Cover illustration of Space Science Fiction magazine Volume 1, Number 5, March 1953
It's no secret that dream-pop trio Galaxie 500 was influenced by the Velvets - their recordings are, in large part, a modern distillation of the pop simplicity that the Velvet Underground specialized in. It is interesting, though, to hear the band's very first recordings and see how much the VU sound was a foundation that they built on with their three near-perfect albums. "Walking Song" , from the band's first three-song cassette demo circulated among their friends in 1987, is the song that sounds the most VU-esque to me. For one thing, it's quite a bit peppier than most of Galaxie 500's later work. Dean Wareham's whine is an obstacle for a lot of people when it comes to Galaxie 500, but you can hear in "Walking Song" how the band is already figuring out how to create a whole much greater than the meager parts they had to work with.
It's kind of sad for me to listen to "Walking Song" in the wake of Pitchfork's recent "history" of the band, which is excellent. Galaxie 500's breakup was so bad and so full of animosity that Wareham and the band's other two members, Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski, haven't spoken since it happened, which is too bad considering the amazing string of albums the group put together. Like the Velvet Underground, they weren't really appreciated until they were already gone.
Photograph titled "Marcus Beresford" from the Bain News Service collection, c. 1920
Peter Quaife, the Kinks' original bassist, passed away last week of kidney failure. A school friend of Dave Davies, Quaife was a founding member of the Kinks who helped bring Ray Davies into the band. He played on all the Kinks' major releases up through 1968's The Village Green Preservation Society - at that point, he left the Kinks, feeling that the band had reached their peak and struggling with the band's power dynamic. He has said on many occasions that Ray Davies treated him as little more than a session musician, and he had little to no involvement in shaping the band's sound. However, he still played an integral part in many of my favorite albums from that era, providing harmony vocals on the band's immortal "Waterloo Sunset" and the bouncing basslines on pop gems like "Party Line" and "Days".
Quaife was reportedly shocked when the Kinks scored a number one hit with "Lola" in 1970 - when he'd left the band, he'd been sure that their hit-making days were behind them. According to the story, he went out and bought the "Lola" single to give it a listen and, when he flipped it over to check out the b-side, he was surprised to hear himself playing bass. The b-side to "Lola" was a 1968 outtake from the Village Green sessions called "Berkeley Mews" - the songs starts with a tinny saloon-piano intro, but then Quaife and the rest of the band come in with a classic VGPS-style arrangement. Quaife's bassline is one of the best thing about the verse of that song, and I can only imagine the confused feelings he must have had about being on the flip side of a #1 hit two years after having quit the Kinks.
Cover illustration of Worlds of If magazine, July 1965
At one time, I thought I could get into the Lovin' Spoonful in a big way - my dad had been a big fan, and I was intrigued by their unlikely success as a NY-based folk-pop band. I did a little research and decided that their 1966 album Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful was the place to start. But the album never clicked with me for some reason - it was a little TOO odd. For me, the old-timey shuffle of the band's rhythm section didn't really mesh with Zal Yanovsky's virtuoso guitar-playing and John Sebastian's often bluesy vocal style. I put my favorite tracks from the album on the ol' Jukebox("Full Measure" being my clear favorite) and shelved the CD.
When "Darlin' Companion" popped up on the Jukebox, I pulled the Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful out again, and I'm liking it a lot better now than I did at the time. Sure, it's still understated and really quirky, but the songwriting is top-notch and the Lovin' Spoonful has impressive versatility. This shows through in a song like "Darlin' Companion", a straightforward country song from a time when pop artists didn't do that sort of thing much. The song's guitar part clearly borrows from the style of Luther Perkins, so it's not a big surprise that Johnny Cash returned the favor by covering the song a couple years later (the most famous rendition being the San Quintin performance). The lyric is cute, although I can't decide whether the line, "A flossy mare like you should have a steed," is clever or terrible. Most of the online lyric repositories say the line begins with "a saucy mare" but there's no way he's saying "saucy".
Illustration from the Pine Burr annual of Campbell University, 1912
"99 Pounds" is an odd song recorded by the Monkees under odd circumstances. In early 1967, the Monkees were upset with manager Don Kirshner over their lack of creative control - their standoff with the famous music-biz villain led to the creation of the Monkees-helmed Headquarters, arguably their best album. However, during the standoff, Kirshner hired Jeff Barry (who had written many of the "girl group" hits of the early '60s with partner Ellie Greenwich) to prepare some songs for the Monkees. Barry picked several songs and recorded backing tracks with studio musicians, including a cover of Neil Diamond's "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" (which would be released as a single) and an odd song he'd written called "99 Pounds".
Barry then surreptitiously pulled Davy Jones into the studio without the other Monkees' knowledge, and Jones (a "company man" at heart) recorded vocals for the songs. Barry's studio musicians then overdubbed the backing vocals and handclaps in place of the AWOL Monkees. Some good songs came out of this session, although you could argue whether they are actually Monkees tracks, having been recorded with even less of the band's involvement than usual. "99 Pounds" may be my favorite of the bunch, but it's definitely a weird song. It's about the joys of dating a girl who is 5'2" and 99 pounds - a very specific subject. Apparently, a girl this size is "a little, bitty package of explosivity" and "don't know wrong from right"! It makes sense for the diminutive Davy Jones to sing a song about a borderline "little person", but if you think about the fact that songwriter Jeff Barry was 6'4", the song's obsession with this tiny woman is definitely a little creepier.
