It's New to Me: Happen Happened by the Salvation Army (1982)

Photo illustration titled "Sitting in the Shade, Buried in the Sand" by Richard Rutledge from Glamour magazine, May 1963

Before the Three O'Clock were part of the psych-revival movement in California in the early '80s, they had a brief incarnation under the name the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army definitely had more of a high-energy punk edge than the band's later period - their first single "Mind Gardens" was put out by the guys from the Minutemen on their New Alliance Records. The Salvation Army also released a fairly good self-titled record before a legal action forced them to change their name. The Salvation Army's debut is now available as Happen Happened under the band name Befour Three O'Clock.

This Happen Happened CD also includes the Salvation Army's initial single and demos. The problem with the collection is that the Salvation Army LP was composed almost entirely of better-produced and better-performed versions of the songs from their demos, so many songs appear on the collection twice. And, for reasons I don't entirely understand, the tracks are presented chronologically, so that the inferior early versions of the songs come first. For purposes of discussing these songs, I'm going to do what I do when I listen to this CD and skip over the demos straight to the Salvation Army LP.

Where the early Salvation Army demos are a sped-up version of Nuggets-style garage, and later Three O'Clock albums favor Brit-psych melodic whimsy, the Salvation Army's LP shows the band transitioning between the two styles. The song titles (e.g. "I Am Your Guru", "Mind Gardens") are straight-up psych-revival, and the melodies show frontman Michael Quercio's skill with delicate hooks, but the delivery is a little too amped-up. Otherwise great songs like "Happen Happened" and "Upside Down" feel slightly rushed, and the songs have a trebly, harsh sound that doesn't suit them. In particular, I find that Quercio's vocals don't work well here - his soft, breathy voice suffers in these sped-up arrangements and often gets lost in the mix.

There's still some value in Happen Happened for fans of psych-pop, though. Songs like "Mind Gardens" and "Happen Happened" point to the more refined sound the band would have just months later when they put out their first EP (Baroque Hoedown) as the Three O'Clock. "Going Home" is one garage-rock track that Quercio pulls off convincingly, and "While We Were In Your Room Talking To Your Wall" is a dreamy mid-tempo number that comes across as a sleepy ballad in context here but would not be out of place on one of their later albums. And it's hard not to be won over by the hat-tips to classic Brit-psych, like the references to Doris Day and Alice Through the Looking Glass on "Happen Happened".

"Happen Happened" by the Salvation Army

In Stores Now: Speak Up by the Guild League

Biblical emblem from J.A. Fridrich's Printers Proofs of Emblem Engravings, 1717

We bid farewell to Australia's much-loved Lucksmiths earlier this year, but there may be a silver lining to that cloud. Lucksmiths lead vocalist Tali White didn't write much of that band's material, saving his songs for his other "band", a loose collective called the Guild League. Over seven years, the Guild League has somehow turned into a real band with six core members, and their most recent record, Speak Up is the tightest, most accomplished record they've turned out. It was released pretty quietly in December of last year, but I only started hearing about it a few months ago, so I'm counting it as a new release for the purposes of categorization.

The one thing I never would have expected to hear in Tali White's gentle indie-pop songs is a heavy ska influence, but it's all over this record. Most of the songs feature excellent horn arrangements, and I was surprised as a long-time hater of ska music that I find it really appealing. And the jubilant trumpet and sax embellishments fit this set of songs well, too - these songs are not the weary travelogues of earlier Guild League records or romantic sketches of the Lucksmiths. There's a real sense of urgency and advocacy in these songs, from the "Come on!" rallying cries of "Mouse vs. Mountain" to the "Speak up! Speak up!" chorus of "Where's the Colour?", it's obvious that White is all riled up about something. The album has its token travelogue song ("Limited Express") and a couple pretty ballads as well, the best being the closing track, "Incandescent" which features an outro with lovely guest vocals from Bec Rigby.

Some experiments on the album don't work, like the menacing spy-theme guitar on "If Not Now...", but the Guild League has never been afraid of trying new things (go back to their debut record and listen to Tali White's "rapping" on "Siamese Couplets" for proof.) But at least it's never boring, and when they're firing on all cylinders, the Guild League are as good as any indie-pop band in the business. They really exceed expectations on my favorite Speak Up track, "Suit Fits". It's a bouncy pop song bolstered by some smooth horn lines and a couple fun breakdowns - the chanting gang vocals in the breaks between verses are great fun, and it builds to a nice big finish, with White yelling with uncharacteristic verve over the final chord. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the breakup of the Lucksmiths doesn't meant that we've heard the last of this group as well.

"Suit Fits" by the Guild League

I Saw a Movie: Whip It (2009)

Finlay plate photograph of Merrily Nute taken by Eric Matson in Talas, Turkey, 1935

An article in this weekend's Parade magazine informed me that Drew Barrymore's production company Flower Films has produced ten films since 1999 - I also read an interesting article in there about how TV ads are too loud, and apparently Peter Saarsgard is half of a show-biz power couple that is breaking all the rules! But the point is that Flower Films is going out on a limb in producing a film by a first-time director with a checkered past - luckily, that director's name is Drew Barrymore. From what I've heard, Whip It has been a personal labor of love for Barrymore, and the result is a clumsy but lovable movie that benefits from a good script and a high-quality ensemble cast.

At the center of this ensemble is Ellen Page, who delivers a quirky but grounded performance that splits the difference between her much-lauded performance in Hard Candy and her ... lets say, more casual approach in Juno. Page plays Bliss, a teen from small-town Texas whose middle-class parents split their time between college football and beauty pageants. It is painfully obvious from the start that Bliss is not cut out for pageant culture, and she is looking for something to care about. On a shopping trip to Austin, she encounters some girls from an underground roller-derby league and is instantly smitten with the idea of full-contact skating. With the help of her BFF, Pash (Alia Shawkat), Bliss deceives her parents and begins a secret life as a "jammer" with the Austin league's last-place Hurl Scouts.

