Why Does This Exist?: "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" by Sufjan Stevens

Panels from Super Mouse: The Big Cheese comic book issue number 35, April 1956

Welcome to the SPOOOOOKY Halloween edition of "Why Does This Exist?"

You don't have to go any farther than the title of Sufjan Stevens' "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" to start asking the question, "Why does this exist?" I'll admit to having been a part-time Sufjan Stevens apologist back in the day, although I've mostly give up since he decided that he has doubts about sharing his music with others and has wasted years writing a boring quasi-classical piece about a freeway. I never really understood this song, and it's only become an increasingly anachronistic "sore thumb" on the Illinoise record over time. The simple fact is that Stevens isn't playing to his strengths at all with this song.

The fakeout intro with the piano is nice, but as soon as the "funky" bassline starts, I'm already thinking, "Awwwww, hell no!" And when it goes into a full-on disco arrangement with mismatched chanted vocals, it's obviously a trainwreck with a climbing number of reported fatalities. Stevens then starts to sing, and it's immediately obvious that his voice has nothing to do with the rest of the song, so he wisely stops singing and lets his zombie backing vocalists take the song to the bridge. Then, when Stevens starts some creepy falsetto warbling over the song's only and endlessly repeated hook, I'm ready to press the "Next" button. If there's one thing the song does well, it's that it combines musical styles in a ludicrous way that is really a tradition of Halloween music, so it's got that going for it. Happy Halloween!

"They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" by Sufjan Stevens

Title Fight: "Every Little Bit Hurts"

Photograph of a San Francisco street advertiser, 1890

"Every Little Bit Hurts", written by Ed Cobb for Brenda Holloway to sing in the early '60s, is a well-known song. It's been covered by Cilla Black, the Small Faces, the Spencer Davis Group, and Alicia Keys, and it was a Top 20 hit for Holloway on Motown in 1964. At that time, though, Holloway didn't want to release the song as a Motown single. She had already released "Every Little Bit Hurts" as a single on Del-Fi Records and had to be forced to re-record the song for Motown as part of her contract. I prefer the original Del-Fi version with its bare-bones bass, piano, and organ arrangement (that's the version posted below) - the Motown version lays on the weepy strings too thick. With its stately waltz time and emotive vocal from Holloway, "Every Little Bit Hurts" does a good job of communicating the feeling of trying to maintain dignity when you're a relationship that's falling apart. The repetition in the lyrics is effective, and Holloway's delivery compellingly combines resignation, indignation, and desperation.

In 2002, Jenny Toomey recorded "Every Little Bit Hurts" for her album Tempting, but it's hard to mistake this song as being a cover version, as the album's subtitle is "Jenny Toomey sings the songs of Franklin Bruno." So this is a different song, written by underrated songwriter, author, and UCLA philosophy professor Bruno, and recorded by Toomey and her friends from the band Calexico. I think Bruno is consciously borrowing from the Ed Cobb original in his use of repetition in the song's opening lines (which basically constitute the song's chorus as well), and it's a catchy little hook. Even though it's one of my favorite songs on Tempting, the song is kind of a let-down because of the awful descending melody line at the beginning of the song's brief quasi-verse sections. The verses are only really useful for the moment when they end and the chorus hook comes back, and the song builds nicely to a big finale, with Toomey repeating the final line. It's a good effort overall, but for me it doesn't come close to matching Brenda Holloway's first version of "Every Little Bit Hurts".

Winner: BRENDA HOLLOWAY

"Every Little Bit Hurts" by Brenda Holloway

"Every Little Bit Hurts" by Jenny Toomey

It's New to Me: Banging Down the Doors by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons (2007)

Poster titled On vous intoxique! by Ecole nationale superieure des arts decoratifs, 1969

I've been struggling coming up with things to write about lately - I decided today to write about this Ezra Furman CD I bought at a gig last week. It's called Banging Down the Doors, and I believe it was his band's first major full-length release. When it came out in 2007, Furman was about 20, but he impressed people immediately as a songwriter. As I mentioned in my review of his recent live performance, he doesn't go out of his way to avoid comparisons to big-name songwriter types like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. His squawking voice and emphatic singing style also says "I'm a songwriter who sings - not vice versa" - on Banging Down the Doors he sounds almost exactly like the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano, to give you an indication of what level of adenoidal whine we're talking about (9.5/10 on the Darnielle Scale of Nasal Singing).

It's easy to see why people took Furman seriously right from the start - Banging Down the Doors is an impressive collection of songs executed with a great degree of confidence. It takes guts to place songs called "I Wanna Be a Sheep" and "I Wanna Be Ignored" back to back in a tracklist, but Furman knows what he's doing. The former song is the album's gentlest track - it delivers a seemingly obvious metaphor about wolves and sheep with a surprising degree of skill, and the latter song is a blistering and straight-forward rocker that addresses the listener directly with lines like, "I want you to enjoy the music without thinking about what the lyrics mean." He pulls this trick again to humorous effect on "The Little Red-Haired Girl", singing, "It's just our first record - I want you to fall in love with me!" He can get away with lines like this because he knows how to use his youth and precociousness to his advantage.

This is also true to some extent on Banging Down the Doors' more ambitious songs - "I Dreamed of Moses" works well because it's grounded in humor, but Furman pushes his luck with "God is a Middle-Aged Woman" and comes off sounding a little too big for his britches. The best songs on the album are those that focus purely on delivering the Harpoons' combined package of unhinged energy, evocative personal lyrics, and a compelling (if borderline annoying) vocalist - the album's opener "Mother's Day" and closer "Lydia Sherman" do this well, as does "How Long, Diana?", a folk-pop number with a sea shanty vibe that has one of Furman's best chorus melodies. The only real weakness of Banging Down the Doors is that it is too unrelenting over its almost-one-hour run time - it can be too much all at once. More variety in the sounds and better sequencing is the answer to this, and Furman did better on the follow-up to this album, 2008's exceptional Inside the Human Body.