The Monkees (or actually Kirshner) chose not to release "99 Pounds" in 1967 - the song sat on the shelf until Jeff Barry produced the Monkees' Changes in 1970. Recorded after Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith had left the band, Changes is not considered a classic-era Monkees record, and it doesn't help that Jeff Barry resorted to old cast-offs like "99 Pounds" to round off the album's tracklist. Listen for the song's highlight, a stuttering clavinet solo by the great Stan Free.
Photograph titled "Man in Costume and with Lute", c. 1880
The sentence "She's a girl," contains very little useful information - unless the species of the observation's object is in question, all you have is a redundant assertion of gender. But I've got two favorite songs called "She's a Girl" nonetheless.
The first is by Romford freakbeat band the Attraction, who released a cover of the Kinks' "Partyline" as a single in 1966. The single failed, even though Dave Davies produced the a-side for the band - I've never heard the cover, but the single's b-side, "She's a Girl" has gained some prominence as a rare freakbeat classic. With a driving drumbeat, a simple melody, and little else, it's not obvious at first why the song would be appealing. But the song's hook is infectious, and there's a neat twist in the lyric. The first verse is all manly assertions about how "she's a girl that belongs to me", but the second verse flips it over with, "All I want to do is belong to you." A good fit for a b-side to one of the Kinks' lesser-known gender-questioning songs.
In 1995, Breeders side-project the Amps (originally Tammy & the Amps) released just one album, but I like it as well as anything the Breeders put out. That's no big surprise, as the Amps featured two guys that went on to play in Guided By Voices. The Amps album, Pacer, is a little less conventional than the Breeders stuff that preceded it - the songs are rough around the edges and have more of a lo-fi sound. "She's a Girl" is a favorite because of Kim Deal's cool-sounding treated vocal (listen for the chorus-processed exhale she does right at the beginning) and because of the intrusive little guitar-string sounds that pop up at the end of the chorus, leading into the guitar solo. The song is an impressive example of the "pop concision" lessons Kim Deal had learned from hanging out with GBV - she does more in under two minutes than the Attraction does with their song in three. I have to give the Amps the win here because of simple economics.
Frontispiece of The Happy Garden by Mary Ansell, 1912
How sad is it that the honeyed voices of '90s indie rock are fading and disintegrating before our very ears? And so few of those guys had decent singing voices in the first place! Songwriters like Robert Pollard and Joe Pernice are taking it in stride, though, adjusting their music to accommodate their aging pipes and using their maturity as an advantage to bring new nuances into their songs. For Pernice, it goes as far as depicting his graying beard in oils on the cover of his new record Goodbye, Killer, the first Pernice Brothers full-length since 2006's Live a Little. He hasn't completely let go and settled in to middle age - you can hear him straining to stay with the demanding melody of songs like "Jacqueline Susann" and he pushes to reach the high notes on the chorus of "The Great Depression" in a way that is a little sad.
For most of Goodbye, Killer, though, Pernice makes the most of growing old. He ditches the New-Orderisms of the last couple Pernice Brothers records and brings back the country sounds of the Scud Mountain Boys, the band of his youth. Country tunes are a good match for where he is now - I'm not sure about the cheesy "life on the road" lyrics of "We Love the Stage", but I like the George-Harrison-circa-1975 guitar on the title track, and the twangy "Newport News" is one of the album's strongest tracks. Goodbye, Killer's other strengths come in the form of Laura Stein's harmony vocals on a couple songs and some great lyrics (ones that Pernice wouldn't have pulled off in his younger years). References to Leni Riefenstahl, Ford Madox Ford, and bechamel sauce give an interesting new dimension to Pernice's love songs, making up for some tired-sounding guitar solos that muddy Pernice's clean pop arrangements.
At this point in his career, the best Pernice can hope for from the critics is "A return to form," the other options being "More of the same" or "Unable to recapture his former glory." For me, though, Pernice is doing something different on Goodbye, Killer instead of playing the same games he did when he was younger. He's at a point in his career where a song like the lovely folk song "The End of Faith" has a real poignancy, while "Jacqueline Susann" drips with a more seasoned bitterness and longing that's (arguably) more compelling than the angst and longing we get from younger songwriters.
illustration study titled "Flamingoes" by Abbott Handerson Thayer for the book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, c. 1900
Portland's spaced-out country rockers Blitzen Trapper are really balladeers in the traditional sense. Their songs are narratives, taking the listener to very specific (but never ordinary) times and places. Their new set of ballads, Destroyer of the Void, splits the difference between the approaches of their last two records, finding a happy medium between the off-kilter weirdness of 2007's Wild Mountain Nation and the more pastoral sounds of 2008's Furr. But, at the best of times, Blitzen Trapper's genre-twisting story songs can take a while to get into, and Destroyer of the Void doesn't seem overly concerned about throwing the listener straight into the deep end. The album begins with the six-minute title track, a multi-part prog-folk ballad that has a couple pretty sections but, overall, makes for a disorienting entry point.