I like a lot of things about Whip It, but the actual roller derby sequences are not highlights for me - the rules of the game are briefly explained in an early scene, but the actual action of the skating is not presented in a "sports film" way that gives any insight into actual strategy or flow of the game. But this is not a disaster, though, because this isn't really a sports film - it's a coming-of-age movie where roller derby is the catalyst for change. Bliss learns about her relationships with friends and family as she comes into her own as a "derby doll", and she also falls into a romance with garage-rocker Oliver (Landon Pigg). Pigg is a problem for me because he looks like a cross between Ashton Kutcher and Patti Smith - he's vacuous and "model" pretty, and this runs counter to much of the film's aesthetic. My only other issue with the movie is the use of indie-rock songs to soundtrack its big scenes - sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I liked the use of tracks by the Go! Team in the skating sequences, but I speak as a Jens Lekman fan when I say that this movie had too much Jens Lekman balladry in it. At some point, you cross a line, and the indie music is just distracting - a scene with dialogue about a "great" LP by Little Joy (a side-project of the Strokes, headed by Barrymore's former boyfriend Fab Moretti) definitely crossed this line.

I am a reluctant fan of Whip It, but my complaints above seem pretty petty when I read them back to myself. And the cast was pretty good all the way around. In particular, Marcia Gay Harden is great as Bliss's mom - she's the "heavy" in the movie, but her performance is pretty sympathetic. She's a mail carrier by day, and pageants represent a lot to her about her childhood and regrets, but she's also an engaged parent who will take her daughter to some pretty "punk" stores for shoe-shopping. Daniel Stern gets a couple good scenes as Bliss's dad, and the always-lovable Kristen Wiig is great as the team "mom" of the Hurl Scouts who takes Bliss under her wing.

The story's arc is not unpredictable, but it is satisfying in how it doesn't treat its protagonist with kid gloves. A couple sequences are very memorable - Barrymore may have some real potential as a director - but she needs to control her twee impulses and focus on maintaining a good narrative momentum. Whip It is a good first effort, though, and benefits from good casting choices and a smart script. I'm pretty easy to please, generally, but I can be as reactionary as the next guy when it comes to hipster-friendly romantic comedy - see my comments on the execrable 500 Days of Summer for proof of this. But I'll admit that Whip It had the charm to knock me off my skates.

"Rollerskate" by Call & Response

It's New to Me: 1969 by France Gall

Daguerreotype of Alexander Melville Bell and David Charles Bell, c. 1840

A star of France's ye-ye music scene in the '60s, France Gall is best known for winning the Eurovision contest in 1965 with Serge Gainsbourg's "Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son" at the age of 18. But some of her most interesting work came in the late '60s, when Gall, like Francoise Hardy and other ye-ye singers, branched out into more mature sounds and other genres, like the various flavors of psychedelia that Gall tries out on her album 1968. The title is apt because, in some ways, the album sounds like a conscious attempt to distill the trends of the time into chanson form, with varying degrees of success.

1968 begins with the lovely "Toi Que Je Veux", an orchestral pop song with a great baroque arrangement. The album has a handful of other baroque-pop songs, including "La Fille d'un Garcon" and "Chanson Pour Que To M'Aimes Un Peu", and they're all pretty good. The album's big, brassy numbers, like "Bebe Requin" and the call-and-response "Made in France", are also winners. There are also a couple Eastern-tinged psych-pop songs, "Chanson Indienne" and "Nefertiti" - these aren't as interesting, but they aren't terrible. And then there are some real oddities, like the Gainsbourg-penned "Teenie Weenie Boppie", and these add a sense of fun and ratchet the album's feel of genre-hopping another notch.

In her youth, Gall was known primarily for her breathy high voice, but by 1968 she was supplementing this with a louder, more direct singing style with a bit of nasality that borders on annoying. Her voice fits the material here well, though, even if she doesn't have an amazing range. 1968 is one of the most interesting and eclectic pop albums I've heard from any '60s French artist, and one listen to "Toi Que Je Veux" will be a good indicator if this is your kind of thing or not.

"Toi Que Je Veux" by France Gall

We Love the Beatles: "I Reach for the Light" by the Raspberries

Detail of the cover illustration of William Mole's Hammersmith Maggot by Romek Marber, 1963

Is it weird that Wires and Waves, a blog that has a feature about loving the Beatles, hasn't had a single Beatles-focused article since the recent deluge of next-gen Beatles merchandise? Maybe I've been avoiding it because I, to date, have had no interaction with the new Beatles stuff beyond reading reviews and (nerd alert!) comparing graphical waveforms of the old Beatles CDs and the remastered ones online. I'll probably write more about the remastered Beatles CDs once I get a chance to hear them - by that time, the fervor will have died down and my opinions will be untimely, superfluous, and begging the question, "Where was this guy when the rest of us were talking about this stuff?"

But on to the Raspberries. One of the quintessential '70s power-pop groups, the Raspberries really loved the Beatles. They also really loved the Beach Boys, but their Brian-Wilson pastiches are awful and were, incidentally, the cause of much contention between singer Eric Carmen and guitarist Wally Bryson. Carmen sounds a little like McCartney, so many Raspberries songs have more than a whiff of Beatleness, but the band goes one step too far on the otherwise excellent "I Reach for the Light". One of the cardinal rules of loving the Beatles is not making a song that causes Beatles fans to groan and roll their eyes. "I Reach for the Light" starts out really well, with a somber piano figure and Carmen in full Paul mode. Nice elements are added to the mix one by one - choral backing vocals come in on the chorus, and the second verse starts with the addition of a cello. And then, at the 1:07 mark, they cross the line WITH A "PENNY LANE" PICCOLO TRUMPET FANFARE! Eric Carmen has said that he and the Beatles were both influenced by Bach in their use of the piccolo trumpet, but that little fanfare is a little too wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

Loving the Beatles is great, guys, but let's not cross that line. Exercise some self-control, please.

