It's New to Me: Smokey and his Sister by Smokey and his Sister (1967)

Lobby card for Zane Grey's The Wanderer of the Wasteland, 1924

"Now that's one lost album that should have stayed lost." That's a line I hear a lot lately, probably because of the proliferation of boutique reissue labels and the increased availability of digital releases. It's a line of reasoning that bugs me, though - what would be the point in wanting something to be unavailable? Take Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's solo album Pacific Ocean Blue - I hear people saying that it should have remained unreleased. Really? It's that bad? So bad that you'd rather deprive everyone else of getting to hear it just to save you the disappointment of inflated expectations? I like "lost" albums - not just for the mystique (although I admit that that's part of the appeal), but because they are usually very personal albums that never got released because of their lack of broad appeal. I will admit, however, that every so often they get canned because they are plain sucky.

Take Smokey and his Sister, for example. I'm calling it a 1967 release because that's when it was recorded, but, apart from two 7" singles, the tracks of this album weren't released until 2007. And it's an album that could make an easy target for the "shoulda stayed unreleased" criticism - a super-twee album of baroque folk-pop made by two kids from Tennessee who moved to New York to make the big time as musicians. After getting a minor hit with their first single, "Creators of Rain", Smokey and Vicki Mims recorded an album of tracks for Columbia, but the execs at the label refused to release the LP - they went on to make a couple records for Warner Brothers, but they never matched the weird appeal of their first songs. A couple years ago, Sundazed Music released the Smokey and his Sister album to satisfy the curiosity of record collectors who had found and loved the "Creators of Rain" single.

The album is oddly appealing to me for some of the reasons I gave above. Vicki Mims has a folky alto voice perfect for harmonizing, and Smokey needs the support for his wafer-thin, whispery tenor. They sing like siblings, with a natural ease and intimacy that's created by their soft vocal style, and well-placed orchestral embellishments give the songs some much-needed "oomph". Cellist George Ricci is one of the best supporting players, adding emotive touches that never overwhelm the delicate compositions. Smokey's songs came from a very personal place as well, with lyrics about love, loss, and the forces of nature. Highlights on the record include the gypsy-folk of "A Simple Cameo" and the sprightly "Come and Be Mine", but the two sides of the "Creators of Rain" single are the Mims' best songs. The b-side "In a Dream of Silent Seas (You Can Find Me)" is the most hushed song of them all, with Smokey's voice often submerged under the waves of violin. As for "Creators of Rain", it's a nature allegory in the familiar acoustic folk style, but its instantly-familiar duet melody matches the vulnerable vocals of Smokey and Vicki perfectly - it's a song that, on its own merits, justifies the "finding" of this lost album.

"Creators of Rain" by Smokey and his Sister

In Stores Now: Revelation Skirts by the Capstan Shafts

Illustration by Virginia Sterrett from Arabian Nights, 1928

The Capstan Shafts, the home-recording project of prolific Vermont songwriter Dean Wells, continues to follow the progression of Guided By Voices (the band that inspired Wells to make music in the first place). After years of solo home recordings, Wells has made the jump into the studio with Revelation Skirts - the ironic things is who is playing the Ric Ocasek role for the Capstan Shafts' Do the Collapse. It's Matt LeMay, the frontman of the unfortunately-defunct spazz-pop band Get Him Eat Him, who not only produced but also played many of the instruments on Revelation Skirts. LeMay wrote famously scathing reviews of Guided By Voices' post-lo-fi records, including a 4.7/10 review of Do the Collapse in which he said, "Pollard used to write minute-long Beatles songs; now he's taken to penning three-minute Ramones tunes. Throughout the album, the added production value seems to hide rather than accentuate." Maybe LeMay sees this as his chance to correct the flaws he saw in GBV's "big break" moment.

As someone who has purchased the entire 350+ songs in the Capstan Shafts discography, Revelation Skirts is a hard album to hear with fresh ears. Not because the sound is the same - it's totally different, with LeMay beefing up Wells' wispy jangle-pop tunes, turning them into Mass Romantic-style arena-ready power-pop. The issue is in the familiarity of the material - the songs of Revelation Skirts are almost entirely "stitched" together from older Capstan Shafts material. It's a smart idea, and Wells does a great job of pulling pieces from his earliest EPs (going all the way back to 2004's The Great Reset Button of Life) and his more recent home recordings like 2007's A Brace for Hephaestus, while avoiding obvious choices from his better-known LPs.

These new stitched-together songs are ideal for new listeners, but they can be jarring for someone who (for instance) immediately recognizes the opening track, "Fairweather Triumphalist" as a Frankenstein-hybrid of old favorites "Drags of Grind" and "The Ice Caps of Mars Are Just Copying Ours". The production choices are smart overall, if the sound is a little in-your-face, reminiscent of the sharp new-wave edges on the Get Him Eat Him records. A couple of the songs get a full "GHEH" makeover - it works on "Cruel Streak Andes", but "Let Your Head Get Wrong" strays a little too far from the Capstan Shafts sound for my taste.

Elsewhere on Revelation Skirts, you get some REM acoustic jangle ("From Revelation Skirts"), New Pornographers power-pop ("Successfully Into You") and plenty of GBV influence ("Versus the Sad Cold Eventually" and "Heart Your Eat Out"). The second half of the record has a particularly great string of songs anchored by the perfect singles "Quiet Wars" and "Your Wasted Isa Talent Here", as well as a melancholy mini-epic called "Versus the World Hater". This may be one of the best records I've heard this year, but I could give a lot to hear a Capstan Shafts record in this style composed of all new hooks. I envy the music fans who will be able to hear Revelation Skirts without any familiarity with the material - I imagine it would be a condensed version of the six-month ecstasy I experienced when I was accumulating the Capstan Shafts records. The constant barrage of hooks, the nimble wordplay, and Wells' creaky-but-elastic faux-Brit singing are everything a fan of indie rock could ask for.

