't always play to Rhodes' strengths, but there's a nice contrast between the sweetness of his vocal melodies and the angry tension in the music. The softer songs, like "Love Will Stone You" and "Golden Child of God" are on par with any of Rhodes' best.
Dunhill didn't promote Mirror at all, so it flopped instead of building on the success of Rhodes' self-titled debut. The label continued with their lawsuit, but Rhodes still owed them another record, so he started working on his swan song, Farewell to Paradise. By this time, Rhodes was an accomplished engineer and producer and had taught himself several additional instruments, so Farewell to Paradise is a great-sounding record. On the down side, one of the instruments Rhodes taught himself was the saxophone, and (although he plays it pretty well) the noodling sax parts on some songs aren't really a good fit. Rhodes sounds totally worn out, too, making the record a pretty depressing listen in some ways. In fact, Farewell to Paradise is the first of Rhodes' records that actually has a "California" sound, and its vibe of soulful resignation sounds is very similar to Pacific Ocean Blue, the final record of Rhodes' old nemesis Dennis Wilson. "Warm Self-Sacrifice", "Blue Horizon" and "Farewell to Paradise" are so good and so sad that it's obvious that Rhodes was wrapping up his recording career in writing them. Dunhill barely released the record and it disappeared without a trace. In one last soul-crushing turn, Rhodes became a record-company A&R man when he gave up music, becoming part of the machine that had killed his dreams.
Rhodes has struggled to get by since the '80s, renting out his home studio to recording artists to make ends meet. He supposedly has hundreds of home demos on tape somewhere, but recent interviews indicate that the bright-eyed dreamer you hear on The Emitt Rhodes Recordings has been gone for years. Hopefully, people will start talking about this excellent set and its Limited Edition run will sell out - then Rhodes might finally see some royalty checks make their way to him after years of being abused by the industry.
Illustration from Widows, Grave and Otherwise by Cora Willmarth, c. 1903
It seems like there's a whole generation of guys out there whose moms listened to Neil Diamond. Not Neil Diamond exclusively, of course - I think that the "Neil Diamond moms" typically also listened to other AM Gold artists like John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot. There's a time in your life when it's okay to reconnect with music that is so closely tied to your childhood, and Play Me is just what I needed to do this (a copy of Graceland will also do in a pinch.) Play Me is a great way to go because, for under twenty bucks, you can get six records from Neil Diamond's peak songwriting period - Velvet Gloves and Spit, Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show, Touching You Touching Me, Taproot Manuscript, Stones, and Moods. 74 songs, if you include the bonus live tracks added to the third disc!
One thing that is immediately apparent when you get Play Me is that Uni Records signed Diamond a little too late - all his early hits are missing. In his short post-Brill-Building tenure at Bang Records, Diamond released "Cherry Cherry", "Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon", "Solitary Man", and "Red Red Wine". Those songs are not found on Play Me, which might make you think that a more comprehensive Diamond collection like In My Lifetime is a better way to go. My hunch is that the Bang Records recordings will get their own deluxe release at some point and, in combination with Play Me, you will then be able to have all of Diamond's peak-period recordings. What you do get on Play Me is everything Diamond recorded from '68 to '72 and, even though the albums are split a little awkwardly across three discs, I find that this a good way to hear the progression Diamond made as a songwriter and a performer during this period. The early albums feature a lot of the bubblegum songwriting style from his Brill-Building days, but this gradually gives way to an emphasis on more ambitious pop songwriting and, eventually, balladry and interpretation of other songwriters' work.
One thing that struck me listening to this collection was that Diamond's big singles from this period are actually pretty weird - "Sweet Caroline" is just about the only one that features a big memorable chorus. "Shilo", "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show", "Holly Holy", "Song Sung Blue", and even "Cracklin' Rosie" play with song structure in interesting ways, eschewing big chorus hooks and finding new ways to make a pop hit without a verse-chorus-verse setup. The early album cuts are still full of simple pop - they can seem underbaked compared to the more interesting singles, but they can be a great substitute for the Bang-era bubblegum that is missing from this set. Many of the other tracks are either covers of excellent songs by writers like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen or experiments of some kind. Some of the experiments are laughably awful, like "The Pot-Smoker's Song", which alternates a brainless pop chorus with heavyhanded monologues from drugees about shooting heroine into your spine. Songs like "You're So Sweet Horseflies Keep Hangin' Around Your Face" and "I Am the Lion" are also WTF-level headscratchers, but some of the weird tracks are fun. It's hard to say what Neil was thinking/smoking when he recorded "Knackelflerg" or "Porcupine Pie", but they are among my new favorites.
