Illustration from The Home Decorator by Sherwin-Williams Co., 1936
I try to limit my non-music content to movie reviews here, but I wanted to write something about the passing of comedian Greg Giraldo. It might seem silly when acting legend Tony Curtis also passed away today, but I always felt a kind of kinship with Giraldo. I don't know if it's well-known that he was a Harvard law grad who had worked at Skadden, one of Wall Street's most powerful law firms. He dropped out of practicing law early on and started over as a stand-up comic. As a lawyer who has a general loathing for other lawyers, I could sympathize with this. I also sympathized with his love for his kids and his anger and befuddlement with the way the world works.
It's too bad that Giraldo is going to be remembered by many as an "insult comic" - he gained some popularity in recent years doing Comedy Central's Celebrity Roasts, but insulting people wasn't the strongest aspect of his comedy. I used to watch Giraldo when he was a regular on Colin Quinn's late-night political-comedy round-table Tough Crowd, and I was always impressed with his ability to debate using attorney-style repartee with well-written jokes sewn into it. One of the best exchanges is this exchange with Denis Leary over North Korea - the good stuff starts around the 3-minute mark. Giraldo was only 44 when he died yesterday of an overdose - I considered him a kindred angry spirit and I'll miss him.
Cover illustration of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1921
If you know what "As the World Falls Down" is, then you already know my dirty little secret - I own a copy of the official soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth, the mind-destroying Jim Henson/David Bowie/Jennifer Connolly Muppet fantasy from 1986. I don't think I'll ever fully understand Bowie's involvement in the project, writing five original songs for the score and playing the skintight-pantaloons-wearing goblin king Jareth. But I am glad that these five bizarre songs exist, especially the druggy ballad "As the World Falls Down", which I can't hear without picturing the nightmare masquerade scene it accompanies in the movie. A children's movie, I should emphasize.
The song is oddly overlong and features some great '80s production touches - I was surprised to find, though, that at one point Bowie contemplated releasing the song as a Christmas single. According to Wikipedia, the reasons for the single's cancellation are "still largely unknown." Really? I would think that the reasons are self-evident.
Advertisement for Lane Cedar Chests from LIFE magazine, May 2, 1955
After a decade-long hiatus, indie-punk originals Superchunk have come back with the best album anyone could expect them to deliver in 2010. Since the band decided to take an extended break to focus on business and family after 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, only frontman Mac McCaughan has kept writing music (as far as I can tell). Consequently, the feisty guitar-pop of Majesty Shredding comes across as the result of McCaughan luring the band back together with some new songs he wanted to record. The album has the focus of the band's McCaughan-driven early albums and less of the uneven, scattershot feel of the collaborative, later-period Superchunk.
Majesty Shredding is hardly a one-note album, though - Superchunk makes the most of the lessons they learned in the trial-and-error years of expanding and changing their original pop-punk sound. Album highlight "My Gap Feels Weird" is excellent off-kilter pop, "Fractures in Plaster" brings back some of that Foolish-era slow-burn drama, "Rosemarie" is muscular folk-pop, and album closer "Everything at Once" even flirts with a shoegaze sound. Little embellishments like the horn section on single "Digging for Something" and the layered vocals on the chorus of "Slow Drip" keep you actively listening and catching the album's abundance of great hooks.
Superchunk never sound "old" on Majesty Shredding, but the album's lyrics do a good job of evoking the energy of youth in a way that is equal parts in-the-moment and nostalgic for times past. The only time that the songs let me down at all is when they go to "simple and dumb", like the endless repetition of the title phrase in "Crossed Wires". The best indication of Superchunk having a great awareness of their strengths and how to play to them might be the use of the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle for the backing vocals on the mighty "Digging for Something". Darnielle's distinctive whine is not a natural choice for pop harmonizing, but his sharp tone complements McCaughan's own strained tenor to make the song's melody really pop. Check it out - it's probably my favorite single of the year so far.
Photo titled "A Rabbit Hutch at Hornchurch Convalescent Camp" from the Alexander Turnbull Library, c. 1918
I didn't see Ben Affleck's directing debut, 2007's Gone Baby Gone, but the most memorable line I heard about it was that it proved Ben Affleck could write and direct three quarters of a good movie. I guess the ending of that one was a mess, and early buzz I heard about The Town indicated that it might have the same problem. Having seen the movie, though, I'm happy to report that Affleck can apparently make about 7/8ths of a good movie. The Town has some minor issues, but it's an impressively moody and well-structured crime drama that balances the viewer's sympathies on a knife's edge.
