Title Fight: "I Know"

Illustration by Otto Korsterling from C.W.E. Brauns' Japanische Marchen, c. 1890

Here we have two excellent songs called "I Know" that come from two very different eras. When the Beta Band emerged from the primordial ooze of Edinburgh, Scotland with their Champion Versions EP in hand, "Dry the Rain" was the track people pointed to as a sign of greatness to come. But my favorite track on the EP is easily "I Know", which repeats the drowsy, gradual layering of sounds that makes "Dry the Rain" so fun, but it's got a vibe of its own. I love the rattling percussion and whispered vocals, and it gets in and gets out with a concision rare in the Beta Band's work. I may over-value brevity - I can't even get through The Three EP's most days because of the marathon-length tracks from The Patty Patty Sound in the middle, but I know what I like, and what I like is "I Know".

The Dard was a teen pop band from somewheres in Florida in the late '60s - the only song of theirs I know is "I Know", recorded with famed producer Norman Petty. From the opening salvo, you know this song is a little odd, with a very twee vocal (especially for this period, when Brits had the market cornered on twee pop-psych). But it comes together as a rather interesting take on sunshine pop with a great cowbell break in the middle and a loopy "doobie-doo" outro. The song's real weakness, though, is the chorus - it has no real hook, and it sounds like a straight-up Association imitation. As much as I'd like to give the win to the more obscure track here, I've got to give this to the Beta Band for a more solid execution overall.

Winner: BETA BAND

"I Know" by the Beta Band

"I Know" by the Dard

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Evil Woman" by Electric Light Orchestra

Diagram from How to Use Corona: the Personal Writing Machine, 1920

I own several ELO records (probably more than is strictly necessary), so it was only a matter of time before ELO popped up on the ol' Jukebox. Not that there's anything new to be said about "Evil Woman" - it's a song that speaks for itself, mostly in the language of falsetto and cowbell. The song is an obvious "hit", so it's not a surprise that it was a Top 10 single, but it's also not really a surprise that Jeff Lynne claims to have written it in under a half hour. There's really not much to it beyond the indelible chorus hook.

That's not entirely true, though - there's a lot going on in "Evil Woman", but it's mostly flotsam. It has a corny, tacked-on intro. It has a slight faux-blues lyric. It even has an obligatory Beatles reference in the line, "There's a hole in my head where the rain comes in." What I notice, though, is that these are the things I associate with ELO, but they are not usually what is being cited when people say a new record is influenced by ELO. And this is a comparison that's being bandied about lately with new albums by the New Pornographers, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, and Apples in Stereo. ELO's influence is hard to pin down because ELO was pretty shamelessly derivative of what had come before. For the New Pornographers, it's something in the melodies and song structures. For the Apples in Stereo, it's in the arrangements and sound choices. For Ariel Pink, I think it's primarily in the production. Luckily, though, none of these bands is really making songs that sound like "Evil Woman", as song that is very much a product of its time.

"Evil Woman" by Electric Light Orchestra

It's New to Me: What We Had by Wednesday Week (1987)

Illustration of the foyer of the Hotel restaurant for Dungelman & Versteeg, 1944

There haven't been many new releases this month that have interested me, so I'm going to stick with writing about older stuff I've picked up recently. Today's "It's New to Me" is Wednesday Week, an LA pop group that released a couple records in the late '80s. Their best-known release, What We Had, was reissued a couple years ago, paired with their 1984 EP Betsy's House and some other bonus tracks. The core of Wednesday Week was Kristi Callan and her sister Kelly - the two of them wrote most of the band's material, the former singing and playing guitar with the latter on drums. A series of bassists and lead guitarists came through the band's lineup, the two most significant contributors being Heidi Rodewald and David Nolte, who both played on What We Had.

Wednesday Week often gets lumped in with LA's "paisley underground", but their approach was less psychedelic and more clean power pop with some garage-rock influences, like that scene's Plimsouls and Bangles. What We Had sounds pretty good - produced by Don Dixon, the emphasis is on Kristi Callan's voice and melodies. Bassist Heidi Rodewald contributed a couple of harder-edged tunes to the album, including the opener "Why" and "Missionary", and they provide a nice balance to Callan's folkier tunes like "I Wonder What You Hear" and "If Only". One of my favorites on the album is "Circle", which pairs a Dwight Twilley power-pop hook with one of Callan's feistier vocals.

What We Had is a solid set of songs, but some of them breeze by without making much of an impression. I couldn't pin down what was missing at first, but, listening to the Betsy's House EP, it became clear that Wednesday Week had a tendency toward monochromatic melody lines. Their earlier songs have verse melodies that hover around a single note without much progression, and some of this comes through on What We Had as well, particularly songs with "heavier" lyrics like "Suicide". Interestingly, one of my favorite songs on this release is the last bonus track "No Going Back", which was the title track to the band's final album, a self-released cassette from 1990. That album probably won't get a reissue any time soon, but there's plenty to enjoy on this expanded version of What We Had.

"Circle" by Wednesday Week

It's New to Me: The Evangelist by Robert Forster (2008)

Panel from Best of the West comic book issue #6, 1952

I've been on a big Go-Betweens kick over the last year or so, listening to the Australian band's original run of '80s albums, their reunion albums from the last decade, and some of the solo albums that songwriter Grant McLennan released during the hiatus years. But I was always hesitant to approach the solo work of the band's other songwriter, Robert Forster. People say that Forster and McLennan were a perfect songwriting team because they complemented each other so well, each bringing to the table something that the other lacked. I think there's a lot of truth to that, but I always preferred the lighter melodic touch of McLennan to Forster's weightier, more literate songs.