Destroyer of the Void doesn't take long to find its groove after its opening misfire, moving between pretty folk-ballads ("Below the Hurricane"), murder ballads ("The Man Who Would Speak True"), and hippie ballads ("The Tree") with ease. Blitzen Trapper make explicit nods to some of their more obvious influences - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival - but I also hear some new points of reference in Destroyer of the Void. The one that is most surprising is how some of the melody hooks point to mid-period XTC on songs like "Lover Leave Me Drowning". After a dozen listens, I still feel like I'm scratching at the surface of Destroyer of the Void, but the album's sepia story-lines are starting to reveal themselves. The album's first song is a real stumbling block, but I don't think that it's a big enough issue that it'll keep me from citing this as my favorite Blitzen Trapper album once I really get acquainted with it.
Detail of a cover illustration from Boys' Life magazine, May 1949
I thought it would be funny to jump on the "troll" bandwagon and turn in a negative review of Toy Story 3, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. The only high-profile "dis" the movie has received has been from Armond White, whose review begins (no joke!) with the line, "Pixar has now made three movies explicitly about toys, yet the best movie depiction of how toys express human experience remains Whit Stillman’s 1990 Metropolitan." Whaaa?!?
I loved Toy Story 3 wholeheartedly when I saw it this weekend, and I can only think of one way to meaningfully qualify my praise for it. It may not be the perfect movie for children, but it is definitely the perfect movie for adults who love kids' movies. As I am no longer a small child, it's hard for me to speak on behalf of the little guys, but I think that Toy Story 3 is quite a bit more intense and mature than other high-profile animated feature for kids. It has very frightening moments (the big baby and the surveillance monkey are the most terrifying villains I've seen lately). It has moments that will honestly make you doubt whether the protagonists are going to survive to the final scene - the threat of "death" for these toys becomes very real in the climactic moment. It also deals with themes like making the transition from childhood to adulthood with a bracing realism that outdoes anything in the previous Toy Story movies. I don't know how kids are supposed to feel about this stuff, but I, for one, am now more than a little disappointed in myself for having grown up. Toy Story 3 only gets away with packing a movie for children with so much weighty material by dint of a note-perfect script.
There were so many places where Toy Story 3 could have been disappointing - from the half-hour mark, I was bracing myself for a crappy ending. But screenwriter Michael Arndt (with help from Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, et al) handles each of the movie's plot twists and emotional moments with amazing deftness. Arguably, humor takes a back seat in long stretches of the movie, but one-off gags are not needed in a movie like this, and the jokes that are there are delivered expertly. I'll admit that I worried about "Spanish Buzz" and the Ken doll's metrosexuality jokes, but none of the stereotyping came off as too heavy-handed and bits like the Mr. Tortilla Head scene got a lot of laughs. The plot may be an extended homage to The Great Escape by way of The Simpsons' Ayn Rand School for Tots, but it easily brushes off such comparisons with impressive pacing and tight plotting that could teach a lesson or two to most of the recent action blockbusters.
The Toy Story trilogy is kind of like the Harry Potter series - by necessity, the movies have matured as the fans have. No one would have been satisfied with a third film that was operating on the level of the original Toy Story story. This may mean that some kids will watch the first two installments of the series over and over for a couple years before they are ready for the intense experience of the trilogy's finale, but, until then, the rest of us can break out the Toy Story 3 DVD after the kids have gone to bed and enjoy one of 2010's best films.
Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis for George Harmon Coxe's Death at the Isthmus, 1954
It was the last night of the Mountain Goats' summer tour, and the last night of the tour can be a terrible show, depending on the circumstances. The band is tired and depressed and homesick. They've changed the setlist a few times but they're still tired of the songs they're playing. They're way past getting on each others' nerves and have moved on to actually hating each other a little. But the Mountain Goats brought their A-game Wednesday night, and turned a what could have been a "grand finally" into an actual "grand finale".
The Beets, from Queens, NY, opened the show, and I was a little puzzled to see as an opening act on a Mountain Goats tour. With simple strummed chords, bouncy melodies, and a standing girl drummer, they were definitely somewhere in the "We love the Velvet Underground" family tree, somewhere between a twee Black Lips and a bratty Modern Lovers. Standard indie-pop fare, for sure, but the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle doesn't usually stump for that sort of thing, preferring to rep for death metal and Feminist folk. To see Darnielle come out on stage and sing along on the chorus with a band that's a hair's breadth from being the Moldy Peaches just felt weird. The Beets were a decent warm-up band, though, and before long the Mountain Goats took the stage.
