It's New to Me: Mignonette by the Avett Brothers

Photo from Impressions school annual, 1977

The Avett Brothers first popped up on my radar about a year ago, at a time when the hype around their 2007 album Emotionalism was still building. Bluegrass punk is not my usual scene, but Emotionalism caught me with its excellent pop harmonies and almost Beatlesy melodies. Now, with their new album, I and Love and You, looming on the horizon with a September release date, I'm pretty psyched. All indications are that they are continuing to hone their songcraft further, as indicated by last year's EP.

My worry about exploring the Avett Brothers' back catalog was that they were probably a just-okay bluegrass band that didn't really go "pop" until Emotionalism. And then I heard about Mignonette, their 2004 album, and I knew I needed to hear it. A sprawling, messy concept album about a 1884 incident of shipwreck and cannibalism on the high seas? This is my kind of album! It's taken me a while to ingest all the songs of Mignonette, but I like it more every time I listen to it. My guess about their pre-Emotionalism material turned out to be both true and not true - the upbeat songs are more honky-tonk than pop, and numbers like "Nothing Short of Thankful" and "Hard Worker" are just downright goofy. Nothing close to the pop perfection of "Die Die Die" or "Paranoia in B-Flat Major". But over its twenty songs, Mignonette contains a wealth of treasures, particularly in the harmony-heavy ballads like "The New Love Song" and "Pretty Girl at the Airport".

The concept behind the album doesn't hold together well - "The Day That Marvin Gaye Died" doesn't really have anything to say about 19th century British maritime law. And there is some unnecessary clutter, including some in-studio chatter and two (!) extraneous hidden songs. But, as I said, I give a lot of leeway to overlong concept albums, and Mignonette is among the best I've heard lately. The band's folk and country influences are blended perfectly to the point that I almost don't miss the pop hooks of Emotionalism.

The album's closing number, "Salvation Song", could pass for an old traditional, with a worn melody and guitar-and-banjo arrangement. But the Avetts are already showing some love of pop dynamics in the shift to a solo piano and layered harmonies on the first chorus. I love this kind of thing, so it really gets me when they do the final chorus a capella. This would be an ideal ending to Mignonette - who knows why the band decided to follow this perfect moment with two middling hidden tracks. If this song appeals to you at all, look for I and Love and You in September.

"Salvation Song" by the Avett Brothers

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Look Back in Anger" by the Television Personalities

Illustration detail from the cover of Popular Science magazine, September 1938

Say what you will about the part-time punks in the Television Personalities - they exhibited a frightening prescience at times. For instance, who else would have thought to write a response song to Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger" fifteen years in advance. Actually, the phrase is borrowed from a '50s Richard Burton movie (and the original play it was based on). The movie is about a love triangle where class difference plays a key role - coincidentally, not unlike "A Place in the Sun" (which I was writing about yesterday.)

The Television Personalities' song, from their 1981 debut album And Don't the Kids Just Love It, is strictly binary, though, involving a "me" and a "you". Singer Dan Treacy seems conflicted - the verses are all regret and apology, but the chorus is where he's "looking back in anger at you." For me, the sentiment is undercut a little by the fact that I always imagine the Television Personalities as being very small. Not like actual "little people", but around 5'2" or something. This impression is reinforced by the fact that they sing about "midget submarines" and "little works of art" and things.

"Look Back in Anger" by the Television Personalities

Title Fight: "A Place in the Sun"

Illustration from the horror comic book After Dark #8, 1955

In 1966, Stevie Wonder turned sixteen. He decided to stop calling himself "Little" Stevie Wonder and started recording political songs. His first hit of the year was a cover of "Blowin' in the Wind" - the second was a song called "A Place in the Sun". I'm going to guess that the song's writers (Ronald Miller, Bryan Wells, and Clarence Paul) took the phrase "a place in the sun" from the 1951 film starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor, and the song may be trying to address some of the movie's social themes. The song has a nice swinging rhythm, a classy mid-60s-syle Motown backing track, and separate sets of male and female backing vocals. By the following year, Wonder was having stronger hits with his own material, and I like those songs a lot better than these early covers, but he sounds great here. And I'm pretty sure he yells, "Hot dog!" during one of the choruses, which always cracks me up.

UK psych-rock band Jason Crest also wrote a song called "A Place in the Sun", but they were clearing referencing the use of the phrase by Prince Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von Bülow in his famous speech about the German colonial empire. Just kidding - they probably took it from the movie or the famous Stevie Wonder song from three years earlier. For Jason Crest, "A Place in the Sun" was the last of a string of fairly good singles that the band put out for Philips Records in the late '60s. The band was often lumped with Procol Harum because of their distinctive organ sound, which can be heard on "A Place in the Sun", along with some very nice harmonies and a fun, if jarring, set of tempo changes. For me, it's the marginal winner here, but it's not really a fair contest. Jason Crest wouldn't stand a chance against any of Stevie Wonder's later singles - that's right - any of them. Even "Boogie On Reggae Woman."

Winner: JASON CREST

"A Place in the Sun" by Jason Crest

"A Place in the Sun" by Stevie Wonder

I Saw a Movie: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Image from Glove Lore by Otis H. Kean & Co., 1897

I finished reading the Harry Potter series by mid-2007 and, to be honest, I have rarely thought back on the books since then. They made much less of an impression than I had thought at the time - the only time I think about Harry Potter is when a new installment in the Harry Potter film series is released. The new movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, comes a full two years after the book series wrapped up, and I found watching it to be not unlike exhuming a corpse. Luckily, it is a corpse I feel quite a bit of affection for, it is well preserved, and it feels good to be reunited for a brief period.

