Photo detail from an advertisement for Pro-Fighting Equipment Ltd., 1981
The early Mountain Goats releases often came in the form of home-recorded songs on a cassette. My favorite of these early cassettes, which boasts one of the greatest titles ever given to anything, is 1994's Yam, the King of Crops, released on the tiny UK label Oska Records. The title is a reference to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and the cassette may or may not be a concept mini-album about that book (reference to Quetzalcoatal and kimchi throw some doubt on that theory). Darnielle has said that Yam, the King of Crops may be his favorite of his recordings, and it has some awesome songs on it. It also has "Two Thousand Seasons".
Nestled in between two great songs, "Alagemo" and "Chinese Rifle Song", "Two Thousand Seasons" is a minute and a half of pure discomfort. Accompanied only by an irritating, mechanical whirring sound, Darnielle sings a morbid lyric about annihilation in that high, keening voice he used to use all the time. The lyric is actually from the slavery epic also titled Two Thousand Seasons by African author Ayi Kwei Armah. Regardless of its scholarly origin, though, the song is just not a good listen in any way, and based on what I see here, it is the least favorite Mountain Goats song among many fans. So, at least I'm in good company, if I choose to think of Mountain Goats fans as good company (you don't have to spend much time on the forum I linked to before having some serious doubts). The only remaining question is, "What is making that whirring sound?" Google isn't really helping me out on that - one reviewer refers to the noise-maker as a "whirligig", but I think he's just guessing.
Illustration from The Pearl and the Pumpkin by Paul West and W.W. Denslow, 1904
I'm glad I didn't try to write about Transference right away - I was tempted to write it off after a few listens. I would have said something like, "Britt Daniel and Jim Eno have decided to take my least favorite thing in the Spoon discography, the monotonous four songs at the end of 2005's Gimme Fiction, and base a whole album on that sound." I still stand by that comparison, actually, but now that I've gotten to know the album a little better, I think that Transference works well in spite of it. Obviously, the lack of immediate hooks was frustrating at first, but the guys in Spoon know what they're doing, and it's hard to believe that they made a hookless album by accident. By removing that instant gratification that I've always looked for in the "ear candy" songs they've included in every album until now, they force the listener to focus on the songs' immaculate sound design and subtler melodic turns. And it works - the songs on Transference take on an almost-catchiness when you stop looking for the hooks and really get into the songs as "pop soundscapes" instead.
Transference's opening track, "Before Destruction", does what a Spoon opening track usually does - it uses droning and repetition to set the stage for what's to come. It starts with a wavering organ sound that disappears when Daniel begins singing - for the first few bars, his singing is distant and accompanied by a demo-like, dry acoustic guitar sound. Then, a more produced vocal and guitar sound replace the "demo" sound, and the organ drone comes back. This patching together of rough and smooth sounds, together with the abrupt adding and removal of ingredients in the palette, is what Transference is all about. This approach creates an almost vertigo-like unbalance at first, particularly in its most extreme applications in the album's first half. "Is Love Forever?" begins with Daniel intentionally singing slightly a little behind the song's beat in an offputting way before settling into a Soft Effects-style groove. "The Mystery Zone" is the highlight of the album's first side, with a more accessible melody, but it lulls you into complacency only to pull the rug out by cutting off suddenly in the middle of the title phrase at the end. The album's first half ends with "Written in Reverse", one of the album's immaculately rough-around-the-edges rockers, but I'd like it a lot more if not for its obnoxious opening couplet: "I'm writing this to you in reverse / Someone better call a hearse."
That line is terrible, but it's a bit of a red herring because the lyrics on Transference are an overall improvement over previous albums. Lines like, "Some ex-girlfriend, call her Heather / Whispers to me "Is lover forever?" and "Everyone loves you for your black eye / They feast on the abundance of your house," are as memorable as anything Daniel has written in the past. The lyrics take a bit of a back seat on the album's second half, but it's okay because these songs are very sonically interesting - it may be one of the strongest six-song sequences Spoon has put together, from the long jam of "I Saw the Light" to the piano ballad of "Goodnight Laura". It's probably not too surprising that the GBV-aping "Trouble Comes Running" is my favorite track on the album, but the initially-underwhelming single "Got Nuffin" also has a scrappy charm when placed deep in the batting order at track ten.
By the time you get to the glitchy, cut-and-paste piano vamping outro of "Nobody Gets Me But You", the album closer, it's hard not to be impressed that Spoon has managed to make an album that is memorable, if not immediate, without delivering a "I Turn My Camera On", "The Underdog", or "That's the Way We Get By". Some people probably won't be able to get past the lack of standout tracks, and this just isn't the album for them. But there's a lot to like in Transference if you do a little digging.
Images of a beauty queen from University of North Carolina's Yackety Yack annual, 1901
I've been experiencing this cognitive dissonance for a while - it comes from the fact that I've been listening to the Beatles remasters constantly since they came out, but I haven't written anything about them here (I kind of think of Wires and Waves as an online "journal" of my listening habits). I've enjoyed the mono versions of the albums a lot and wanted to say something about them, but I don't want to write a long spiel about how I grew up listening to everything in stereo, so I even love the "terrible" stereo mixes of the early Beatles albums. So I think I'll write about Mono Masters, the only truly new release of all the recent Beatles remasters. And it may be my favorite Beatles release ever.