The touring "power trio" unit of the Mountain Goats (Darnielle with bassist Peter Peter Hughes and drummer John Wurster [on loan from Superchunk]) was sporting the right look. They resembled a trio of defrocked itinerant preachers in their frayed suit jackets - quite appropriate, as they're touring behind The Life of the World to Come, an album with Bible verses for song titles. Darnielle even takes on the preacher persona in concert, filling the set with rousing, life-affirming singalongs, contemplative hymns, and life-lesson anecdotes about his own life and the characters he writes about. A lot of fans miss the old days when Darnielle would have everyone sit Indian-style on the floor and play a whole acoustic set, sitting in a chair. To those fans, I say, "Quit your whining, nerds!" I went to a few of those shows, and they were special, but the Mountain Goats in their current live form are formidable.
They didn't play my favorite songs from The Life of the World to Come ("Genesis 3:23", "Isaiah 45:23", "Ezekiel 7") but the rest of the setlist was hard to argue with. A couple greats from Tallahassee ("Game Shows Touch Our Lives" and "Old College Try") were highlights, and I even enjoyed the perennial audience singing on "No Children" and "This Year". Darnielle seemed pretty surprised, though, when the crowd was just as willing to chime in on the verses of "Love Love Love" from 2005's The Sunset Tree - he may underestimate that one as a crowd favorite. As he often does, Darnielle did an acoustic mini-set of chestnuts in the middle of the show, which gave him a chance to play a couple I've long wanted to hear live, "The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)" and "From TG&Y". I know not to expect too much from the Mountain Goats when it comes to encores - yes, they did Franklin Bruno's "Houseguest" again - but I still felt satiated at the end of the show.
You could feel that the band was running on fumes from a grueling tour, but they put everything they had left into the show, and I appreciate that. Darnielle's face seemed to beam at times with the accomplishment of having wrapped up another successful tour. He's put his "band" through a few different iterations over the years and, as a confessed homebody and introvert, he will probably never be fully comfortable in "performance" mode. But on Wednesday night he did a convincing imitation of a born showman, a performance that will probably send more than a few attendees scrambling to get better acquainted with the Mountain Goats' extensive back catalog.
Panels of The Story of Smokey Bear comic book, 1969
The Swedish folk-pop duo First Aid Kit first caught some attention through a YouTube video that featured the two girls covering a Fleet Foxes song in a forest. At the time, sisters Klara and Johanna were 15 and 18 years old respectively. Now its two years later, and they have released their first full-length album The Big Black & the Blue, a surprisingly mature collection of original folk songs that makes the most of the Söderberg sisters' talent for harmonies. Opening a capella with "In the Morning", First Aid Kit blend close harmonies that at first brings to mind the Everly Brothers, but the woozy melodic turns the song takes are more reminiscent of the girls' beloved Fleet Foxes and that band's progenitors.
The arrangements on The Big Black & the Blue stick to traditional folk, maybe a little too much, but the Söderbergs' vocals prove they can bring even the most pedestrian melody to life. Sometimes Klara's vocal takes on a conversational drawl that brings Jenny Lewis to mind and other times it's clear as a bell, and Johanna's ability to match her harmonies to her sister is possibly the best weapon in the First Aid Kit arsenal. Their lyrical skills are still developing - the simplicity of their words can be charming, as on the band's most recent single, "I Met Up with the King", or it can be pretty grating, as on the album's first single "Hard Believer". Lines in the latter song like, "I see you've got your bible, your delusion imagery/Well I don't need your eternity or meaning to feel free" are a little "on the nose" and make me wince. But the album has enough highlights, like the delicate "Josefin" and the lilting "Waltz for Richard", to give a satisfying listen today and an indication of great potential for First Aid Kit.
Stereograph titled "Indian Women Exhibiting Cranial Deformation" by Richard Maynard, 1870
In 2003, I was hearing good things about Azure Ray, the dream-pop duo from Omaha. I wanted to buy their new album Hold On Love but, for whatever reason, I thought it would be weird to buy it for myself. So I got it as a gift for my special ladyfriend, because it seemed like "music for ladies". Even back then, though, I knew that my special ladyfriend prefers adenoidal yelping to dreamy, girly harmonies, so she never really listened to the album. I did listen to it, and though I liked it a lot, it didn't take me long to decide that I didn't need the other Azure Ray albums. "The Drinks We Drank Last Night" is one of the best songs on Hold On Love, a neat compromise between the low-key, gauzy compositions they were known for and the big pop moves they were trying out in their new material. It has that sense of melancholy that made Azure Ray songs so pretty, but its subtle sing-song melody is one of their best. Produced by Eric Bachmann of Crooked Fingers, the song makes nice use of the woozy strings and pulsing synths that he was working with at the time.
Panels from a comic strip in Motion Picture magazine, December 1912
I refuse to believe that the Futureheads are incapable of writing the kind of songs that their fans want - the creativity and energy in their first two records was real and not the kind of thing that just evaporates. The last time they put an album out, 2008's This Is Not the World, I think I shrugged and said, "I guess this is the just the kind of album the band is interested in making." I'm tempted to go there again, but I'm increasingly having trouble understanding why a band would refuse to play to its strengths. The songs aren't bad, either, but they are arranged and produced in a way that seems to intentionally try to make them sound like mainstream guitar pop. The guitar sounds on The Chaos are bafflingly generic-sounding, for instance. I just don't get that.