In book form, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (one of my favorites of the series) was 650 pages long, and getting that many pages into 150 minutes must have been a challenge, but I think that it is a qualified success. Writer Steve Kloves has figured out how to make a Harry Potter movie that people will enjoy, and he follows that formula here, making sure that nothing gets left out entirely while making some smart compromises. The Half-Blood Prince is paced well and follows a clean plot arc that reveals how smart some of Rowling's writing was under all the clutter.

The visual effects are impressive throughout the movie, and director David Yates has done a good job over the last two films of darkening the atmosphere of the Potter-verse to mirror the books' shifting tone. Director of Photography Bruno Delbonnel keeps things low-key for the most part, but makes some eye-pleasing choices in framing his shots (particularly in the shadowy halls of Hogwarts). And most of the cast members acquit themselves well, with Jim Broadbent being a notably great addition, even though I initially thought him too "watery" to play the gruff Professor Slughorn.

The Half-Blood Prince did have some grating weak points, though. I know the cast is competent - even the younger actors are pretty experienced at this point - but most of the cast had frustratingly uneven line deliveries. Some scenes were pitch-perfect, but others were bafflingly awkward. I think this must be a result of the director's style - I'm guessing that Yates didn't do a lot of retakes and may not have helped the actors much with line readings.

My greatest frustration with The Half-Blood Prince may be that it was too short to do the story justice. The mystery referred to in the title is set aside halfway through the film to focus on building up to the film's climax so that, when the "half-blood prince" reveals himself, it doesn't have much impact at all. The film also suffers from some quick cuts between scenes that make things feel rushed - in an attempt to get the movie down to two and a half hours, they were probably doing a lot of "editing room magic" and it shows. I almost think that this movie would be better divided into two parts, as the team has decided to do for the film's final chapter. From my memory of the books, though, The Half-Blood Prince is a lot more eventful and dramatic than The Deathly Hallows, which I remember as dragging quite a bit in the middle and having long sequences that went nowhere. We'll find out how the series finale translates to film when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I comes out next year.

"Wizard Buys a Hat" by the Mountain Goats

In Stores Now: These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks

Illustration by Louis Wain from Henry Drummond's The Monkey Who Would Not Kill, 1910

I was wary of We Were Promised Jetpacks at first. Something about this band from Edinburgh, Scotland smacked of "youth culture" in a way that frightened me as a guy over thirty. Their band name and image recalls emo-punk groups like Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, or The Academy Is... There was a time when I would have written a band off for such associations, even though they may be unintentional or existing solely in my own head, but I decided to give We Were Promised Jetpacks' debut album These Four Walls a try anyway.

The most promising thing about the album to me was its connection to Frightened Rabbit, a band that I love. Some people say that too much is made of the connection between the two Scottish bands - "You're just comparing them because their vocalists both have heavy Scottish accents" - but I think the comparison is justified. Like Frightened Rabbit (a band who they have opened for on tour multiple times), We Were Promised Jetpacks trade in unironic sentimental pop and arrangements that focus on dynamics, swells, and big crescendos.

The best songs on These Four Walls, like the album opener "It's Thunder and It's Lightening" and "This Is My House, This Is My Home", follow the Frightened Rabbit template effectively without sounding like rip-offs. Slower numbers like "Conductor" and the eight-minute epic "Keeping Warm" show how this dynamic can be stretched out without losing its impact, and a few oddities like the acoustic closer "An Almighty Thud" and the instrumental "A Half Built House" show that the band isn't 100% wedded to a single sound. The latter song also proves that there is likely no end to bands cribbing from the Conet Project as well - I thought for a while that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had put an end to that.

The reason that These Four Walls rises above being a second-rate Frightened Rabbit imitation is that the sonics the band uses are different enough to give We Were Promised Jetpacks' songs an identity of their own. They don't use the same Telecaster-led pocket symphony that Frightened Rabbit opts for - their preferred sound is simpler and grittier and also somehow more spacious. The chiming guitars, bell sounds, and drumming style bear a resemblance to the post-rock sounds that were popularized a few years ago by Godspeed You Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky.

The best aspects of These Four Walls can all be found on the album's second track, "Ships With Holes Will Sink". Vocalist Adam Thompson's thick accent is clear and unadorned as the song opens, but the band builds up to a big, big guitar sound by the middle of the first verse. Several different guitar parts are layered nicely, dropping away and coming back to create a nice ebb and flow as the propulsive drumming drives the song along. This song would probably be great in a live setting, and I may get a chance to hear it that way soon. We Were Promised Jetpacks are touring the US in the late summer with Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad (another similar Scottish band that I've been meaning to investigate). A show like that might be too much sentimental Scottish pop for the average person, but I haven't come close to getting my fill yet.

"Ships With Holes Will Sink" by We Were Promised Jetpacks

In Stores Now: I Think This Is by Young Fresh Fellows

Image from the cover of the magazine Maski (Saint Petersburg, Russia) Issue No. 1, 1906

The Young Fresh Fellows have been around in some form or other since the beginning of the '80s, but they don't put out music much anymore. Not surprising, considering that frontman Scott McCaughey is a sideman in REM and Robyn Hitchcock's Venus 3, as well as fronting the Minus 5, a Pacific Northwest collaborative group of sorts. The last time McCaughey put out a Young Fresh Fellows record was 2001, in conjunction with a Minus 5 release. I'm not sure why he would want to put out CDs by his two different bands at the same time, but he's done it again, as I Think This Is was released at the same time as the new Minus 5 record, Killingsworth. I haven't picked that one up yet, opting for I Think This Is instead, even though I much prefer the Minus 5 record of the two released simultaneously in 2001.