Intended to be a companion to the stereo Past Masters collection of Beatles singles, Mono Masters compiles the mono versions of those singles for the first time on CD (I think). Obviously, the first disc is a big improvement, because the stereo mixes of those early Beatles singles were not great, pushing all the vocals to one channel for a lopsided listening experience. I was more surprised by the second disc, though - Disc 2 of Past Masters has long been a favorite, primarily because of the first three singles on it, "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out", "Paperback Writer"/"Rain", and "Lady Madonna"/"The Inner Light". Mono Masters gives you those great singles as they were heard on the radio when they first came out (they sound really good!), and then it trims off a single that I've never really liked much, "The Ballad of John and Yoko"/"Old Brown Shoe". There was never a mono mix of that single, but it's no big loss.
The cool thing is that Mono Masters replaces that single with the tracks from the lost Yellow Submarine EP, previously unheard mono versions of "Only a Northern Song", "All Together Now", "Hey Bulldog", and "It's All Too Much". I know that not everyone loves those songs as much as I do, but they sound better here than they did on the "remixed" soundtrack album from a few years ago. Combined with the '65-'68 non-album singles I love so much, these tracks make the second disc of Mono Masters one of the most varied and non-linear collections of Beatles songs outside the White Album.
It's still got the single version of "Hey Jude", which I don't love, and "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" is what it is, but I find myself coming back to this disc again and again. It know it's kind of silly - anyone could make a Beatles mix with these songs, but these mono mixes sound really good, and the alchemy of this new sequence just makes it better. I hope that Mono Masters becomes generally available at some point, because this should be accessible to those who don't want to spring for the Beatles Mono Box. Here's the mono mix of "Only a Northern Song", which has a dense, forceful feel to it that I never got from the stereo version, and the trumpet sounds really bright and immediate. Highly recommended.
Cover illustration by Jack Gaughan from Jeff Sutton's The Atom Conspiracy, 1963
The Red Chapel began life as Det Røde Kapel, a four-episode documentary miniseries that aired on Danish TV in 2006. I'm glad that director Mads Brügger decided to re-edit the episodes into a feature documentary - it makes for an interesting film with a unique premise. The Red Chapel is the story of Mads Brügger's efforts to put together a cultural exchange project with North Korea. That in itself isn't too weird, but there's more. Brügger's plan is to take two Korean-born Danish comedians (Simon and Jacob) to North Korea to perform for the people there. And their performance centers around flatulence, vulgar performances of Hans Christian Andersen stories, old Danish TV skits, and an acoustic performance of Oasis's "Wonderwall". Oh, and Jacob, one of the two comedians, has a serious physical disability (cerebral palsy, I think) that impairs his movement and speech.
That last bit is essential to what makes The Red Chapel work, in spite of its issues. All of the film of the movie was shot in North Korea (in a style very reminiscent of the Danish Dogme 95 directors) and all the footage was subject to examination and censorship by the oppressive North Korean government. Brügger anticipated this issue, so he relies heavily on Jacob to deliver most of the frank commentary on what's going on, as the North Korean handlers could not understand his "spastic Danish", as he calls it. As Jacob, Simon, and their director submerge themselves in the mind-boggling isolationist madness of North Korea, Jacob's freedom to speak is one of the film's best assets. Less successful is Brügger's pedantic voice-over, which he may have felt he had to add to explain the pieced-together post-censorship footage. But he goes too far, ascribing hidden thoughts and secret motives to the North Koreans without any support for his assertions. It's pretty heavy-handed and unnecessary - there are plenty of surreal and creepy moments in the movie as it is.
For anyone familiar with accounts of visits to North Korea, the sight-seeing excursions the Danes are taken on will not be new, and the stock footage of North Korean military and cultural exhibitions are filler at best, but Brügger adds some fun twists by constantly challenging his Korean handlers. In front of the much-revered statue of Kim Il-Sung, Brügger obtains permission from his handlers to recite "What Love Is Like" by the subversive poet Piet Hein (spoiler alert: it's like a pineapple). On a trip to the Ministry of Culture, Simon and Jacob present a functionary with a fancy pizza spade that is intended as a gift for Kim Jong-Il himself. Simon leads a group of North Korean girls in a singalong of "Hey Jude" at a picnic.
Brügger is not the only one playing games, though. The North Koreans have their own fairly transparent motives, seeking to exploit the Danes' visit for propaganda purposes - they can show that they do not persecute the disabled as they have often been accused of doing, and they can use Simon and Jacob's visit as a jab at South Korea, the country that gave them away as children. Simon and Jacob appear to be happy to go along for the ride at first, but they become increasingly alarmed at how Brügger and the North Koreans are using them as pawns. This is most apparent in the transformation of Simon and Jacob's planned performance, which Brügger happily lets the North Koreans twist to their own agenda - in the end it just proves his point about them. The give-and-take between the comedians, their director, and the North Koreans is the key element of The Red Chapel, and provides a more nuanced counterpoint to Brügger's skewed narration.
In the end, Brügger seems frustrated that his efforts don't reveal the poisoned black heart of North Korea, but I think that he's undervaluing what he was able to capture on film. Jacob and Simon are very sympathetic and intelligent stand-ins for the audience, and you have to feel for them as they are exposed to events of an ever-escalating strangeness. The final performance of the revised cultural exchange stage show is very surreal, as is the Koreans' reaction to it. The Red Chapel is not the scathing exposé of North Korea that Brügger was obviously hoping for, but it works just as well as a humorous and surreal ordeal of two young comedians navigating between two sets of handlers trying to make a political statement.