The Futureheads can still make me smile, though. After an opening title track leaden with the clunky hard-rock moves the band has been showcasing lately, the Futureheads deliver two solid singles, "Struck Dumb" and "Heartbeat Song". Each has a nice, jumpy riff and catchy melody that work well together in spite of the album's dull production. The second half of the album has another duo of catchy songs, "I Can Do That" and "Sun Goes Down", but these ones are more simple and straightforward, with anthemic one-line choruses (a la "We Cannot Lose" from the Area EP). The songs in between aren't wholly uninteresting, but they're weighed down with hard rock flourishes where the band should be focusing on using their unpredictable pop sensibility and talent for cool harmonies. For example, "Dart at the Map" is a great song and features some of the album's most interesting lyrics, but it devolves into a wanky guitar jam halfway through and never goes back to its soaring chorus. Why, Futureheads, why?
For me, The Chaos's most interesting song might be "Living on Light", a 90-second a capella track hidden at the end of the record. Why put that there? It says to me, "Yeah, we can still do that thing you like, but we're not gonna." It's kind of a dick move to post a hidden track with a review of an album, so I'm going to share the album's second best song, "Struck Dumb", instead. And then I'm going to go back to waiting for this great band to decide to start doing the thing they're great at again.
Postcard from the "Maiko Girls of Kyoto" collection, 1952
Not too long ago, I was marveling at the ability of Scottish band Teenage Fanclub to work together as a unit - I was watching a not-too-old YouTube clip of the band playing their '91 single "The Concept", and I was impressed that they could pull off the song's impressive guitar-and-harmonies attack together so cohesively. As a band with three songwriters, their success can rely heavily on cohesiveness; their last album, 2005's Man-Made worked as well as it did in spite of lacking any clear "hits" because each of the band's contributors carried his share of the weight. Even the band's weakest songwriter, lead guitarist Raymond McGinley, delivered a great song on Man-Made, the sweet piano ballad "Only With You". This set me up for a shock when I heard their new one Shadows - it might be the most lopsided album they've released.
People have been comparing Shadows to '70s soft-rock bands like Bread and America, and this comparison has some merit, but aren't there any UK groups from that period that you could use instead? Stealers Wheel, maybe? Anyway, the band relies on acoustic arrangements on the majority of the songs, with some stately string arrangements and folky embellishments - not too dissimilar from 2000's underrated Howdy. But the thing that stands out to me is that two of the band's songwriters don't really show up here. My usual favorite, bassist Gerard Love, turns in one good song ("Shock and Awe") and three decent ones. McGinley drags the whole album down by giving us one decent song and three boring-as-all-hell ones. His lilting waltz-time "Live With the Seasons" would be a stand-out on the album, but McGinley's voice has been reduced to a sqeaky croak at this point and can't compete with with the still-sweet vocals of Love and Norman Blake.
Speaking of Blake, it's a good thing that he contributes a third of the songs on Shadows, because they're basically the only highlights to be had. From the standout soft-rock single "Baby Lee" to the piano pop of "Dark Clouds", Blake brings hooks and sweet melodies to his songs that save the album from mediocrity. His songs sound fresher somehow - it may be because he's working with some outside collaborators like Euros Childs of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. I wouldn't call Shadows a top-tier Teenage Fanclub record, but some smart sequencing and a very strong showing from Norman Blake keep it from being a low point in their impressive discography.
Advertisement for Willimantic Spool Cotton, c. 1900
So I think I'm done with "We Love the Beach Boys", so I'm moving on to the quintessential "under-appreciated but influential" band, the Velvet Underground. I'm not sure how many entries this series will have - I can think of a handful of bands that love to rip off VU, but I may end up cutting it off after that. I decided to start with a less-obvious one to make it a little more interesting. I'll talk about Yo La Tengo, the Modern Lovers, and the Jesus & Mary Chain later on.
One of the first things I remember hearing about the Owls was that their music had a heavy Velvet Underground influence. I checked out a couple of their songs online - I didn't hear the influence, to be honest, but I was into the Magic Marker Records scene at the time, and the songs were pretty catchy, so I got the album (2007's Daughters and Suns). It was only after I got the record that I realized that Allison LaBonne, the group's lead singer, was the woman from the Jim Ruiz Group (who I loved!) Also in the group was Brian Tighe of the Hang-Ups, and "Channel" is one of his songs. Listening to the album for the first time, I was thrown off a little by the mix of styles and sharing of songwriting and vocal duties, but when "Channel" came on at the end, I said, "There it is!"
"Channel" sounds a lot like VU's "Some Kinda Love" from the Velvet Underground album - the intro and first verse are especially VU-esque, with a chugging organ-and-guitar riff and a Lou-Reed vocal from Brian Tighe. As the additional vocal parts come in on the chorus, the song sounds less and less like a straight-up VU pastiche, and the harmonies are absolutely lovely. "Channel" is an odd choice for an album's closing track, but it was worth it for the delayed gratification of understanding why I was hearing that the Owls had a heavy Velvet Underground influence.