I Think This Is is an odd record in that it's much more ordinary than you might think. McCaughey pulled in his friend and famous UK surrealist Robyn Hitchcock to produce this record, and it seems like an weird choice to me. McCaughey's songwriting is almost aggressively mundane, using intuitive melodies and structures with very plain observational lyrics. Often compared to They Might Be Giants in the past, this observation misses the mark because TMBG are obviously trying to be funny. The Young Fresh Fellows are just talkin' 'bout stuff.

Hitchcock's fingerprints are found in the sonics of the album, particularly the guitar tone and sound of the backing vocals, but the songs are what you'd expect from the Young Fresh Fellows. It's a really good set of songs, though, with some real feeling lurking under the plainness - "If You Believe in Cleveland" is funny and aching at the same time, and the as-stupid-as-it-gets "Go Blue Angels Go" bounces around like a Great Dane puppy. McCaughey's love of Nuggets-era rock and power-pop comes through in every song, and the album's only clunker is "Shake Your Magazines" (not a shocker that this one is actually by Chris Ballew of Presidents of the USA).

There are other non-McCaughey contributions on the album that work well. Peter Buck co-wrote the excellent slow-burning "Betty Let the Good Times Crawl", and Robyn Hitchcock's backing vocals (along with those of Kurt Bloch) sound great. I'm still not a fan of Tad Hutchison's oddly show-offy drumming style, but Bloch and James Sangster do their parts well. Bloch even contributes two songs of his own, including the great "New Day I Hate". The high harmonies on this one hit just the right spot for me.

"New Day I Hate" by Young Fresh Fellows

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Walk Into the Sea" by Low

Portrait of Igor Stravinsky from the LIFE magazine collection, 1882

I heard some troubling things about Low a few months ago. I don't follow the band fanatically, so I don't always know what they're up to, but I've heard that bandleader Alan Sparhawk has not appeared to be doing well in recent public appearances. I don't know if this is true, but it easily could be - Sparhawk has talked very publicly about his struggles with depression, particularly in the Low documentary You May Need a Murderer, and there's the much-exaggerated "mental breakdown" he had onstage at the End of the Road festival last year. I see that Low is doing some shows in Europe later this summer, so maybe he's feeling better.

A lot of the lyrical content of Low's songs addresses feelings like doubt and fear, a result of Sparhawk's perspective as a person of faith with depressive tendencies. The closing number from Low's 2005 record The Great Destroyer revisits these themes with lyrics like, "Time's the great destroyer / Leaves every child a bastard / But when it finally takes us over / I hope we float away together." With a pounding drumbeat and Sparhawk and Mimi Parker's signature harmonies, it's one of the band's most accessible songs, but I find it as emotionally devastating as the agonizingly slow and spare songs of their early albums.

"Walk Into the Sea" by Low

It's New To Me: Sci-Fi Lullabies by Suede (1997)

Illustration from a South Tyrol codex by Hugo von Trimberg, 1468

I didn't really follow Brit-pop much in the '90s, but I'm finding that I missed out on some pretty good stuff. So I'm playing a little catch-up. I have to admit, though, that Suede (or the London Suede, as absolutely no one refers to them) was never high on my list. Their relatively thin discography, emphasis on sexual politics, and Brett Anderson's aggressively annoying voice were all turn-offs for me. But I'm a sucker for non-traditional starting points for investigating the band, and I was curious about Suede's famous b-side collection, Sci-Fi Lullabies.

People have said that Sci-Fi Lullabies holds up as well as (or better than) Suede's first two albums (the ones with Bernard Butler on guitar, generally held to be their best work). I can't speak to that, not having heard either Dog Man Star or their self-titled debut, but for me Sci-Fi Lullabies turned out to be a great introduction to the band. It's a two-disc, set and the first CD, composed primarily of the b-sides to the singles from Suede's first two records, is especially good, displaying everything I was looking for in this band. The amazing, otherworldly guitar sounds, sweeping melodies, and glam swagger combine wonderfully, making up for any misgivings I had about Butler's vocals. And the tracks work surprisingly well together, sounding as like a real album.

Starting with the amazing one-two punch of the poppy "My Insatiable One" and the majestic "To the Birds", the collection sounds like more like an a-side collection than a set of castoffs. "The Living Dead" is a delicate acoustic counterpoint to the glam sound, and "Where Pigs Don't Fly" brings a wistfulness to their usual capital-A attitude. The only dip in quality in the first disc is in "The Big Time" and "High Rising" being placed back-to-back - they are both faintly boring and overlong ballads that slow the momentum in an otherwise flawless run of songs.

The second disc of Sci-Fi Lullabies is composed entirely of b-sides from Suede's third album, 1996's Coming Up. Bernard Butler had been replaced in the band at this point by Richard Oakes, and I've heard that the band's sound was steered entirely by Anderson at this point, even though other band-members had co-writing credits on some of the songs. The loss of Butler is easy to hear in this later material, as the guitars have a more direct sound and lose some of that cool otherworldliness. But I think I benefit from coming to this material later and with no baggage, because I enjoy this later material a lot as well. The hooks are still there, the sound is darker and more aggressive, and I find the lyrics more interesting. Plus, it's amazing that Suede wrote fifteen b-sides for Coming Up. The album itself was only ten songs long. Suede may have stretched a little too far, in fact, as the second CD of Sci-Fi Lullabies trails off a bit at the end - I guess they were running out of steam a little when it came to the album's fifth single.