EDITOR'S NOTE: My glowing praise for this record is in no way related to the fact that the front cover of Revelation Skirts is (coincidentally?) an image I used on this site for a Young Fresh Fellows review last year.

"Your Wasted Is a Talent Here" by the Capstan Shafts

Title Fight: "Nothing At All"

Advertising card titled "American Family" by James S. Kirk & Co., c. 1900

Welcome to an "All Twee All the Time" edition of Title Fight. In one corner we have Brighton, UK's Brighter, and in the other we have the Shins of Portland, OR (formerly of Albuquerque). Both of these tracks are rarities of sorts - Brighter's "Nothing At All" is from a set of four songs recorded by the band in June of 1990, just a couple months before they assembled their only big release, the Laurel mini-LP. I'm not sure why these songs were never released by the band (until Matinee Records put together the Out to Sea compilation) - they're as good as anything the band recorded. I'm guessing they were supposed to go on a single that ended up being scuppered (as the English say). This track's good points: a nice keyboard part under the standard twee-pop guitar jangle, plenty of tambourine, and a nice line in the chorus, "I think I'm on the shelf again." The song's weakness is definitely in the incredibly flimsy-sounding lead vocal.

The Shins' "Nothing At All" was a b-side to their "Phantom Limb" single, and it's a solid track that would have strengthened the underwhelming Wincing the Night Away album. The song's got some great synth riffs and an incredibly catchy sing-song melody, and the arrangement steadily adds elements as it goes, including handclaps, which are always nice. The downside to this song is that it sounds like it was recorded by James Mercer without any help from his fellow Shins. This wouldn't be a problem except that it brings to mind how Mercer unceremoniously dropped his old Albuquerque friends from the band last year - I have lots of fond memories of seeing that lineup in their early days, going all the way back to their opening slot on Modest Mouse's 2000 tour.

I couldn't live with myself if I gave Mercer the victory, even though I like that song a lot, so I'm giving the win to the one with the out-of-tune vocals. Yay!

Winner: BRIGHTER

"Nothing At All" by Brighter

"Nothing At All" by the Shins

It's New to Me: Distant Shores by Chad & Jeremy (1966)

Cover illustration of Popular Mechanics magazine, August 1947

My recent series of reviews of '60s sunshine pop continues today with the LP Distant Shores from British folk-pop duo Chad & Jeremy. Chad & Jeremy had commercial success in the US, in part because of the lush orchestral arrangements they used to bolster their acoustic tunes. From '64 to '66, they released some great singles (and a couple patchy albums), and people thought they had run their course as part of the British Invasion scene. But, with the release of Distant Shores in 1966, the duo showed they weren't done yet. The album is considered by some to be Chad & Jeremy's best, as it is fully realized (whatever that means) but avoids some of the dippy conceptual moves that they turned to with their other late-'60s albums.

Distant Shores opens with its title track, which was Chad & Jeremy's last hit single. It's a lovely baroque pop song with an "Eastern" acoustic riff that gives it a more modern feel than some of the more traditional numbers on the record. Songs like "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" feel soppy and old-fashioned, but they do pretty well with more contemporary folk material like Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound" and Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Mornin' Rain". They also contribute several quite-good originals to the album, showing that (like many of the folkies) they were figuring out that they could write songs as good as the ones they were covering - of these, the awkwardly-titled "You Are She" is the best. It sounds like a lost Left Banke track.

There's more good songwriting from Chad & Jeremy in Distant Shores' thirteen bonus tracks - a couple of them are useless (a couple of the album tracks sung in French?), but there are eight songs that are good enough to be on the album, and half of them are originals. Jeremy's "Last Night", the b-side of the "Distant Shores" single, is a bouncy pop number, as is the Chad-written "Your Mama's Out of Town". My favorite track on the whole CD is probably "Teenage Failure", a surprisingly angry-sounding song (for a pair of folkies) with very Byrds-like chorus and some amusing lyrics from Jeremy Clyde. He sneers at his boss, pretty girls, and ultimately starts taking pot-shots at the listener, singing, "Now this ain't a very fine song / But lucky for you, it ain't too long /(Sit still or I'll smash your face in!)" So here's your warning: you'd better sit still while listening to this one.

"Teenage Failure" by Chad & Jeremy

Why Does This Exist?: "Jimmy's Einstein Poster" by Guided By Voices

Illustration from the pamphlet "How the Underground Fights Back", 1942

I realize that I should have done a Guided By Voices "Why Does This Exist?" a while ago. As a big big fan of the band, I can't deny that, in the course of releasing thousands of songs over the last couple decades, Bob Pollard has released more than a couple songs that raise this question. My favorite may be "Jimmy's Einstein Poster", a brief boombox-recorded ditty that tells a simple story. Bob Pollard's brother Jimmy bought a poster of Albert Einstein, and Bob thinks this is hilarious. There are a couple interesting questions here, though.

First, why did Pollard bother to commit the song to tape, even including a messily "spliced-in" bridge that required stopping the boombox and then pressing "record" again? Also, why did Pollard record a "teenage brothers teasing each other" song in 1996, when both Bob and Jimmy were in their late thirties? The song was most likely written in the '80s, but Pollard committed it to tape while making demos for the album Not In My Airforce. I guess Bob still thought it was funny enough to be worth recording. And, to be fair, I do get a chuckle out of the line, "He looks at it to make him smarter every day! Now he's smarter every day!"

"Jimmy's Einstein Poster" by Guided By Voices

It's New to Me: Popsicle by Jan & Dean (1966)

Cover illustration of The Alcade magazine, March 1970

So, when I picked up this Jan & Dean CD from a sale at the Sundazed Music website, I had no idea what I was getting. I knew that this was the LP they released prior to Save It For a Sunny Day, which I love (although it's really a Dean Torrence solo record). However, I was surprised to find that Popsicle was actually a cobbled-together compilation album released just months after Jan Berry almost died in a serious car accident in 1966. That seems weird, right? It gets weirder.