Postcard image titled "Harvesting a Profitable Crop of Onions" by W.H. "Dad" Martin, 1909
Outrageous Cherry wasn't even a "blip" on my radar a month ago, and now I'm thinking I need to track down every album they've released. Last week, I wrote about my first exposure to the Detroit-based band, in the form of their 1999 album Out There in the Dark, and I mentioned at the time that used CD bins would probably help me accumulate additional Outrageous Cherry releases soon. Lo and behold, I found a used copy of 2005's Our Love Will Change the World the next day, and these 12 songs have won me over completely.
I had some reservations about Outrageous Cherry at first because of Out There in the Dark's off-putting throwback production touches, but Our Love Will Change the World sounds much better to my ears, even if the songwriting itself is not clearly superior. The songs are impressively consistent and catchy power-pop, though, with some psychedelic touches. I still find Outrageous Cherry's biggest problem being that their songs are so consistent that they create a sense of monotony, as there are no clear peaks and valleys on an album like Our Love Will Change the World. I can say that I enjoy all of the songs on the album - the bouncy title track, the repetition-heavy "Unless", the slow-burning psych-pop number "You're a Reflection of Infinite Chaos", and the jangly closer "Calling" are as close to standouts as the album has, but most of the other songs are as worthy of praise.
The album is not perfect, though - the production still doesn't quite work for me for some reason. I may find an Outrageous Cherry record with the perfect sound as I continue to explore their discography, but for now the strength of the songwriting is enough to make the songs totally listenable. I also question the sequencing a little - the album is pretty heavily backloaded, with the first half weighed down with slighter numbers like "You've Been Unkind". Also, they probably didn't need to put an instrumental as the third track - I tend to think that instrumentals don't belong in the album's first third (although a good opening instrumental can work). Overall, though, this album is a good second impression of the band, and it makes me want to track down The Book of Spectral Projections, known to be their darkest and most psychedelic album, as soon as possible.
"You're a Reflection of Infinite Chaos" by Outrageous Cherry
Illustration from Dudley Allen Sargent's Health, Strength and Power, 1904
A couple weeks ago, I realized that I'd missed a couple cool-sounding albums that came out in the spring by artists I feel some loyalty to - The Desert of Shallow Effects by ex-Beulah guy Miles Kuroskay and Ted Leo's new one, The Brutalist Bricks. I think I didn't run out and buy them when they came out because I had an inkling that I might find them underwhelming, but, while this turned out to be true, I'm finding I'm enjoying The Desert of Shallow Effects more and more as I listen to it.
In the five years since Beulah's much-documented implosion, Kurosky went through a rough patch where he couldn't play music because of a bad shoulder injury; he also had some other health problems, if I recall correctly. And he got married. I think these experiences color a great deal of the lyrical content of The Desert of Shallow Effects, which Kurosky has described as a set of stories. It is true that they are remarkably verbose compositions, very different from the sketchy refrains Beulah worked with. A lot of the content seems very personal and emotional as well, but I'm still deciding whether this kind of album plays to Kurosky's strengths.
The instrumentation on The Desert of Shallow Effects has not changed much from the Beulah days and features an orchestral pop grandiosity provided by a variety of musicians. The weak link in these songs, for me, is structural, though. The songs on the album lack good choruses and, while its true that a lot of dudes write great story-songs without choruses, I think that Kurosky's whimsical baroque pop style needs a chorus hook to work. Take a listen to "An Apple for an Apple" below and tell me if you can tell which section is the chorus. I think it's only repeated once and it doesn't make much of an impression.
Even though it's dense, wordy album without a lot of immediately accessible moments, The Desert of Shallow Effects is still an impressive work that I think I'll appreciate more as I listen to it over a couple months. For a lot of artists, I wouldn't hang in there with a "difficult" album that long, but I have a soft spot for Kurosky's singing voice and sense of melodicism. Which is more than I can say for The Brutalist Bricks, which I probably won't even bother writing about.
Images of cigarette insert cards by W. Duke Sons & Co., c. 1900
It occurred to me the other day that the whole idea behind Probabilistic Jukebox was to show off my awesome and diverse musical tastes by printing excerpts from my randomized Winamp playlist. Why haven't I been doing that?!?
1. "Leaning on a Cane" by the Delgados 2. "You Wanted Me to Hang Around" by Wednesday Week 3. "Umbrellas" by the Free Design 4. "Imperial Bedroom" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions 5. "Collapsing Stars" by the Mountain Goats 6. "Blame the Weather" by XTC 7. "Shaker" by Yo La Tengo 8. "Have a Day Mr. Clay" by Robert Pollard 9. "Nonpartisan" by Optiganally Yours 10. "Once Upon the Seas of Abyssinia" by T. Rex
Oh, right. That's why. Because most of my Winamp playlists make me look like a standard-issue indie doofus. But at least that first song is an interesting one.