I'm having to reevaluate things now, though, because The Evangelist is a very impressive album. Released in 2008, after Grant McLennan's passing, it includes the songs that were going to go on the next Go-Betweens record, including a few unfinished McLennan songs that Forster has fleshed out. So, in a way, this is not really a solo album at all - Grant McLennan's presence is pervasive in the album's sounds and melodies. You can almost hear him singing backing vocals on some of the tracks, and this feeling is reinforced by the fact that Forster clearly intended to pay tribute to his friend with these songs. The album begins with a pair of wistful songs, "If It Rains" and "Demon Days", that find Forster setting a circumspect mood. "Demon Days" was a McLennan song, so the songs mesh together like a dialogue about regret and hope. These songs are followed by two simple pop songs, "Pandanus" and the excellent "Did She Overtake You", that keep the album's momentum from getting bogged down with melancholy.

The glossy production keeps The Evangelist from becoming too raw or too personal, but the songs are great and flow together really well. The centerpiece of the album is the title track, where Forster brings some heavy emotion into his conversational delivery - that's the one song that can be a little hard to listen to if you're thinking about the great loss that overshadowed the album's recording. After that point, though, things take on a more positive tone, and McLennan contributes two characteristically upbeat songs to the album's second half. "It Ain't Easy" is the most interesting of these, as Forster balances McLennan's breezy chorus with a touching verse lyric of his own about his friend. It's affecting without being macabre, with memorable lines like, "A river ran and a train ran and a dream ran through everything he did." Like the album as a whole, it's a capstone on a long and fruitful songwriting partnership.

"Did She Overtake You" by Robert Forster

It's New to Me: Elephants Memory by Elephants Memory (1969)

Illustration of Pat Tracy from the Purdue Debris annual, 1903

The psychedelic jazz-rock combo Elephants Memory is almost as interesting for the weird trivia surrounding it as it is for its fried, horn-inflected rock. Here's a few little nuggets: 1) Carly Simon was in the band's original lineup and contributed to some of the songs on their 1969 debut but the songs had their lyrics changed after she left the group; 2) the band's debut record didn't sell well at all (they were on the famous bubblegum pop label Buddah Records for some reason) but they went on to have songs on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack and played as John and Yoko's backing band on the Some Time in New York City album; 3) their debut album was produced by Wes Farrell in between his gigs producing for two family groups, the real-family Cowsills and not-real Cowsill-imitators the Partridge Family; and 4) vocalist Michal Shapiro left the band after the debut album to pursue other interests, including painting - her painting Butternut hangs in Don Draper's album on the TV show Mad Men.

Oh, and they also made a very weird pop record in 1969. With a wide variety of instruments and styles at their disposal, Elephants Memory seem to have been determined to squeeze all their favorite sounds into eleven tracks. Coming off somewhere in between a more wacked-out Bonzo Dog Band and a gentler Mothers of Invention, Elephants Memory features a lot of horn-heavy acid rock, mixed with some more atmospheric tracks (like the epic "Old Man Willow") and a couple straightforward pop songs. "Crossroads of the Stepping Stones" is a nice slice of sunshine pop that doesn't belong anywhere on the album, assuming any of these tracks really "belongs".

The disparate and sometimes grating stylistic shifts are a little much, and the band's lyrics often cross the hazy line between "psych-pop nonsense" and "stupid-sounding nonsense". Also, where Michal Shapiro does an adequate job as a Carly Simon stand-in, male vocalist Stan Bronstein isn't great. Although I'll admit that I like his singing on some of the odder tracks, like the ragtime-on-speed weirdness of "Yogurt Song". It's not really a song that's representative of the album as a whole, but none of these songs really are. And, lyrically, it's one of the more enjoyable moments on the record - how can you hate a line like, "They know I'm high on yogurt pie"?

"Yogurt Song" by Elephants Memory

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Smithers-Jones" by the Jam

Photograph known as "Peaches! Near Greenville, Mississippi" by William Eggleston, 1971

My knowledge of the British mod-punks the Jam pretty much begins and ends with 1978's All Mod Cons, but I also own a copy of their demos/b-sides collection Extras for some reason. Made up largely of tracks from the years following All Mod Cons, it makes a strong argument that I need to go buy Setting Sons and Sound Affects when I get a chance. I was reminded of this when "Smithers-Jones" popped up on the Jukebox today - written by Jam bassist (and David Cassidy look-alike) Bruce Foxton, it's considered an anomaly in the band's Paul-Weller-dominated oeuvre. It's not much of one, though - it basically sounds like a very good Paul Weller song from that period.

The interesting thing about this version of "Smithers-Jones" is that it is a conventional pop arrangement of the song that is not as well-known as the all-strings version found on Setting Sons. It was released as the b-side of the "When You're Young" single in 1979, and it's my preferred version of the song. Kicking off with a great Motown bass line from Foxton, it has a sprightly melody that (like many Jam songs) is a sharp contrast to the song's lyric, a tale of workplace woe. The vocals are Quick One-era Who, and it's pretty catchy in spite of having an odd structure to it. The song's best moment is on the bridge, where Smithers-Jones gets called into his boss's office and finds out he's been made redundant. The boss's pronouncement is accompanied by a pounding drum fill that ends with some sweet harmonies, as the boss says, "Sorry, Smithers-Jones."

"Smithers-Jones" by the Jam

We Love the Beach Boys: "Run Run Run to the Centre Pompidou" by Grant Hart

Detail of a mosaic ceiling decoration in the Belorusskaya metro station in Russia, 1952

Grant Hart's career since the break-up of Husker Du has been a series of comebacks and dropping-off-the-map-agains. Arguably, his most successful comeback has been his 1999 solo album Good News for Modern Man, which features some of his best songwriting and has a great "pop" sound that stands in stark contrast to the (some would say) odd production choices on the Husker Du records. When I say it was "successful", I mean creatively - I think it didn't do very well commercially. I've heard that it sank Pachyderm Records, the label that put it out. If you want to hear Hart aping Bob Dylan, 1989's Intolerance is still your go-to, but Good News for Modern Man is where you can hear Hart going all-out pop.