"I Reach for the Light" by the Raspberries

It's New To Me: Out to Sea by Brighter (2006)

Photo illustration from an advertisement for the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, 1938

Part of the UK indie-pop scene in the late '80s and early '90s, the band Brighter is often dismissively referred to as "like the Field Mice". That's actually a pretty fair comparison, considering the band's sound and the songwriting style of Keris Howard, but there's a lot nice things to find in the Brighter discography. Thanks to Matinee Recordings, the band's entire 35-song discography is available (pretty cheaply) on two collections - lately, I've been listening to the second of these collections, Out to Sea. This collection is actually an expanded version of Brighter's only long-form release, the eight-song mini-album Laurel. Out to Sea begins with the full version of Laurel, including a couple outtakes, and then appends two singles and a bunch of unreleased songs at the end. All together, this forms a one-hour collection of very nice (if kind of anemic and twee) indie-pop.

Laurel is an interesting release, and it's hard to know how I'd have experienced it on its own at the time of its release. The mini-album begins with two entirely guitar and vocals songs, "Christmas" and "Frostbite" - Brighter never had a drummer, but these songs are particularly delicate and gauzy, making for an inauspicious and insubstantial opening gambit. It pays off, though, as more sounds get added to the mix as Laurel progresses - the icy piano stabs of "Summer Becomes Winter" really catch the ear, and when the muted overdriven guitar strumming come in halfway through "Ocean Sky", it might as well be thunderous riffage in how starkly it contrasts with what came before. "Ocean Sky" also introduces the drum machine, which is a key component in Brighter's uptempo numbers. Oddly, the mini-album kind of trails off with its closing tracks, but the patient adding and subtracting of sounds makes it an interesting listen, and Keris Howard's wide-open and decidedly non-virtuoso singing style makes for a nice focal point in these arrangements. The two outtakes from the Laurel sessions are the excellent upbeat pop songs "If I Could See" and "Wallflower" - they could have been included to turn the mini-album Laurel into a solid and more varied full-length album. I guess this just wasn't what Brighter had in mind.

After the Laurel section of the collection, Out to Sea delivers the equally interesting "singles" section with the "A Winter's Tale" and "Next Summer" flexi-singles. These singles, particularly their strong a-sides, present a more immediate and hook-oriented version of Brighter - Keris Howard has said that he didn't know whether Brighter should be a new Sea Urchins or a low rent My Bloody Valentine, and you can hear both inclinations on fuzzy pop songs like "Next Summer" and "Looks Like Rain". Interestingly, some of the strongest tracks on Out to Sea are unreleased tracks at the end of the collection, recorded a few months before the Laurel sessions - I wonder why none of these songs saw release at the time. In particular, the pair of "There Is Nothing We Can Do?" and "Nothing at All" (cheekily presented back to back here) are as strong as anything else the band recorded. I like being able to ingest an interesting artist's whole oeuvre in one shot, so grabbing the whole Brighter discography at a bargain price really paid off.

"If I Could See" by Brighter

Title Fight: "Come On In"

Illustration of fuchsias from The Floricultural Cabinet and Florist's Magazine vol. 19, 1851

So "Come On In" is a pretty generic song title, and there are a ton of songs out there called "Come On In", but I thought it would be kind of funny to pit soft-rockers the Association against Delta bluesman (and brief '90s hipster icon) R.L. Burnside. I could just have easily gone with the great "Come On In" by Bonniwell's Music Machine, but that wouldn't have been as funny.

R.L. Burnside started playing the blues in the '60s and kept on doing it until his death in 2005, and his rhythm-heavy take on juke joint blues is great if that's the sort of thing you're into. In the late '90s, though, he got dragged into the indie music spotlight by working with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and producer Tom Rothrock. The only Burnside record I ever bought was a weird mix of live recordings and remixes called Come On In (I'd heard a track from it on a CMJ sampler), but my favorite thing on the collection (by far) was a live solo take of the title track, a traditional blues song. Burnside plays a cool blues riff that follows his expressive singing of the melody - it's a nice exercise in simplicity, recorded well.

On the far side of the musical spectrum, we have the Association's "Come On In". The opening track to their fourth album Birthday (their "psychedelic album") is built on a bouncy bassline and a steadily-building vocal arrangement with lots of the sunny harmonies that the Association was known for. The song doesn't have much in the way of substance, but the layering of the vocals on the final chorus is one of my favorite Association moments, and it's enough to give the Association the edge in this match-up.

I don't necessarily like what it says about me that I prefer soft-psych silliness to gritty delta blues - I really DO like that Burnside track. I should probably go back and give Burnside's blues albums a chance (i.e. not his weird remix albums from the late '90s), but I think I may just be hardwired to prefer post-Beatles guitar pop. I kind of hate myself now - so much for this being a hilarious "odd couple" match-up.

Winner: THE ASSOCIATION

"Come On In" by the Association

"Come On In" by R.L. Burnside

In Stores Now: Popular Songs by Yo La Tengo

Detail of a Japanese postcard by unknown artist titled "Japanese Postal Service", 1905

"Unassuming" is a much nicer word than "boring", and the low-key music of Yo La Tengo can't really be called boring (by me, anyway) - I'm never bored when listening to it, even when I think I should be. So it must be unassuming.

Yo La Tengo's new album Popular Songs has an inviting name, much more so than 2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. And where that album aggressively challenged the listener, starting with an 11-minute groove-heavy jam and sticking a 9-minute ambient piece in the middle of the tracklist, Popular Songs is structured in a more inviting way as well. It has its atmospheric epics - it would hardly be a Yo La Tengo album without them - but they are annexed into an area of their own at the end of the tracklist. For me, this approach works a lot better - I can just listen to the nine pop songs at the beginning of the album and then opt in or out of the second portion, depending on my mood.