My favorite of the entire set may be "Killing of a Flash Boy", a b-side from 1994 "We Are the Pigs" single. It starts with a great, crunchy guitar (a la Bowie's "Queen Bitch") and the vocal drips with attitude. The lyrics, as far as I can tell, are sexy-sounding nonsense (I'm still trying to figure out "They know that when she's stacked up top/she'll be a sucker for the shotgun show"), but they're delivered with a sneering conviction that is a big part of Suede's appeal for me. I may need to go buy some actual Suede albums - I hope I won't be disappointed in the real deal.

"Killing of a Flash Boy" by Suede

In Stores Now: The Eternal by Sonic Youth

Detail of a cover illustration from Home & Garden by Erik Nitsche, June 1939

I like Sonic Youth, but I stopped buying new Sonic Youth albums a while ago. It started to seem like each one that came out was "another Sonic Youth record" - nothing special. When they released Rather Ripped in 2006, I heard that it was a turn toward a more straightforward "pop" sound, using their signature guitar sounds in more conventional structures for a more accessible sound. This was probably not good news to a lot of Sonic Youth fans, but it was just what I was hoping for. For some reason, though, I never got around to buying Rather Ripped - something about that terrible Rancid-looking album cover, probably. So, when I heard earlier this year that their first album for Matador Records, The Eternal, was going to be an extension of this trend (with a better album cover), I thought I'd give it a chance.

And I'm enjoying it a lot. Starting the album with two Kim Gordon songs is a gutsy move, and not really a smart one - she's the least accessible songwriter in the band, and her vocals and lyrics grate on a lot of people. Me included. But, luckily, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo both come through on their songs. "Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso)" and "Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn" are demonstrations of pop concision by Moore that I never knew he had in him. His dreamy,droning lullaby "Antenna" is also a winner. Gordon's best song on the record is "Calming the Snake", which has an appropriately serpentine bass riff, but her "Malibu Gas Station" is the album's weakest track, running out of gas (ha!) halfway through its six minutes of churning riffage.

Ranaldo has always been my favorite songwriter and vocalist in Sonic Youth, and I've come to terms with the fact that he only gets a couple tracks per album (at best). On The Eternal, his songs are well-placed highlights - the penultimate "Walkin Blue" is a very melodic pop song with his catchiest melody since the Dirty b-side "Genetic". Earlier in the album, "What We Know" provides a dark counterpoint to Moore and Gordon's poppier numbers, but it's catchy in its own way. Starting with a bass riff that doesn't sound very Sonic Youth to me (new bassist and former Pavement dude Mark Ibold's influence?), it delivers a catchy melody hook and nice guitar freak-out before doubling back nicely to the initial bass line. I think I need to go find used copies of the last three Sonic Youth records and do some catching up.

"What We Know" by Sonic Youth

I Saw a Movie: The Hurt Locker (2009)

Cover Illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1952

I'll admit that I haven't read much about director Kathryn Bigelow, but, looking at her filmography, it looks like she's trying to win a game of genre bingo with as few plays as possible. She has never made the same kind of film twice in her career, and her films have very little in common - Near Dark was vampire horror, Blue Steel was a noir thriller, Point Break was big dumb action, Strange Days was cyberpunk, The Weight of Water was dramatic mystery, and K-19 was historical fiction. And now she has made her war movie, so she can check that off the list. Oddly, though, The Hurt Locker transcends the faceless genre exercises of her earlier work and delivers something really substantial.

The Hurt Locker is about the soldiers in a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq - the guys that disarm improvised bombs, car bombs, and (apparently) suicide bombs. Probably because it's based on the experiences of writer Mark Boal embedded with a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, there is a very dry, procedural approach to the movie's material that appeals to me. Much like HBO's excellent mini-series Generation Kill, the story is not about super-soldiers or high drama - The Hurt Locker is about normal young people who are able to rise above the confusing, depressing, and dangerous environment of fighting a foreign war. The movie focuses on two soldiers, Will James (Dahmer's Jeremy Renner) and JT Sanborn (We Are Marshall's Anthony Mackie) - the former is the maverick and the latter is the by-the-book guy. But The Hurt Locker doesn't play like a "buddy" movie - the unglamorous, documentary-like approach of the film defuses such typically Hollywood associations.

The leads' performances are excellent, and the film's pacing is surprisingly good, considering that it eschews the standard plot arc (for the most part - more on that in a minute). The look and feel of the movie are note-perfect and really draw the audience in - I think that the choice to film in Jordan with Iraqi refugees playing the locals has a lot to do with this. As a guy who grew up hanging around an army base, I tend to measure military movies in terms of how I think a young GI would see them. GIs, in my experience, typically love either high action or serious realism, either providing pure entertainment or an actual insight into the "soldier" experience. I think that The Hurt Locker hits the latter mark pretty well, although I have misgivings about a few things.

First, the bomb disposal units of the U.S. Army use robots - everyone knows this. However, in The Hurt Locker, the robot disappears after the opening sequence, and this doesn't really ring true. I also had issues with some jarring celebrity cameos - if you cast relative unknowns as the movie's leads, what is the point of throwing Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, and LOST's Evangeline Lilly into random scenes? And, although I really liked the another-day-another-bomb plot structure, it felt a little like each scenario tried to one-up the previous one, escalating the drama artificially. This ratcheting-up was not needed and only made the slight misstep in the movie's final chapter seem like more of a let-down.