One of the album's most tuneful songs is its Brian Wilson tribute "Run Run Run to the Centre Pompidou" - the intro and verse is all Grant Hart, reminiscent of earlier compositions like "Books About UFOs", but on the chorus, you get a chorus of Grants chiming in with sunny "ooooh-bop-bop" harmonies. The song also features a decent surf-guitar solo, and travelogue lyrics about wandering around Paris that bring to mind Beach Boys songs like "Amusement Parks U.S.A.", "California Girls", or even *gulp* "Kokomo". It's a lovely song, and got me thinking about how Hart is a little like post-Beach-Boys Brian Wilson - drug use has taken its toll on him but, when he gets his crap together and puts out a record, you can still hear the songwriting spark that makes him special.

"Run Run Run to the Centre Pompidou" by Grant Hart

In Stores Now: Travellers in Space and Time by the Apples in Stereo

Cover illustration of Melba Marlett's Death Is in the Garden, 1951

The Apples in Stereo take a lot of flak for not being a serious band. They've been producing solid albums of old-school bubblegum pop since the mid-'90s without feeling any need to deviate meaningfully from their approach to music, and they have no problem appearing on the Cartoon Network, singing songs about the Powerpuff Girls. Robert Schneider has steered the band through various lineup changes and permutations without compromising his vision of what the band should be, and I think that's admirable. And, if you're a fan of pop music, that's also a very good thing because you can count on an Apples in Stereo album to deliver the goods.

The Apples' new album, the sci-fi pop epic Travellers in Space and Time, is drawing a lot of ELO comparisons, but that's not really big news to anyone who spent any time with their last LP New Magnetic Wonder. The cowbells, processed vocals, and lush arrangements that brought A New World Record to mind are still there, and certain moments on the record (the guitar intro to "Dignified Dignitary" or the sawing cellos on "Nobody But You") may remind you of "Don't Bring Me Down" or "Do Ya" - Schneider is definitely more interested in the dancefloor-ready ELO hits than the prog-pop stuff. Travellers in Space and Time is overstuffed with hooky pop songs with few down-tempo moments or instrumental interludes. This is clear on disco-y numbers like "Dance Floor" and "Hey Elevator", songs that bring late-'70s Bee Gees to mind as much as ELO.

To me, the real story here is the additional songwriting and singing contributions on Travellers in Space and Time. For the first time since Hilarie Sidney's departure, Schneider is ceding some control of the band to his immensely talented bandmates. All six members of the band get songwriting credits somewhere on the album, and four of the songs have someone other than Schneider singing lead. I'm not sure if it really works, though, especially since these songs are mostly packed into the album's second half. The issue I have isn't with the songwriting, though - the songs are strong, but the other guys in the band just don't have a distinctive lead vocal style. I'll make an exception for Bill Doss, whose "Wings Away" is a highlight - he has a great voice that I've loved on Olivia Tremor Control and Sunshine Fix records. But the other non-Schneider leads on the record kind of drag things down - for the first time, I'm realizing that Schneider's singing is a really big part of the band's charm.

This minor gripe notwithstanding, I'm really enjoying Travellers in Space and Time. It's not "serious" music, but it's seriously catchy, and I think it would appeal to a lot of people if they'd just lighten up a little and give it a chance.

"Dance Floor" by the Apples in Stereo

It's New to Me: Flash Light by Tom Verlaine (1987)

Photograph of Dennis Stock by Andreas Feininger from LIFE magazine, 1951

I wrote about Television's Adventure a while ago, and, if I recall correctly, I was pretty impressed with it and felt stupid for having slept on Television for so long. You could probably guess that my next step would be to go out and buy Marquee Moon. Or - OR - maybe the best next step would be to buy a Tom Verlaine solo album from a full decade after Television broke up because it was part of a big sale on the Collector's Choice website. Because, uh, that's what I did. I'll get Marquee Moon at some point, I'm sure, but I am impressed that this Tom Verlaine solo album is just what I hoped it would be.

Of course, 1987's Flash Light doesn't have the magical guitar interplay that I loved so much on Adventure - Television's other guitarist Richard Lloyd had been doing his own thing for many years at this point - but Verlaine offers plenty on his own, as it turns out. The songwriting on this album is strong, offering a variety of different pop song structures, and many of the numbers feature Television-esque guitar breaks that take the song to a higher elevation. The album starts a little slow, though - the opener "Cry Mercy, Judge" doesn't have much substance to it, and there's no real hook to "A Town Called Walker", but the fourth song, simply called "Song", is where the album really hits its stride. A delicate song woven of spider-webby guitar parts and a simple melody, "Song" totally plays to Verlaine's strengths.

I know I say this all the time, but the second half of this album is SO much better than the first. "Bomb" is turgid and over-dramatic, but it's followed by four near-perfect songs, starting with "At 4 A.M.", which features some of the album's best guitar work. The last three songs are working squarely in the pop idiom, and "Annie's Tellin' Me" is the best of them, with a fun melody and some really cool riffs that fit together perfectly. The album's closer, "One Time at Sundown", is almost as good but has an unfortunate "One Night in Bangkok" reference in the title lyric and chorus melody that may or may not be intentional. Maybe it's time to make an effort to pick up a copy of Marquee Moon - at this point, it's starting to look like I'm just being contrarian for the sake of it.

"Annie's Tellin' Me" by Tom Verlaine

I Saw a Movie: Kick-Ass (2010)

Image from a poster for Joseph Golden's The Great Gamble, 1919

When I saw Kick-Ass over the weekend, I went in not knowing much about it. I knew that it was the adaptation of a comic book of the same name about teens who decide to become superheroes in a world without superpowers. But I got the impression that that's more than most of the people in the theater knew about the movie - now, I wonder how my viewing of Kick-Ass would have been different if I had either (a) read the comic before seeing the movie, or (b) not known it was based on a comic at all. It shouldn't make that much of a difference, right? But I get the feeling that my two big grievances with the movie are based on now much I knew about it going in.