The three long numbers at the end of Popular Songs could be seen as alternate endings, choose-your-own-adventure style. My favorite is the 9-minute "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven", a long, dreamy number with some atmospheric backward guitar and nice lulling vocals. The 11-minute acoustic-and-feedback-based "The Fireside" is less successful, sounding more like a piece of film music, but the final 16-minute track "The Glitter Is Gone" is the only one of the three that is solely instrumental. It's a real guitar-heavy jam with a nice feel of ebb and flow to it, but I have to be in the mood for that sort of thing for it to be my preferred way to end Popular Songs.

I should probably jump back to the nine shorter songs that start Popular Songs - they are mostly excellent, if a little lighter and twee-er than you might expect from Yo La Tengo. The opener, "Here to Fall" is as adventurous as the pop section gets, built on a bass riff and string arrangement. Elsewhere, they do the fuzzy pop thing (a la "Cherry Chapstick" or "Sugarcube") with "Nothing to Hide", lounge-y organ funk on "Periodically Double or Triple", and even a Belle-and-Sebastian-style number with a Beatlesy bridge in "When It's Dark" featuring an excellent lead vocal from Georgia Hubley. The album's one real Ira-and-Georgia duet, "If It's True", is dressed up like a Motown number (think Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell) and it's a fun - if not really convincing - pastiche.

"Avalon or Someone Very Similar" features the prototypical Yo La Tengo sound circa Painful, with sighing backing vocals and a warm organ sound. Yo La Tengo has been making consistently excellent albums for twenty years, and its give them the option of cherry-picking from earlier styles that fans will really appreciate. At this point, they are masters of their craft, and if you find them boring you probably bailed out ages ago. If you didn't, Popular Songs will probably have everything you look for from Yo La Tengo.

"Avalon or Someone Very Similar" by Yo La Tengo

In Stores Now: Forget the Night Ahead by the Twilight Sad

Detail of the cover illustration of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #16 by Jack Kirby, 1965

Well, this one isn't quite "In Stores Now" - it comes out next Tuesday, but I was sent a copy of the CD through entirely legitimate channels, and I don't feel like waiting until next week to write about it! I've been listening to Scottish indie-rockers the Twilight Sad all week, and I saw them live on Monday. I like the direction they're going with Forget the Night Ahead, as well. Their debut album from 2007 combined arena-rock-style bombastic melodies with post-shoegaze guitar squall with a "LOUDsoftLOUD" dynamic, but the songs were a little too self-contained. The singles were great, particularly "That Summer, at Home I Became the Invisible Boy", but the album didn't necessarily hang together well. And this is where Forget the Night Ahead is a big improvement - it is an album that takes the same strengths and sounds and builds something bigger with them.

Like their debut, Forget the Night Ahead seems front-loaded at first. After the slow build intro "Reflection of the Television", you get "I Became a Prostitute", "Seven Years of Letters", and "Made to Disappear" back to back. But these songs benefit from being a little more focused, with guitarist/mastermind Andy Macfarlane approaching their sound from a different angle each time. Vocalist James Graham has a thick Scottish accent that is hard not to love, and his vocal melodies are memorable and big without sounding corny. And the album benefits from an ebb and flow with songs like the pulsing piano-based "The Room" and a capella "Floorboards Under the Bed" adding additional texture to prevent things from getting too samey-sounding.

The Twilight Sad save some of their big guns for the end of the album. My favorite song, and possibly the catchiest one on Forget the Night Ahead, is "Interrupted". It distills everything that the Twilight Sad does well into one of their most concise pop songs, which I always appreciate. A spacious sound mix, great guitar textures, big chorus melodies, a sense of real drama - what more could you ask for?

"Interrupted" by the Twilight Sad

Why Does This Exist?: "All Dressed Up For School" by the Beach Boys

Hand-colored plate from G.B. Sowerby's Thesaurus Conchyliorum, 1847

The Beach Boys released four albums in 1964, and there were still some songs recorded that year that didn't see the light of day until years later. One of these songs is "All Dressed Up for School" a Brian Wilson tune that is excellent in some ways but also begs the question, "Why does this exist?" "All Dressed Up for School" is not the most creepy, child-molestery Beach Boys song - that distinction goes to "Hey Little Tomboy", a song Brian Wilson wrote in 1974. It is a little disturbing, though, that Brian Wilson was writing the same kind of song ten years earlier at the age of 22. "All Dressed Up for School" is about seeing the neighborhood tomboy in her girly school clothes for the first time. The theme itself isn't overtly salacious (unlike the outright disturbing "Hey Little Tomboy"), but the lyrics go a little too far.

The chorus of "Dressed up for school - Ooooh what a turn-on" answers the question of why the song was not cleared for release, but you have to wonder what Brian Wilson was thinking. It's unfortunate too, because the song has some interesting musical ideas in it - ones that Wilson would reuse later in songs like "Heroes and Villians" and "I Just Got My Pay". You've got to love that a capella intro.

"All Dressed Up For School" by the Beach Boys

I Saw a Show! Frightened Rabbit, the Twilight Sad, and We Were Promised Jetpacks at the Urban Lounge, 14 September 2009

Photo of a US military tank crew from the LIFE magazine collection, 1944

"This is a pretty Scottish show, but you want to talk about Scottish shows? The f***ing Proclaimers are playing here next week! Back home those guys sell out 3,000-4,000 seat arenas ... here they play the same little places we do." This was Scott Hutchison opining on the fleeting nature of US fame for Scottish musicians before the headlining set his band, Frightened Rabbit, played here Monday night. And Hutchison was right - it was a VERY Scottish show. Three of Scotland's best indie-rock bands were crammed into a little club on a Monday night, playing almost four hours of music. A pretty good deal for the $10 ticket price.

The first band that played were the fine young Scotsmen of We Were Promised Jetpacks. Their debut album has been a real highlight in a pretty spotty year for new releases (so far), and I was curious to see how their punchy guitar pop would translate to a live setting. Their set was tight and very energetic - they have good chemistry for such a young band. They opened with a more rocking version of the epic "Keep Warm" from their debut album, and spent the rest of the set hitting all the highlights from that record.