Illustration titled "Bart Davis's Dance" from George W. Harris's Sut Lovingood's Yarns, 1867
So I'm going to be seeing about six shows at Sundance this year, and I plan to write about all of them. Just to give you advance warning. The first show of the Festival is always special, and this year was no exception. I'm glad my special lady friend and I decided to see a "small film" for our first movie this year - the combination of low expectations and high enthusiasm made the screening of Grown Up Movie Star a better experience than it would have been to, say, catch it on the Sundance Channel at 3:00 AM. But maybe I'm just equivocating because I think that I shouldn't have liked this movie as much as I did. I liked it a lot.
It can't have hurt that Big Love's Shawn Doyle (he plays Bill's brother Joey if you watch that show) got up before the movie started and thanked us for coming. I thought it was odd that he would do that until I realized that he was the star of Grown Up Movie Star - I didn't even know that he was from Newfoundland! Set in that least-appreciated of Canada's maritime provinces, the movie features a cast and crew with quite of bit experience in Canadian TV. Writer and first-time director Adriana Maggs does a good job of translating the good aspects of her TV experience to a movie that makes the most of its limited scope and resources, focusing on intimate moments and gentle but incisive funny-because-its-true humor.
Grown Up Movie Star is about a small-town family of "Newfies" made up of a failed hockey pro, Ray (Doyle), his wannabe-actress wife, Lillian, and their two preteen daughters. Lillian makes her exit as the movie starts, explaining to her older daughter Ruby (Tatiana Maslany) that she is going to Hollywood to become famous, leaving the girls with Ray. Ruby is deeply affected by her mother's departure, realizing that (at 13) she is close enough to being a woman to start interacting with the world in a new way. Meanwhile, Ray, an NHL flameout making a living building houses, is also hit hard by his wife's departure - he is forced to reevaluate his life and, particularly, his sexuality in a new context.
The parallel sexual metamorphoses of Ray and his daughter Ruby are central to Grown Up Movie Star, but they are also the film's weakest element. The whole set-up is too obvious, and a key sequence halfway through the movie really, REALLY hits you over the head with, "See - the two of them are going through the same thing!" That's really my only major complaint about the movie, though. The cast and script are very good - the actors and the writing are both very affectionate toward the characters and subject matter, and Maggs usually errs on the side of tasteful understatement. For a sexual-awakening story, Grown Up Movie Star relies on low-key humor to a surprising degree, and it works well, more than making up for a couple moments of melodrama. Also, the look of the movie is quite good, creating an effective "real-life" feel by using a frozen Newfoundland village for its setting without going overboard with obvious signifiers or stylistic touches.
Doyle and Maslany's performances are really what make Grown Up Movie Star better than it should be, though - they work together as the two sides of the film's thematic axis, interacting with a very real father-daughter dynamic and drawing the audience into their lives. Maslany is particularly impressive. When she got up with the rest of the cast (the whole cast!) for a Q&A at the end of the show, she revealed that she is 24, more than a decade older than her preteen character, and the crowd gasped audibly - she was just that good. Seeing the whole cast in that little screening room may be why I came away from this movie with such a positive impression - they all came down to Sundance as a group of Newfies that made a made a great little film about a Newfie family, and they were excited that people were enjoying what they'd made.
French "Alexandria" postage stamp designed by Luc-Olivier Merson, 1927
The first half of 2010 is shaping up pretty nicely, with new releases from many of my favorite bands. Spoon and the Magnetic Fields have new ones out this month, February will bring a new Robert Pollard LP my way, Frightened Rabbit's much-anticipated The Winter of Mixed Drinks comes out in March, and there are rumors of a firm May release date for the new National record. For me, though, the best news came yesterday, when the New Pornographers announced the release of their new album, Together, on May 4th. My birthday! Announcements like this are more special when the band is one that could cease to exist at any moment - photographic evidence shows that Dan Bejar and Neko Case were definitely involved in the recording of the new record!
As much as I liked the sophisticated Fleetwood-Macesque pop of the last New Pornographers record, which was actually displayed best on that album's b-sides like "Silent Systems" and "Fortune", I hope they go a different direction on this one. Carl Newman's solo album from last year refined that songwriting approach and added some much-needed weirdness on songs like "Submarines of Stockholm", but I get the feeling that he may be done exploring that particular avenue. And Bejar, Case, and the others are also important contributors, and I'm sure they have new things to share. I'm excited to see what the New Pornographers come up with this time around.
Illustration titled "The Wapaloosie" by Coert du Bois from William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, 1910
Lush's 1994 album Split has never really made a big impression with me - I've always much preferred their other two albums (although it's weird that they only ever released three albums, isn't it?) I noticed recently that just a cursory glance at Split's tracklist reveals it to be an invitation to title fights against a lot of my favorite bands. It has songs called "Invisible Man" (the Breeders), "Undertow" (REM), "Blackout" (Pavement), "Lovelife" (the Rutles), and, of course, "Lit Up" (the National). "Lit Up" isn't really one of my favorite National songs, but the National is one of my favorite bands right now. How does their "Lit Up" match up against one of the best songs on my least favorite Lush albums?