Which is not to say that I didn't like Kick-Ass - I enjoyed it quite a lot. Set within the last couple years (the extensive use of Myspace by the movie's characters already dates the movie a little), the movie's main character is Dave Lizewski, an inconspicuous high-schooler who decides to become a masked vigilante called Kick-Ass. The problem with Dave's character is that he's an empty costume at the center of the story. The script does a good job of plausibly getting him into his costume but, once he's wearing his green wetsuit and mask, he doesn't really DO anything. A single act of well-documented vigilantism gets him some media attention, but he never gets a chance to develop any kind of "superhero" identity before getting swept up (largely as an observer) in a much larger existing conflict between the mafia and a couple other underground vigilantes, Big Daddy and Hit-Girl. The accelerated sequence of events, going straight from "his origin story" to "out of his depth", makes me think that the story was compressed by necessity to get the comic series' full plot line into a two-hour run-time. But I haven't read the comic, so I don't know for sure. All I know is that I would have enjoyed the movie a bit more if Kick-Ass had been a little less of a passive protagonist.

Once Kick-Ass gets into its second section, it's really all about the pre-teen Hit-Girl and her father/mentor, the ex-cop who calls himself Big Daddy. The duo have a plan to take down the D'Amico crime family, which they have been carrying out quietly since before Dave took masked vigilantism into the news. The thing that made the biggest impression in this part of the movie is the graphic violence (which is kicked up a couple notches from the already-grisly first action sequences), and the fact that it is an 11-year-old girl who is instigating the bloodshed. I think Kick-Ass does a good job of showing just how NOT NORMAL Hit-Girl and her dad are - there's no glossing over the sociopathy involved in their pursuits. But the consequences are never fully addressed, and this is another thing that I would guess was handled better in the comic series.

Those two issues aside, Kick-Ass is a thoroughly enjoyable, hyper-violent, funny, and (I'll admit) thought-provoking superhero movie. The script defies the audience's expectations to humorous effect at many points, and the performances are all quite good. Even Nicholas Cage chooses the appropriate variety of scenery-chewing for the movie he's acting in, which happens rarely these days. Because it's hard-boiled detective story structure and it doesn't gloss over the ugly consequences of crime-fighting, it is a very different animal than some viewers might expect, but it is a good story told well when taken on its own terms.

"This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" by Sparks

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Fingertips 19 (I'm Having a Heart Attack)" by They Might Be Giants

Illustration of Constance Binney from the cover of Filmplay magazine, June 1922

I hope this proves once and for all that these tracks are really randomly selected - there's no way I would have voluntarily chosen to right about a 22 second song by They Might Be Giants today! But, how that the opportunity presents itself, I'll "stan" for TMBG. I don't think it's their nerdish charm and cleverness that makes them important to me, either - I love Apollo 18, the album that "Fingertips" comes from, even though at the time, it was their least successful in terms of presenting memorable and funny novelty songs. However, it is a great pop album that features some of their strongest straightforward songwriting. Songs like "Which Describes How You're Feeling", "See the Constellation", and "The Statue Got Me High" are as catchy as anything they ever wrote. And then there's "Fingertips", which is a clinic on writing pop hooks in the form of 21 song snippets.

Some of the "Fingertips" tracks are as short as five seconds, but each one has a self-contained hook and a memorable line or two of lyrics. When I first bought this album as a kid, I would do as the liner notes suggested and put the album on "random play" so that one or two of the snippets would play between each full-length song, creating a Who Sell Out sort of feel. "Fingertips 19 (I'm Having a Heart Attack)" is one of my favorites in the collection, and has a lot of nice little things in its 22 seconds. Electric piano and a neat bassline play under a surprisingly emotive vocal, ending with a nice big drum-fill-to-nowhere.

Listening to "Fingertips" now and thinking about the songwriting skills of John Flansburgh and John Linnell, I'm tempted to pontificate judgmentally on what happened in the years following Apollo 18. But the truth is that I just stopped paying attention as much as anything else. Just listen to this 22-second track a couple times (I'm sure you have 44 seconds to spare) and you can really hear and appreciate the craft that went into making it.

"Fingertips 19 (I'm Having a Heart Attack)" by They Might Be Giants

In Stores Now: Romance Is Boring by Los Campesinos!

Painting titled Portrait of a Boy in a Green Suit by Sheldon Peck, 1828

I wanted to write about Romance Is Boring sooner - it's been out for a couple months now, which makes my opinion now even less relevant - but a couple things have been holding me back. First, the music made by Welsh brat-rockers Los Campesinos! is very dense, lyrically and (as of this album) musically as well, so it can take a while to get a feel for the whole album. Second, the band has made an album this time around that is even harder than usual to get into, although it does reward patient, repeated listens.

One funny thing about writing about an album a couple months late is that I have an impulse to respond to the other reviews out there - often, I feel a need to defend the band against its detractors, even if I agree with them to some degree. For instance, the AV Club said that Romance Is Boring would make a better EP than an LP, and I think this goes back to the point about how dense this music is for twee pop. But the fact that the first five tracks by themselves would make a great stand-alone EP - from the roaring-out-of-the-gate (and appropriately titled) "In Medias Res" to the spastic but brief "Plan A" - indicates that the problem may be overload more than working with an album packed with filler. In fact, the second half of the album is arguably more interesting than the first (although I'm always saying that).

The review in Allmusic calls the album a let-down, placing the blame at the feet of Garth Campesinos, who wrote the lyrics, and Tom Campesinos, who wrote the music. This is kind of true, but not (as Allmusic alleges) because they both brought inferior material to the table. The problem is that there's a disconnect between the lyrics and music at times that can make the album more interesting but also frustrating. The hard rock flourishes on some of the songs ("Plan A", "I Warned You: Do Not Make an Enemy of Me", "I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know") make sense for a band tired of accusations of tweesploitation, but sometimes Gareth's lyrics (which make up at least half of the band's charm) often get lost in the cacophony. For instance, the opening lines to "Plan A" (including the excellent couplet, "Days tethered to the running track/Evenings chained to the dishrack") are totally incomprehensible under the song's blaring horns and squealing guitars.