Next up was the Twilight Sad, the shoegaze-inspired arena rockers from (you guessed it) Glasgow who made a big splash in 2007 with their first record Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. I've been listening to their new one, Forget the Night Ahead, a lot lately - I'll post a review of it later this week. Their sound was the deafening wall of pummeling guitars that I expected, and they played a decent set, even though it didn't have as many selections from the new record as I'd hope for. The new songs (especially "Seven Years of Letters" and "I Became a Prostitute") sounded great - the one thing that I found really off-putting about the Twilight Sad was James Graham. It was a situation where a band's frontman looks and acts very different from what I imagined - with his heavy Scottish burr and bleak lyrics, I was expecting him to be a brooding poet of some kind. Instead, he was a cross between David Gahan and Ed Kowalczyk. Something about the shaved head, the preening, and the overly emotive gestures seemed at odds with the music - I enjoyed the set a lot more when I wasn't watching him sing.

It was almost midnight when Frightened Rabbit took the stage, and the crowd was pretty pumped up. The Hutchison brothers (and co.) looked to be in good spirits, launching immediately into a high-energy set that hit just about every song from their last album. Maybe this is just "Headliner vs. Opener" Syndrome, but the sound mix was noticeably better - songs like "Fast Blood" and "I Feel Better" maintained the excellent dynamics of their recorded versions, and poppy singles "The Modern Leper" and "Head Rolls Off" delivered some extra emotional heft with the addition of live-show energy. Grant Hutchison's drumming was a real highlight as well - the much-overused descriptor "propulsive" is the only appropriate way to describe his contribution to Frightened Rabbit's live sound.

I would have liked to hear a few more songs from their debut record, Sing the Greys, but the one number they did include from that album was a highlight. "Square 9" was the song they chose to close the set with, and it sounded great. They also debuted a new song from their next album (due 2010) - "Nothing Like You". On first listen, it sounds like a natural development of their sound, and it's as catchy as anything they've done. Ears ringing, I stumbled out of the Urban Lounge at 1:30 AM, making a mental note that 2010 is already shaping up as a good year for music.

"Square 9" by Frightened Rabbit

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Carryout Kids" by Spoon

Background art from Walt Disney's The Sword in the Stone, 1963

"Carryout Kids" was the b-side to "I Turn My Camera On", a song that may be Spoon's biggest "hit" (it was used in a Simpsons episode, if you consider that to be a valuable metric.) But I find the b-side just as interesting, if not as infectious. Built on an electric piano riff (not unlike "Small Stakes" from Spoon's previous album, Kill the Moonlight), it uses the Spoon trick of making a lot out of a little. The keyboard bit is sloppy and supplemented just by Britt Daniel's voice until a couple chugging guitar parts enter the mix at the track's midway point. Some drum and xylophone come in toward the end, but the tension built on that piano riff never really hits any recognizable payoff.

"Carryout Kids" ends with a snippet of borrowed dialogue, a move that screams, "We didn't know how to end this song." This issue and the song's throwaway lyric are probably why the track got relegated to b-side status, but it's a fun listen. For some reason, I think of Billy Joel when I hear this song. I have no idea why - I have a vague memory of Spoon saying that this song had something to do with Billy Joel, but I have no idea what the connection would be.

"Carryout Kids" by Spoon

I Saw a Movie: Extract (2009)

Cover illustration of Nikolai Semenovich Tikhonov's Dvenadtsat Ballad, 1925

I'm not sure if I'd call Extract a return to form for Mike Judge - I've never had strong feelings about his body of work one way or another - but it's a story hewn from from realistic circumstances and lifelike people, putting it light-years ahead of his last movie, the wildly uneven and unsubtle Idiocracy. The premise is pretty simple, anchored in events that took place years before the movie begins: Joel (Jason Bateman), a grad student studying chemistry and working as a bartender, isolates a component in wintergreen oil that can be added to flavorings to reduce the amount of burn-off during the cooking process. He starts a company, Reynolds Extract, and it gradually becomes a very successful venture with a state-of-the-art bottling facility. At some point, he marries Suzie (Kristen Wiig), a graphic designer who designs logos for the company. He buys a nice house and a BMW and spends a lot of time working - in his spare time, he hangs around with longtime bartender buddy Dean (Ben Affleck).

It's a mundane premise that could be the life story of your neighbor, if you live in a nice neighborhood where people have BMWs. This foundation allows Mike Judge to make the most of his awkwardness-and-impotent-fury humor, and Extract is a modest but excellently executed comedy as a result. On this foundation you simply add a couple random elements - a freak accident at the plant results in a workplace injury, a young grifter named Cindy (Mila Kunis) starts working at the plant, and Joel starts making some bad personal decisions fueled by sexual frustration and horse tranquilizers. The chaos unleashed on Joel is pretty brutal, but it never gets so bad that you stop laughing at his bad luck. Extract concludes with a too-neat ending that is at odds with its everyday premise, but this worked for me because I like tidy comedic endings.

The cast of Extract is as good as you can ask for, and Mike Judge's team gets points for some inspired choices. Jason Bateman is an obvious choice for Joel, and he's great, but casting Ben Affleck as the stoner best friend is an oddball choice that works really well. Affleck is obviously having fun with a little role that gives him something to chew on, and most of his scenes work really well. I was also worried about Judge using David Koechner here - he's played the same loudmouthed oaf character in Anchorman, The Office, Reno 911, and a dozen other places - but does a good job of playing against type as Joel's terminally boring and annoying neighbor Nathan. Mila Kunis and Kristen Wiig aren't given much to work with as female leads, as is common in comedies of this kind, but they make their roles work.

If anything, Extract is a little too mundane. I had some trouble getting excited to write about it - it's like retelling a kinda-funny story you heard from a friend. But not everything has to happen on a huge scale, and Extract is comfortable succeeding on a smaller scale. It's a tightly-written and excellently-acted little comedy about normal people, which is a breath of fresh air after a summer of blockbuster-style grandiosity.