Overall, though, I enjoyed The Hurt Locker as much as anything else I've seen this year. If you only see one bomb-disarmament thriller this year, make it this one!

"Homemade Bombs in the Afternoon" by A.C. Newman

I Saw a Show! Jenny Lewis and Bon Iver at the Twilight Concert Series, 9 July 2009

Lithograph titled "Scoperte fatte nella luna Sigr. Herschell", 1836

The Twilight Concert Series is a local free summer concert thing that has been running for a long time, but this year's lineup is especially good, including Sonic Youth, M Ward, Iron & Wine, and the Black Keys. The season's first show was Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley) and Bon Iver - the show was the night before I was leaving on vacation (the vacation I just got back from today), but it seemed like a show worth seeing so I put off packing to go downtown and check it out. I was pretty surprised to get to the venue at 7:00 (the scheduled starting time) only to find that the plaza was already packed with people. Also, Jenny Lewis (the supposed headliner) was already playing.

I'm a fan of Rilo Kiley and Jenny Lewis's songwriting, but haven't gotten around to picking up her latest, Acid Tongue - nevertheless, it would have been nice to get there in time to get a good spot for her set. As it was, we could barely see the stage from where we were, although the band, which included Jenny's boyfriend Johnathan Rice, sounded great. The PA cut out during the set's quietest song, "Acid Tongue", but I found myself enjoying new songs like "The New Messiah" and "Big Wave" as much as older favorites like "Silver Lining" and her cover of the Traveling Wilburies' "Handle With Care" (benefiting in this setting from not having Conor Oberst on vocals).

The upside to the scheduling mix-up was that I got a better spot for Bon Iver's set, and they were quite good. I haven't really been a fan of theirs - most Bon Iver songs I've heard sounded like Fleet Foxes minus the pop hooks - but I was impressed with their live set. The stand-outs of their set included "For Emma", an epic rendition of "Babys", and a version of "The Wolves" that called for some audience sing-along. Toward the end of the set, though, they played "Blood Bank" and "Brackett, WI" (from the Dark Was the Night compilation), and those two songs really blew me away.

The two things I took away from this show were 1) I need to show up early for these free concerts if I want to be able to see anything at all, and 2) I need to go get the Bon Iver album.

"Brackett, WI" by Bon Iver

Phoning It In: "Telephone Town" by Guided By Voices

Illustration titled "Travel by Covered Wagon" from Covered Wagon Co., c. 1928

I wouldn't really be phoning it in if I didn't include a post about my favorite band, Guided By Voices. I could write posts about this band in my sleep, and they have a catalog of ~1000 songs, meaning that there's a track for any occasion or subject. Take 1987's "Telephone Town", a home recording that sat in a suitcase in Robert Pollard's basement for almost twenty years, before being released on Suitcase 2, the second box set of Guided By Voices rarities pulled from the titular piece of luggage. The rinky-dink woodblock percussion gives this one a demo sound from the start, and the Midwestern accent Pollard sings in pegs this as predating the band's British-accented peak years, but there's something nice going on here. The lyric is doggerel("everyone I know pretends to be a person/everyone should try not to be a person"), but Pollard sings with a lot of energy, especially on the beautiful ascending melody line of the bridge.

I'll never understand the allegations that Robert Pollard needs an editor - he left a song this good in his basement for two decades before he decided it was worth sharing. Pollard's new project, Boston Spaceships, is re-recording some of these old rarities, and I think "Telephone Town" is a good candidate for this treatment.

"Telephone Town" by Guided By Voices

Phoning It In: "Pick Up the Phone" by the Notwist

Still life print titled "Piles of Books" by Hercules Segers, c. 1630

It's so weird that the Notwist started out as a metal band. Their 1991 self-titled debut was pretty thrashy hard rock, but by 2001's Neon Golden, the band had turned into a remarkably different thing. Combining organic sounds (acoustic guitar and banjo) and lulling vibes with some harsh electronics, the Notwist make great atmospheric music that is now widely imitated in the indie scene. "Pick Up the Phone" has a fun sputtering percussion line and what sounds like a harmonium anchoring the arrangement, which builds on itself nicely as it goes along. In this song, "picking up the phone" is getting out of a self-destructive cycle - maybe it's about calling a suicide hotline? Why are these telephone songs all so depressing?

"Pick Up the Phone" by the Notwist

Phoning It In: "Telephone Line" by ELO

Photo titled "Musician of the Sahara Desert" from the American Red Cross photo collection, c. 1890

Is it embarrassing to admit that my first real exposure to ELO was through that one VW commercial? Probably - prior to that, I only knew Jeff Lynne as the one Traveling Wilbury that I didn't recognize. "Mr. Blue Sky" was just the gateway drug into the weird world ELO, but I'm at the point now where I've heard all the arguments against ELO (and there are a lot of them, and there are good ones) and I still like them. "Telephone Line" starts with several ELO signatures that aggravate the band's detractors - sound effects, heavily treated vocals, and corny electric piano. The chorus, however, is immense, with a Lennon/McCartney hook and a huge overproduced arrangement that swells to absurd crescendos. Also, I love how Lynne starts the second verse with, "Okay, so no one's answering..." It cracks me up.