Lush's "Lit Up", like a surprising majority of the songs on Split, was written by guitarist Emma Anderson and not the band's frontwoman Miki Berenyi. I like Anderson's dreamy, Cocteau-Twinsy sound as a contrast to Berenyi's more aggressive pop approach, and "Lit Up" is a good showcase of the band's ability to use harmonies, layers of reverb, and a few crystal-clear guitar lines to make a lovely song. It's probably my favorite song on Split, while the National's "Lit Up" is one of my least favorite songs on their 2005 album Alligator. It was the band's third single from the album, and I think my problem with it has a lot to do with the fact that it is such an obvious attempt at a radio-friendly single - that's not what I like from the National, a band that is at its best when they're not trying to impress anyone. The chorus is just kind of *blah*, and the thick sound undermines Matt Berninger's excellent lyric, although the line "You wear your skirt like a flag and everything surrounds you" almost wins this face-off single-handedly.
In the end, though, I think I prefer what Lush does with the title phrase, evoking luminescence where the National are definitely referring to the phrase's other meaning - the state of being sloppy, falling-down drunk.
Painting titled Native Clown by Kenneth Noland, 1986
When I turned on WinAmp last night, "Come Spy With Me" popped up at the top of the playlist, and I was suddenly confronted with a dilemma. Obviously, this was a "Probabilistic Jukebox" moment, but "Come Spy With Me" is also an obvious candidate for a "Why Does This Exist?" write-up. It's one of the weirdest things the Miracles recorded, but it's also pretty awesome. It's a Smokey Robinson composition written for a 1967 spy spoof (also called Come Spy With Me) starring Andrea Dromm. The IMDB entry for the movie says that the song was a bigger hit than the movie was - that means the movie must really have bombed, because the song "Come Spy With Me" was never even a single or album track. It was the b-side to the Miracles' very-wordy-but-also-awesome single "The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage".
"Come Spy With Me" is an interesting, if not totally successful, pop song with a spy-theme feel to it. My favorite thing about it is probably how it starts with a sudden horn sting followed immediately by a simple guitar riff. This bit is repeated at the end of each chorus, which is nice because the chorus is really short and unmemorable. The verse is interesting, though, with a constantly rising melody that Robinson executes wonderfully. His lyric on the other hand, is laughably corny, including lines like, "Love will be our secret password," "We'll be a brand new spy sensation", and "We can share intrigue of all varieties!" "Come Spy With Me" is a very listenable oddity, and I admire the Miracles for trying something that wasn't really in their wheel-house. It's too bad that the movie it was attached to was such a flop - one review of it reportedly employed the phrase, "Come die with me." Ouch.
"Come Spy With Me" by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
Cover illustration from Vaclav Bene-Tebizsky's Z Rznych Dob, 1902
My recent discovery of Tom Petty's excellent 1982 album Long After Dark may turn out to have been the beginning of something big because I'm going deeper into the mid-/early-Petty albums and I'm liking what I'm hearing. From Long After Dark, I backtracked to the albums that preceded it, 1981's Hard Promises and 1979's Damn the Torpedoes. I'll write about them both eventually, but for now I prefer the former album to the latter, so I'm going to talk about that one a little.
I know that this goes against conventional wisdom, but I think that Hard Promises is not quite as good as Long After Dark. Or maybe it's a better album, but it just doesn't suit my tastes quite as well. I think that the big problem is "The Waiting" - unlike the weird hit single from Long After Dark ("You Got Lucky"), "The Waiting" is an undeniable, perfect guitar-pop song. It doesn't help that it's the lead-off track on the album, casting a long shadow over everything that follows. The song's that immediately follow it definitely suffer - "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)" is a longtime fan favorite with a harder rock sound and it has a good lyric, but the wailing guitar on the chorus bugs me. "Nightwatchman" and "Something Big" come after that, and they're just kind of there, not trying too hard to justify their existence.
By the time we get to "Kings Road", we're only in the penumbra of "The Waiting" and the songs start to sound a little better (also, they're just better songs). "Kings Road" and the two songs that follow it ("Letting You Go" and "A Thing About You") are solid rootsy power-pop of the kind I like from this vintage of Petty songs. "Letting You Go", in particular, does a good job of using some "retro" touches to give the song a timeless feel, and I love the "whoa whoa" vocals on the chorus. This string of good songs is topped off by "Insider", a duet with Stevie Nicks that is a new favorite of mine - I was pretty surprised that Petty and Nicks have voices that blend well, but it works really nicely. Nicks also sings backup on the closing ballad, "You Can Still Change Your Mind", a song that seemed pretty boring to me at first, but it's lodged itself in my head a few times since I started listening to this album. It benefits from being on the far end of the album from "The Waiting", and it builds nicely to a bouncy bridge and then a big finish.
So far, I'm really digging early '80s Petty. I'm becoming increasingly skeptical about 1979's Damn the Torpedoes, though - it's supposed to be one of his best, but it's not doing it for me so far. Maybe it's because it breaks the "Ten Song Rule". Maybe I'll warm up to it as I listen to it more.
Detail of the cover illustration of Planet Stories magazine issue #10, 1955
I'm a little late to the party on 2010's first big indie release, so I'll just summarize my feelings about Contra: it's an easy album to get to know and like, it aims for an admirable amount of variety for a second album, and it's a little on the short side. Vampire Weekend throw down the gauntlet with their much-quoted opening lyric to "Horchata" - actually, each of the song's rhymes for the title word is a cringe-inducer. I know what the band was going for with those opening lines, but I still have to grit my teeth to get through that first verse - it's worth it, though, because the chorus of "Horchata" blooms into a technicolor explosion of rhythms and layered vocals. Contra is a conventional album in some ways, but it features some quick turns and dynamic shifts, and that's when it's at its best. The clean guitar lines and minimal pop melodies of the band's debut have been replaced with a more varied approach that works more often than it doesn't.