Romance Is Boring works more often than it doesn't, though, and it benefits from the new textures and instrumentation to make it the band's most ambitious and rewarding album. A few clunkers aside, the Campesinos are still delivering the kind of infectious, hyper-literate twee pop they've been making since their first EP, as you can hear on songs like the album's single, "There Are Listed Buildings". But they aren't satisfied JUST doing that and, thankfully, are trying new things to keep it interesting.

"There Are Listed Buildings" by Los Campesinos!

It's New To Me: That Skinny Motherf***er with the High Voice? by Dump (2001)

Illustration from Cora Lane Sherman's The Redemption of Marie Gordon #10, 1926

My love of gimmicky concept albums is well documented, and I think I've even defended covers albums at various points. I'll admit that I'm pretty psyched that the Mates of State are putting out a covers album this summer - I only really worry about a covers album if the artist behind it has a limited grasp of musical interpretation that would yield uninteresting results (see The Spaghetti Incident?) A covers album devoted to a single artist, like (for instance) Nilsson Sings Newman, is an interesting phenomenon as well, because it can give a musician an opportunity for a long-form interpretation of another artist's work. Which brings us to That Skinny Motherf***er with the High Voice? (another covers album with a question mark at the end of its title - could be some kind of pattern!)

That Skinny Motherf***er with the High Voice? (the title is a line from Prince's song "Bob George") is an album of Prince covers by Yo La Tengo's James McNew, who does occasional solo projects under the name Dump. Originally released on cassette by Shrimper Records in '99, the album was released on CD a couple years later. Its twelve songs primarily come from Prince's early-to-mid-'80s recordings, including some big singles ("1999", "Raspberry Beret") and some b-sides ("Erotic City", "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?"). McNew has a good feel for what makes Prince's music unique, and he uses his lo-fi resources to produce 4-track solo recordings that emphasize Prince's lyrics and melodies. When he tries to do too much, layering guitars on "Raspberry Beret" and crowding the arrangement of "When U Were Mine" with a busy harpsichord sample, the songs get sludgy-sounding but still retain their charm.

When McNew strips the songs way down to skeletal arrangements, they work even better. "The Beautiful Ones" and "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?" feature little more than McNew's wispy tenor over guitar and drum machine, but they don't sound like demos. And "Pop Life" benefits so much from this treatment that I find the cover superior to the original - it has a delicacy and vulnerability that I seldom find in Prince's persona- and production-heavy arrangements.

That Skinny Motherf***er with the High Voice? has a run of questionable, sample-heavy drones in its second half that drag the album down, though - I was particularly sad to hear one of my Prince favorites, "Girls + Boys", given this treatment, and the 7-minute "A Love Bizarre" is almost unlistenable (why is it even on here? It's a Sheila E. song!) Overall, though, Dump produces a solid covers album - the song selection avoids the pitfall of using too many (or too few) "hits", and the reinterpretations never seem labored, focusing on the elements that make the songs special.

"Pop Life" by Dump

It's New to Me: Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label (2004)

Collage titled Welcome to the World's Famous Brands, No. 2 by the Luo Brothers, 2006

Working my way back through the Numero Group's Eccentric Soul series, I'm finding that the different labels and scenes chronicled in the reissues each have their unique charms. Numero 003, The Bandit Label, tells the story of an underground label run by Arrow Brown, a small-time criminal/entrepreneur, in Chicago from '69 to '81. Brown had a big house on Chicago's south side full of women - they were basically his concubines. While engaging in various shady activities, Brown dreamed of building an entertainment conglomerate - it all started with singing parties held at his house, a primitive karaoke thing where people would get up and sing over records playing with the volume low.

The first group to form under the Bandit Label was the Arrows, a soul combo featuring a great soul singer named Johnny Davis. The Arrows tracks on this compilation are pretty rough-sounding and generic, but the ones with Johnny Davis's name on them are a little better - I can see "You've Got to Crawl to Me" having been a hit under different circumstances. The Arrows dissolved in the early '70s, though, and Davis was the victim of a grisly murder. Arrow Brown continued to release music through the Bandit Label, though - for example, he put out singles by his girlfriend Linda Balintine and his eight-year-old son Altyrone Deno Brown. Balintine's songs are solid but suffer from poor sound quality, while Altyrone Brown's tracks are cute but pretty weak vocally. If this was all the label had to offer, this compilation would be a waste of time.

Luckily, the one LP released by the Bandit Label is a real winner. In the wake of the Arrows' break-up, a new combo formed around Brown's daughter Tridia Brown and successful local singer Larry Johnson. They called themselves the Majestic Arrows, and they released The Magic of the Majestic Arrows in 1973. It looks like pretty much the whole LP is included on this compilation, and it makes a solid backbone that supports some of the weaker material. From the psychedelic soul of "Going to Make a Time Machine" to the melancholy "I'll Never Cry for Another Boy", the Majestic Arrows tracks are pretty great. Their love songs are excellent, too - "Love Is All I Need", "Doing It For Us", and "We Love Together" are lush-sounding and have great vocals that could have found big success on a more legitimate label. My favorite tracks may be the mostly-vocals Majestic Arrows demos tacked onto the end of the compilation - they show off the group's singing talent in a refreshing bare-bones environment and reveal that the Majestic Arrows had some good song ideas that never got a chance for a release.

You could argue that the Bandit Label would be better represented by a reissue of the Majestic Arrows LP than this compilation, but, a few weak tracks notwithstanding, Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label is worthwhile in that it gives a good picture of what one of Chicago's weirdest soul labels was all about.