"Telephone Line" by ELO

Phoning It In: "Phone Sex" by Superchunk

Photo titled "Quartet of Sandwich Spreads" by Romulo Yanes, c. 2000

You'd think Superchunk had entered some contest to choose a sexy song title and then write the unsexiest song possible to go with it. "Phone Sex" is from 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, the band's last release before going on extended hiatus (although they are now back together and supposedly recording again). It represents a real diversion from Superchunk's pop-punk sound with its country flavor, violins, and pedal steel guitar, but the real unsexy thing about it is the lyric. It's not a song about phone sex - it's a song about not having phone sex because your partner may or may not have been killed in a plane crash. The band didn't play the song live in the wake of 9/11 because the song can easily be associated with the experiences of people who lost loved ones in that tragedy. It's a pretty song about uncertainty and anxiety, and the layered vocals in the outro are very nice.

"Phone Sex" by Superchunk

Phoning It In: "He's on the Phone" by Saint Etienne

Detail of a cover photo montage from Japanese fashion magazine Shiseido Graph, 1934

So I'm out of town for a week, but I'm going to be posting "phoned in" blog entries from the Pacific Northwest. And, you see, they're going to be my favorite telephone-related songs. It's a cheesy conceit - I know that - but the whole point here is that I don't have time to deliver anything better, so deal with it.

[rockist] Eurodance is, apparently, a genre. Dance pop is not something I gravitate toward, but I always thought that Saint Etienne would be an exception to my natural aversion. The English combo had a sense of sophistication and appreciation for '60s pop that gave them a level of credibility that you don't get from an act like, say, Whigfield. They were on Sub Pop, and that's got to be worth something. [/rockist]

One of their biggest crossover singles was 1995's "He's on the Phone", a song with a complicated history. Suffice it to say that the song started out as a track called "Weekend à Rome" by French pop star Étienne Daho. "He's on the Phone" has a sparkling pop melody and peppy backbeat, and Sarah Cracknell's delivery is nice as always. Even though Eurodance is not my bailiwick, I jumped on the new Saint Etienne remasters that just came out, and (a few long, boring remixes aside) I think they're a lot of fun. Plus, because I was so out of touch the first time these songs were popular, it's all very fresh to me.

"He's on the Phone" by Saint Etienne

We Love the Beatles: "What's the New Mary Jane?" by the Moles

Baseball card image of the Boston Red Sox's Tris Speaker, 1912

In this, the (probably) last entry in the "We Love the Beatles" post series, we look at the Australian band the Moles, who know that nothing says "We love the Beatles" quite like appropriating a bit of Beatles ephemera as your own. "What's the New Mary Jane?" was originally a John Lennon tune recorded for the White Album. Recorded with just George and Yoko, the song was part pop and part sound collage. It was left off the album at the last minute and became one of the Beatles' most famous unreleased songs (until its inclusion on the Beatles' Anthology 3 in 1996.)

The Moles' song is not a cover, but it seems to be an intentional tribute to the style of the original, combining bandleader Richard Davies' interests in fuzzy pop and noise to create the Moles' signature tune. The song starts with some helium horns and an echoey vocal singing the chorus hook - the full band comes in with a crunchy riff, and then the spacey intro bits come back for the chorus. Some aspects of "What's the New Mary Jane" are very 1992 (particularly the production and the My Bloody Valentine guitars) but the melody and psychedelic touches successfully evoke the era of its namesake.

"What's the New Mary Jane?" by the Moles

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Don't Try to Hide It" by the Edgin Inds

Cover Illustration from the novelization of Return of the Killer Tomatoes by Spacesick Publishing, 1965

There's not much to say about the Edgin Inds - they were a Florida garage band (possibly from Lake Wales) that was part of the local scene in Orlando in the mid-60s. They recorded a couple singles, the first being "Don't Try to Hide It"/"U.F.O." for Tener Records. Mike Spenser (who compiled the Trash Box box set where i found this track) describes "Don't Try to Hide It" as "one of my favorite blends of the Left Banke approach to art-pop and the rawer folk-rock that stamps this a great garage band."

Like a lot of the rare singles found on the Trash Box, the song is not presented in pristine form, but I can hear what Spenser is talking about through the hiss and crackle. The jangly guitar and organ are not the standard garage sound, and the harmonies almost work. The lyric, however, is pretty terrible: "If you have the talent/here's what you do/if you have the talent/keep it in view." Considering that the song is obviously about a girl, I hope the "talents" being referred to are not what I think they are.

"Don't Try to Hide It" by the Edgin Inds

It's New To Me: Save For a Rainy Day by Jan & Dean (1967)

Detail of a hand-colored political etching titled "The French bugabo frightening the royal commanders" by Isaac Cruikshank, 1797

In 1966, Jan & Dean were still riding the wave of hits that had peaked for them in '63 and '64 with "Surf City", "Dead Man's Curve", and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena". In April of that year, though, Jan Berry collided with a parked truck on the way to a meeting in LA and sustained serious brain damage, leaving him bed-ridden and paralyzed. Berry was the production genius and leader in all things Jan & Dean, so this tragedy left Dean Torrence in a weird position. During Berry's slow convalescence, Torrence worked on a Jan & Dean project on his own, despite the protests of Berry's family, who thought control of the group should remain with Jan. Torrence's project, the concept album Save For a Rainy Day, was home-recorded and self-released - until its re-release by Sundazed Records, it was a little-heard oddity. Now anyone can get a copy of Save For a Rainy Day and enjoy an odd and beautiful project that Dean Torrence produced during a difficult time.