"How Long, Diana?" by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Pavilions of Sun" by Tyrannosaurus Rex

Detail of a cover illustration from Hanatsubaki magazine, February 1940

If you stop and think about it, it's pretty weird that T. Rex, the band that basically invented glam rock in the UK in the early '70s, started out as a "bedroom bard" act that sang folk songs full of Tolkien-esque mythos. Back then, they were Tyrannosaurus Rex, a duo of composed of singer Marc Bolan and bongo player Steve Took, and they produced three albums of odd lo-fi folk-rock before Took was fired and replaced with another bongo player, Mickey Finn, for Tyrannosaurus Rex's fourth album, 1970's A Beard of Stars. This album prominently featured Bolan's electric guitar for the first time, and touches of blues and overt pop leanings foreshadowed the name and direction change that would come when the band became T. Rex later that year.

The songs on A Beard of Stars are mostly minimalist sketches - at 2:39, "Pavilions of Sun" is one of the album's longest tracks. It stumbles out of the gate without an intro of any kind in a rush of bongos and acoustic strumming. Like most of Bolan's songs from this period, "Pavilions of Sun" has a very abbreviated and repetition-heavy verse-chorus structure. Right there in the middle, though, a chugging electric guitar riff appears and then disappears just as abruptly - it comes back for a little vamping at the end in an outro that ends with a nice exultant shout from Bolan. This transition-period sound, combining bedroom folk and blues rock, makes A Beard of Stars a unique record in the T. Rex canon - a year from its release, Bolan was fronting a full four-piece band and releasing the landmark Electric Warrior.

"Pavilions of Sun" by Tyrannosaurus Rex

It's New to Me: Willy and the Poor Boys by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)

Illustration from The Advance: Yearbook of Indiana State Normal School, 1916

Sometimes it seems like I don't write anything for this blog except reviews of albums everyone else already knows by heart, but I realized today that it's been a couple weeks since I did one of those. So guess what? Willy and the Poor Boys is a pretty good record, as I'm sure everyone else already knows.

It wasn't a conscious thing at all, but my avoidance of Creedence Clearwater Revival was probably mostly about my entirely unfounded fears of "Southern Rock" (a scene that CCR had little if anything to do with), and my hatred of the Eagles. Two things changed my mind about CCR: the use of the song "Lookin' Out My Back Door" in the movie The Big Lebowski, and a message board poll I saw in which a very large and diverse crowd agreed that CCR was the most universally likable rock band. So I went out and bought CCR's 1970 album Cosmo's Factory, and I had to admit straight away that it was a great record. Starting with the band's fourth album put me in a weird position, though - CCR's albums after Cosmo's Factory are considered to be less-than-great, but I was concerned that, if I went back and bought their albums in chronological order, I'd find that their early stuff didn't have the characteristics I loved about Cosmo's Factory.

So I decided to work backward from Cosmo's Factory, which put 1969's Willy and the Poor Boys next on the list. There are a few songs on Willy and the Poor Boys that everyone knows well enough that I would just embarrass myself trying to write something non-redundant about them - "Down on the Corner" is an easy-going pop song in the style of "Lookin' Out My Back Door" (probably my preferred mode of Fogerty compositions), "Fortunate Son" is a fiery political statement about David Eisenhower's ability to avoid getting sent to Vietnam, and "Effigy" is a heartfelt epic with some great guitar work in it.

The album's two covers ("Cotton Fields" and "The Midnight Special") are actually real album highlights with great harmony vocals, and the rest of the Fogerty originals are pretty good - I find myself particularly enjoying the chooglin' sound of "Feelin' Blue" and the alien-abduction-themed "It Came Out of the Sky" more than I thought I would. But, while Willy and the Poor Boys isn't weighed down by the just-kinda-there covers and overlong "groove" tracks that weighed down Cosmo's Factory a little (eleven minutes of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"?), it does have some filler in the form of two "meh" instrumentals. These instrumentals are really more than interludes, though, and I can excuse them when the rest of the album's tracks are so consistently excellent.

So, CCR is two for two so far for me - the natural next step would be to pick up Willy and the Poor Boys' 1969 predecessor Green River, but I've been reading some good things about the underrated Pendulum from 1970, the last of the classic-era CCR records. I'm going to have to do some more research before proceeding further.

"It Came Out of the Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Title Fight: "I Don't Believe You"

Detail of a cover illustration by Robert Bonfils for Brant House's Torture Trust, 1966

The definitive song "I Don't Believe You" is probably the one found on Another Side of Bob Dylan. The title of that album refers to Dylan's then new-found interest in personal subject matter in his songs, the first of many perceived betrayals of his fans (who wanted more protest songs, apparently,) and "I Don't Believe You" is a very personal-sounding song. The song's title is appended with a paranthetical "(She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" a lot of places you see it, but my copy of Another Side just calls it "I Don't Believe You", a phrase which actually never appears in the song. The song is a stand-out on an album of classics, notable for its unusual (for Dylan songs of that era) sing-song melody, as well as its little guitar flourishes and a Dylan harmonica solo that's one of my favorites. The song has no true chorus - each stanza ends with the phrase, "She acts like we never met" - and it has some very memorable lyrical phrases, like "From darkness dreams are deserted, am I still dreaming yet" and, "Though her skirt it swayed as a guitar played, her mouth was watery and wet." It's one of my favorites on Another Side, "My Back Pages" being the only song I like better.

I think the Magnetic Fields' "I Don't Believe You" started out in the band's live repetoire in the mid-'90s, and it was a favorite among fans from the start. It was released in 1998 on a 7" single (for Merge, I think) as a three-minute rush of blippy electro-pop (similar in arrangement to 69 Love Songs' "If You Don't Cry") but this limited edition single didn't get heard by many. When the Magnetic Fields were recording their 2004 album i, the song was an obvious choice for re-recording and inclusion. As part of the band's "no-synths" trilogy, "I Don't Believe You" got a very different treatment on i, with an arrangement of piano, cello, and banjo. I actually like this more organic arrangement (and slower tempo) better, although the original single has its charm as well. Interestingly, the solo after the bridge is almost identical in the two versions.