"Going to Make a Time Machine" by the Majestic Arrows

I Saw a Movie: Mother (Madeo) (2010)

Fashion plate titled "Soir de Paris" by Pierre Mourgue, 1922

Bong Joon-Ho, the acclaimed Korean director, may only have a few features under his belt, but I've been impressed with his last three movies, including his newest one, Mother. Like The Host and Memories of Murder, Mother is an unconventional thriller with the odd plot twists and tonal shifts that we've come to expect from Korea's best contemporary filmmakers. It's also his third consecutive film showing an intense interest in the treatment of the mentally disabled in Korean culture, following the childlike murder suspect of Memories of Murder (2003) and the lobotomized protagonist of The Host (2006) with a story that revolves around a young man named Do-Joon. Do-Joon has mental disabilities and lives with his mother in a small Korean town - caught in the wrong place in the wrong time, Do-Joon becomes the prime suspect in the murder investigation of a young girl.

Bong revisits some of the weirdness of Korean police work that was the focus of Memories of Murder in showing how Do-Joon is railroaded into confessing by the detectives. And this is where Do-Joon's mother gets involved - played masterfully by Korean TV actress Kim Hye-Ja, Do-Joon's "Mother" is the movie's emotional center. A mild-mannered herbalist and unlicensed accupuncture practitioner, Mother is an unlikely vigilante, but she is forced to continue an investigation that the police have given up on, having found their scapegoat in her helpless son. In looking for the girl's real killer, Mother exposes some of the unspoken truths of small-town life in Korea as she discovers how a normal girl could become the target of violence. She is also forced to examine her relationship with her son and some difficult memories of the years raising him.

The tension and violence swirl around the placid and determined Mother as she moves between scenes that are impressive vignettes about small-town culture, as well as visually compelling bits of film-making. Bong's style is less extreme here than it was in The Host for sure, with the crazy swings between comedy and suspense toned down a little. It's more apt to compare Mother with the similar Memories of Murder, but Bong takes a similar set-up in a completely different direction here to explore more personal themes. Won Bin has the film's most difficult role as the disabled Do-Joon, but his performance is quite good. Also worthy of mention are the excellent performances of the supporting cast, including Jin Ku and Yoon Jae-Moon (who I really liked in the otherwise unimpressive crime drama Dirty Carnival). With a pitch-perfect ending that left me stunned, I was surprised to find Mother superior to Bong's 2003 film, which is one of my favorites.

"Mothers" by Jean-Paul Sartre Experience

Probabilistic Jukebox: "I Can Go Now" by the Toms

Panel from Otto Messmer's Dell Comics Four Color issue #46, 1944

When I first heard the Yellow Pills: Prefill power pop compilation, three tracks stood out to me immediately as different from the rest, and two of them were by the Toms. The home-recorded solo pop project of Tom Marolda, the Toms easily had the two best songs on Prefill, "Sun" and "(I Wanna Be A) Teen Again", so I went looking for any records by the Toms that happened to be in print. I was thrilled to find that Not Lame Records had re-released the Toms' 1979 debut album in a two-CD set with a bunch of other Toms songs from that era. I was excited because these recordings dated roughly from the time when he had recorded "Sun", but initial listens to The Toms revealed it to have a less distinctive sound, lying squarely in the typical power-pop sound of the era.

The Toms revealed itself over time to be a set of solid songs recorded with a dinky, homespun charm, but it took a while to get over that initial disappointment. You should go find "Sun" somewhere on the Internet if you haven't heard it to get a sense of where my high expectations were coming from. But I'm going to share the song that popped up on the Jukebox, an outtake from The Toms called "I Can Go Now". It's easily as good as any of the songs that ended up on the album, with a nice jangly intro that leads right into the song's catchy verse/chorus, featuring Marolda backing himself up with some nice harmonies. The one thing that bugs me about "I Can Go Now" is the way he put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of "immune" right before the bridge - "I'm IMM-une to you!"

"I Can Go Now" by the Toms

We Love the Beach Boys: "The Sylvan Screen" by Olivia Tremor Control

Photograph of Lance Link, Secret Chimp by Ralph Crane from LIFE magazine, 1970

It was over a decade ago that I first tried to piece together a version of SMiLE, the great lost Beach Boys album, using the versions floating around on the Internet at the time. I burned a CD-R that seemed to be a pretty good amalgamation using the available materials, and I played it constantly for about a year. I lost that CD-R ages ago (around the time that Brian Wilson released his recreated SMiLE in 2004), but for some reason I didn't pick up a copy of Smiley Smile, the album the Beach Boys put out in '67 when it was clear that the SMiLE project was dead. Well, I bought the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey two-fer CD last week, and I was surprised by how much I like it. I'd never heard the "creepy" version of "Wind Chimes" before or the official versions of "Vegetables" and "Wonderful". And I was pretty surprised that "She's Goin' Bald" was actually a re-write of the SMiLE-period track "He Gives Speeches" (one of my favorites from the project, actually - I have mixed feelings about this version - it's "humor" reeks of Mike Love's tampering.)

My point, I guess, is that few bands have tried to tackle SMiLE-style pop symphonies (and for good reason), but one of the closest I have encountered is Olivia Tremor Control's 1999 album Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One. With its sunny themes, unconventional recording methods, repeated instrumental figures, and ambitious song structures, Black Foliage seems to be trying to capture not just the scope of SMiLE but some of its actual sound as well. "The Sylvan Screen", found on "side 3" of Black Foliage is probably the best single track on the album for showing what OTC was trying to accomplish. It looks like the version I've uploaded here doesn't include most of the minute-plus of ambient beach sounds taken from Swedish field recordings (no big loss), but it does have the song's haunted verses, harmony-heavy chorus, and amazing vocals-only coda.

Now if only Olivia Tremor Control had stayed together long enough to make a Wild Honey sound-alike...