Contra really only has two down-tempo songs ("Taxi Cab" and "I Think Ur a Contra") and they're both excellent, so it's kinda weird that the album has been accused of being sluggish in the momentum department. I think it's because the album's songs often match a rushed-sounding arrangement with a very lackadaisical vocal performance from Ezra Koenig - he only really seems to push the vocals at all on "California English" and "Cousins", but that's fine with me. I like the way he croons and sighs over the songs' driving rhythms. In fact, the run of uptempo songs after the album's near-perfect first half is the album's low point for me. "Run" doesn't employ its dissonant synths quite right and has an irritating chorus hook, and "Cousins" is short on melody and long on manic energy.
The third uptempo song of that run, though, is "Giving Up the Gun", my favorite track on the album. It is also the first of the three longish songs that end the album, along with "Diplomat's Son" (with its distracting but forgivable MIA sample) and the minimalist "I Think Ur a Contra". "Giving Up the Gun" does the urgent-drums/relaxed-vocal thing better than any other track on the album, and it has a couple really great hooks. Oddly, I've seen it referred to as one of Contra's weaker tracks, so maybe I like different things about this album than other people. It would definitely sound out of place on Vampire Weekend's debut album, and I think that's a good thing. The guys in the band know better than to stay in one place for too long - Contra is them trying out a few different avenues to figure out where to go next, it can be a lot of fun watching them play "chemistry set" with the different aspects of their sound.
Photograph titled "Lungmotor" from the archive of the Bain News Service, c. 1940
I'm going to keep this short - it's hard to write about Prince intelligently because there is so much you need to know, and I'm just starting to figure out Prince's various collaborators, incarnations, official releases, and other stuff. I'm not really qualified to say anything about Prince's work beyond what I like and don't like, so I'll stick with that. What I really, really like is Parade, much more than I expected to. My first Prince purchase was Sign o' the Times - people tell you that's where to start - but that album doesn't really work for me as well as this one. Parade is like a Prince album custom tailored to what I like about Prince.
It's diverse without being baffling (see Sign o' the Times), it's got some jams without becoming a marathon slog (see 1999), and it's poppy without reminding me of the Prince videos from my high school years (see Diamonds and Pearls and Love Symbol Album). There are still plenty of Prince albums I haven't gotten to know well, but I'll be surprised if I end up liking any of them as well as Parade. Maybe I need to see Under the Cherry Moon if I'm going to be a Parade superfan.
The interesting thing about Parade is that I find it to be heavily backloaded - I think I'm developing a complex of some kind, though, because I have trouble enjoying the first halves of any albums lately. But I think that it must have been intentional in the case of Parade - the album's three charting singles are tracks 8, 10, and 11. The first half of the album is bogged down a little by an underwhelming intro track and a turgid title track, and it ends with a "meh" instrumental. The second half is perfect, though, with three great singles ("Kiss", "Mountains", and "Anotherloverholenyohead"), and three to great ballads ("Do U Lie?" and the jaw-droppingly beautiful closer "Sometimes It Snows in April"). I know that there's some interesting story and context to this album - it was his last album with the Revolution - but I'm still learning that part of the story. For now, I'm just glad that I found a Prince album that fits me like a purple glove.
Deer painting by unknown Native American artist from the Acee Blue Eagle Papers, 1935
If you're the kind of person that cares about such things, you've probably already heard that Jay Reatard's sudden unexpected passing was announced yesterday. He was 29. This was hard news for me because Jay was the kind of songwriter I get really excited about, endlessly prolific and restless with an understanding of a lot of different traditions and styles of songwriting. He was a punk, a garage-rocker, a power-pop guy, and a lo-fi home recording artist. He said in an interview once that he was driven to create and release music by a fear of running out of time, and there's no denying that he ran out of time too soon. He ended up on my Best of the Year lists in 2008 and 2009, but I was always most excited about where he was going with his music. Just recently I was listening to the last song off his last album, "There Is No Sun", and thinking, "This guy just keeps getting better."
I don't want to get into a discussion of Jay's controversial public persona, but his naked ambition and restlessness drove him to create some amazing songs and records. And now I'm left feeling that we've all been robbed of the music Jay would have gone on to produce. And from what I've heard from people that knew him, that's nothing compared to the loss felt by those who were close to him.
Illustration by Gluyas Williams from the US Department of Labor's If Your Baby Must Travel in Wartime, 1944
70s art-pop combo 10cc were a quartet with an abundance of talent - each of the four was a talented vocalist, instrumentalist, and songwriter. I'm particularly fond of their first two albums, 10cc and Sheet Music, inventive records that also pay homage to a lot of the band's pop inspirations, including the Beach Boys. "Rubber Bullets", from the self-titled debut, outs Graham Gouldman as a big fan of the early Beach Boys stuff, taking that sunny pop sound and using it to describe a bloody prison riot. It's a fun song, but I prefer the band's other big Beach Boys homage, "Old Wild Men" from the band's second album.
A Godley and Creme composition, it is a rare tribute to the dreamy post-Pet-Sounds sound Brian Wilson favored on Surf's Up and Smiley Smile. The song has a guitar-based arrangement, but you'd never guess it, as the song's persistent background drone was done using "the gizmo", a device invented by 10cc to create lush string-section sounds using a normal guitar. The vocal harmonies are intricate without being show-offy, and the poignant lyric about the aging stars of rock music's first generation is pretty great. In 1974, when this song was released, Brian Wilson was cloistered in his bedroom, lost in a haze of drugs and mental illness, and this song always brings that tragic image to my mind when I hear it.