Taken from the band's first album, 1996's Domestiques, "Leaning on a Cane" is not really a classic, but it contains some of the elements that made the Delgados great soon thereafter. At first, it sounds like a lot of the other songs on Domestiques, with Alun Woodward's colorless vocals buried under generic "90's alternative" guitar. But, when the string come in on the second chorus, along with Emma Pollock's sweet harmonies, "Leaning on a Cane" momentarily takes off in a way that the band would perfect on 2000's The Great Eastern.
Illustration from Robert Tyas's Flowers and Heraldry, 1851
Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells have one of the biggest buzz albums of the season, and it's one of the most written-about albums as well. There's not much of value that I can add except to say that I like Treats a lot even though it's not really the kind of thing I normally listen to. And I may be able to explain a little about why I like it as well.
I don't follow many of the indie trends these days - I don't really know my chillwave from my darkwave from my post-nouveau-Balearic - but the Sleigh Bells demos that were circulating months ago caught my ear. It sounded like Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss were hitting on something that some of these trendy bands don't bother with - pop dynamics. Sleigh Bells know how to add and subtract sounds and mix them in a song to create a heavy-hitting pop song structure. I do think that they really a little too heavily on the blown-out drumbeats - one or two songs without them would give the album a less headache-inducing relentlessness (the closing title track in particular doesn't need those heavy beats). But Sleigh Bells ends up with a sound halfway between Last Splash-era Breeders and the Go! Team, with a little MIA and Lush thrown in for good measure. And that makes for a pretty good mix.
A couple of the songs on Treats are straight-up filler ("Run the Heart" and the downright crappy "Straight A's") which should be enough to sink a 32-minute album, but the songs have enough momentum to carry through a couple rough spots. And I don't think that the album could survive being any longer than this - it'd cause migraines for some people at half its length. But, if you like fuzzy indie pop with some bite, Treats probably has at least a couple songs that'd fit that title description for you.
Cover illustration from AMA News magazine, October 1971
In the early days of Motown, Berry Gordy was willing to sink pretty low in his attempts to cash in on success. Of all the "sequel" singles from that era, though, the Marvelettes' "Twistin' Postman" is probably the most bizarre. Not only is it a continuation of "Please Mr. Postman", it's also a dance-craze cash-in. I can imagine Gordy telling Brian Holland, "We need you to write a sequel to 'Please Mr. Postman' - oh, and it has to mention the Twist!" So the song is a happy ending for the yearning girl from the Marvelettes' first hit, but this time the postman is bringing her that letter she's been waiting for! And he's doing the Twist for some reason! I'll admit, though, that I like the handclap break on the bridge - that and Gladys Horton's energetic lead vocal make the song worth hearing in spite of its WTFness.
Cover illustration by Harry Payne from The ABC of Horses, 1880
In retrospect, there was no way that I wasn't going to be a little disappointed with S.F. Sorrow. Released in 1968 by UK rockers the Pretty Things, S.F. Sorrow is cited as the first real "rock opera" and a probable influence on the Who's Tommy, which was released the following year. It's also probably the most psychedelic of the original rock operas, although I've never heard The Story of Simon Simopath by Nirvana (not that Nirvana!), which predates S.F. Sorrow by a full year. On top of all this, S.F. Sorrow was also a colossal failure for the Pretty Things, giving it that "unrecognized masterpiece" feel that I find irresistible. There was no way that it could live up to the hype.
Notwithstanding my reservations, I have to admit that S.F. Sorrow actually lives up to the hype in some regards. For one thing, the album sounds terrific - producer Norman Smith gets an amazingly organic and complex psychedelic sound out of the Pretty Things in spite of some heavy-handed psychedelic arrangements that turned out much better than they should have. My issue with S.F. Sorrow is the songs, ultimately - I find about half of them to be unengaging, as good as they sound. "Death", one of the songs that people gush about, doesn't really appeal to me at all, for instance. The sense of "drama" doesn't really work for me, which might mean that I'm not a fan of "rock operas" as much as non-operatic concept albums. Too many of the songs lurch along with a fakey-sounding gravitas and no recognizable hooks.
There are six or seven songs on S.F. Sorrow, though, that I think are excellent. This leads me to believe that I'll like the album as a whole if I just give it time. The opener, "S.F. Sorrow Is Born" is a great thesis statement of the album's intentions with its fanfare and complex structure, making a promise that the Pretty Things only partially deliver on. Of the songs split into distinct sections, "Baron Saturday" is the most successful, remaining cohesive and compelling even during its lengthy interludes. And "I See You" is a fitting climax to the album, featuring some of the album's trippiest sounds. My favorite song on the record, though, is probably "Trust", a slice of light psychedelia that relies heavily on layered vocals and a simpler pop structure than most of the album's cuts. Phil May's vocal carries some of the real emotion that I don't hear in the album's more bombastic moments, and the layered harmonies have an excellent sound (courtesy of producer Norman Smith.)
I just read on Wikipedia that S.F. Sorrow was released the same week as The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and Village Green Preservation Society - can that really be true? If so, is it any wonder that it was overlooked at the time? I'm still figuring out how I feel about the album as a whole, but my current thinking is that, even though the Pretty Things' songwriting doesn't reach the same heights as those other three albums, for its sound and ambition, it definitely deserves to be grouped with those classic releases.