"The Sylvan Screen" by Olivia Tremor Control

It's New to Me: 2 Years On by the Bee Gees (1970)

Photo of Mona Kingsley from Screenland magazine, April 1922

Sometimes I think that I damage my credibility by raving about every new thing I hear. I'm the kind of guy that looks for the good in everything, but there's such a thing as going too far. Which I may be doing today, by writing some very positive things about one of the Bee Gees' post-Odessa records. Odessa is a handy stopping point for the band, marking the end of their run of great albums in the '60s as well as being the last record before Robin Gibb quit the group. But, as it turns out, a year later Robin was back and the band recorded a new album celebrating the time apart, appropriately titled 2 Years On.

2 Years On opens with its title track, a grandiose pop song in the Odessa style - for some reason, I assumed that this had been the big single from the album. It wasn't - the song on the record that brought the Bee Gees their first Top 5 hit in the US is "Lonely Days", a song that I don't particularly like. With a stark contrast between its wistful verses and stomping, bluesy chorus, "Lonely Days" gets compared to the sophisticated pop approach of Abbey Road, but it really doesn't work for me. It doesn't help that the chorus lyric is a simple repetition of the non-rhyming, "Lonely days, lonely nights - where would I be without my woman?" It's one of few weak spots on the album, though.

"2 Years On" is the only obvious single on the record, but there are also a few surprisingly rocking songs that work really well (like "Back Home" and "Every Second, Every Minute"). But if you're listening to the Bee Gees because of their ability to rock hard, you're doing it wrong - the Bee Gees are all about the melodramatic balladry. And 2 Years On has its share of great ballads. "The 1st Mistake I Made" has a Dylan-esque sadness to it, and the closing track "I'm Weeping" (possibly the perfect title for a Bee Gees song from this era) features little more than Robin Gibb's bell-clear voice singing a hymn-like melody over a pulsing drumbeat and organ. My favorite, though, may be "Alone Again", the song that follows "Lonely Days" on the record and is a much better take on the same theme. It has the biggest chorus on the whole record, so big that it comes close to sounding totally maudlin, but that's a gray area where the Bee Gees do some of their best work.

Overall, I find 2 Years On to be an album that doesn't break much from where the band had left off the previous year with Odessa. The interesting arrangements and harmonies are great and bring me back to listen to it again and again, but I'm starting to worry where I'll draw the line now when it comes to the bee Gees. Do I just give up and buy Saturday Night Fever?

"Alone Again" by the Bee Gees

Title Fight: "Hot Love"

Panel by Ogden Whitney from Herbie the Fat Fury comic book #11, August 1965

The '70s was a weird time, but there's no arguing that it was a decade that knew a little something about "hot love". In 1971, T. Rex put out their song "Hot Love" as a non-album single, and it became a UK #1 hit. Following on the heels of another great T. Rex single, "Ride a White Swan", the two singles make a good case for the band having peaked sometime between their self-titled album and Electric Warrior. It's a weird single in some ways, starting with a distinctive flutter of strings over handclaps and gradually building up a salacious energy that ends with an interminable repetition of its "La la la la la la la" chorus. Did I get the right number of "la"s there? At 4:59, you could argue that the song could have been faded out about a minute earlier to make a more concise pop statement, but there's something powerful in the singalong invitation of that endless, stupid refrain.

In 1977, Cheap Trick released its debut record, which is said by many to have ushered in the "new wave" sound the way T. Rex conjured glam rock from thin air six years earlier. Rick Nielsen approached songwriting as a fan of rock as much as anything, so I'd guess that it was no coincidence that they started the second side of Cheap Trick with a song called "Hot Love". Apparently, when the album was first released on CD years later, "Hot Love" was made the opening track by mistake - a terrible mistake considering that "ELO Kiddies" is the perfect opening statement for that album. I'll admit that I like the two albums that followed Cheap Trick's debut a lot, but I have some issues with the production of this record. The sound is a little too scuzzy, I think, and it doesn't serve the songs well. "Hot Love" is actually a good example of this, with a great riff and fun melody colliding in a muddy sound that rushes past without making much of an impression until things change up a little on the bridge, which is easily the highlight of the song. The outro is nice as well, but it would have sounded a lot better with the cleaner production of Heaven Tonight.

Winner: T. REX

"Hot Love" by Cheap Trick

"Hot Love" by T. Rex

It's New to Me: So Tough by Saint Etienne (1993)

Cover photograph from Te Ao Hou, the Maori magazine, March 1968

So I bought my first Saint Etienne album - I've owned the Continental collection of non-album tracks for a while, and I love it, so it made sense to delve into their proper discography. I started with 1993's So Tough, their second album, because I think of it being their first real album as a cohesive unit, the first album having been made before singer Sarah Cracknell was actually part of the group.

So Tough impressed me immediately as an album of surprising musicianship from a group that prided itself as being fans of music rather than musicians. And it's true that the album is really a jumble of dialogue snippets, obscure samples, and field recordings shaped into the rough semblance of pop songs, but it really works. This is clearly evident from the album's opening track, the excellent "Mario's Cafe", where a playful melody is built entirely around a single perfect string sample, taken from a cover of the Temptations' "I Wish It Would Rain".

Saint Etienne's approach to composing So Tough does result in some weird sequencing, though, which makes it a hard record to get into. "Mario's Cafe" is followed by the instrumental "Railway Jam", a non-musical interlude called "Date With Spelman", and "Calico", a song which features a guest rapper, a 16-year-old girl called Q-Tee. "Railway Jam" and "Calico" would both have benefited from a lead vocal from Sarah Cracknell - the bonus disc on the So Tough re-release feature a version of "Railway Jam" with vocals called "Orpington Blues", and it's quite good. After this rough start, though, So Tough has a very strong middle section. The 7-minute single "Avenue" is a hypnotic delight with a great Pet Sounds bridge that makes sense of the titular Beach Boys reference. "You're In a Bad Way", the album's other single, is a purposefully corny throwback to '60s pop, but it is meticulously arranged and has a great chorus. The cool ballad "Hobart Paving" and the Field-Mice-esque "Leafhound" round out this section of the album. That last track is another favorite of mine - it's the only track on the record where Saint Etienne's love of '80s indie really shows through, but they nail it. It's not really a surprise, as collaborator Ian Catt had worked with the Field Mice previously - the stuttering drum-machine tambourine and acoustic strum have a real C86 vibe.