In late 1965, Jan & Dean recorded a cover of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" and scheduled it for release as a single in January 1966. The song had been paired with a b-side pulled from Jan & Dean's 1963 LP Drag City, a song called "Popsicle Truck" (although they decided to shorten the title to "Popsicle" for the re-release.) Jan's car crash happened in April, and, within a month, Liberty Records had released the "Norwegian Wood"/"Popsicle" single. "Popsicle" ended up getting radio play, and it was Jan & Dean's last real pop hit. By June, the Popsicle LP was ready for release. It included six songs from the duo's 1964 album Ride the Wild Surf, and a few tracks grabbed from other records released in '63 and'64. "Popsicle" was a recycled track as well, so the only songs on Popsicle that hadn't appeared on a Jan & Dean LP were "Norwegian Wood" and a really old (1962) single called "Tennessee".

So, basically, Popsicle appears to be a "junk" album released by Liberty as a crass way to cash in on Jan Berry's terrible car accident. That's gross and everything, but my big issue with Popsicle is that it mostly makes me want to track down the LPs these songs originally came from - the tracks from Ride the Wild Surf are particularly solid. "Popsicle" is a fun single, but it's pretty corny and features a prominent *shudder* saxophone part that bears an unfortunate resemblance to "Yackety Sax" (the music from The Benny Hill Show). I actually quite like their version of "Norwegian Wood" - the vocal arrangement serves the song's melody well, although they don't really pull off the song's psychedelic vibe. Some of the tracks are underwhelming - "One Piece Topless Bathing Suit" in particular doesn't live up to its title - but my favorite track is the real chestnut in the bunch, "Tennessee". It's a pretty slight song and also has that terrible saxophone, but the intro is an undeniably grin-inducing stomp, and the song does you a favor by putting its best foot forward, repeating the intro several times between the song's short verse sections.

"Tennessee" by Jan & Dean

In Stores Now: Memphis by Magic Kids

Watercolor titled Sunrise and Mountain by Oscar Bluemner, 1928

Magic Kids are evidently proud of being from Memphis,Tennessee - to the point that they named their record after their town. This move may give people a misleading impression about the band's music, though. Memphis has a long, rich heritage of soulful, grimy music, and Magic Kids' baroque power-pop can only legitimately claim any direct lineage in the quieter moments of Big Star's discography. Memphis is a collection of songs best described by the word "classy" - from the song structures to the horn and string arrangements, the band's sense of fun is the only thing from keeping their music from crossing the line into "stilted and over-sophisticated" territory.

The balance between this classiness and fun-loving-ness can be heard in the album's much-circulated tracks "Hey Boy" and "Superball". The former bounces along on a jaunty harpsichord-and-horns riff that screams Pet Sounds, but the call-and-response vocals really make the song work. "Superball" moves a little faster than this band can pull off safely, especially weighted down with an intricate arrangement of strings and horns. But, even though it threatens to come off the rails or descend into a muddy mess at any minute, the song hangs together with excellent results.

The members of Magic Kids are too young to cite the Beach Boys as a direct influence - they're young enough to have grown up with dads that listened to XTC and REM, but they don't seem to connected with current trends either. If anything, I find that their sound falls somewhere in between - more than anything else, the songs on Memphis remind me of cerebral '90s power-pop like Zumpano and Velocity Girl. The connection to Zumpano's second album, Goin' Through Changes, seems like the most apt comparison to me - the songs have a similar baroque quality that seems, at first, to get in the way of the songs' hooks. After a couple listens, though, it all falls together, making the album a thoroughly satisfying listen. The second half of Memphis flags a little with its more contemplative vibe, but I'm liking the whole record more and more as I get into it.

Where "Superball" and "Hey Boy" are the stars of the album, the song that represents Magic Kids' overall approach best is "Summer". Vocalist Bennett Foster showcases the two sides of his sweet common-cold-sufferer's voice with its mellow lower register and light falsetto with a song that floats along on a pocket-orchestra bed before breaking into a nice "tropicalia" section at the end. Summer's almost over, so I recommend giving this song as many listens as you can squeeze in before the leaves start to change colors.

"Summer" by Magic Kids

Probabilistic Jukebox: "When the Party Ends" by Saturday Looks Good to Me

Photo of Truman Capote in Sicily, c. 1950

I hesitated to write about this song even though it popped up at the top of my Jukebox playlist - I wrote about a Saturday Looks Good to Me song back in May. But I can't resist this song because it's (a) probably my favorite SLGTM composition, and (b) it is a rarer alternate version of the song. The structure of "When the Party Ends" is fun to me - it runs through a couple verses before an instrumental break neatly splits the song into two distinct halves. The second half of the song is a breathless extended verse with an AAAA rhyme scheme with some funny near-rhymes mixed in with some great ones ("opulent", "permanent", "insignificant", "discontent", "circumvent", etc.) This song is the "hard rock" version of the song that appeared on the vinyl release, and its completely different from the more acoustic CD version. I like the CD version better overall, but this version is better in a couple ways. First, the explosive opening is more impressive. Second, I love the echoey harmonica part that comes in during the second half of the song. Then this reverb effect starts to cut in and out on the vocal, making it sound a little trippy.