The weakness of the Magnetic Fields' "I Don't Believe You" is that the lyric gets a little too cutesy for me at times. The wordplay is facile and below Stephin Merritt's normally high standards - the reference to Tom Jones's "They Were You" is also a little too wink-wink-nudge-nudge. I'm going to give this one to Dylan on lyrical merit.

Winner: BOB DYLAN

"I Don't Believe You" by Bob Dylan

"I Don't Believe You" by the Magnetic Fields

Why Does This Exist?: "Suzy Creamcheese" by Teddy & His Patches

Color plate by Walter Fitch from British sea-weeds : an introduction to the study of the marine algae of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Channel Islands, 1867

In 1967, Teddy Flores Jr. and some friends started recording music in San Jose - they were called the Patches after the eye-patch worn by Teddy himself (supposedly, he had lost an eye to cancer.) So why did the Patches' first A-side bear the name "Suzy Creamcheese"? Suzy Creamcheese was a fictional character (a singer and Salt Lake City resident) created by Frank Zappa for the Mothers of Invention's debut album Freak Out (released in '66). Apparently, Teddy & His Patches heard the Mothers' epic freak-out "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" shortly after its release and decided to "borrow" a snippet of it as an intro for their debut single. According to the Patches' keyboard player, he never even knew who Frank Zappa was until after their single was released.

I always think of "Suzy Creamcheese" as one of the wildest tracks on the garage-rock compilation Pebbles Volume 3. After the intro stolen from Zappa, it goes into a "Louie Louie"-esque organ riff with some pretty wacked-out vocals. This is followed by a pretty decent psych instrumental section, and then the song ends with an entirely different slower bit with clearer vocals and some simple organ arpeggios (a sound that reminds me of Korean psych-rock band San Ul Lim.) Listening to Pebbles Volume 3 now, though, "Suzy Creamcheese" is not even close to being the craziest thing on here. It's catchy and well-executed, but it can't compete with the insanity of the Driving Stupid's "Horror Asparagus Stories" or the Hogs' "Loose Lip Sync Ship". Teddy & His Patches actually made the local pop charts with a second single in '67 titled "Suzy", but I've never heard that song.

"Suzy Creamcheese" by Teddy & His Patches

In Stores Now: In & Out of Control by the Raveonettes

Editorial cartoon from the Eugene Register-Guard, December 8, 1978

Denmark's Raveonettes released one of my favorite albums of 2008, the swirling fuzz-poppy Lust Lust Lust. That album showed the band continuing their gradual move away from the influences predominant on their first few records(early '60s garage and surf rock, as well as later bands that leveraged those sounds like the Jesus & Mary Chain) and embracing a more "pop" approach rooted in the "girl group sound" of bands like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las (the JAMC's other influence). On In & Out of Control, the Raveonettes have traced the progeny of the girl groups, cherry-picking the best melodic tricks found in '70s power pop and more recent Europop/Eurodance hit-makers like *gulp* Roxette and Ace of Base.

This isn't a bad thing, though - In & Out of Control is a straight-up pop record with a new-found focus on fresher hooks, but the Raveonettes haven't completely reinvented themselves. The lyrics are still classic Raveonettes, combining some morbid subject matter (drugs, rape suicide) with that girl-group "teen death ballad" approach. The big single, "Last Dance", is about being in a relationship with an addict who has overdosed on more than one occasion. Two of the album's biggest pop moments are in the songs "Suicide" and "D.R.U.G.S.", and the band's shiny new pop approach interplays weirdly with the song's themes. This is most evident on the minimalist pop of "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)" - this song has come under fire for going too far in using bubblegum hooks to anchor a song that addresses the issue of rape in a reductionist and demeaning way. To be honest, though, even though I can understand why it would make some people flinch, I think it's a worthwhile exercise as part of the album's context. On its own, it's pretty odd, but it works as part of a cohesive set of songs.

One of the gems on In & Out of Control is "Breaking Into Cars" - its monotone verse is a throwback to the sound on earlier Raveonettes albums, but this is just a set-up to contrast with the huge new-wave-tinged chorus melody. It's a great pop song that shows the Raveonettes' talent for combining their influences in novel ways to keep their sound fresh - I never would have guessed after their first two albums that they had this kind of potential, but, so far, every little reinvention has made them better and more interesting. Let's see how long they can keep it going.

"Breaking Into Cars" by the Raveonettes

In Stores Now: The Life of the World to Come by the Mountain Goats

Illustration from Felix O C Darley's Sketches Abroad with Pen and Pencil, 1868

John Darnielle has released a new album under his nom de musique, the Mountain Goats. Darnielle has a nasal singing voice that is hard for some people to get past, but getting used to that voice is a process that that can deliver big rewards because of what it has to say. Darnielle is one of the best songwriters working today, and his ability to tackle a project like The Life of the World to Come is further proof of his ambition. It's an album about the Bible, a concept that would be a disaster in the hands of a less talented writer. Each song is a Bible verse presented in the form of a modern-day parable, and each is delivered with a great deal of humanity and grace. Darnielle is definitely a skeptic in his views on theology, but he also has a lot of compassion toward this subject matter. He also evidently knows the Bible very well, and the lyrics are, for the most part, subtle in their use of biblical language to draw very personal vignettes.

The Life of the World to Come opens with "1 Samuel 15:23", a quiet acoustic number that addresses the idea of religion as a business or self-help scheme. It's the kind of song we've heard from Darnielle many times before, but the rest of the album shows more variety, particularly as many of these songs were written and performed primarily on piano (a first for the Mountain Goats). Thematically, some of the album's best songs form natural pairs. In "Hebrews 11:30", a pagan anticipates a fleshly resurrection - in "Isaiah 45:23", a patient with chronic pain waits for his soul's escape from the bodily prison. "1 John 4:16" evokes the Christian being fed to lions, while "Deuteronomy 2:10" is sung from the point of view of the beast, ruminating on its own extinction. The album's two road songs, "Psalms 40:2" and "Ezekiel 7", tell the respective stories of a vandal's pilgrimage that borders on religious ecstasy and a killer contemplating the salvation of his soul after torturing a boy to death. Two of the album's most poignant songs deal with the passing of a loved one - "Philippians 3:20-21" ponders the departure of the spirit and its destination, while the very personal "Matthew 25:21" focuses on a person's feelings in watching a loved one succumb to cancer.