I'll admit that I would have been more interested in a movie where Affleck cast himself as the creepy a-hole cop and put Jon Hamm in the role of the hunky armored-car thief. And that issue may have affected my enjoyment of The Town - the central romance of the movie seemed weak. Affleck gave a passable performance, but he never really made me interested in him as a person, and his kidnap-victim/love-interest Rebecca Hall was a weak-chinned wet spot where a strong female character should have been. The good news is that pretty much everyone else in the cast shone (shined?), with Hamm and The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner giving two of my favorite performances of this year. The other supporting roles were all solid - I especially enjoyed Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite, and (surprisingly!) Blake Lively in small but impactful roles.
The plot of The Town is nothing unique - it's a standard "lovable criminal tries to find a way out of the 'game' as the noose tightens" arc, but the script keeps things moving briskly and gives plenty of room for good performances and pithy dialogue. With two solid directing turns, Affleck has done a lot to absolve himself for his dark days as a rom-com lead. At this point, I need to go see Gone Baby Gone - it may have a messier third act than The Town, but I think that, for me, it will benefit from having a different Affleck in the lead role.
Detail of the cover of Pantomime magazine, February 11th, 1922
I'll admit that the Title Fights can't all be close races - I had a good one planned for today (Stephen Malkmus/Extra Glenns), but I'm going to do that one next week. This one is more like, "Why did this guy write a decent song and then give it a name that already belongs to a song that's un-mess-with-able?"
So why DID Andy Bopp, mastermind of the (terribly named but still quite good) power-pop band Myracle Brah, write a song called "Hearts on Fire"? Is it possible that he never heard the Gram Parsons-Emmylou Harris duet of that name from Parson's amazing '74 album Greivous Angel? It's unlikely, I think. Maybe the theory is this: invoking a legendary song can add some depth or something to a pretty-good song by connecting the two songs on some level.
Does it work on Myracle Brah's "Hearts on Fire"? The song is an acoustic ballad that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Parsons "Hearts on Fire" - the tempo is similar and the melody starts with a similar descending line. There's even a slide guitar solo! And he doesn't hide from the phrase "hearts on fire", either - it's repeated throughout the song. Overall, I think I'd have preferred the song if it had a different title, but I have to give Andy Bopp some credit for recording his "Hearts on Fire" in mono. The song was on Myracle Brah's 1999 album Plate Spinner, which is all recorded in mono and sounds quite good that way.
Cover illustration from the Penguin edition of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1965
49th Parallel is the sole eponymous album by Calgary-based garage-rockers the 49th Parallel, released on the strength of their Canadian-pop-chart hit "Twilight Woman", a piece of light psych-pop that was strong enough to make this band a blip on the "Canadian one-hit wonders of the '60s" list. The band's music is described in the Lion Productions reissue liner notes as "prairie punk", but I think that this is very misleading. Sure, they were from the prairies of western Canada, but their music is not really the forward-looking garage-punk of bands like the Sonics - it's a more predictable cross between blues-rock and psychedelic pop, but that doesn't mean it's bad.
49th Parallel is actually a really solid rock album, and the reissue benefits from including the band's early singles that led up to its release (a total of 11 bonus tracks!) The 49th Parallel started out doing rhythm-heavy garage rock - their debut single "Laborer" is a good example of this, although their second single "She Says" is an excellent but embarrassingly obvious Byrds ripoff. By the time they were assembling their LP, based on the success of the "Twilight Woman" single, they had a solid collection of garage-pop numbers built around Dean Abbott's malleable hard/soft vocal style, and buzzing guitar-and-organ-based arrangements. Because they had an affiliation with RCA through their label, they also had the ability to add horn and string embellishments to some songs (although the album manages to have an oddly lo-fi, budget/garage sound in spite of the big sound).