The final third of So Tough is a collage of cultural references, with snippets of Japanese and tap-dancing mixed in with a song built on a Rush sample ("Conchita Martinez") and a girl-group pastiche ("No Rainbows For Me") recorded in mono. With only nine vocal tracks, one instrumental, and five between-song "skits", So Tough looks like a "thin" album on paper, but I find it to be a surprisingly rich and rewarding listen. I picked up the 2-CD reissue, which comes with a second disc of 17 non-album tracks, which almost make a first-rate album on their own with the inclusion of great songs like "Orpington Blues", the canceled single "Everlasting", and a cover of Teenage Fanclub's "Everything Flows". I have to say "almost", though, because the bonus disc has a five-minute remix of "I'm Too Sexy" hidden toward the end, and that's a song that may never regain listenability. So... caveat emptor or something.

"Leafhound" by Saint Etienne

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" by the Clash

Illustration from The Bad Mrs Ginger by Honor C. Appleton, 1902

The secret shame of my relationship with the Clash is that, as a kid, I thought Mick Jones was the band's frontman. I think I saw the video for "Train in Vain" on MTV in the '80s and unintentionally drew some conclusions. It wasn't until I finally got around to buying London Calling almost a decade later that I realized that there was this other guy called Joe Strummer. To this day, though, the most accurate way to sum up my opinion of the Clash is, "My favorite songs are the ones with big pop hooks, which basically means all the Mick Jones songs and a few others." I know it's not suppose to be that way, but what can I do? Go listen to some Big Audio Dynamite II, I guess.

It's probably no surprise that Sandinista! is my favorite Clash album, as I value music by number of songs above all else (I'm only kind of kidding). There are plenty of great Strummer-sung songs on Sandinista! - "Charlie Don't Surf" and "The Street Parade" are two of my favorites - but "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" might be my number one Clash song ever. It's kind of a weird one, with its pop edge blurred by heavy reverb and organ drone, but it has a simple guitar part that comes through and acts as the main hook. It has three evocative verses that stay on the right side of tacky invective, but just barely (listen for the questionable use of "bourgeoise" in the second verse). And each verse ends with a stretched out note that sounds like the lead-in for a big chorus, but it never comes. Instead, the three verses come in succession and then the band vamps over an extended outro, repeating lines from Phil Ochs' "United Fruit". I'd like "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" just as well if Strummer sang it, but the band gave the vocals on this kind of song to Mick Jones, and he does a good job with it.

"Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" by the Clash

It's New to Me: Ohio Express by the Ohio Express (1968)

Cover illustration of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1922

I remember first hearing about the Ohio Express in an interview with REM's Michael Stipe - he claimed that the band and particularly their hit song "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" were a bigger musical influence on him than the Beatles or the Beach Boys. That made an impression on me as a teenager, and you can imagine how puzzled I was when I first heard "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" on oldies radio. It was just some corny bubblegum pop song! Which, I guess, was Stipe's point. Disappointed as I was at the time, I find that, returning to the Ohio Express now as someone who loves late-'60s bubblegum, there's a lot more to this group than their little song about having "love in [your] tummy."

The Ohio Express were an actual group at one point, but it's hard to get good information on how the band turned into an anonymous brand for generic pop music. They may have their roots in the Rare Breed, a group of garage rockers from NYC that had a single on Nuggets. They signed with Buddah Records under the name the Ohio Express in 1968 - at that time, Buddah was making a name for itself through the shrewd and workmanlike skills of its resident hit-makers Kasenetz and Katz. During that year, the Ohio Express recorded two records and, by the end, the original band had been replaced by two units - a touring band who made money performing under the Ohio Express name, and a group of session musicians recording hits with songwriter Joey Levine. The details on how this happened are sketchy - some of the band's early songs are credited to "D. Kastran" and "J. Pfahler" without explaining whether these are pseudonyms for actual band members Dean Kastran and Jim Pfayler. Interestingly, the very last songs the "band" recorded were done by a different group entirely, the guys that went on to form the band 10cc.

The band's first album, Ohio Express, was made during the first transition period, and it's a schizophrenic-sounding affair as a result. The album opens with "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy", one of the best bubblegum singles from the era, written and sung by Levine, backed (I assume) by the Buddah Records session players. The second song, "Winter Skies", is a nice bit of sunshine-pop a la the Association, with a different vocalist. This is followed by "Into This Time", which is a trippy psych-rock number that almost sounds like a different band entirely, featuring a yet another different lead vocalist. This forms a kind of pattern for the album as it bounces from Levine's pop singles ("Down at Lulu's" being the album's other hit) to weirdness like "First Grade Reader" (featuring lines out of a "See Dick and Jane" primer sung with goofy mock-menace).

Ohio Express's most anomalous track is one of my favorites as well, a psych-pop song called "Turn to Straw" that sounds different from anything else on the record. The lead singer sounds almost like Donovan, and the song is laden with standard "out there" vocal effects and lots of backward-masked sounds. It has a cool melody, though, and wouldn't sound out of place on a collection of legit psych-rock singles. As a whole, though, the album almost plays like a compilation record, with a thin common thread running through the songs' sounds to give it a little coherence.

The CD I bought also contains the second Ohio Express record, Chewy Chewy, but it's a less interesting release. By the time it was assembled, the band had been completely reshaped by the Kasenetz and Katz hit machine, so it primarily features Joey Levine singing generic bubblegum songs, some of which are note-for-note remakes of songs that were already hits for the 1910 Fruitgum Company. And the songs are interspersed with terrible jokey "skits". It's too bad that the Ohio Express didn't manage to keep its hybrid status between bubblegum, psychedelia, and garage rock, which made for a much more interesting mix.

"Turn to Straw" by the Ohio Express