Save For a Rainy Day is a concept record about rain - its ten songs are each separated by several seconds of rain falling and thunder crashing. It was recorded to four-track in the garage of Torrence's friend, musician Joe Osborn, with Osborn and Torrence's other neighbors helped record the album's basic instrumental tracks. These tracks were all overdubbed and mixed down to a single track of the four-track recorder, allowing Torrence to use the other three tracks to layer his vocals. This odd recording style and the use of rain effects creates a distinct feel that sets Save For a Rainy Day apart. It has a dense and hazy sound to it, combining sophisticated arrangements and professional vocals with primitive recording techniques. It reminds me a little of the Tokens' Intercourse album in that way.

The songs on Save For a Rainy Day are thematically unified, but they come from a variety of sources. Two of the songs came from sunshine-pop songwriter Gary Zekley, and these are the album's most obvious singles - "Yellow Balloon" and "Like a Summer Rain". Covers of standards like "When Sunny Gets Blue" and "Pocket Full of Rainbows" are thrown in the mix, as well as a decent version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Rain on the Roof". A few nice songs are attributed to Nat Ormsby - I did a little research on the name, and it looks like it was a pseudonym that Dean Torrence used for songwriting. His songs are a little corny lyrically, but they have a nice baroque pop sound that fits the album nicely.

One thing that made me fall in love with Save For a Rainy Day immediately was that it is an obvious influence on some of my favorite albums, particularly The Albemarle Sound by the Ladybug Transistor. That album borrows the sound palette of Save For a Rainy Day wholesale, even including a cover of "Like a Summer Rain". If you like that album at all, you should track this one down immediately.

My one big issue with Save For a Rainy Day has to do with the Sundazed reissue - they include 13 bonus tracks, which is always nice, but they put some of them at the beginning of the tracklist. The CD starts with four stereo mixes of tracks from the album before presenting the mono album itself - this can be frustrating if you want to hear Save For a Rainy Day, not two versions of "Yellow Balloon" practically back to back. I can understand, though, that it is tempting to put the stereo versions up front - they have a great accessible sound that is quite different from the dreamy vibe of the actual album.

Take this stereo version of Dean's own composition "Taste of Rain" - it has some interesting stereo tricks going on, and, even though it's obvious that Dean doesn't have the signature vocal style of a solo artist, he has a real talent for layering vocals and creating neat arrangements.

"Taste of Rain" by Jan & Dean

In Stores Now: God Help the Girl by Stuart Murdoch (and some cute girls)

Background art from animated short "Mouse in Manhattan", 1945

So Stuart Murdoch shelved Belle & Sebastian for this? I'm a little disappointed, particularly because it seems like the effort that was put into God Help the Girl could have produced two superior Belle & Sebastian records, without having to do a global search for singers, write extraneous fiction, or hire Rick Wentworth to conduct a massive orchestra.

I think the key problem with God Help the Girl is that Stuart Murdoch thinks he's the kind of songwriter who writes universal songs that can be sung effectively by any singer - it's now pretty clear that he's not. Of the nine vocalists on God Help the Girl, only one can pull off Stuart Murdoch's lyrics convincingly. Unsurprisingly, that vocalist is Stuart Murdoch. The other vocalists have varying success - Catherine Ireton, the project's main vocalist, doing pretty well most of the time, but some other vocalists are not as good. I don't think it was a good idea to give 17-year-old Asya (of the band Smoosh) a lead vocal here - she is way out of her depth. I don't mind the guest vocal by Neil Hannon (of the Divine Comedy), but I have a higher tolerance for his voice than many people. Overall, Murdoch's lyrics and melodies leave a listener distracted, thinking, "This song here would be better with the traditional Belle & Sebastian sound."

I'd gotten excited about initial reports that God Help the Girl would be heavily influenced by the '60s girl group sound and classic stage musicals, but, for the most part, I don't think the project delivers well on either of these inspirations. The singers can't help but sing in more of a modern pop idiom, and the arrangements are more Northern Soul than classic pop.

The album's opening number is "Act of the Apostle", a song that originally appeared on Belle & Sebastian's The Life Pursuit, and I always thought it didn't sound as good as it could on that record. Unfortunately, the God Help the Girl version is not an improvement, with Catherine Ireton trying way too hard to "interpret" the wry lyric, and the orchestra swelling absurdly over a low-key indie melody. The songs that stick better to the girl-group sound ("God Help the Girl", "Come Monday Night", "I'll Have to Dance with Cassie") are quite nice, but these pop treats are surrounded by overstuffed and tacky pieces like the creepy Murdoch-sung "Pretty Eve in the Tub" (why imitate the Kinks' worst twee impulses?) and poorly executed faux showtunes like "If You Could Speak". And the two instrumental interludes are surprisingly grating, considering how brief they are.

Even my favorite song on God Help the Girl, "I'll Have to Dance with Cassie", has an intro that is a little cringe-inducing. Once the band kicks in, though, it's a lot of fun and has a light pop arrangement that benefits from less intrusion from the orchestra. God Help the Girl was originally intended for Murdoch's compositions that would work better in a musical-theater context (including some that had already been released as Belle & Sebastian songs), but I can't help but hope that some of the better songs found here go back the other way. I'd love to hear "I'll Have to Dance with Cassie" or "A Down and Dusky Blonde" performed by Belle & Sebastian, where Murdoch is playing to his strengths.