Highlights on this reissue include the above-mentioned "She Says" (although I always love Byrds ripoffs), the Sgt. Pepper's whimsy of "Lazerander Filchy", the horns-heavy freakbeat number "Eye To Eye", and the wah-wah guitar madness of "Close the Barn Door". Of course, "Twilight Woman" towers over everything else here, sounding like a very solid early Badfinger single, and I should probably make that the "taster" track. However, I can't resist posting my favorite 40th Parallel song, the totally weird "(The) Magician" - with an ominous strings-and-organ intro, it's a great example of psych-pop melodrama, kind of like the Association in one of their more theatrical moments. It's probably the most ambitious thing the band did, and it only works because Abbott nails the vocal and arranger Don Hockett (who also wrote the track) brings in that french horn at just the right time.
Detail of the movie poster for The Lady From Shanghai, 1947
I wonder if REM gets too much credit for the resurgence of interest in the Velvet Underground that started in the '80s. Music writer Gina Arnold once said that she'd heard of the Velvet Underground before REM, but she listened to them because of REM. And it makes sense - in the early days, guitarist Peter Buck shaped much of the band's sound, and he was a notoriously snobby record store clerk at the time. It's no surprise that he was listening to Big Star, the Velvets, and the Byrds. In its early days, the band covered "There She Goes Again" for the "Radio Free Europe" single - "Pale Blue Eyes" was the b-side to "So. Central Rain", and "Femme Fatale" was on the flip-side of the "Superman" single.
But I find it's much harder to pin down the VU elements in the REM sound than it is to spot the Byrds influence (hello jangle!) or the big Big Star choruses. The one REM song that always brings the Velvet Underground to mind for me is Reckoning's "Time After Time (AnnElise)", a song possibly best known for being Stephen Malkmus's "least favorite song". "Time After Time" is not an obvious VU rip-off - the layered percussion that creates much of the song's appeal is more complicated than anything Mo Tucker pulled off, but Bill Berry manages to retain some of that primal, tribal-pounding feel. The droney, midtempo melody falls somewhere between "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties", and the vaguely Eastern dissonance in the Buck's slow-strummed guitar chords has a Sterling Morrison feel. I don't know what Malkmus is on about - this song is clearly better than "Camera".
Illustration from a catalog for American Playground Device Co., 1935
I purchased If Wishes Were Horses under false pretenses. I got Blueboy confused with Ballboy, a Scottish band that people put in the "Recommended if You Like Belle & Sebastian" file. It looked like a Belle & Sebastian kind of thing - originally released on Sarah Records, the album had a pastel-tinted cover photo and song titles like "A Gentle Sigh" and "Fondette". As it turns out, Blueboy is also a Belle & Sebastian-esque group, but they were early-'90s progenitors of the B&S indie-pop sound (where Ballboy were progeny of the late-'90s Scottish twee-splosion). So I kind of got what I was looking for, in a roundabout way.
If Wishes Were Horses was Blueboy's 1992 full-length debut, built around the songs of Reading, UK singer Keith Girdler and guitarist Paul Stewart. The recent reissue of the album includes eleven (!) bonus tracks, covering the four singles issued before and after the LP came out. It's good that the singles tracks are included because I think that I would have been underwhelmed by If Wishes Were Horses as a standalone eight-song album. It has three top-notch jangle-pop numbers, a couple low-key acoustic tracks with a nice bossa-nova sound, and a few tracks that are quite forgettable. Girdler's wispy vocals took some getting used to - it helps a lot to have cellist-vocalist Gemma Townlet take some of the leads and provide doubled vocals on the album's big "pop" moments, like the chorus of "Sea Horses", the album's strongest track. But too much of the original Wishes album is just pleasant background music without much substance.
Taken together, the pre- and post-Wishes singles make a more enjoyable full-length by themselves, with tracks like "Meet Johnny Rave" and "A Gentle Sigh" showing a more energetic and engaging side of the band. The band's very first single, "Clearer", shows that the band started out by simply aping some of the better moves of the Field Mice, but they developed quickly. "Popkiss", their second single sounds fully formed (and predates Wishes by several months) - it has a great, chiming guitar sound and sweeps in and out to augment a feather-light but pleasant melody. The later singles that round out the collection are just as good, making me think that Blueboy's second LP, Unisex, may be more my cup of tea. It's worth noting that Blueboy frontman Keith Girdler passed away from cancer a couple years ago (he was still quite young I think) - I can't help but think of that when I hear some of the more wistful and delicate songs on If Wishes Were Horses.