Illustration from Wee Wisdom children's magazine, June 1947
I'm sure that, like most people, you associate the name ABC with the brilliant Bell Biv Devoe spin-off kids' group Another Bad Creation, but apparently there was also a new wave band of the same name that achieved some degree of success in the early '80s. Part of the "new romantics" movement, ABC has always been a little bit of a hard sell for me, but people keep raving about The Lexicon of Love, so I put it on my Amazon wishlist and - voila! - some cool friends sent it to me for Christmas.
The two famous singles from the album, "Poison Arrow" and "The Look of Love (Part 1)", tell you what you need to know about early ABC. They both have wailing saxophone intros. They both feature big, bomabastic melodies and new-wave-tinged orchestral arrangements. A very conspicuous funky fretless bassline is found in both songs. They both have the immaculate auditory shimmer of a Trevor Horn production. And yet I have always loved "The Look of Love" and been offput by "Poison Arrow". I think it's that chorus hook: "Shoot that poison arrow into my HEEEAAAAART!"
The most impressive thing to me about The Lexicon of Love is that it is a debut record. It is SO well-constructed and mature-sounding that it's hard to believe that young guys came in off the street and recorded it without any kind of track record. Martin Fry must have always been a confident and debonair frontman waiting to happen because he is not hesitant in putting his persona all over this record. The lyrics are a little too much and also not enough at times - I cringe every time at the triple-rhyme of the word "day" in the first verse of "Valentine's Day" - but they are great when they get it just right, on less well-known album tracks like "Date Stamp" and "Show Me".
The Lexicon of Love is so relentless in bringing the high-energy sophisti-pop in the album's first half that the slowing momentum of the last few songs is a welcome change. In fact, the perfectly over-the-top super-ballad "All of My Heart" is easily the album's best song, and I'm kind of surprised that the album's other singles are better known. The song does a great job of capturing the essence of the phrase "new romantic" with its falsetto-driven verses and grind-to-a-halt chorus hook and an arrangement that is somehow very new wave and also timeless. The weakest point on the album is the head-scratcher "4 Ever 2 Gether" which follows "All of My Heart" - it's too long and exudes a totally different vibe from the rest of the record. It would be a sour end to The Lexicon of Love, as it is only followed by an instrumental coda, but the CD I have adds an excellent appended closer in the form of the B-side "Theme from 'Mantrap'", a lounge-y piano reinterpretation of "Poison Arrow" that redeems that song for me entirely.
People have varying opinions on the arc ABC followed after The Lexicon of Love, but there seems to be consensus that the band's first album got it right.
Photo titled "Grenfeld Mission" by George Silk from the LIFE magazine collection, August 8th, 1949
As it turns out, all of the things I dislike about Avatar are the things I already disliked about it before even seeing it. And now, having seen Avatar, I realize that there are as many things to like about the movie, so I'm not really a hater when I point out the strikes Avatar had against it from the start. First, pretty much every word that comes out of James Cameron's mouth about this movie makes me wish that both he and it didn't exist. I know I shouldn't have read so much of his press, but his comments have just been incredibly douchey. Second, the gigantic and crass marketing campaign ramping up to Avatar's release left a really bad taste in my mouth - I can't help but want something to fail when it is being shoved down the public's throat with such forcefulness. Third, the script is pretty awful. And, yes, I knew that the script was crap before seeing the movie - you don't have to read much of the script posted here (I think it's the official real deal) to get a feel for it.
But I went and saw the thing anyway. In 3D (not IMAX, though). And I liked it. As I kind of suspected, Avatar is a lot like my favorite Cameron movie, The Abyss. But with a worse script and a less capable cast as its weak points, and with an amazingly detailed and vivid CGI world as compensation. People have compared Avatar to Dances With Wolves, Pocohontas, or Fern Gully, but I think that it is surprisingly similar to The Abyss in its premise, plot arc, and overall tone. The exposition-heavy first act of Avatar is embarrassingly bad compared to The Abyss's more clean-cut setup - it's as if Cameron has forgotten how to introduce concepts and characters without having straw-man characters (Giovanni Ribisi and Joel David Moore get this thankless task in most of their scenes) do it by rote recitation.
The first half-hour of Avatar also features some distracting "blatant 3D" shots of the Captain EO kind, which were aggravating on top of the boring exposition and terrible dialogue. But all these problems receded into the background when our hero Sam Worthington moves his CGI avatar from the awkward world of humans into the fully CGI movie-within-a-movie known as Pandora.
I would say that I enjoy the Pandora-centric section of Avatar more than the average viewer because I am a sci-fi/fantasy nerd who loves the phenomenon of "world-builder's disease", except that I think that this is what most people love about this movie as well. I don't think they're loving the amazing performances or innovative plot twists (there are none either in Avatar). But the Hiyao-Miyazaki-meets-Roger-Dean world of Pandora is an immersive experience, even for a real skeptic, and the alien flora and fauna were really well designed (they were so impressive that I forgot how irritating it had been to hear James Cameron go on at length about designing them). I also thought the 3D technology was used very well in this section of the movie, incorporated seamlessly without drawing a lot of attention to itself.