"Factory of Raw Essentials" by Guided By Voices

It's New to Me: Me About You by Jackie DeShannon (1968)

Detail of cover illustration from Popular Mechanics magazine, July 1957

Jackie DeShannon is a singer-songwriter who had a remarkable career, but a lot of people have no idea who she is. She's the writer of "Betty Davis Eyes", and the singer of "What the World Needs Now Is Love", among other things. She opened for the Beatles on their 1964 tour of America, and her boyfriend Jimmy Page played guitar on her early singles. She wrote hits for the Searchers and Marianne Faithfull, among others. I fell in love with her early single "Dream Boy" a while back, so I was excited to see that Collector's Choice was reissuing some of her '60s albums. 1968's Me About You has been released on a two-fer CD with 1970's To Be Free - I haven't digested the latter half of this duo enough to opine on it yet, but I'm really enjoying Me About You.

Me About You is an odd album in that it is mostly covers from a hit-writing singer. DeShannon chooses some excellent songwriters to cover, though, beginning with Bonner and Gordon, the duo that wrote the Turtles hits. The three Bonner/Gordon songs on Me About You are the album's poppiest selections, particularly the easy-going title track and the peppy "What Ever Happened to Happy". DeShannon covers folky numbers by Jimmy Webb, Tim Hardin, and the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian with excellent results as well. My two favorite covers on Me About You, though, are the two very different songs found back-to-back toward the end of the album. These are songs that show her great range as a singer. The first is Van Dyke Parks' "High Coin", a lilting piece of twee-pop with a baroque arrangement that comes to life with DeShannon's lively delivery. The second is Motown classic "I'll Turn to Stone" - The Four Tops version is a favorite of mine. DeShannon polishes some of the grit off of it with a sparkly handclap-and-tambourine arrangement that doesn't lose any of the song's great soulfulness.

Me About You only has a few DeShannon originals on it, but they are excellent as well. The best of them is "Splendor in the Grass", which I think must have been a hit of some kind, although I can find no evidence of that. DeShannon wrote it for the movie of the same name and recorded it with as a demo with the Byrds during their very early days as a band. I'd like to hear that version, but I doubt I'd like it as well as the re-recording found on Me About You. It has an excellent baroque-pop arrangement that starts with a big orchestra intro that gives way to DeShannon's tender and emotive delivery of the song's verse and then gradually building back up to the big orchestra sound on the chorus. It's a little piece of pop perfection from one of the best songwriters of the '60s.

"Splendor in the Grass" by Jackie DeShannon

Why Does This Exist?: "Theme from 'Step by Step'" by Kleenex Girl Wonder

Panel from the "Fun at the Zoo" feature in Sad Sack Comics, August 1954

The short answer to the question posed in the title is, "Because it's awesome!" But sometimes that's not a good enough answer. The terrible, tinny sound quality pegs this track as being from the Sexual Harrassment-era incarnation of Kleenex Girl Wonder, which makes it even stranger that this song was a "hidden track" at the end of a mix CD that KGW's Graham Smith sent my special lady friend for her birthday (the mix was titled Pizza Night at Husband and Wife Castle). Somewhere in the hissy, lo-fi mess of this recording, there's a plinking piano and some great shouty backing vocals, but I think that the story behind this recording is probably far more interesting than the result. However, some mysteries are best left ... unsolved.

"Theme from 'Step by Step'" by Kleenex Girl Wonder

It's New to Me: The Dreaming by Kate Bush

Illustration from an advertisement for AC Spark Plugs, 1957

A friend of mine once said that The Dreaming is the favorite Kate Bush record of true fans, and you aren't a real Kate Bush fan until you love The Dreaming. I love Hounds of Love, the only Kate Bush album I know well, so I thought that it was time to find out if I'm a true fan. The answer is ... maybe not. The Dreaming, released in 1982, was the predecessor to Hounds of Love - they are the first two albums that Kate Bush produced on her own, and they are considered by many to be her best work. They are very different animals to me, though - Hounds of Love benefits from being split into two distinct portions, a side-long conceptual piece and a set of stand-alone pop singles.

The Dreaming, on the other hand, is an abstract anthology, drawing inspiration from books, movies, and history and spewing it all out in a stream of ever-shifting musical tones and ideas. Bush sings in so many different voices on this record that I feel like I'm inside the head of a person with Multiple Personality Disorder. And not in a good way. It's too much - most of the songs are impenetrable to me. Still, maybe I'm on my way to being a "true Kate Bush fan" - I keep coming back to The Dreaming even though it always leaves me baffled and overwhelmed. It's confounding without being repellent.

There are only two songs on The Dreaming that make sense to me at this point. The first is "Suspended in Gaffa", the closest thing to a real pop song on the record (oddly, it was not widely released as a single, and the more bizarre "Sat in Your Lap" was the album's minor hit.) The other song that clicked with me immediately is "Houdini", probably because it's simplicity and beautiful string-based arrangement offer some solace late in the album's track-list (before the totally insane closer "Get Out of My House"). It is elegant and uncluttered, and Bush's vocals are much easier to follow and enjoy. It's not entirely un-unhinged, though - the climactic removal of Houdini from the water-tank is accompanied by Bush singing in a deranged tone, "With your life the only thing in my mind, WE PULL YOU FROM THE WATER!" Nice.

"Houdini" by Kate Bush

I Saw a Movie: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Frontispiece to Karl May's Im Reiche des Silbernen Loewen by Sascha Schneider, 1957

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is best described in a few simple words - it is a "Quentin Tarantino movie", with all the positive and negative baggage that comes with that designation. It has all the key characteristics of a Tarantino story being told by Tarantino: a strictly confined structure with the immediately identifiable framing sequence, a script full of memorable gritty dialogue and out-of-left-field humor, and (of course) facial mutilation.