A couple things on the album seem a little "on the nose" compared the light touch I expect from the Mountain Goats - the "vehicular disaster" imagery of "Matthew 25:21" seems particularly obvious and dampens the song's emotional "oomph" for me. The beating-heart sound effect that ends the album is also a little much, but these are minor quibbles based in very high expectations. Darnielle's superlative word choice and vocal style is on full display here - the bone-chilling effect of his phrasing on a seemingly neutral line like "Someone will have to mop this floor for me" is very impressive.

The album's most overt pop song, "Genesis 3:23", is a good starting point here, but it also has an unexpected depth to it. Darnielle uses the expulsion from Eden as the foundation for pondering the instinct to return to places where terrible things have happened to us. I can identify with the desire to return to formative places and see them from a new perspective. There's a lot of weight behind the simple chorus phrase, "I used to live here."

"Genesis 3:23" by the Mountain Goats

I Saw a Show! BrakesBrakesBrakes and Ezra Furman & the Harpoons at the Kilby Court, 16 October 2009

Illustration by Peter Newell from Carolyn Wells' Mother Goose's Menagerie, 1901

Like other non-traditional music venues I've known, the Kilby Court draws an unpredictable crowd, both in size and composition. I've seen a show there where a capacity crowd has left en masse after the local opener and before a well-known headliner. I've been to shows there where a huge crowd inexplicably showed up on a weeknight to see a fairly new band, and I've been to shows there where the band outnumbered the audience. Friday night, New York's Ezra Furman & the Harpoons and Brighton, UK's BrakesBrakesBrakes played a pretty great show to a mostly empty room - it's too bad, but that's how these things go.

I didn't get there in time to see the other opener, Florida songwriter Rachel Goodrich, but Ezra Furman & the Harpoons was the band I was actually most excited to see. Furman has released two great albums for Minty Fresh, and he comes across as a great-songwriter-in-training. Comparisons to Dylan often come up in articles about Furman, which isn't really fair, but it's a comparison he openly invites with his songwriting and his adenoidal singing style. He wears his other influences on his sleeves as well, and it's easy to hear homage to artists from Springsteen to Neutral Milk Hotel in his songs. But the songs themselves are great in spite of their transparent influences and heart-on-sleeve lyrics, and his band played a great set with highlights from both of his albums. Furman complained that the change in elevation was messing with his voice, but he blazed through some pretty lively versions of favorites like "The Stakes Are High" and "The Worm in the Apple".

Ezra Furman & the Harpoons

The headliners of the show, BrakesBrakesBrakes, is part of a UK music scene that doesn't get a lot of coverage in US music press. You hear a little about British Sea Power and the Electric Soft Parade, but only filtered through the UK indie press (where "indie" has a very different meaning than it does Stateside). Initially a songwriting project of Eamon Hamilton (and initially called Brakes before a US legal conflict forced the band to put their name in triplicate), BrakesBrakesBrakes has evolved into something of a dynamic, if hard to pin down, rock band. Live, their sound is as slippery as it is on record, sliding from an arena-rock Beatnik Filmstars on the more "indie-rock" numbers to Clinic-gone-country on the acoustic songs.

BrakesBrakesBrakes

It's all good fun, though, and their setlist equally covered all three of their albums, opening with the stomping "All Night Disco Party" from their 2005 debut. They played a lot of bouncy upbeat numbers like "Ring a Ding Ding", "Spring Chicken", and "Hey Hey" - the highlight of the set was probably a blazing version of "Don’t Take Me To Space (Man)" from their latest studio release, Touchdown. They rounded out the set with some folkier songs like "On Your Side" and "NY Pie", one of my favorites from their first record. They seemed to be in good spirits as well, in spite of the low turnout.

I can't help but feel a little uncomfortable at under-attended shows, knowing that the band is probably disappointed. There's nothing I can do to make their experience more pleasant in any meaningful way, even if I'm enjoying it as much as I can. Both bands I saw on Friday seemed to take it in stride and with good humor, though, so I was able to loosen up and just enjoy the music. I'm not sure either band will come back this way again, so I'm glad I got a chance to see them - check them out if they're playing a show in your area.

"NY Pie" by BrakesBrakesBrakes

In Stores Now: I and Love and You by the Avett Brothers

Illustration titled "Increase of Power" from LIFE magazine, January 2, 1950

The Avett Brothers seemed to be on the verge of taking their bluegrass-pop into huge crossover-success territory. Their last album, Emotionalism, hit all the right buttons with all the right people, slowly picking up momentum and buzz a full year after its release in 2007. The time was right to jump to a major label, pick up a big-name producer (Rick Rubin) and put out an album with broad appeal. The Avetts pulled off the first two steps without a hitch, but they may have not quite done the third step right with their new LP I and Love and You. Sure, you'll see lots of references to the Avett Brothers on Facebook, but they're getting surprisingly luke-warm reviews from many legit critics and media outlets. The crossover is happening, but it's nowhere near as explosive as it could/should be. Why?

I'll admit that I love I and Love and You, but I think it's a failure on some levels. I probably love it for being a failure - I'm like that. First, I should say that I think that Rick Rubin's production is a non-factor in this album's degree of success - I and Love and You sounds like an Avett Brothers record, and fans of Emotionalism and the Avetts' earlier albums have little to complain about with the sound of the band here. The bluegrass, country, rock, and pop elements are all still there, as are the banjo, Hammond organ, cello, and acoustic guitar. The sound is right - it's the songs that aren't quite right.