The poor first act and excellent second act are capped off with a finale that has good and bad points. Comments about the big battle at the end of Avatar seem to be either, "Well choreographed and easy to follow" or "Too much like a video game." I think that both of these comments are valid, and the movie's ending is predictable and satisfying in equal measure. Overall, I think Avatar is a deeply flawed success that would have been better if Cameron had followed the template of his earlier work more closely. However, I worry about the trends that it may be creating with its huge success, as it would be as hard to recreate its good points in other movies as it would be easy to emulate its faults (especially the terrible cross-marketing and emphasis on gimmicks).
Panels from Midnight Mystery comic book issue #5, 1963
It's easy to justify missing Zumpano the first time around - they only really existed for two years, during which they put out two excellent records on Sub Pop and then dropped off the map. In fact, if frontman Carl Newman hadn't gone on to organize his immensely successful New Pornographers project, there probably wouldn't be much interest in the Zumpano records. But, even though there is a lot of interest from fans of Newman's recent bands and solo records, the two Zumpano records were out of print for a long time and have not been given the deluxe reissue treatment they deserve, reportedly because Newman himself finds them embarrassing. I don't know if he's just overly critical of his own work - he gives this impression in interviews, at least - but it's not really fair to fans of his songwriting to leave these excellent records languishing in relative obscurity.
The second Zumpano record, Goin' Through Changes, is a hard one to pin down, and I think that's why it's one of my favorite things Newman has done. It's a very "sophisticated" guitar-pop record that shows an interest in baroque-pop arrangements and ambitious, dynamic song structures. Few of the songs have obvious hooks, but they are catchy nevertheless, in often unexpected ways. "It Doesn't Take a Genius", for instance, has a shuffling, hesitant momentum to its verses, and the abbreviated chorus is almost subtle to a fault. Michael Ledwidge's Zombies-aping harpsichord is a big part of the song's appeal - I get the impression that he was a big part of this album's approach and sound. The restraint and patience in how it unfolds shows that Newman's songwriting was mature this early in his career, making it even more puzzling that he thinks that this album is a mortifying portrait of youthful awkwardness.
Cover illustration of Super Science Stories issue #5 by Gabriel Mayorga, 1940
I think I knew from the beginning that "We Love the Beach Boys" would degenerate quickly into an accounting of my favorite songs that have great harmonized vocal breakdowns, and I'm okay with that because I LOVE THAT GIMMICK SO MUCH. I've already got favorites by the New Pornographers, Apples (in Stereo), Pernice Brothers, and Olivia Tremor Control in mind based on this single criterion.
"Take the Long Way Around", from 1997's underrated/understated Songs from Northern Britain is like most of Teenage Fanclub's more retro-sounding numbers in that it sounds more indebted to the Byrds than the Beach Boys, with its bouncy jangle and close harmonies. But there's a little "we love the Beach Boys" in there as well. The sad-sounding summery lyric, particularly the phrase "golden light sensation", is very Surf's Up. And that baroque-sounding breakdown where the instrumental backing drops away, leaving a single guitar strum, ticking clock, and panned wordless vocals, would not exist without Brian Wilson.
I'm not sure if it was a coordinated conspiracy or a coincidence, but this was the year that people gave me '80s music for Christmas. It turned out to be a cool thing because I'm getting a sense of real time and place as I listen to and familiarize myself with a bunch of albums that were released within a few years of each other. The Talking Head's Remain in Light has one of the quintessentially '80s singles in "Once in a Lifetime", but it's a unique creature, too. In the fine tradition of "It's New to Me", I will present my observations on the album without checking to verify that I am just saying exactly what people have been saying about the record for thirty years.
To me, Remain in Light is the expanding universe - it begins with an explosion of incredible density, heat, and velocity that gradually expands, slows, and cools, and it ends in frigid, lifeless stasis. Given that the album is a Brian Eno production, the last and most ambitious of the three that he did for the Talking Heads, this could be intentional, and it makes for an interesting listen. Remain in Light starts with its three fastest and most complex songs - in the original vinyl release, these three songs made up the entire A Side, and together they are a monolithic barrage of poly-rhythms and layered sounds that has, so far at least, been hard for me to sort out. The opening song, "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", leaves the biggest impression, but it becomes harder to concentrate on the continued cacophony, and I find myself getting disoriented in the stampede of the two songs that follow, "Crosseyed and Painless" and "The Great Curve". During the songs' long instrumental stretches, a little breathing room begins to open up, but the real relief doesn't come until the album's fourth song.
That song, "Once in a Lifetime", is the obvious center and balancing point of the record, finding the sweet spot between the clutter of Remain in Light's first side and the sparser, moodier material that ends the album. The propulsive energy of the album's first act is still there, but the hooks are more clearly defined and the melody becomes the focus for the first time on the album - this isn't particularly surprising, as the album is largely unconcerned with chord progressions. I've always liked "Once in a Lifetime" as a song, but it takes on a new flavor in the context of Remain in Light's big bang, as does the other song in the album's balanced middle, "Houses in Motion" (unsurprisingly, this was the album's other single).
The album's final section is composed of three slower songs, the highlight of which is the sparse "Listening Wind" - I may not be the ideal Talking Heads fan, as I vastly prefer this kind of song to the band's more ambitious rhythm-heavy compositions, but the sighing guitar lines (by Adrian Belew, I think) are a great counterpoint to Byrne's sad, swaying chorus melody. Fittingly, this song is followed by an even sparser and colder-sounding finale, "The Overload", a song famously patterned after Joy Division, a band that none of the Talking Heads had actually heard at the time. Allegedly. Byrne nails the Ian Curtis vocal so perfectly, that I think the band may be overstating their unfamiliarity with Joy Division's work. This song is a little too cold for me, just as the album's first third is a little too hot, but I enjoy Remain in Light's warm gooey middle quite a bit, and listening to the whole album is a pleasantly odd experience, where each song is a little slower and less dense than the one that preceded it.