Inglourious Basterds is ostensibly about a group of guerrilla soldiers operating in occupied France during World War II. These soldiers, the Basterds, are a group of Jewish-American soldiers led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), but I think it's unhelpful to think that you're going to get to know the Basterds at all over the course of the movie. They are all rough sketches at best, Pitt included, but they are at the center of a web of overlapping stories involving a young Jewish woman who owns a Paris movie theater, a Nazi war hero, a British agent on a special mission, and an SS officer known as "the Jew Hunter". This latter character, the story's antagonist, is the one that the viewer gets to know best over the course of the movie - this seems like an odd choice, but this SS officer, Colonel Landa, is a compelling and complex figure brought to life by Christoph Waltz. Waltz is the essential element of Inglourious Basterds, and his performance may be my favorite from any Tarantino movie (definitely as good as Robert Forster in Jackie Brown or Kurt Russell in Death Proof.)

My biggest frustration with Inglourious Basterds was that it seemed like a story too big for the movie it was in. Sometimes, this in medias res approach can be a good thing, helping the viewer to feel that they've been dropped into a real and complex world. In Inglourious Basterds, though, it just created the appearance of a big story that had been massacred in the editing room to get it down to a reasonable run-time. The whole thing seemed stitched together, and the seams were too easy to see. It was frustrating to be introduced to some great characters that never got fleshed out, but this frustration might go away if Tarantino carries through with his threat to make a prequel to Inglourious Basterds with some of these same characters.

I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds quite a bit in spite of its substantial flaws, but your mileage may vary depending on whether you have patience for some of Tarantino's quirks as a director and story-teller. At the very least, you will probably find one or two of the movie's sequences to be memorable. And I don't just mean the scenes with facial mutilation, although those might be memorable in an "I'll see you in my nightmares!" way.

"German Studies" by the Breeders

It's New To Me: Lizardland by the Brotherhood of Lizards (1989)

Photo of the Henderson family taken by Ralph Crane from the LIFE magazine collection, 1970

By the end of the '80s UK troubadour Martin Newell had been through two decades of underground music, from the junkstore glam-rock of the Plod to the lo-fi jangle-pop of the Cleaners from Venus. I'm a big fan of Newell's '80s recordings with the Cleaners, as well as his excellent solo work of the '90s, but there was a missing chapter in between that I only recently became aware of. In the late '80s, after the dissolution of the Cleaners, Newell formed a duo with Nelson, who had played a variety of instruments in the band. That's right - Nelson only has one name! How cool is that? Nelson and Newell only released one full-length record as the Brotherhood of Lizards, but it remains one of the strongest releases in Newell's discography.

The first thing I noticed about Lizardland is that it bridges the gap between the Cleaners' bare-bones jangle and the more baroque sound of Newell's first (and best) solo album, 1993's The Greatest Living Englishman. Nelson's influence is immediately noticeable in the use of mandolin and glockenspiel on several tracks, and Newell's songwriting is sharp and consistent. Pastoral psychedelia is the order for the day on many of the tracks, including the excellent opener "It Could Have Been Cheryl". "The Dandelion Marine" and "Sand Dragon" are other are also excellent soft-psych songs, but upbeat pop numbers like "She Dreamed She Could Fly" and "The Happening Guy" provide some good variety.

"Market Day", with its lilting melody and mandolin riffs, is one of my favorites on Lizardland. Like Newell's best songs, it revels in its English-ness, and Newell harmonizes with himself beautifully on the chorus. In my experience, it can be hard to find some of Newell's releases (in the US at least), but Lizardland is one that is definitely worth the effort.

"Market Day" by the Brotherhood of Lizards

Probabilistic Jukebox: "The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness" by the Feelies

Detail of a photo illustration titled "Tree Hugger" by Frances McLaughlin-Gill, originally printed in Glamour Magazine, March 1949

I bought the Feelies' debut album Crazy Rhythms in 1993, after reading about the band in Gina Arnold's book Route 666. The book was marketed as a cash-in on Nirvana's success, but it was actually a pretty decent history of American college rock, which was what I needed at the time. Arnold's book introduced me to the Hoboken scene of the late '70s and early '80s, populated by nerdy new-wavers like the Feelies and the dB's. I had high expectations when I first listened to Crazy Rhythms, but I only listened to it a couple times before shelving it - I liked the songs well enough, but something about the format of the album just bugged me. The CD was mastered at a very low volume, for one thing. A few of the songs started with several seconds of silence, while others had slow, quiet fade-ins that were hard to hear. There was a lot of space between the songs on the album, and it didn't work for me.

It's kind of too bad that I didn't become a big fan of this album, though, because there's a lot in the songs that appeals to me. The opening track "The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness" came up on the Jukebox today, and I'm loving the gradual-building tension and the interplay of the two guitarists. The guitars' super-clean sound was supposedly achieved by plugging them directly into the mixing board without using an amp or mic, and they sound really good. One key part of the Feelies' appeal is lost on me, though - I know everyone loves Anton Fier's drumming, but it doesn't do much for me.

I can't help but think a better-mastered version of this record would impress me a lot more - coincidentally, Bar/None Records is re-releasing the Feelies' first two records next Tuesday, and I hear that these new versions sound really good. At the very least, I'm going to pick up their second album, The Good Earth, which I've never heard but always heard good things about.

"The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness" by the Feelies

It's New to Me: Tommy (1985-1987) by the Wedding Present

Illustration titled "Goat in bedroom gazing at sleeping person" by Felix Darley, c. 1880

People seem to associate the rise of the UK indie band the Wedding Present with the break-up of the Smiths. I'm not sure why this is the case, as the singles collected on Tommy (1985-1987) were all released while the Smiths were still together. It's true that the Wedding Present's first album, George Best, was released around the time of the Smiths' dissolution - I guess maybe you had to be there to see the connection. There are also people who associate the early Wedding Present singles with the "twee" indie sound that was growing in popularity in the UK at that time, but I don't hear much "twee" in these songs. Bitter, angry lyrics sung in a throaty growl over buzzsaw acoustic guitars - that doesn't sound too much like twee-pop to me. Sounds more like the Buzzcocks.