Photograph from the dealer's catalog of the Richard Douglas firm, 1904
I picked up Out There in the Dark based on Carl Newman's recommendation. Not that Carl came over to my house and said, "You know what you should hear?" But the new New Pornographers record came with a bonus 7" single of Outrageous Cherry covers, and that seemed like a pretty strong endorsement from the band's frontman. So I went out and got Out There in the Dark, the album that contained two of the three songs covered on the 7" - I could just listen to the 7" itself to get an idea of how good the songs are, but hooking up my turntable is SUCH a pain. And I trust Newman's recommendations - I bought the Sex Clark Five's Strum & Drum because he gushed about it in an interview. I love that record now, and I'm already warming up to Outrageous Cherry in the same way.
It's weird that Outrageous Cherry has not been on my radar AT ALL - I think I had them confused with the atrocious Buckcherry. Anyway, they're a psych-pop band from Detroit that's been around for about 15 years, and (based on what I've read) Out There in the Dark is considered to be one of their best releases. At first glance, Out There in the Dark has a promising format - twelve concise pop songs (none over 4 minutes), plus an 11-minute jam at the end. On first listen, though, I was struck by some odd sound choices that can be jarring. The album's opening track, "Georgie Don't You Know" is a creamy pop tune, but it sounds like frontman/mastermind Matthew Smith has run all the sounds through a rusty spring reverb unit. As a result, it sounds like the band is playing at the other end of a piece of PVC pipe pressed against your ear. The album's second song, "Togetherness", gets a similar sound treatment. And so the album goes with minor variations - by the time I hit the middle of the album, the echoey sound was actually kind of comforting. I found myself realizing, though, that the album's first two songs were amazing pop songs with distracting production touches. I had to start the album again to hear those songs again with less fresh ears.
So that's basically the deal with Outrageous Cherry - the hooks are great, although Smith comes close to crossing the line into generic retro-pop at times. Little touches like the backward guitar on "Only the Easy Way Down", a whistling solo on the crunchy "Where Do I Go When You Dream?", and the horns on "A Bad Movie" provide some necessary variety, and the vocal reverb actually helps draw attention away from the fact that Smith has a pretty ordinary-sounding voice. There's no argument with his skill as a songwriter, though - he churns out concise psych-pop songs with remarkable consistency on Out There in the Dark. And the great thing about discovering a band like Outrageous Cherry is that their albums are, for the most part, readily available used, so I should be able to pick up more of their stuff easily.
Illustration titled "So At Last They Came Down to the Pier, Gorgeous" by Katharine Pyle from Harriet Morgan's The Island Impossible, 1899
Considering that May has been a big month for new releases, I oddly haven't written about a brand-new album in a couple weeks. I've just picked up several new albums, though, and one of the best of the lot is Tobin Sprout's The Bluebirds of Happiness Tried to Land on My Shoulder. The Michigan-based songwriter, painter, and kiddie-lit author used to be a strong supporting member of Ohio's Guided By Voices, but he has, well, "branched out" over the last decade. This has meant that his musical releases have become infrequent, which can be frustrating for those of us who remember when Sprout was part of indie-rock's most prolific group. But, while his recent albums have been released fairly quietly and not received much attention, they are always worth a listen. And I use the word "recent", even though The Bluebirds of Happiness... is Sprout's first album since 2003's Lost Planets & Phantom Voices.
Some things have changed in Tobin Sprout's sound since that time, and some things haven't. For one thing, while Sprout's voice is still quavering and helium-high, it has mellowed a bit and has a more mature, melancholy sound to it. His music has also take on a more somber and introspective tone, but The Bluebirds of Happiness... never sounds dull. Sprout still has a knack for catchy melodies and pop arrangements, and his use of sound is better than ever on this record. Recorded at his home studio, Moonflower, in Leland, Michigan, The Bluebirds of Happiness... takes the ramshackle indie-pop of his earlier records and transforms it into something more singular, a pocket dimension of pocket symphonies with a lovely, dreamy feeling. The toy-soldier drum machines, Twin-Peaks synths, and strummed guitar still provide the foundation for his songs, but they have a careful craftsmanship to them now that makes the album a rewarding listen on headphones.
Some of the songs on The Bluebirds of Happiness... are clear throwbacks to earlier periods - "You Make My World Go Down" has the growl and bite of his "rock" side project, Eyesinweasel, and "Soul Superman" takes me all the way back to the chiming pop sounds of his best record, 1997's Moonflower Plastic. But these songs are digressions - the core of the album is a set of sepia-tinted reminiscences of love and family, which become more elegiac as The Bluebirds of Happiness... winds down to its conclusion. The album's signature tune is probably its opener, "Pretty" - built on a bouncy piano riff, it's easy to miss the sad tinge to the song's remembrances of young love. The whole album sounds like a "pretty" farewell, but Sprout has hinted that this will not be his last musical release. I hope that he makes room in his busy schedule to record more records like this one.
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.
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GBV Inc.