"I'll Have to Dance With Cassie" by God Help the Girl

We Love the Beatles: "Sorry Paul" by Oranger

Detail of photo by Horst P. Horst from Vogue magazine, July 1, 1939

The San Francisco band Oranger obviously loves the Beatles, but they seem to be worried that their feelings would not be reciprocated by at least one of the Fab Four. Why else would they feel the need to preemptively apologize to Paul McCartney in the title of the opening track to their 2000 album The Quiet Vibrationland? The opening line of the song reveals why - the verse melody of "Sorry Paul" is stolen note for note from the wordless chorus of "Every Night" (from 1970's McCartney album). In fact, all of "Sorry Paul" is a pretty good reason to say, "Sorry Paul" - I can count the non-Beatles aspects of the song on one hand. For instance, drummer Jim Lindsay was always more Keith Moon than Ringo Starr, and you can hear a little of that "wild-man" style in his fills on this song. I'll admit I lost interest in Oranger when Lindsay left the band - a band has to have more going for it than just loving the Beatles.

"Sorry Paul" by Oranger

In Stores Now: Travels with Myself and Another by Future of the Left

Detail of a stereograph titled "Insurgents from Sparta", c. 1897

I find it hard to make an argument against loud, aggressive music without sounding like a total pantywaist. But, for whatever reason, I cannot stomach most music with vocalists who do more yelling than singing. This means that I have trouble with the barking of hardcore punk, the Cookie-Monster growls of Euro metal, and the outright screaming of emo/screamo/crabcore. I know that angry music is supposed to make you want to hit something or at least focus the hit-something impulses you already have, but I invariably just want to hit the dude singing. Well, not quite invariably - there are a few bands that appeal to me in their rage, and Mclusky was one of those bands.

The Welsh indie band did some of the best, funniest, and most profane post-hardcore pop I ever heard. I wasn't immediately sold on them the first time I heard them - like many people, my first Mclusky experience was seeing a Flash animation on the Web of kittens performing "Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues". I was, however, completely sold on them the first time I heard their perfect aggro-pop single, "To Hell with Good Intentions". The fact that they gave their songs names like "Without MSG I Am Nothing" and "The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not on Fire" meant that no amount of screaming would ever make me fall out of love with Mclusky.

And then Mclusky broke up. Two of the guys, Falkous and Egglestone, went on to form Future of the Left and, in spite of the arguments made to the contrary by fans, it is really just a natural extension of Mclusky's agenda and artistic direction. Travels with Myself and Another is Future of the Left's second album, and it's as catchy, funny, and (yes) angry as anything these guys have made since Mclusky Do Dallas. To me, the album divides pretty clearly into three sections: i) catchy songs, ii) angry songs, and iii) funny songs.

Travels with Myself and Another begins with three hook-filled natural singles, the teeth-gnashing "Arming Eritrea" and "Chin Music", the driving death-march of "The Hope that House Built", and the keyboard-driven "Throwing Bricks at Trains". The singles are followed by the four songs I think of as the angry songs - the invective in "I Am Civil Service" and "Land of My Formers" is so real-sounding that I almost forget that Future of the Left has a sense of humor. But the album's last four songs, beginning with the Lifter-Puller-esque "Stand By Your Manatee", bring back the band's dark humor with lines like "Nothing in the world could take her common shame away/cos Emma's mom and dad use plastic forks!"

For my money, though, it's hard to beat a song that starts with the line, "Slight bowel movements preceded the bloodless coup." "Throwing Bricks at Trains" is, quite simply, a song about two guys that like to go up on an overpass and throw bricks at moving trains. It's more than that, though - it's about a young person's first exposure to outright sociopathy. Our narrator feels responsible for bringing together the two idiots that, when together, reach some critical mass of indifference that allows them to lob bricks into trains full of people. Okay, now it's starting to sound like I have to over-intellectualize loud music to enjoy it - I'd say that there's probably some truth in that, but I don't think any justifying is needed when it comes to music as fun and irreverent as Future of the Left.

"Throwing Bricks at Trains" by Future of the Left

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Son of a French Nobleman" by the Jacobites

Detail of an illustration by Andre Galland from Dominique en Auto, 1955

I was pretty excited when I booted up the Jukebox last night and heard the soft intro to "Son of a French Nobleman". The Jacobites' story started in 1982, when, subsequent to the break-up of their art-punk band Swell Maps, brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks formed the Jacobites with the Subterranean Hawks' Dave Kusworth. Sudden and Kusworth were writing consciously retro pop songs at the time, heavily influenced by early-70s glam rock, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. Their sound was sassy and swaggering at times, and folksy and delicate at others. Their classic '80s albums were out of print for years and it can be hard to figure out the confused thicket of their original discography, but Secretly Canadian Records released expanded versions of their original albums a while back, revealing some real slept-on classics.

The real jewel is the Jacobites' 1985 album Robespierre's Velvet Basement. Originally conceived as a double album, the Jacobites' label asked the band to set aside half the songs from the recording sessions and release it as a single LP. The 2002 re-released version restores the full 27-song tracklist as it was originally conceived, spread across 2 CDs. Dave Kusworth's "Son of a French Nobleman", originally the last song on Side A of Robespierre's Velvet Basement, is now the last song on Disc 1. And that's where it belongs - it's a great closing song, showing the Jacobites' ability to build a song on a single chord progression and chorus-less melody that builds up to a big finish. The continually rising melody adds to the tension as the song gains momentum, with additional elements and voices entering the mix with each line. They hit the crescendo just right, too, with a new vocal coming in on the last shout of "Forever!" - it's one of those perfect pop moments that I look for in music.

"Son of a French Nobleman" by the Jacobites