Simply put, I think I and Love and You is weighed down by its concept and a set of songs built around that concept. The liner notes contain a 500-word "mission statement" on the subject of love - that ought to set off warning alarms in your head right there. A good three quarters of I and Love and You is composed of down-tempo songs ruminating on the same subject, starting with the album's opening title track. It's not a bad opener, but it's a slow song followed by five more slow songs (barring this sequence's standout moment, the uptempo break in the middle of "The Perfect Space"). This sequencing may be a reaction to the embarrassingly front-loaded Emotionalism, which started with five of the best songs the Avetts have ever written. But people were drawn to the uptempo bluegrass-pop of "Die Die Die" and "Paranoia in B-flat Minor" on that album for a reason, and I and Love and You seems to deliberately withhold its pop moments.

Those pop moments are there, though, if you have patience. I and Love and You is as back-loaded with fun songs as Emotionalism was front-loaded. "Kick Drum Heart", "Tin Man", and "Slight Figure of Speech" are pure pop - big, stupid, and lovable. They have a bouncy rhythm and enthusiasm that is reminiscent of Charm School-era Bishop Allen - they probably got pushed to the back of the setlist for not being serious enough, and that's too bad. I and Love and You is best when it's not taking itself too seriously - it ends with a five-song run as good as anything on their previous albums. Maybe we can blame Rick Rubin for putting the songs in the wrong order, but I'm guessing the Avetts did this to themselves. A more pop-oriented sequencing would have made I and Love and You the big crossover hit it was set up to be - instead, it's an album for fans, containing hidden gems deep in its bowels and rewarding patience and repeated listens.

"Slight Figure of Speech" by the Avett Brothers

We Love the Beatles: "All You Need Is Hate" by the Delgados

Panel from the "Keepers of the Wilderness" feature of Spin and Marty comic book issue #1082, 1960

Over the years, lots of bands have expressed their hatred of the Beatles in different ways, but on their 2003 album Hate, Scottish indie-rockers the Delgados took things to another level entirely. "All You Need Is Hate" is a cynical song poking fun at the use of the word "love" in pop songs, and it's built around a reference to the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". in addition to the lyrical reference, they slyly quote the melody of the song as well and I've got to believe that the reverb on Alun Woodward's vocals in the opening lines is intentionally Lennon-ish. These things make me think that the Delgados are using "hate" to express a love of their source material and, if you can love "All You Need Is Love", you probably love everything the Beatles have done.

Sadly, the Delgados split in 2005, but they're not forgotten. Vocalist Emma Pollack put out a solo album last year, and Alun Woodward put out an album under the name Lord Cut-Glass earlier this year. Drummer Paul Savage has done quite a bit of production work at Chem19, the Delgados' old studio - his credits include producing Touchdown, the latest studio album from Brighton UK's Brakes. The Brakes are painfully underrated in the US, probably due to the fact that they've changed their name to BrakesBrakesBrakes in the States over a legal conflict. They're currently touring the US with the excellent Ezra Furman & the Harpoons - if you live in the Salt Lake City area, they'll be playing at Kilby Court tomorrow night and shouldn't be missed.

"All You Need Is Hate" by the Delgados

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Soft Touch" by George Harrison

Photograph of office 305 of Hoffmann-LaRoche Inc. in Nutley, New Jersey, November 17, 1943

It's interesting that this song popped up on the jukebox because I've been thinking about George Harrison lately. I've been listening to the Beatles remasters A LOT, and one thing that has stood out to me has been Harrison's songwriting arc over the Beatles' seven year recording career. Harrison's songwriting ambitions started modestly enough with "Don't Bother Me" from With the Beatles, the first of many songs he'd write on the subject of just wishing people would politely sod off. Depending on your point of view, Harrison's songwriting either turned interesting and ambitious or took an unfortunate detour with his discover of Indian music and philosophy, which resulted in the "Eastern" sounds in songs like "Love You To", "Blue Jay Way", and "The Inner Light".

During the later years, he joined John and Paul in exploring more bluesy sounds ("Savoy Truffle", "Old Brown Shoe"). He also wrote three perfect pop songs during his last years with the Beatles - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Here Comes the Sun", and "Something". Who would have guessed that nine short years later, Harrison would be hanging out on a tropical island, writing laid-back pop songs (and thereby opening the door to unpleasant comparisons to Jimmy Buffett)?

Harrison's self-titled album from 1979 is not highly regarded, and I admit that it does have an odd combination of unchallenging written-on-a-beach compositions and too-slick '70s LA production. But Harrison was always as consistent as a vocalist and guitarist as he was an uneven songwriter, and George Harrison sounds great even if some of the songs aren't his most interesting. "Soft Touch" was written while Harrison was in the Virgin Islands (Margaritaville?) - in a scenario that basically says "EXTRA EXTRA - SONGWRITER RECYCLES MATERIAL!", Harrison was playing around with the horn melody from "Run of the Mill" (one of the best songs on his best solo album, All Things Must Pass), when the riff turned into something else. And that became the basis for "Soft Touch", one of many inconspicuous but excellently executed mid-tempo songs found on George Harrison - it has some goofy romantic lyrics (another problem with the album generally) but it has that nice descending guitar riff anchoring a nice, breezy melody that makes you wish you were right there with George on the beach watching the boats on the horizon.

"Soft Touch" by George Harrison

In Stores Now: Signal Morning by Circulatory System

Illustration from A German Comic Paper by William DeLancy Ellwanger and C.M. Robinson, 1894

For me, sometimes the best test of "how good something is" is whether I feel like writing about it. And I don't really have anything to say about Signal Morning by Circulatory System, a music-making collective centered around William Cullen Hart (formerly of psych-pop experimentalists Olivia Tremor Control). To be sure, there are very few albums that sound anything like Signal Morning, so there should be lots to talk about - the problem is that there is one album that sounds almost exactly like this one, and that album is Circulatory System's self-titled debut album from 2001. Basically, it took Hart and his cronies eight years to remake their debut album without any recognizable variance in quality or style.

Granted, Will Hart has been focusing (as he should) on managing his multiple sclerosis in recent years, and this has had an effect on his musical output. I just have trouble getting past the fact that there's not really anything new going on in Signal Morning. It's an album of slightly off-kilter cut-and-paste psych-pop, played impeccably and assembled artfully. But everything on it has a direct analogue in something Hart has done before. The lyrical themes are all ones that he has explored at length in his previous work - you're not going to be shocked to see words like "joy", "blast", and "parades" in the tracklist. The sweet, Beatlesy vocals are still there, but diced up and processed nearly to oblivion. Horns and strings fade in and out of arrangements indiscriminately, but without ever feeling misplaced.