"When the Party Ends" by Saturday Looks Good to Me

It's New to Me: Harpers Bizarre 4 by Harpers Bizarre (1969)

Cartoon titled "Lincoln and his Cabinet" from The Only Authentic Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1864

I wrote last week about the passing of the Free Design's Chris Dedrick, and I mentioned my love for '60s soft rock and sunshine pop. Harpers Bizarre is a band that I've been curious about for a long time - I heard their version of Jim Pepper's "Witchi Tai To" on a blog a couple years ago, and the sound was intriguing. I did a little research, and it seemed like most people were pretty "meh" on Harpers Bizarre (e.g. the Allmusic write-ups of their albums). I noticed recently, though, that the Harpers Bizarre records were on sale cheap from Sundazed as part of their ongoing "garage" sale, so I grabbed a couple of them. The band's fourth album, Harpers Bizarre 4 is the one that comes closest to what I was hoping the band would sound like - not surprisingly, it's the album that "Witchi Tai To" comes from.

4 is a mix of covers and originals, and it's missing some of the strong contributions the band had from Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks on their debut record. Instead, their covers include better-known songs like the Beatles' "Blackbird" and John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane". These songs are beautifully arranged with a soft-psych sound, and the group's layered vocal sound is a good match for the hazy production. A few of the numbers are a little jarring, like the lite-blues-rock of the Templeton-Scoppettone original "Soft Soundin' Music", ironically the song with the hardest sound on the album, and the strangely soft-pedaled cover of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle". But, overall, the album has a pleasantly soporific feel to it.

One of the factors contributing to 4's sleepy vibe is the chantlike quality of many of the songs. The cover of Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood" sets the tone at the beginning of the album, and "Witchi Tai To", bonus track "Poly High" (by Harry Nilsson) and two Templeton-Scoppettone originals in the album's second half have this kind of sleepy, repetitive sound as well. My favorite is still "Witchi Tai To", which has a mesmerizing arrangement that slowly builds and thickens with repetition. I love the jingling bells that are high in the mix, adding a contrasting sound to the peyote-smeared chanting underneath. It's a little like the sound palette the Animal Collective has been working with lately, actually.

"Witchi Tai To" by Harpers Bizarre

We Love the Velvet Underground: "Several Girls Galore" by My Bloody Valentine

Illustration from a programme of Le Theatre Libre, printed in Les Menus & Programmes Illustres, 1898

I'm not sure how to pinpoint the Velvet Underground's influence in the music of My Bloody Valentine, particularly in the case of their Loveless album, which is famous for sounding different from everything recorded previously or since. But there is some evidence in My Bloody Valentine's first full-length, 1988's Isn't Anything, that there really IS a straight line you can draw from the Velvet Underground to My Bloody Valentine, and this line goes directly through the Jesus & Mary Chain. My favorite song from the album, "Several Girls Galore", has been called a "cubist take" on the Jesus & Mary Chain by Uncut's David Stubbs. And I can see that, but I also think I can see past that to the Velvet Underground influence underneath that. There's some "Venus In Furs" feeling in the drone of "Several Girls Galore", and Belinda Butcher's blank chanteuse approach to the vocal brings Nico to mind.

"Several Girls Galore" by My Bloody Valentine

In Stores Now: The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

Cover illustration of John Bull magazine, November 6, 1954

Have you heard that there's a new album from Arcade Fire? It's only the #1 RECORD IN AMERICA THIS WEEK! I'm pretty psyched about this for reasons that may be obvious if you've been following Wires and Waves for a while - I've been on a big Merge Records kick this year. I read The Story of Merge Records this year, and I've been collecting various releases from the label's back catalog as well as purchasing their various new releases. Merge is easily my favorite label these days, and so I'm ecstatic to see them release an album that shot straight to the top of the pop charts. So I'm easily predisposed to give The Suburbs a free pass, but it also helps that I'm a fan of the band.

Arcade Fire has followed the baroque assault of Funeral and the dark bombast of Neon Bible with an ambling marathon of an album that is easily their longest to date (sixteen tracks that run over an hour). For this reason, The Suburbs doesn't have the immediate impact of its predecessors, although I definitely think it's a stronger release overall than Neon Bible. It doesn't help that the sprawling Suburbs takes a while to get some real momentum going. The album starts with three midtempo numbers that, to date, have not made much of an impact on me - the second track, "Ready to Start", is the best of the three and would be a standout track if not sandwiched between two songs that do the same thing but not as well. After this weak start, though, the album picks up with a string of seven excellent songs that rival anything the band has done. This run peaks with the two-part "suite" of "Half Light I" and "Half Light II (No Celebration)" - these two connected songs deliver on the ambition and promise of The Suburbs.

The album's last third is a deflating downhill slide, with the exception of the towering "The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)", my favorite track on the record. It's an easy song for me to like because it sounds like ABBA circa Super Trouper/The Visitors, and it has a bouncing disco sound that plays at the fringes of the album's established palette and gives the record one last "hurrah". I'm usually a "more is better" guy, but I honestly think I'd like The Suburbs better if it was a couple tracks shorter. There's been a lot of talk about the sophomoric lyrics of The Suburbs, but they don't bother me - I see them as a decent allegorical hybrid of the youthful exploration of Funeral and the overpowering politics of Neon Bible. The album is a mixed bag, but it's the number one album in America, and who am I to argue with the pop charts? The kids have spoken.

"The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" by Arcade Fire

I Saw a Movie: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Illustration from The Circus Procession by the McLoughlin Bros. of N.Y., 1888

I can't say I'm shocked that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World had an underwhelming opening box office, in spite of the excellent reviews it received. It has a several strikes against it. Director Edgar Wright has two cult favorites under his belt, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but has not had a big hit movie. The film's title character is played by Michael Cera, best known for his lightweight, teenage, coming-of-age films. The film is based on a series of Canadian graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley - they're best known for their mix of romantic angst, indie-rock lyric-quoting, and video-game references. It's not a formula that says, "Box office boffo!"