Czechoslovakian matchbook label promoting fire protection, 1970
Every time the Thermals come out with a new record, I hope that it will blow me away completely as the obvious "album of the year". Of course, what I really want is a time machine that allows me to go back to 2006 and start this blog a couple years early for the sole purpose of prematurely hailing the Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine as the best album of the decade. I love that album a lot, but I need to come to grips with the fact that the Thermals aren't going to recreate it, and I actually don't really want them to. What they're doing now is just as interesting, if it doesn't hit quite as hard as the "peak vitriol" the band was working with in 2006. After albums about politics, religion, and death, the Thermals (a band built around the relationship between guitarist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Foster) has finally made a "relationship" record.
Hutch and Kathy (as they called themselves when they were performing as a pre-Thermals twee-acoustic duo) are a cute couple, but Personal Life is NOT a cutesy record. The songs have titles like "I Don't Believe You" and "Never Listen to Me", making it seem at times like a breakup record, but the theme of the record seems to be the dark corners that exist in functioning (or dysfunctioning) relationships. These songs are desperate, creepy love songs of people clinging to each other - manipulation, mind games, and weird power dynamics are in the spotlight. It makes Personal Life a much more interesting listen than a we're-happy-and-in-love album, but it's also quite dark - in a way, it's more depressing than 2009's Now We Can See, which was composed solely of 11 songs about death.
Personal Life has a distinctive sound that continues to move away from the all-out assault of the first three Thermals records, favoring Spoon-style minimalist, rhythm-heavy rock structures. Foster's bass is the most powerful sound on the record, with the guitar embellishing the arrangements with power chords and baritone-range solos for variety. Harris's vocals are strong and doubled with Foster's on the best tracks, like "Never Listen to Me". Like most of the tracks on Personal Life, the second single from the record is best described as "deceptively simple", making a lot out of a few elements. It's not a balls-to-the-wall barn-burner, but there's a lot of power in its chugging rhythm and simmering, insistent vocal line.
Like most just-for-fun side projects that turn into main gigs, the Thermals seem like they should have painted themselves into a corner ages ago (around the time of The Body, the Blood, the Machine), but they're finding ways to make each album a compelling, theme-specific work.
Photo by Gjon Mili from LIFE magazine's "Fall Fashions", 1949
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to New Jersey indie-rockers the Wrens was their 2003 paean to middle age and failure, the now-legendary The Meadowlands. Like a lot of people, I'm sure, I was so impressed with this record that I worked my way backward through the two previous Wrens albums. Secaucus made sense to me as a precursor to The Meadowlands - it was the "anger" stage of grief to Meadowlands' "resignation" stage. The Wrens' debut record, Silver took me by surprise, though - I guess I had trouble thinking of these sad "grown-up" men as the sneering punks they'd been a decade earlier. The mix of sinewy Pixies guitar leads and shoegaze feedback washes wasn't totally unexpected, but the harsh, listener-unfriendly production and 23-song length work in combination to make Silver a long, weird trip.
The Wrens describe their own debut in less-than-flattering but pretty funny terms on their website, but I think they undersell Silver a little. There are more than two good songs on the record - a good half-dozen of the songs are quite good, and there are another dozen that have excellent parts mixed with some amateur execution. "Adanoi" is one of the more interesting songs on the record, with very direct references to the album's religious themes and a good mix of angry energy and melodicism. One of the song's lines is actually taken from a Hebrew mealtime prayer, so I'm guessing that the track's title is an intentional misspelling of the word "adonai". Compared to the band's later work, though, even the best tracks from Silver sound a little half-baked unless they fall right in your wheelhouse - as the band's guitarist Charles Bissell says, "Everyone should make a first record. Except us."
Frontispiece from Children's Sayings by William Canton, 1900
I'm not writing about the new Light Footwork record in a timely fashion - National Historic Landmarks came out in the spring, but I didn't even know it existed until recently. That's the first problem - there are a lot of great bands that fly under the radar of most music publications and blogs, especially ones like the Light Footwork, who self-release their music. You have to proactively make the rounds of these bands' websites at regular intervals to see if they have something new - if you don't do that, you miss it. So it was about a month ago that I found out about National Historic Landmarks - I ordered it right away, which brings us to the second delay involved here. I've listened to this album over a dozen times, and I'm still not sure what to think of it. I know I like it, but I'm not sure how to talk about it.