I have to admit that I like lighthearted "I Am a Believer"-style Neil Diamond the best, and Play Me has a lot of great simple pop songs that hit the right spot for me. One of my favorites is "River Runs, New Grown Plums", which features nice handclaps and a multi-tracked "la la la la la" chorus. Also, this song doesn't remind me of my mom, which can be a plus.
Photo by Leon Kuzmanoff for the cover of GQ Magazine, April 1961
I wrote about the Get Ready to Fly psych-pop compilation a while ago, but one of my favorite songs from this record popped up as the Jukebox selection last night, so I'm going to write a little more about producer Norman Petty and his Clovis, New Mexico studio. One of the most talented young bands that found their way to Clovis was the Tyme of Day from Irving, Texas. Brothers Shelby and Chris Rogers and their friend Bob Anderson made up the group, who were the house band at the popular Dallas teen club Lou Ann's. The Rogers boys' mother had moved to Clovis and invited her sons to come up and record with Petty in his studio. They recorded a couple singles that were good enough to get picked up and distributed by Mercury, but the band fell apart when the band's frontman and songwriter, Shelby, was born again and formed the Christian rock band Joshua.
There are so many things that I like about "Listen to What Is Never Said", beginning with Bob Anderson's bass riff and its clean plucked sound. Shelby Rogers delivers a strong vocal with a weird "father's advice" lyric that has prescient Christian overtones. And Petty's production touches are great as well, including the rumbling one-note keyboard overdub he added after the band finished recording. It's hard to believe that this song ended up on the b-side of the Tyme of Day single with a bubblegum pop number called "I Wanna Know" as the a-side.
Illustration detail from a movie poster for Harold Lloyd's A Sailor-Made Man by Joop van den Berg, 1921
The Numero Group has done it again. The archivist record label known mostly for their series of Eccentric Soul compilations, the Numero Group has been digging up rare and unreleased music of other kinds as well. This month they've released A Lovely Sight, an album that never really existed by a band called Pisces that barely ever existed. Underground '60s psych-pop is not the Numero Group's usual focus, but I'm glad they decided to put this one out. It's an interesting album, and as is often the case with Numero Group releases, the liner notes and storytelling of its origin is as powerful as the music itself.
Pisces was composed primarily of Jim Krein and Paul DiVenti, two musicians and music enthusiasts who lived in Rockford, Illinois in the late '60s. In music circles, Rockford is mostly known as the hometown of Cheap Trick, but the town's little music scene was around before those guys came along. Krein and DiVenti played around town in a few different struggling bands, eventually deciding to form a band together. They both had demanding day jobs, so their band gradually turned into more of a recording project when they got a small loan to open a music studio of their own. They got a lot of their equipment and recording know-how from Nielsen Music, the store owned by the family of Rick Nielsen (later of Cheap Trick!) Their arsenal included a 4-track reel-to-reel and some excellent custom mics made by a friend of theirs.
Heavily influenced by the Beatles, Krein and DiVenti wrote and recorded over a dozen original psych-pop songs in their little studio, when they weren't using the space to make money recording jingles and local mariachi acts. Their songs had an interesting low-key vibe that could be either serene or creepy, with a focus on close harmonies reminiscent of the Hollies or Zombies. Krein is a decent guitarist, and DiVenti's keyboards are as important to the band's sound as his smooth lead vocals. It kind of sounds like they were consciously recording one of each kind of stereotypical psych-pop song - they had a doom-and-gloom spoken word piece ("Genesis II"), a Paul-McCartney-style music-hall number ("Motley Mary Ann"), a creepy lullaby ("Children Kiss Your Mother Goodnight"), and a slow-burning garage rocker ("Like a Hole in the Wall Where the Rat Lives"). Their interest in experimental sounds livens up the material, and the recording-project approach to the music puts it in its own little world, isolated from any real scene. Krein and DiVenti got a small record label, Vincent Records (owned by a local tailor), to put out a couple of their singles but none of them went anywhere.
Pisces' last shot at a breakthrough came when Krein, teaching guitar lessons on the side, found that one of his students had a great singing voice. Seventeen-year-old Linda Bruner was a troubled young woman from a rough background, but her soulful voice was perfect for some new songs Krein was working on. She only recorded a few songs with Pisces, but Vincent Records liked them well enough to release a single under the name Bruner. Unfortunately, the single didn't sell and Linda decided to quit music for good. A short time later, the A Lovely Sight studio burned down and Pisces effectively ceased to exist.
Numero Group unearthed these recordings and has tried to put them into the form of a full-length LP, which had been in Pisces' plans at one point. The songs work well together, and the four numbers featuring Linda Bruner's lead vocals definitely add a much-needed depth to the album. My favorite of these songs may be "Are You Changing in Your Time", a simple folk song with delicate acoustic guitar by Krein and keyboards by DiVenti. Bruner's delivery is pretty nuanced for a teenager, and, while the song is not really representative of the more psych/experimental stuff on A Lovely Sight, it does capture the relaxed feel of the album. I don't know where Krein, DiVenti, and Bruner are today, but I hope they know that the Pisces album finally exists and people are enjoying it.