I can also see why Scott Pilgrim vs. the World got a lot of good reviews, though. Wright smartly combines the pop-culture tropes of the graphic novels with his own kinetic style for a movie that never uses the same visual trick twice and never cuts from one scene to the next in a conventional manner. He pulls off the balance of comedy and action even better than he did in his last two films - Hot Fuzz in particular felt schizophrenic at times, and Scott Pilgrim never does that. The script pulls out the best material of the six graphic novels (which I liked but didn't love) and makes the unlikely plot structure of six big fight scenes work where it seems like it shouldn't. The solid ensemble cast works hard to recreate the circle-of-friends feel of the books, with Kieran Culkin and Ellen Wong providing the best performances as Scott Pilgrim's gay friend and teenage girlfriend/stalker.

For me, though, the film's two leads are a big hole in the middle of the movie. I wasn't expecting much from Ramona Flowers, as O'Malley's source material doesn't give the character much depth, but - man! - did May Elizabeth Winstead look good standing around. On the other hand, I was surprisingly let down by Michael Cera - he made some of the great Scott Pilgrim lines from the books come to life, but he lost me when he started kicking butt. Something about that Raggedy-Andy hair and weak chin didn't work for me when the movie kicked into high gear.

I hope, though, that the good buzz around Scott Pilgrim vs. the World continues to build, because I think there's a pretty big group of people that would enjoy this movie but are shying away from it because of the whole Nintendo/Canada/indie-rock thing. Edgar Wright's very distinctive style will grate on some people (especially the over-40 set), but Scott Pilgrim has at least 120 great visual and verbal gags, and you only really have to laugh at about a third of them to come away from the movie satisfied.

"Pilgrim's Progress" by Procol Harum

In Stores Now: Sometimes You've Gotta Fight to Get a Bit of Peace by the Cocker Spaniels

Illustration from patriotic postal cover titled "Poland Fights On!", 1944

The last we heard from Sean Padilla (aka the Cocker Spaniels), he was telling us how it felt to be "The Only Black Guy at the Indie-Rock Show" on his last album Withstand the Whatnot. That was 2004. But Padilla hasn't been slacking since then - his work on the new album Sometimes You've Got to Fight to Get a Bit of Peace has been ongoing since 2005, and the home-recorded songs tell the story of his life over the last half decade.

Sometimes You've Got to Fight... has all the things that I like about Padilla as an artist. His distinctive voice - a high, squeaky tenor - can be an issue at first, but I've grown to like it over time, and it certainly gives his songs their own flavor. The biggest draw for me with the Cocker Spaniels songs, though, is their mix of musical influences. Padilla openly acknowledges his debts to Stevie Wonder and Prince, but his music is a more complex mix of classic soul and modern indie-rock sounds. I particularly like the songs where these influences collide head-on, like the sex ballad "Practice Makes Perfect", where wobbly shoegaze guitars meet a slinky lovesexy melody. Over 18 songs and a full hour, Padilla goes from electronic funk ("Touch My Hair") to British-Invasion pop ("Take the L") to acoustic balladry ("Postcard from Exile"). All these approaches are captured with clean, poppy arrangements (including embellishments like horns, bells, and strings) that belie their home-recorded origins.

My big issue with the Cocker Spaniels continues to be with Padilla's intensely personal lyrics. His songs address specific episodes in his life in very literal terms, with an awkward earnestness that underscores his lack of maturity and undercuts his attempts at corny humor. We learn in unpleasantly graphic detail that Padilla has had issues with kidney stones ("Small Stone"), mooching off family members ("Help & Hassle"), and keeping jobs ("The Overeducated Underclass" and "Two Weeks' Notice"). Things become particularly awkward when he addresses a specific individual in intimate terms, whether he's chiding his under-achieving cousin in "Cousin Ben" or confessing platonic love for his little brother ("Postcard from Exile") and good friends ("Bromance on 29th" - that title alone sets my teeth on edge.)

Padilla's songs about girlfriends fare much better because they have some bite to offset the goopy, straightforward sentimentality. The five girl-centric songs on the album are my favorites, the best being the acerbic "Schadenfreude". It's uncharacteristically harsh for a Cocker Spaniels song, but this actually makes it more fun. David Lobel provides nice horn accents to a light-funk arrangement, and Padilla pulls off one of the album's biggest laughs with the line, "Don't you think it's a big unfair to bounce without a care just 'cause I hate Silverchair?" Touche, Sean! Sometimes You've Got to Fight... is available through the Cocker Spaniels website.

"Schadenfreude" by the Cocker Spaniels

Title Fight: "The Hook"

Advertising card for Powder Monkey by Brooke, Benjamin, and Co., c. 1930

So we've got two indie-rock songs called "The Hook". The first comes from the debut album by Grant Lee Buffalo - the album was called Fuzzy, and to this day I think of it as the album that taught me an important lesson: Don't trust music recommendations from Michael Stipe. Fuzzy was an album I never really connected with, but for some reason I ended up owning all four Grant Lee Buffalo albums - two of them I still like quite a bit. The strongest song on Fuzzy was "The Hook", a jangly, acoustic number with a slippery melody that made the most of Grant-Lee Phillips' sweet drawl. Also, unlike many of the other songs on Fuzzy, "The Hook" had a decent chorus hook. You know when it arrives because Phillips helps out by saying, "This is the hook!"

The eponymous post-Pavement album from Stephen Malkmus, on the other hand, is an album I liked right away and still enjoy. But, where Grant Lee Buffalo's "The Hook" was the bright spot on a spotty album, Malkmus's "The Hook" is a lone clunker in a set of great tunes. It's just SO goofy - the honking horns and cowbell on the intro make me wince every time. Malkmus delivers a talk-sung lyric that is too straight-forward to play to his strengths, and, as the song has no chorus (no "hook"!), there's little but the lyric to focus on. It tries to sound tough, but it comes across like a children's-story narrative. And what's up with that "Bop-pow!" exclamation Malkmus squeaks out as the song ends?

Everything about the song grates on me, but I have to admit that I have more fondness for a grating song from a great album and a great song from an album that MIchael Stipe tricked me into buying.