Collage by Andy Warhol titled Untitled (Superman Collage #15), 1960
During the recording of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. in 1967, the Monkees set aside time to record an a capella version of a fifteenth-century Spanish villancico carol called "Riu Chiu" (sometimes known as "Riu Riu Chiu"). Why? I have no idea. They recorded the song on the same day they recorded "The Door Into Summer", so maybe they were just in a folky sort of mood. I guess the recording was used in a Christmas episode of the Monkees' TV show, so that kind of makes sense and may answer the titular question in this case.
Now I love the Monkees, but I'll admit to being surprised that they kind of do a good job with "Riu Chiu". It's quite possible that they were mimicking an earlier recording, but their phrasing is unexpectedly classical-sounding and they nail the harmonies. I'm not sure they pull it off with the level of feeling that you'd get from the more devout artists who have covered the song (like Sixpence None the Richer or [I'm not even kidding here] David Archuleta), but their version is definitely more "W-T-F", as the kids say.
Poster illustration for Geo. W. Lederer's Belle of New York, c. 1900
He was never one to rush things, but I get the impression that former Luna frontman Dean Wareham has really been taking it easy since he dissolved the group. He's put out two albums with sweetheart/collaborator/former-voice-of-Jem Britta Phillips, but even these releases have been pretty casual affairs. 2003's L'Avventura seemed pretty inessential to me when it came out, but I acquired it recently and - surprise! - it's as inessential as I'd presupposed.
On L'Avventura, Wareham's strengths as a songwriter and interpreter are on display, and he also shows a willingness to share the spotlight that he has not been really well known for in his career. But it just doesn't come together very well. The three songs Wareham wrote for L'Avventura are all quite good, particularly the saucy "Night Nurse", a call-and-response duet with Phillips. His covers are sometimes questionable choices (latter-era Madonna?), but most of them are quite good, including a Yo-La-Tengo-style drone version of the Doors' "Indian Summer" and an appropriately spacey take on Buffy St. Marie's "Moonshot". Only a carbon-copy version of the Silver Jews' "Random Rules" sticks out as pointless, and that's because Wareham and the Jews' Dave Berman have too much overlap in their "skill sets" for the song to benefit from a reinterpretation. Phillips contributes two solid compositions of her own, although they suffer from boring arrangements that I think are intended to showcase her voice. And her voice isn't that interesting, as nice as it is. Also, because I got the 2008 reissue version of the album, I've got three unnecessary remixes by Sonic Boom tacked on the end of the album.
L'Avventura is just a hodge-podge, with poor sequencing being a big part of the problem. The best thing that I can say about it is that it reminded me that I need to track down the releases by Opal, the '80s neo-psych duo of David Roback and Kendra Smith. Wareham and Phillips are reasonable latter-day facsimiles of those two, and I really love their version of Opal's "Hear the Wind Blow" on this record. I'm imagining what the original version must sound like and my imagination is making it sound pretty good - too bad the Opal records are long out of print and pretty rare at this point.
Trade card of Chinese boy with stamps by Daniel Low, c. 1900
Happy New Year, everyone. In 1980, ABBA released Super Trouper and, as you might expect from a band that came out of the Eurovision Contest, the Swedish quartet was not above writing a pandering cash-in holiday song on occasion. "Happy New Year" is very cheesy, but Agnetha's lead vocal makes the cornball lyrics work. And I love how, at the beginning of the chorus, I always expect the line to be, "Happy new year, happy new year! May we all have a beer!" Of course, the line actually ends with, "Have a vision..." but it's still funny. And it's on my favorite ABBA album of all ABBA albums, and that's got to be worth something.
Twenty years after the ABBA song, Camera Obscura released their own "Happy New Year" on their first full-length, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi. It's a less heavy-handed number than the ABBA song, with the light pop sound you'd expect from a Stuart Murdoch production. The wordless backing vocals on the later choruses is nice, and Tracyanne Campbell's voice is as strong as on their later work, but something about the song is a little too insubstantial. This is a feeling I get from most of the songs on Camera Obscura's debut - they just lack the hooks and depth of their more recent work. And there's nothing really "New Years"-like about the song, so I think I have to give the win to ABBA, who catch the New Years vibe better with their "Happy New Year".
Wires and Waves is a daily music blog by Nathan J. All songs featured on the blog are presented temporarily for preview and promotional purposes only. If you hear something you like, go buy the thing. Or, better yet, go to a show and buy an overpriced T-shirt. Or send a big envelope of unmarked bills to an artist you feel a special spiritual connection with.
If you represent the copyright holder of a song posted here and you would like the song to be removed, please leave a comment and it will be yanked forthwith. If you are upset because your song has not been featured yet at Wires and Waves, feel free to contact me, and I'll see what I can do.
Now Playing
The Double Cross
Sloan
Yep Roc
Only In Dreams
Dum Dum Girls
Sub Pop
Cults
Cults
In the Name Of
Hit After Hit
Sonny & the Sunsets
Fat Possum
Rolling Blackouts
The Go! Team
Memphis Industries
Let's Go Eat the Factory
Guided By Voices
GBV Inc.