The Light Footwork's first album, 2005's One State Two State, had most of the ingredients I like in an indie-pop album - strong male and female vocalists, a lyrical loquaciousness, and a good blend of musical influences. Becca Wilhelm's conversational vocal style and the songs' ambitious-but-accessible structures were the big selling points for me. In the half-decade between the two LPs, not that much has changed in the Light Footwork formula, but National Historic Landmarks seems less accessible than the debut somehow. It's more substantive, I think, but it's taking me a while to dig into it. The songs are built around the concept of actual historical landmarks and have names like "Danger Cave", "Shack Mountain", and "Bruton Parish Church", but this concept is more of a jumping-off point than a unifying theme. The songs themselves are all over the place.
This may be why National Historic Landmarks takes so long to sink in - for one thing, the vocals are heavily treated with effect this time around, making the dense lyrics harder to absorb. Wilhelm and partner Jay Underwood both play a variety of instruments on the record, supplemented by Willis Thompson on drums and a few guest players, and this gives the arrangements a lot of variety. The song structures don't really push the songs' hooks to the forefront, but the melodies are smart and some of the songs made an immediate impression. The appropriately Modest-Mousey "Oregon Trail Ruts" and the somberness of "The Hermitage" are early favorites of mine, although the best track on the record is probably "Carlsbad Irrigation Project", which really captures the Light Footwork's best assets on display. Just watch out for the song's groan-inducing final line - *spoiler alert* - it involves the phrase "Carlsbad / Carls-worse!"
"Carlsbad Irrigation Project" by the Light Footwork
Light in the Attic Records recently released an excellent reissue of the 1969 love-affair LP of British actress Jane Birkin and professional French lecher Serge Gainsbourg, and I've been "giving it a lot of spins", as the kids say. The origin of the Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg album is pretty interesting - the couple met on a movie set and fell madly in love, and Gainsbourg asked Birkin to record a duet with him. The song was the sexy "Je T'aime", which Gainsbourg had recorded the previous year as a duet with Brigitte Bardot (he was having a brief fling with her at the time). The re-recording was made, and Gainsbourg loved it, but his record label, Philips, was concerned about Birkin's sighing and moaning during the song's second half. Supposedly, the president of the label said the couple had to record ten more songs to release with "Je T'aime" because he was willing to lose his job over a scandalous album, not a scandalous single.
Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg doesn't sound like a hastily thrown-together filler LP, though - Gainsbourg had a deep bag of tricks to dip into. Birkin was a very amateur chanteuse at this time, however, and the tracks he gave her to sing are on the thin and gimmicky side. The goofy "Orang Outan" and old-timey novelty "18-39" are the album's weakest tracks, although "Jane B" (a self-description by Birkin set to a Chopin tune) and the sweet ballad "Le Canari Sur Le Balcon" are quite nice.
Gainsbourg re-purposed some of his previous compositions for the Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg project as well, singing a song he wrote for Francoise Hardy ("L'Anamour") and one he wrote for France Gall ("Les Sucettes", a song perverted enough to scar Gall's career for years). His rich voice also gives some great gravitas to the ballads "Sous Le Soleil Exactement" and "Manon", and his other duet with Birkin on the album (the also kinda-scandalous "69 Annee Erotique") is almost as good as "Je T'aime". The whole LP, though, orbits around that first duet, and I admit that it's a compelling track, even though I'm not even remotely scandalized by Birkin's purring. To be honest, the little-girl/lollipop fantasy of "Les Sucettes" is much more disturbing, but "Je T'aime" created a classic pop-music scandal in 1969, and I'm nothing if not a respecter of the classics.
"Je T'aime ... Moi Non Plus" by Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin
Cover illustration of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1921
I hit the ol' random play button on Winamp looking for a "Probabilistic Jukebox" song, but this Carpenters track popped up, and I immediately found myself asking two questions: 1) Why did I rip this track to my hard drive? and 2) Why did this song get recorded in the first place? I understand that, in 1974, the Carpenters were best known for their soppy ballads (which I unashamedly love!) and wanted to show that they could do something upbeat and fun. But I don't understand why they thought that this lifeless reproduction of the Marvelettes' 1961 hit was the solution to their problem.