Winner: STEPHEN MALKMUS

"The Hook" by Grant Lee Buffalo

"The Hook" by Stephen Malkmus

Chris Dedrick (1947 - 2010)

Image titled "Glenn Orbit Flight" from LIFE magazine, 1962

Chris Dedrick was the leader of the New York sibling pop group the Free Design in the 1960s. The Free Design didn't have any big hits, even though they put out a string of excellent pop albums with famous producer Enoch Light, but there was a resurgence of interest in the band's sound in the last decade or so. When their albums were re-released by Light in the Attic Records starting in 2003, I picked them up on a hunch, never having heard the band. The Free Design made an immediate and lasting impact on me with their jazzy but innocent pop songs, bolstered by Enoch Light's immaculate production. I blame the Free Design for my continuing obsession with 60s vocal pop and sunshine pop in particular - in the last week, I've picked up albums by Jan & Dean, Harpers Bizarre, the Mojo Men, and Chad & Jeremy - groups I wouldn't have gotten into without the music of Chris Dedrick.

But nothing else is quite like the music of the Free Design. Chris Dedrick was the group's main composer, arranging clever melodies and intricate harmonies for his siblings to sing. The youthful themes, kookiness, and Christian bent of his lyrics gave the band a unique perspective as well - songs like "Kites Are Fun", "Daniel Dolphin", "You Could Be Born Again", and "Close Your Mouth (It's Christmas)" come from a unique place, perhaps a reflection of a family culture that the close-knit Dedrick siblings had created together. By the time that the Free Design parted ways in 1972, Chris Dedrick had relocated to Canada, where he continued to work in music, eventually becoming an award-winning composer of film and TV scores. Among his best work is the score to Guy Maddin's excellent movie The Saddest Music in the World.

Today, Dedrick's influence can be heard in the music of groups from the Super Furry Animals to Stereolab, and his music can be heard in a variety of locales the band never would have dreamed of in 1967 - for example, the children's show Yo Gabba Gabba (a favorite at my house) has featured several different Free Design songs. The Free Design CDs are mostly out of print at this point, but Light in the Attic Records has them on LP, and high-quality downloads are readily available as well. They are worth tracking down. Dedrick was 63 when he passed away last week at his home in Canada.

"The Proper Ornaments" by the Free Design

In Stores Now: Mines by Menomena

Cover Illustration of the novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie, 1965

When I first heard about Portland band Menomena, everything about them seemed so interesting. They had a debut album called i am the fun blame monster!, a phrase that is also an anagram for "Menomena's first album". And the album was sold in the form of a flip-book! The band wrote songs using a sampling software that they wrote themselves, weaving snippets together on a computer and then teaching themselves to play the resulting composition as a live band. They augmented their standard rock trio setup with baritone saxophone and three distinct singing voices. Basically, I was having difficulty at the time distinguishing between "interesting" and "gimmicky", a problem I still struggle with today.

Somewhere between the release of the band's 2007 album Friend or Foe, and their new one, Mines, Menomena stopped seeming so gimmicky. Is that why I'm having trouble getting into their new album? Or is it because they've finally made an album that is too opaque for me to sink my teeth into? Mines is a great-sounding album, but I have no idea what it's about. The minimalist sleeve is composed almost entirely of a photo of statuary in the forest, and the songs have cryptic titles like "Taos", "Bote", and "Intil". I expect this level of crypticness from some bands, but in the past I've always felt I had some idea what Menomena was doing - this time around, I feel stymied.

Maybe I just need to spend more time with Mines (although I wouldn't be trying to write about the album if I hadn't already given it a good half-dozen listens). I hesitate to say that the songs on Mines are weaker than their past work - when I listen to them one at a time, they still show the unique composition style the band has always had, and there are plenty of solid hooks. The songs just don't always add up to something bigger. Some of the album's songs show a lot of potential to grow on me, though - "Five Little Rooms", for instance, is vintage Menomena, with a great bari-sax part, layers of piano and percussion, and a creepy, psychosexual lyric.

"Five Little Rooms" by Menomena

I Saw a Movie: Winter's Bone (2010)

Illustration from Vance County N.C. Population and Economy booklet, February, 1967

The Sundance Film Festival is fun and everything, but you never end up seeing the movies you should be seeing. So you end up seeing one of the better shows that played at the festival six months later and think, "You mean I could have seen THIS at Sundance instead of that crappy movie The Romantics?!?" And Winter's Bone is the kind of movie I want to see at a film festival - an adaptation of a less-than-well-known novel with a relatively unknown lead and an original concept.

Winter's Bone takes place in the Missouri Ozarks (the setting of many of Daniel Woodrell's stories) - the movie's central figure is an unassuming teen aged girl named Ree. She lives in the woods, where she looks after her mentally unwell mother and two younger siblings. Her father has evidently not been much of a presence in the home - engaged in a variety of unsavory activities (like cooking meth), he's often gone for long stretches. After a long absence, though, Ree learns that he has put the family house up as collateral on a bond and subsequently skipped bail. Faced with losing her home, Ree has no choice but to find her father by going from one shady shotgun shack to another, trudging through the cold woods and questioning a variety of hillbilly criminals. Winter's Bone is a re-contextualized noir film set in an unlikely setting that has a specific set of social codes, which the audience must suss out by reference - in a way, it's reminiscent of Brick, another movie classified as teenage noir.