The credits on Signal Morning split the songs into "side one" and "side two", and the two sides were arranged and edited separately. For whatever reason, side one has a far higher detritus-to-pop ratio - it only contains three tracks that could be considered standalone songs, surrounded by six snippets. Signal Morning's second half fares better, boasting the album's three best compositions. The first, "Blasting Through", uses the trick of repeating a simple snippet of song six or so times, each time filtered through a different set of effects, but it's done really well here and doesn't sound repetitive. "The Frozen Lake/The Symmetry" has an interlude's title, but it is actually one of the most hook-driven songs on the record.

My favorite thing on Signal Morning, though, is the closing title track. Again, nothing really new going on here, but the acoustic strum reminds me of my favorite aspects of the Olivia Tremor Control records, and the use of the horn bleats in the arrangement is a nice touch. Given Hart's health situation, this may be the last track we hear from him for a while - Signal Morning may be more of the same on a lot of levels, but at least it ends on a high note.

"Signal Morning" by Circulatory System

I Saw a Movie: Bright Star (2009)

Illustration from Randolph Caldecott's The Milkmaid, 1882

I have to admit that I don't know the work of New Zealand writer/director Jame Campion that well - certainly not well enough to have any expectations going into one of her films. But, being most familiar with The Piano among her works (like most people), I was both surprised and unsurprised by her new film Bright Star. Bright Star is period-romance/biopic about the last days of John Keats and his relationship with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and it has Campion's trademark meditative pacing, impressive musical selections, and vivid visuals from its opening sequences - nothing surprising there. The thing that did catch me off-guard was Campion's interest in a love affair that is so outwardly chaste - not what I'd expected from a director known for talking Meg Ryan into getting naked and filming Kate Winslet urinating all over herself (not at the same time, obviously.)

Bright Star rises and falls on the rhythms of Fanny Brawne's heart - Fanny's a young girl obsessed with fashion who finds herself sharing a house with Keats and his prickly fellow poet Charles Armitage Brown. Fanny is portrayed as being quite young, although her age is never stated - a lot of things are never stated, actually, in the mostly-opaque storytelling here. We don't know much about the financial standing of Fanny's widow mother, or where Fanny gets the money for the materials she uses to sew all her amazing outfits, but the presentation of the story is such that you don't need to feel the need to question the historicity. We are looking into the very specific past of Fanny Brawne, and her portrayal by New Zealand TV actress Abbie Cornish provides much of Bright Star's emotional impact. Visually, Cornish is a combination of Katherine Heigl and Kristen Stewart, displaying the vacant openness of the former with the rodent-like squint of the latter, but she makes this look work and ably portrays the wide-eyed devotion of first love and the anguish of untimely loss.

I hope I didn't need to provide a SPOILER ALERT before alluding to the fact that John Keats dies at twenty-five. The shadow of this event stretches back to the film's earliest scenes, and Campion's script does a good job of balancing light and dark even as the film's tone grows increasingly claustrophobic. Much is made of the relationship dynamic between Fanny, Keats (played adequately by Ben Whishaw), and Charles Brown. Brown is played by US indie-film actor and Parks and Recreation cast-member Paul Schneider, and I was prepared to hate his performance. His accent was a little uneven, but his performance was quite good and a key part of the film. His character adds a much-needed tension to Bright Star - he's the best friend who may be putting his own interests ahead of his friend's.

Bright Star is not a real crowd-pleaser - it asks a lot of the audience without giving a lot back, but what it gives can be intimate and rewarding. Watching Fanny learn to inhabit the world of poetry as she falls in love with the poet is compelling, and every frame of the film is carefully composed with thoughtful use of color and light (kind of like Barry Lyndon). It's definitely a film that will get talked about more as Oscar season approaches, and it deserves to be talked about. On the surface, there's not a lot going on in Bright Star, but there are moments in this movie that suggest an immensity of things.

"Poet" by Sly & the Family Stone

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Sugar Hiccup" by the Cocteau Twins

Panel from The American Air Forces comic book issue #8, 1945

I don't own any Cocteau Twins albums, and I've been meaning to rectify this. The one thing I do own by the Cocteaus is Lullabies to Violaine Vol. 1, a collection of the singles and EPs from the first half of the band's career. It is an amazing collection, and I'm glad I made it my point of introduction to the band, but I'm not really sure where to go from here. The early stuff is a little too goth for me, although I'm not too bothered by the heavy '80s production aesthetic that comes across in most of their work.

From what I've heard so far, "Sugar Hiccup" was where the Cocteau Twins really started to hit their stride. It was on the 1983 Head Over Heels record, but this version is the 12" single version that I have from Lullabies to Violaine. It hits you over the head with some '80s sounds right up front - the intro features a mock choir and some drum pads that would be hilarious if they didn't fit the arrangement of the song so well. Because vocalist Liz Fraser takes some real liberties with phonetic rules in her singing style, the title phrase is the only sequence of recognizable English words I can make out, but I can let go and appreciate the sound of her voice without trying to interpret the sounds.

Maybe I should start out with Head Over Heels and work forward through the Cocteaus albums. However, I hear that a lot of people consider Heaven of Las Vegas to be the band's best work, so that might be a good starting point as well.

"Sugar Hiccup" by the Cocteau Twins

Title Fight: "We Were Wrong"

Photo of wallpaper designer Vera Newman by Yale Joel from the LIFE magazine collection, c. 1965

Admitting that you've been wrong can be a hard thing to do, so it's not surprising that few bands have chosen to do so in the form of a song. But kudos to Boyracer and the Bonzo Dog Band for their willingness to put a painful admission out there for everyone to see. But the question remains - who does a better job of presenting such an admission in song?