But what do I know? This cover turned out to be one of their biggest worldwide hits, in spite of Richard Carpenter's airless arrangement, Karen's emotionless vocal, and a terrible TERRIBLE saxophone solo. This "Please Mr. Postman" has none of the fun of the Marvelettes original or the fierceness of the Beatles' '63 version. Karen's drumming has some bounce to it, even if it doesn't swing, and the guitar solo (probably by Tony Peluso or Tim May) ends the song nicely, but the song is pretty pointless overall. "Please Mr. Postman" was released as a single in '74 and then on the album Horizon in '75 - it was the Carpenters' last #1 on the US pop charts, which is kind of sad as it is inferior to some of the better singles they had afterward (like "Only Yesterday" and "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft").
"Neue Liebeslieder Walzer, op. 65a" with handwritten notes by Johannes Brahms, 1877
The Bulldog Breed was one of many East London psych-rock bands that existed briefly in the late '60s, as a community of musicians collaborated under a variety of names. Their best-known song is probably "Portcullis Gate", the b-side of a standalone single released in advance of their only LP, 1969's Made in England. When I heard that song on Rubble Vol. 6, I made a mental note to see if I could find anything else by the Bulldog Breed - the song was a nice mix of freakbeat and psych-pop sounds, similar to my much-loved Wimple Winch, and I was curious to hear more.
So I picked up Lion Productions' rerelease of Made in England when I got the chance. The LP didn't live up to the expectations set by "Portcullis Gate", but it has some cool songs. The problem with Made in England is that the Bulldog Breed seem more interested in pursuing blues-rock and psych-pop as parallel styles, rather than mixing the two into something more interesting. Some of the bluesy numbers are cool, particularly the album's opening track "Paper Man", which is the album's natural single. "Silver" has some nice piano embellishments to go with a rote blues riff, and "I Flew" has a nice melody marred by lyrics like "Come down, cobra, come down - Disneyland is distraction!" But tracks like "Broomstick Ride" and "Reborn" have little to offer beyond repetitive riffage and pounding drums. The best freakbeat track on the LP may actually be the unfortunately-titled but hard-hitting instrumental "Top o' the Pops Cock?!?!".
The psych-pop numbers on Made in England, on the other hand, skew too much to the fey end of the spectrum, with dainty vocals and lots of harpsichord. Of these, "Eileen's Haberdashery Store" and "Dougal" are the greatest offenders, but the former has some good hooks in it that make it worthwhile. "Folder Men" is pretty fun as well, with a mile-a-minute delivery of its wordy verses over some nice banana-fingers piano. Interestingly, the best track on the Made in England reissue is a bonus track, the A-side to the "Portcullis Gate" single. "Halo in My Hair" has an early-Pink-Floyd sound, but it has the mix of hard-psych and soft-psych that I was hoping to hear from the Bulldog Breed. It looks like they may have blown their two great ideas on their first single and followed it with a not-as-great LP before moving on to other projects.
Two songs named after a 1956 play by John Osborne, recorded about a year apart. David Bowie's "Look Back in Anger" was recorded for 1979's Lodger, the third of his Brian-Eno-produced Berlin Trilogy. A year later, UK "part-time punks" the Television Personalities put a song of the same name as the closing track on their debut record, And Don't the Kids Just Love It. In fact, the Personalities' title could be a reference to Bowie and not Osborne, considering the album's mix of literary and pop-culture references. These are both good songs, and I've felt bad that I've used cop-out judgments in recent Title Fights ("I'm sad that the Shins broke up! You lose [frowny face]!"), so I'm going to rate these two by some concrete but still totally subjective criteria.
MUSIC: Bowie's "Look Back in Anger", like many of the songs on Lodger gives a co-writing credit to producer Brian Eno, and the *sounds* of the song are very Eno, with the propulsive,layered production and chanted backing vocals. I like the stuttering intro, and the guitar solo by Carlos Alomar is nice, but the there's not quite enough going on in the melody for me. The Television Personalities song on the other hand, is a lean slice of lo-fi pop, with plenty of tape hiss and a single blaring rhythm guitar riff. In this case, the melody's simplicity works in its favor, highlighting a couple nice hooks, and putting the emphasis on the song's sentimentality.