Hearing these early Wedding Present singles for the first time, I'm impressed by how Wedding Present mastermind Dave Gedge had a definitive and immediately recognizable sound mastered right from day one. Tommy (1985-1987) collects the band's first four singles, originally self-released by the band on their Reception Records label. A few of the single versions were subbed out for superior radio sessions recorded during the same period, but the tracks all blend together well enough. Perhaps too well, in fact - the band's first single "Go Out and Get 'Em Boy!" sets the band's breakneck pace and other early tracks like "Once More" and "This Boy Can Wait" have memorable hooks, but many of the songs rush by in a trebly, clattering blur. The band's last single features three songs that are more or less perfect ("Never Said", "Every Mother's Son", and "Favourite Dress"), ending the collection on a real high note. This single directly preceded the recording of George Best, so I think I need to track down a copy of that somewhat elusive record next.

My favorite song on Tommy (1985-1987) is probably "You Should Always Keep in Touch with Your Friends". The track here is from the band's first session on the John Peel Show - I'd be interested in hearing how it originally sounded on the 7", but I can't argue with the energy and jangle of its Peel Session version. And it has one of Gedge's best breakup-obsessed chorus lyrics, "I'm sure you understand/The first who lay beside me/Made me what I am!"

"You Should Always Keep in Touch with Your Friends" by the Wedding Present

Why Does This Exist?: "Fifi the Flea" by the Everly Brothers

Photo of Orson Lowell from the George Grantham Bain Collection, c. 1950

Here's a new semi-regular feature from Wires and Waves - an examination of songs that raise the highly philosophical question, "Why does this exist?"

By 1966, the Everly Brothers were considered washed-up, and neither of them had reached their thirtieth birthday yet. They'd peaked early, with a string of hit singles from 1656 to 1960 that brought harmony to rock and roll and cemented their reputation as part of the first wave of rock pioneers. But times had changed, and the Everlys hadn't really figured out how to change with them. Until they recorded 1966's Two Yanks In England, a bandwagonesque attempt to emulate the success of the British Invasion bands - it was the product of excellent execution of several good ideas. Update their sound by eliminating most of their tamer country influences in favor of loud guitar? Check. Bring in the Hollies to play as backing musicians on most of the album? Check. Get permission from the Hollies to record some of their non-hit tracks that had some unfulfilled potential? Check. Have Jimmy Page come in to provide some lead guitar as a session musician? Check. Record a song about a little flea that falls in love with a flea clown from the flea circus? Check. Wait ... what?

The only real oddball inclusion on the Everlys' Two Yanks In England album is "Fifi the Flea", a song the Hollies had written for their Would You Believe? album. It's a weird little song about two fleas that die of sadness and are buried together, and Don and Phil do everything they can to bring out the story's pathos with their yearning harmonies, but - c'mon - this is a song about flea circus romance! There's no mystery in why the Hollies wrote and recorded it - they were putting out two albums a year at the time and needed some filler songs. A standard practice at the time. But why would the Everly Brothers ever decide to cover this song on their big comeback album?

My guess is that, recording with the Hollies, the Everly Brothers wanted to capture the British Invasion sound by using as many British songs as possible (the album also contains covers of hits by Manfred Mann and the Spencer Davis Group). The Hollies probably didn't give the Everlys permission to cover any of their big hits, preferring to see if they could improve on the Hollies versions of excellent b-sides like "Signs That Will Never Change" and "Have You Ever Loved Somebody". The Everlys rose to the challenge on those tracks, which is why Two Yanks In England is an underappreciated rock classic. But they went to the well one time too many and ended up including a real head-scratcher called "Fifi the Flea". No pun intended.

"Fifi the Flea" by the Everly Brothers

It's New to Me: Suburban Light by the Clientele (2000)

Illustration from the cover of Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger, Jr., 1872

I heard about the Clientele years ago, and they sounded like the kind of thing I enjoy - a London band that writes delicate, '60s-influenced pop with a dreamy vibe. I checked out some of their early singles and songs from their debut album, The Violet Hour, though, and found that they left no impression on me at all. It sounded right when I was listening to it, with a great reverb-heavy sound that doesn't really sound like anything else and great vocals and lyrics by frontman Alasdair MacLean. But the reverb reached some saturation point for me where it made the songs impenetrable, like a heavy lubricant that made the song's hooks slide right by without catching my ear. Later on, I picked up the band's second and third albums (Strange Geometry and God Save the Clientele) on a trip to the record store for reasons I can't recall. I didn't have the same problem with those albums - I loved them right away. And I still do. So I decided to give the early stuff another try.

Suburban Light is a collection of singles and unreleased tracks compiled a full three years before the band even put out their first album. On my first few listens, I was still having problems getting into the songs. MacLean supposedly sings most of his vocals through a guitar amplifier to get that interesting reverb sound, but on these early tracks it makes it harder for me to follow the melodies for some reason. These song's reward a little patience, though, and I soon found a lot of great pop moments lurking in the cavernous echo. Some of the songs are just a little dull, particularly "Reflections After Jane" and "Joseph Cornell", even though the latter song seems to be the collection's centerpiece. The opening track, "I Had to Say This", is as close to an upbeat pop song as this collection has, but "We Could Walk Together" and "An Hour Before the Light" also avoid sounding totally somnolent with lively drumming and a nice Byrdsy guitar jangle. And most of the slower songs, like "Monday's Rain" and the slide-guitar-driven "Lacewings", have memorable melodies as well as cozy, echoey atmospherics.

A pattern I noticed was that the later singles were generally more memorable and better than the earlier ones. The standout song for me is "(I Want You) More Than Ever", taken from a 2000 7" single. It has a lovely, yearning chorus melody and simple pop arrangement that shines in the instrumental breaks. The Clientele have another album - Bonfires on the Heath - coming out in October. MacLean has hinted that this may be the band's last album, and I can understand being concerned that the band is working in a very limited idiom. But, from what I've heard, Bonfires on the Heath may be their best work yet.

"(I Want You) More Than Ever" by the Clientele