Winter's Bone hangs on the performance of Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Ree, and I think she pulls it off admirably - the genre tropes underpinning the story can't maintain a viewer's interest alone, and the audience being able to get into Ree's head humanizes the movie a great deal. The supporting cast is excellent as well, featuring some solid character actors scuffed up to look like country folk - two Deadwood regulars, John Hawkes and Garret Dillahunt are naturals for this material, and Hawkes' turn as Ree's uncle Teardrop comes close to stealing the show. Cheryl Lee and the woman who played the daytime prostitute on My Name Is Earl also make solid contributions. The directing is good and only borders on the self-consciously arty for a brief B&W dream sequence, and the naturalistic dialogue didn't come across as stilted to me at all. Most of the dialogue is straight out of the novel, but locals brought in to play small roles get to do some improvisational stuff, including an excellent scene where Ree is questioned by an earnest, real-life Army recruiter.

I didn't notice it until after the fact, but Winter's Bone is, for the most part, surprisingly low-key emotionally. Ree's struggle is desperate enough that it should make the viewer ache with sympathy, but the tension is kept at a very low simmer. I think, though, that I prefer the low-key suspense and subtly grim atmosphere to the more emotionally-charged, histrionic route they could have gone with this material. Notwithstanding some genre window-dressing and emotional distance, Winter's Bone is worth seeing for its finely tuned performances and an engrossing setting.

"Dead Man's Will" by Iron & Wine

In Stores Now: Crazy For You by Best Coast

Drawing titled A Slicker by George Hand Wright, 1918

Crazy for You took me by surprise. I'd heard some of the Best Coast singles, and with a few exceptions ("Angsty", "That's the Way Boys Are") they hadn't made much of an impression. But I'm all about buying "summer" albums in the summertime, and it's hard to argue with an album that has a map of California, palm trees, a sunset, and a kitten on the cover. Crazy for You isn't the "second coming" or anything, but it exceeded my expectations in a couple ways.

I expected fuzzy, reverby girl-group pop on Crazy for You, and that's what the album delivers. What I hadn't anticipated was how much I like Beth Cosentino's voice on this record. The album opens with "Boyfriend", and my first thought was, "Wow - she sounds a lot more like Liz Phair than I expected." But the Phair comparison only works on that song and "Summer Mood" - she does a Jenny Lewis thing on most of the other songs (this was more in line with what I expected). On a couple songs, however, her voice bears a surprising resemblance to Neko Case - she's not a belter in the same league as Case, obviously, but there's a lot of similarity there. Listen to "Our Deal" or especially "Each and Everyday" and tell me I'm wrong.

The songwriting on Crazy for You is decent - the lyrics are what you'd expect from a young woman whose hobbies include pining for boys, playing with her kitten, and smoking large amounts of marijuana. The song structures are impressively ambitious in places, though, and this is hard to do with retro-pop without muddying things too much. Cosentino limits herself to a cool-sounding tempo change on a few songs, including the dirge-like intro to bonus track "When I'm With You" and the dreamy coda on "Each and Everyday". Crazy for You just barely breaks the 30-minute mark, but it easily accomplishes its mission in this time, setting a nice "summer mood" for chilling out and drinking lemonade.

"When I'm With You" by Best Coast

Probabilistic Jukebox: "1,000,000" by R.E.M.

Painting titled White Cat with Bee by Harry Beard, 1877

Didn't I say a while ago that I was going to start padding these Jukebox entries by listing the first 10 songs that pop up on Winamp when I press the old "Randomize List" button? Well, here's what I got last night.

1. R.E.M. - "1,000,000"
2. Superchunk - "With Bells On"
3. The Strapping Fieldhands - "Tickled with Olive Branch"
4. The Go! Team - "The Power Is On"
5. The Velvet Underground - "New Age"
6. The National - "The Thrilling of Claire"
7. Unrest - "Love to Know"
8. Belly - "Untogether"
9. The Awkward Stage - "T-Rexia Nervosa"
10. Jenny Toomey - "Cheat"

Not a bad mix of songs there, but I'm glad that and REM song came up first - there's been some chatter about REM on the popular music forums lately because of the recent re-release of Fables from the Reconstruction. Discussions about REM can get pretty heated - one post I read even asserted that it is not possible to be a fan of both REM's early albums and their later work. That's just a ludicrous overstatement, obviously, but maybe there's something to it.

Take "1,000,000", the first song on the second side of the band's first EP, Chronic Town. Michael Stipe's vocals on the song are mixed higher than the rest of the EP, so the lyrics are much clearer to the listener, but, apart from this anomaly, the song is miles away from what REM was doing later in their career. The song has a primal simplicity, with Stipe growling the verses over a single chord. There's not much to the chorus, either - a simple repeated hook and a little guitar jangle. Having listened to it a couple times in a row, I have to wonder why I like this song as much as I do - there's really not much to it. Even the bridge doesn't do much, and REM prided themselves on great bridges in their early songs (because Peter Buck couldn't play a decent guitar solo, allegedly).

This song represents the first stages of REM's songwriting and the ferociousness of their early live sound - by the time they recorded Murmur, the band had already moved on to more ambitious compositions and arrangements. But, if I had to choose, I would easily toss these very early songs aside aside in favor of the great albums they would record later in their career. The question of when they stopped recording great albums is a matter open to discussion, though.

"1,000,000" by R.E.M.

In Stores Now: Crushes - the Covers Mixtape by Mates of State

Cover illustration of American Motorcyclist magazine, May 1972

For the third time in recent weeks, I'm breaking my policy of only reviewing things I've purchased on CD/vinyl to highlight a "digital-only" release. This time it's Crushes - the Covers Mixtape, a stop-gap album of covers by Mates of State, issued for fun while they work on their next album. For me, this is just what the band needed to put out to show that they still know how to have fun - their last couple releases have missed some of the sizzle of their early records. And with a cover by the Mates of State, you know what you're going to get: boy-girl vocals, keyboard, drums, and some pop embellishments. The choice of covers is what determines the collection's quality, and Mates of State have collected a good mix of old and new material, some of which is right in their wheelhouse and some that is more of a stretch.