WORDS: There's a lot to be said for Dan Treacy's simple, emotive lines in the Television Personalities' "Look Back in Anger", but the contrast between the simpering apologizing of the verse and the resentment in the chorus doesn't really work for me - I'm not really buying Treacy's anger, for one thing. On the other hand, Bowie's lyric about a visitation from the angel of death has several memorable lines, my favorite being, "The speaker was an angel - he coughed and shook his crumpled wings." The borrowed title phrase is also worked into the song in a more poetic fashion, so I think Bowie's ahead on points in this category.
It's a pretty close race, really - maybe Oasis is right and we should just call the whole thing off. Because,you see, Oasis had a song called... oh, never mind. When it comes down to it, the Television Personalities "Look Back in Anger" is easier to like even if it's not as admirable a composition as the Bowie song - it's the one that I am more eager to listen to. Also, it's a great title for an album-closing track, so the Television Personalities get bonus points for that as well!
Winner: THE TELEVISION PERSONALITIES
"Look Back in Anger" by David Bowie
"Look Back in Anger" by the Television Personalities
Detail of the cover illustration of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1974
The Peanut Butter Conspiracy were one of the definitive "hippie-rock" bands of the late '60s - formed from the ashes of folk-rock band the Ashes in LA in '66, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy had singles that were actually called "It's a Happening Thing" and "Turn on a Friend (to the Good Life)". It doesn't get much more hippie-rock than that. Featuring two singer-songwriters, Alan Brackett and John Merrill, and a great lead vocalist named Sandi Robison, the band had a lot going for them: nice three-part harmonies, some inventive lead guitar sounds, and an unlimited supply of hippie lyrics about time, love, and flowers.
Living Dream is a collection of the best tracks from the Conspiracy's two best-known LPs, plus a couple random outtakes. In retrospect, maybe I should have just bought the Collectables' 2-fer CD that has both albums (The Peanut Butter Conspiracy Is Spreading and The Great Conspiracy) - Living Dream only covers half of the tracks from ...Is Spreading, but those six tracks are easily my favorites. Also, only one track from The Great Conspiracy is omitted, which also seems odd. Why leave off a song called "Invasion of the Poppy People"?!? It sounds awesome! Especially when they decided to include the track "Captain Sandwich", a decidedly un-awesome bit of filler.
The thing that strikes me most about Living Dream is how much I prefer one of the Conspiracy's songwriters to the other. Alan Brackett's more bombastic approach to hippie-rock is very Jefferson Airplane, and his song structures are often odd and ungainly. On the other hand, John Merrill's more melodic songs really appeal to me with their Byrds jangle and baroque touches. It's not that Brackett's songs are terrible - I was just surprised when I checked the CD booklet and found out that EVERY song I liked was by John Merrill. Brackett is seen as the band's main creative force, as he wrote their two best-known singles, but I think that John Merrill (with the production help of Gary Usher) may have been the band's secret weapon. Check out one of his best tracks, "Dark On You Now", from The Peanut Butter Conspiracy Is Spreading - it has a lovely lead vocal by Sandi Robison and the chorus melody is perfect hippie-rock goodness.
Photograph titled "Mr. Thomas Coleman's Anniversary" by Scurlock Studio, 1951
The Modern Lovers may be the quintessential "We Love the Velvet Underground" band, as the band's existence derives from and overlaps with the Velvet Underground in a variety of ways. Frontman Jonathan Richman moved to New York in 1969 in part because of his fascination with the Velvets, and he stayed with their manager for a while when he arrived in the city. John Cale produced the band's first demos. And then there's the undeniable influence of Lou Reed's singing style on Richman's vocals. But there's a subtler VU influence that can be found in other aspects of the Lovers' music, like Richman's willingness to blend ultra-cool subject matter with the totally uncool in his lyrics.
Where Reed's songwriting had songs about filth and drug addiction sitting next to twee-pop nursery rhymes like "After Hours" and "I'm Sticking With You", Richman mixed dark "relationship" material with decidedly un-punk material about "growing up" and "the good old days". Take a song like "Dignified & Old", for instance - Richman confronts this contradiction head-on in a song about the comfort of anticipating old age when being young and in love just sucks. He admits that his friends accuse him of contradicting himself, but this doesn't stop him from saying, "Hey kids! Someday we'll be dignified and old!"