Cover illustration from Three Vassar Girls in Russia and Turkey by Elizabeth W. Champney, 1889
When you live in one of the fly-overest of fly-over states, you take what you can get when it comes to good concerts. When I found out that Glasgow's Camera Obscura was playing here for the first time in ten years of touring, I bought tickets right away even though (a) Tuesday night is tough one for concert-going with my work schedule, and (b) I'm not a big fan of the Urban Lounge as a venue. I'm glad I did, too - it was a really good show.
The opening band was Agent Ribbons from Sacramento, a three-woman cabaret-pop ensemble. Sounding a lot like Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis singing Dresden Dolls covers in the style of - well - Camera Obscura, actually, they played a nice warm-up set, but unfortunately they were playing to a "We want the headliner!" crowd. I'd like to see them again under different circumstances. It was fairly late when Camera Obscura finally took the stage, and I was starting to worry that we would get short-changed in the setlist department. It turned out, though, that I had no reason to worry.
When front-woman Tracyanne Campbell took the stage with her band, she had a very stern, almost glowering look on her face. I was sure at first that she was in a sour mood, but the band sounded great from the start and the crowd was very responsive, so I'm pretty sure that she just takes her performances very seriously. Throughout the set, she was focused on the songs, and I caught her giving little reproving looks to band-members when things didn't sound quite right. The result was a high-energy set with a great sound mix that matched or improved on the arrangements from the records, and Campbell's voice was in excellent form. Her vocals really stood out because they were not boltered by heavy backing vocals, overdubs, or multi-tracking as they usually are on the records, but they sounded great and crystal-clear.
The band played just about every song I'd want to hear at a Camera Obscura show, sticking mostly with uptempo numbers and including all the big hits. I was slightly disappointed when they skipped two of the songs on the written setlist that I wanted to hear ("Suspended from Class" and the rarely-played "Books Written for Girls") to appease on obnoxious audience-member's constant request for, "Lloyd Cole!" but I admit that I'm glad they played "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" - it sounded great live. By the time they came back out for an encore, I was wondering what they'd do because they hadn't really held back any of the hits for the end of the show. They ended up playing the somber "Come Back Margaret" and closing with "Razzle Dazzle Rose", which turned into a full-band freakout with a single trumpet melody holding everything together as it rose to a crescendo of noise. The encore was all gravy after the stellar main set, so it was cool to see them having some fun with it.
My Maudlin Career/Swans/Honey in the Sun/Tears for Affairs/Teenager/Let's Get Out of the Country/Eighties Fan/French Navy/James/Away With Murder/Sweetest Thing/Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken/If Looks Could Kill (Encore) Come Back Margaret/Razzle Dazzle Rose.
By the end of the show, the Urban Lounge was a sauna - I'm pretty sure the venue was well past its legal capacity of 299 people, and the ventilation/AC was not really cooling things off. Nevertheless, Tracyanne Campbell promised that they wouldn't wait another ten years to visit again. I hope she stays true to her word.
Photo of Julie Adams by Loomis Dean from LIFE magazine, c. 1954
My music tastes are pretty simple. I like catchy pop/rock music that has a twist to it that makes it interesting. Radio pop is fun to sing along to, but it never holds my attention for too long. On the other hand, impenetrable experimental music is interesting, but without the hooks it just washes over me without leaving an impression. I've been listening to Veckatimest, the new Grizzly Bear record, multiple times a day for about a week, and I'm just starting to find my way into it. It's not impenetrable, but it is JUST SO DENSE that it's taking me a little while to find my handholds. I'd like to spend another month with it before writing about it, but I'm already just about the last person on earth to weigh in anyway. So, I'm still in the "learning" phase, but I can already say that Veckatimest is easily one of my favorites of 2009.
Grizzly Bear's last album, Yellow House, was hard to get into because there was such a stark contrast between the two stellar pop songs ("Knife" and "On a Neck, On a Spit") and the more ambitious baroque songs that made up the rest of the album. Veckatimest has this issue, but to a lesser degree - there are still two pop songs that lift the album to stratospheric heights (this time, its "Two Weeks" and "While You Wait for the Others"), but this time the there are plenty of other songs on the album are almost as immediate. The album's two standouts have the advantage of being familiar - since they were premiered live on Letterman and KCRW (respectively) last year, I've been anticipating the studio versions. But there's plenty of other great stuff here. Opener "Southern Point" is a favorite of mine (and I rarely like opening tracks) with a busy, swirling arrangement that pulls me into the album like an auditory whirlpool. "All We Ask" is one I enjoy more and more as I listen to it - the first time you hear it, you're not on tenterhooks waiting for the big choral-vocals-and-handclaps finale, and that's half the fun. The closing ballad "Foreground" is probably my favorite Ed Droste vocal performance (I'd almost say that he is outshined by Daniel Rossen's numbers on this album) and is based on a simple crystalline piano riff that contrasts with the busy arrangements of the earlier songs.