Only two of the songs on Crushes date back to the '70s or earlier - solid versions of Fleetwood Mac's "Second Hand News" and Vashti Bunyan's "17 Pink Sugar Elephants" are found in the album's strong second half, but most of the material on the album is much more recent. Covers of songs by the Mars Volta and Girls work much better than they should, and their excellent take on Dear Nora's "Roller Coaster Ride" may give that underrated band a little more exposure. But two songs right at the beginning of the collection don't work at all. Belle & Sebastian's "Sleep the Clock Around" is recreated note for note from the original and is the only track on the album that seems undercooked, and Death Cab's "Technicolor Girls" is just a weak song that's missing the key element on this album: fun.

Overall, though, Crushes is effortlessly smile-inducing and surprisingly polished for a less-than-serious release. Two songs on the album do a great job of showing the Mates' intention of wringing maximum joy from their source material. "Long Way Home", one of Tom Waits' lovely "orphan" songs, gets a "pep-squad cheer" makeover, and Daniel Johnston's fragile "True Love Will Find You in the End" is transformed into a pop powerhouse. Crushes does not aspire to "high art" status, but it's a great, summery record for driving around with the windows down.

"True Love Will Find You in the End" by Mates of State

It's New to Me: Alchemy by Richard Lloyd (1979)

Print titled "Fish Market (#73)" by Kawakami Sumio from the "100 Views of New Tokyo" series, 1930

New York art-rock combo Television broke up in 1978, severing the partnership of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, whose two-guitar attack was unlike anything in the history of rock. The following year, Richard Lloyd released a solo album called Alchemy, one of just a handful of albums he'd release in his post-Television career. I've heard that this somewhat obscure record is actually a "lost" power-pop classic, so I've had my eye out for a copy for some time. Is it possible that Lloyd stepped out of Verlaine's gaunt, gaunt shadow and delivered a single amazing pop album before scrapping his solo career in favor of session work?

The answer is "yes and no." Richard Lloyd isn't much of a singer, and he's not a consistently good lyricist either. But, on Alchemy, these leaden weaknesses are turned to gold (no pun intended!) by his excellent sense of melody and the strength of his guitar-playing. Lloyd tries a variety of pop sounds on Alchemy, including the Byrds-influenced jangle of "Should Have Known Better", new-wave keyboards of "Blue and Grey", and harmonica-inflected blues-pop on "Woman's Ways". He's caught a lot of flak for how the too-high chorus of the latter song exposes his inadequacy as a vocalist, but I actually find his strangled squeal quite charming.

My favorite song on the album is the title track, a chugging, mid-tempo number that shows how his subtle use of lead guitar turns a ho-hum structure and melody into a memorable pop song. If you like Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend and the guitar work that Lloyd contributed to that album, Alchemy is probably right up your alley.

"Alchemy" by Richard Lloyd

I Saw a Movie: Inception (2010)

Cover illustration of Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact comic book, Vol. 11 No. 5, November 3, 1955

Inception is an odd summer blockbuster, for sure. The success it continues to have (three weeks in the #1 spot at the US box office) indicates that it has a broader appeal than I would have guessed, but the movie's vociferous detractors show that its charm is hardly universal. A lot of people take pot-shots at the movie for being crass pulp masquerading as highbrow art, but I don't think director/writer/producer Christopher Nolan is interested in whether his story qualifies as "art". As he has done in the past with movies like Memento and The Prestige, he has created with Inception a cold but elegantly constructed narrative that has much more to do with "craft" than "art".

Nolan's craft is not going to hold everyone's interest - Inception is accused of being overlong, full of plot holes, and emotionally disconnected, and many viewers are simply going to see it that way. There's nothing to be done about it. For me, though, there's a lot to love in the crystalline structure of Nolan's narrative, the eerie parallelism in the recurring pieces of dialogue, and the mundane, architectural portrayal of his dreamscapes. The movie never seemed long to me - Nolan takes the requisite half-hour to set up the rules of his game, explaining to the viewer that we are working with an alternate present (or near past/future?) where a technology exists that allows people to share dreams. Initially used for military training, a dream-based form of corporate espionage called "extraction" soon came into prominence - this introduction prepares us for the heist format the movie follows, as well as the peculiar rules that the team will be playing by for the film's remaining two hours.

The nested narratives of Inception have their problems, especially in the case of the alpine retreat "dream level", but the masterful editing ties them together with the fun complication of each thread measuring time differently from its predecessor. The cast is well-chosen, with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hardy turning in excellent supporting performances, although it's hard to tell at times if Ellen Page (playing new extractor Ariadne) has been given a thankless role or if she's actually totally out of her depth. And at the center of this delicate machine, you have Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Cobb, the leader of our team of bandits. The emotional ballast of the movie falls squarely on him and his complicated relationship with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Predictably, their relationship is portrayed in a very cerebral way, but I found myself genuinely moved by a few key moments between the two - even in the absence of sentimentality, Nolan can use careful dialogue and some key visual elements (especially a closeup of a rattling railroad tie) to evoke emotion.

Nolan portrays dreams in such a mundane, unfanciful way that it is clear that he is not that interested in dreams themselves - Cobb and his team even refer to dreams as "levels", like the designed layouts found in a video game. Dreams are really a stand-in for storytelling itself, and Nolan uses the dreams of Inception to reveal some of his views on storytelling. Early in the film, Cobb tells Ariadne the keys to a good dream: 1) borrow bits and pieces from other places but never steal entire structures, 2) avoid messing with the rules too much because it will disorient the dreamer, and 3) plant ideas subtly so that the dreamer does not know when he/she is being manipulated. If you take a step back, this is a mission statement for Inception itself, a slightly skewed heist movie that references movies from Last Year at Marienbad to The Matrix and messes with the viewer's expectations in both obvious and non-obvious ways. That's pretty "meta" - you can gripe about Nolan's execution in making a good summer blockbuster, but it is hard to argue with his craft.

"Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" by the Decemberists