The Bonzos' "We Were Wrong" comes from 1969's Keynsham, their last album before their breakup in 1970. It's a fun mix of doo-wop style and lounge-y vocals composed by Vivian Stanshall, an oddball in a band of oddballs. Stanshall's chorus seems very sincere: "We were wrong - we were wrong - but so young and so frightfully in love." But this sentiment is very much undercut by the verses, which describe such incidents as a blowing-up skirt frightening the horses at the track and wiping free champagne off of a hired DJ. The song's organ riffing in the outro is goofy and fun, and Stanshall's voice, as always, drips with mock sincerity and gravitas. Quite a good entry overall.

Indie band Boyracer's "We Were Wrong" comes from 1996's In Full Colour, their last album before their breakup in 1997. Are we seeing a pattern here? Maybe admitting you were wrong is a pre-breakup thing, although I continue to doubt the sincerity of the sentiment (both the Bonzos and Boyracer reunited within a few years of breaking up). Boyracer's "We Were Wrong" is a pretty piece of fuzz-pop, built on a bed of static, feedback, drum machine, and spidery guitar lines. However, the song's lyrics are all but incomprehensible except for the line, "We were wrong." What were you wrong about? How am I supposed to know if I should be magnanimous and forgive you if I can't even make out the details of your so-called apology? I'm going to have to disqualify Boyracer on the basis on non-intelligibility and give the win to the Bonzos.

Winner: THE BONZO DOG BAND

"We Were Wrong" by the Bonzo Dog Band

"We Were Wrong" by Boyracer

It's New to Me: The La's by the La's

Detail of illustration by Vladimir Kirin from Iv. Brlic-Mazuranic's Croatian Tales of Long Ago, 1922

In fits and starts, I've been exploring early '90s brit-pop lately - I consider it a scene I could have really gotten into at the time if I hadn't still been obsessed with US college rock from the '80s. The self-titled album by the La's is an easy album to acquire - turn around and you're likely to see one sitting in a cardboard box with a sticker on it that says "$2 OBO" - but it's also a record with an interesting story, a single anachronistic hit single, and a lot of under-appreciated first-rate songwriting.

1990's The La's is an album that can barely be visible in the shadow of its stand-out single, "There She Goes". The single was actually released in 1988, a full two years before the band's only album came out. But some bands work this way - the La's existed as a band starting in 1984, so they were obviously in no hurry. And this became more apparent as time went on, even as the band was hailed in England as a great new talent. The La's was recorded with famous producer Steve Lillywhite, and the band was apparently quite unhappy with the process and the results. The band's frontman, the eccentric Lee Mavers, publicly and consistently disowned the record, stating that the band played the songs poorly during recording sessions in hope that the results would never see the light of day. Mavers vowed to re-record the record in the manner that he had originally intended, and that the second La's album would not be recorded until this had happened. And it never happened. So all we have is this heavily flawed document of the band (albeit supplemented as of last year by an expanded version including the band's demos of the songs from The La's).

The interesting thing about The La's is that it has a definite set of influences, most notable pre-1965 British pop and Merseybeat, but it shows a surprising variety of approaches to its influences. Like the original UK beat bands, some of the songs here lean more toward '50s R&B sounds, where other songs could almost be replicas of skiffle-pop. None of the other tracks have the soaring, reverb-laden melodies of "There She Goes", but I find a lot of the album to be just as appealing (moreso, even, by virtue of being less familiar.) "Feelin'" has a great intro riff and bare-bones rock arrangement straight out of Hard Day's Night, but the album's other single "Timeless Melody" has a thick guitar sound and nice layered vocals - it's hard to believe that this was a band trying to sound crappy. Bluesy songs like "Doledrum" and "IOU" have a different sort of retro vibe, and the closing epic, "Looking Glass", is full of ideas and shows where the band might have been going if they hadn't decided to throw it all away.

My favorite song The La's is probably "Way Out", which I think was originally released as the band's very first single back in 1987. It has a nice chiming, Byrdsy riff and a sped-up waltz feel to it, with Lee Mavers singing in a spiteful-sounding voice about ... I dunno, probably drugs. According to some, all their songs were about drugs - even "There She Goes". If true, it could explain their inability to get their act together and record another record.

"Way Out" by the La's

In Stores Now: Origin:Orphan by the Hidden Cameras

Panel from Forbidden Worlds comic book issue #29, May 1954

Toronto-based songwriter Joel Gibb has been making "gay church music" with his friends as the Hidden Cameras for almost a decade, and he hasn't lost the ability to surprise people with his music. In the early days, it was easy to shock the audience with hymns about queer politics and revival-style live shows featuring go-go dancers in ski masks. Now, with a fourth full-length release titled Origin:Orphan, the surprise is just how far the Hidden Cameras have strayed/matured from their original approach.

Origin:Orphan was recorded in various locales after the Hidden Cameras spent an extended period in Germany, and I think this shows in the album's sound. I can't pretend to know much about Krautrock - I don't really know my Neu! from my Popol Vuh - but I hear some very motorik sounds and downright Teutonic sentiments on this record. Where previous Hidden Cameras records, were propelled by bouncy folk-pop, Origin:Orphan begins with a slow-building statement of purpose called "Ratify the New". All the elements of the Hidden Cameras sound are still there - strummed acoustic guitar, strings, Gibb's crystal voice - but they are utilized differently. Most of the album's tracks are based on that propulsive, straight-forward drumbeat associated with Krautrock, and textures and repetition are emphasized in place of joyous choruses. The lyrics are also heavier and more abstract - the explicit gay content of the band's debut The Smell of Our Own is probably gone for good at this point.

I may be making this album sound gray and boring by comparing it to German things, but it's only gray and boring compared to the technicolor explosion you might expect from the Hidden Cameras. The music still has a celebratory, quasi-religious sound, and (once you get past the album's overtly Kraut-y opening track) Origin:Orphan offers a good variety of pop sounds. Single "In the NA" is very reminiscent of the band's earliest recordings (circa Ecce Homo), and two other pop songs in the Hidden Cameras' original idiom ("Underage", "The Little Bit") brighten up the album's second half. "Colour of a Man" is a nice, delicate ballad, and "Do I Belong?" brings a smile with an intro that has to be an intentional U2 imitation.