I've talked about the early and late songs in the album, but the middle section is still mysterious. I get the impression that I will eventually like it best, but this is an album that reveals itself in an unhurried way. There's plenty to bring me back again and again, but there's plenty of new things to enjoy with each listen. Only a few things grate - the lyric of "Dory" is uncharacteristically weak and conspicuous for a band that doesn't lean heavily on its words. And the penultimate track "I Live With You" doesn't do anything that isn't done better elsewhere on the record. But the other ten songs have no trouble justifying their existence.
I thought about posting some song other than "While You Wait for the Others", which is available in a zillion places on the Interwebs, but who am I kidding? This song is possibly the best thing that Grizzly Bear has done, and Daniel Rossen's lead vocal is the reason. Where some Grizzly Bear songs have multiple focal points, "While You Wait for the Others" draws the listener straight to Rossen's voice. As the song builds from its simple guitar-based verse arrangement to the swaying, layered vocals of the chorus, everything adds to the lead vocal line instead of distracting from it. And the bridge is a true work of beauty, with the vocals bouncing around until Ed Droste's aching moan soars up to wash everything else away and lead into the final chorus. Just for fun, you can flashback to a year ago to see Grizzly Bear's first public performance of the song on KCRW here. You can tell that they knew that they were on to something good.
Image from the "Lulu and Leander" comic strip by F.M. Howarth, August 19, 1906
I've always liked the Ramones, but my interest has primarily been in their early years, before the lineup changes and weirdness that came from surviving as a band in the early '80s. I always figured that End of the Century, the album they recorded with Phil Spector, was where I needed to draw the line. They look so sad in their color-coordinated t-shirts on the cover of that one. I was surprised to hear some good things recently about Pleasant Dreams, the record they recorded after their experience with Phil Spector. My interest increased when I found out that Pleasant Dreams had been produced by Graham Gouldman, who wrote many of my favorite '60s classics ("Bus Stop", "For Your Love", "Heart Full of Soul") and founded 10cc. I'd read some negative things about Pleasant Dreams - allmusic.com panned it, calling it an attempt at a "heavy metal" record. To the contrary, I think it might now be my favorite Ramones record, and it couldn't be further from heavy metal - I think it's actually the Ramones' one true power-pop record.
To my ear, Gouldman is a good match for the material written for the record by Joey and Dee Dee. The vocals sound great, and Gouldman pushed the band to use more harmonies, which was a good call. Some Spector-ish touches linger in the production, which is not surprising considering Gouldman's background, but the record doesn't sound dated and has a nice, muscular sound. Opening single "We Want the Airwaves" is the only track that is even vaguely "metal"-ish, and even that track has a great pop hook (and a weird reference to Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" with the whispered "that's right" on the chorus). Many of the other tracks, like "She's a Sensation" and "Come On Now" walk the line between punk and bubblegum, another Gouldman specialty. Some of Joey's songs are deliberate early-rock throwbacks, like "The KKK Took My Baby Away", "7-11", and "Don't Go", and they provide a good contrast to Dee Dee's more aggressive punk numbers. Johnny Ramone famously disowned this record as a crass attempt to "go pop", but I think it plays to the Ramones' strengths all the way through.
My favorite song on the album is "It's Not My Place (in the 9 to 5 World)", and it may be my favorite Ramones song ever. It's all over the place in the best possible way, and it has some real nice Gouldman touches that bring it to life (like the use of sound effects to open the track and the way the call-and-response backing vocals are layered on the chorus). The bridge is a little jarring in the way it slows things down - it took me a couple listens to realize that it is pulled directly from the Who's "Whiskey Man". Marky's drumming is a highlight throughout Pleasant Dreams, but he's especially great on this track. Basically, though, its all about that chorus hook, which is so fun to sing along to. Give it a try.
"It's Not My Place (in the 9 to 5 World)" by the Ramones
Wires and Waves is a daily music blog by Nathan J. All songs featured on the blog are presented temporarily for preview and promotional purposes only. If you hear something you like, go buy the thing. Or, better yet, go to a show and buy an overpriced T-shirt. Or send a big envelope of unmarked bills to an artist you feel a special spiritual connection with.
If you represent the copyright holder of a song posted here and you would like the song to be removed, please leave a comment and it will be yanked forthwith. If you are upset because your song has not been featured yet at Wires and Waves, feel free to contact me, and I'll see what I can do.
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Cherry Red Records
Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin
Light in the Attic