The variety and introduction of new sounds might be off-putting to longtime Hidden Cameras fans, but Gibb's work stands up better to repeat listenings with this new breadth, particularly when the band gets to stretch out and play with textures and forms on longer songs like the Origin:Orphan's title track. And if you want to get that old-school Hidden Cameras feel, you can just skip to Track 9 and enjoy the a capella intro and high-life guitar flourishes of "Underage".

"Underage" by the Hidden Cameras

In Stores Now: Zero to 99 by Boston Spaceships

Illustration by J.C. Leyendecker from Robert Chambers' Iole, 1905

Robert Pollard's got another new record - his sixth of 2009. Another LP under the name Boston Spaceships, his project with Chris Slusarenko and friends, this release proves that Boston Spaceships is his most consistently great project since retiring the Guided By Voices name. Slightly superior to The Planets Are Blasted (released in February of this year!), Zero to 99 is arguably less consistent but boasts more highlights. The album leans heavily toward the power-pop side of Bob's multi-pronged approach to rock, which is what I tend to prefer anyway. It benefits from some dalliances in prog and heavy psych, but bringing the pop hooks is what Boston Spaceships does best.

Zero to 99 starts with "Pluto the Skate", one of four straight-up remakes of old demos on the record taken from Pollard's Suitcase box set. It's a noisy psychedelic song-sketch that is barely different from its demo, but it leads into a string of six perfect songs, one of the best sequences of songs found on any of Pollard's albums from this year (or any year, maybe.) "How Wrong You Are" and "Radical Amazement" are great guitar pop that show Pollard's voice is in fine form (a legitimate question considering how destroyed it sounded on some of the songs on his last release, Elephant Jokes.) "Found Obstruction Rock and Rolls" and "Trashed Aircraft Baby" bookend two softer pop songs, the slow-burning "Question Girl All Right" and "Let It Rest a Little While", a song featuring a huge chorus and some nice guest guitar work from REM's Peter Buck.

The second half of the album lets up on the momentum a little and focuses more on variety, with little sketches like "Godless" and "Return to Your Ship" mixing with the proggy "Go Inside" and the insanely catchy minimalist pop of "Mr. Ghost Town". One remake I was looking forward to, "Meddle", is the big letdown of the album, turning the jangle-pop of the demo into a pounding hard-rock riff that just sounds stupid. The closing track of the album does a much better job of updating an much-loved demo - "A Good Circuitry Soldier" started life as an acoustic ballad from the lost Concert for Todd project, and it get a nice reinterpretation here, with some double-tracked vocals and a steadily building arrangement. It doesn't have a single hook - it's one of those Pollard melodies that is all hook, and it sounds great here.

With nothing new left to look forward to from Pollard in 2009 (this doesn't count yet another Suitcase-series rarities box set he's releasing in December), our favorite Ohio songwriter has delivered some great songs and albums this year. He put enough great songs across his 2009 releases to make a two-disc "greatest hits" collection rivaling many bands' career outputs.

"A Good Circuitry Soldier" by Boston Spaceships

In Stores Now: Born Again Revisited by Times New Viking

Detail of cover illustration from Ray Russell's Sardonicus and Other Stories, 1961

Ohio's Times New Viking were bringing lo-fi back before it became the new thing to bring lo-fi back, and they do scuzzy indie rock in a way that is immediately identifiable and listenable in spite of being a mess of musical and non-musical sounds. Last year's Rip It Off was a lot of fun, and it pointed to Times New Viking refining their fuzzy textures with better-thought-out melodies and structures. In a way, I think their new record, Born Again Revisited is a retreat from this trend, abandoning this refinement for a more scatter-shot approach.

Born Again Revisited takes the band's noisy, melodic style of past albums and divides its songs into two camps, separating the noisy ones from the melodic ones. As a result, you end up with some songs that emphasize the noise but offer little else, and the two worst offenders in this category - "I Smell Bubblegum" and "Little World" - are toward the beginning of the record, keeping Born Again Revisited from really taking off in spite of some excellent grimy pop songs like the opener "Martin Luther King Day" and single "No Time, No Hope". The less frenetic melody-focused songs that dominate the latter part of the record also lose a little of their edge from this divide-and-conquer approach, but they fare better overall. Songs like "Half Day in Hell", "2/11 Don't Forget", and "Those Days" are almost pretty (ugly-pretty?) and make good use of Beth Murphy's buzzing keyboards and inflectionless vocals.

After a couple listens, I was convinced that Born Again Revisited was disappointing, but after more listens (that's right - I listen to a record more than twice before writing about it!) I'm liking it a lot better. It has subtler hooks than its predecessors, but they must be there because I've been catching myself singing song-sketches like "High Holidays" to myself at work. There's a lot of bands using these same tricks lately, but Born Again Revisited shows that, while Times New Viking didn't invent lo-fi, they still have a unique knack for making a big poppy racket with some rudimentary recording techniques.

"2/11 Never Forget" by Times New Viking

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Outside Chance" by the Turtles

Illustration titled "That's a Silly Tune" by James Montgomery Flagg from Ralph Barbour's An Orchard Princess, 1905

Why are the Turtles' records out of print? Their early records may not be that interesting - too many Bob Dylan and P.F. Sloan covers - but I'd really like to have their last two records, the all-over-the-map The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands and the Ray-Davies-produced Turtle Soup. I just noticed that they are available from Amazon MP3 in "high-quality" MP3 format - maybe I should just get them that way. I don't know if they'll ever be released on CD again.

Of the early Turtles singles, "Outside Chance" is easily my favorite. Not included on any of the Turtles' albums, the song was written by friend Warren Zevon several years before he started releasing his own albums (at the time, he was singing in a duo under the name Lyme & Cybelle). The song is bog-standard "We Love the Beatles" mid-60s pop until the end of the second chorus (the 55 second mark in the song), when a really cool, burbling electric piano solo comes in. That moment is enough to make the song a great one, and I often find myself throwing disc two of Nuggets on, just so I can enjoy that moment when the electric piano solo starts.

"Outside Chance" by the Turtles