Detail of a poster for The Ault & Wiborg Co., c. 1920
It may not seem like a big deal that I'm listening to Gary Numan, but it's kind of a big deal. Here's the thing - I hate "Cars". The Gary Numan song (also the Pixar film, but that's an unrelated issue). That song bugs me for reasons I've never been able to articulate properly - something about the chorus melody, I think. But I keep hearing about how great Gary Numan (and/or the Tubeway Army) is/are, and I've been eying Telekon for a while, so I decided to take the plunge. One great thing about Telekon is its cover art, with Numan's head floating in a black void accented with red stripes. The other thing here that's a big draw for me is Asperger Syndrome. I'm fascinated by this disorder in a general way, and Numan has made public statements about how it has affected his life, so I was interested to see how the disorder plays a role in his music.
Telekon is possibly the best musical portrayal of Asperger Syndrome committed to a fixed medium. Originally conceptualized as a science-fiction concept album about a man with telekinetic powers, the protagonist of this story evolved into a portrait of Numan himself, a man with a mind outside the norm, trying to make sense of his new-found fame. Songs that are clearly part of the original concept (like the title track and "I Dream of Wires") blend with songs sung nakedly from Numan's own point of view (like the excellent "Remind Me to Smile").
I like pretty much every song on Telekon, which is a relief to me because it means that my problem with "Cars" is not a problem with Numan's general approach to music. His plastic-android vocals and cutting-edge-at-the-time synth sounds might be difficult to swallow in large quantities, but he softens the blow here by mixing guitar, strings, and some excellent, icy piano into the arrangements. Of course, the version of the album I'm listening to also adds the two top-notch singles that Numan intentionally left off the album, "We Are Glass" and "I Die: You Die", and that also makes the album more listenable. However, my favorite part of the album is the quartet of introspective songs that ends Telekon: the analytical "I Dream of Wires", the ruminative "Remember I Was Vapor", the elegiac and despairing (and perfect) "Please Push No More", and the redemptive "The Joy Circuit".
Telekon is a portrait of Numan at his breaking point, overwhelmed by the popularity of The Pleasure Principle and the "Cars" single, and it's considered the last album of his peak period. I'm not a big "new wave" guy, so I'm not sure if I'll end up listening to this record often enough to justify tracking down Numan's other highly-regarded LPs, but Telekon is just what I was hoping it would be. It's a fascinating and intimate collection of songs about trying to understand the world, and it's got some surprisingly catchy moments for an album known for not yielding a hit single. "Remind Me to Smile", "This Wreckage" and "I'm an Agent", which may be my favorite track on the record, provide an uptempo counterpoint to the album's inward-looking moments.
Illustration titled "The Triplets" from W. Heath Robinson's Bill the Minder, 1912
Robert Pollard is on quite a roll lately - not only is he making some big waves with this fall's reunion tour of the classic Guided By Voices lineup, but he is also rolling out very strong albums on three different parallel tracks (while also managing a regular stream of collaborations and side projects). The Circus Devils albums are decent, but their experimental hard rock doesn't appeal to me as much as the progressive work of Pollard's solo albums and the fun-loving power-pop of Boston Spaceships. The difference between the two latter projects is in the motive of the primary collaborator. Todd Tobias, who produces the solo albums (as well as the Circus Devils records), is focused on taking Pollard's current perspective and ideas and translating them into music. The measured and mature (and borderline morose) Moses on a Snail, which came out earlier this summer, is the most recent fruit of this collaboration, and it is admirable that Pollard has a willing helper as he follows his capricious muse.
Former GBV bassist Chris Slusarenko, on the other hand, just wants to have fun. With Boston Spaceships, Pollard is nudged constantly back to his roots in pop/rock music, as well as the various peaks of his own storied career with Guided By Voices. Over the last two years, Slusarenko and Pollard (with the help of drummer John Moen and various guest players) have built a solid standalone discography of four LPs, the most recent being the brand-new Our Cubehouse Still Rocks - the title may be a Joyce quote, but it can be seen as a mission statement for the project as well. Cubehouse delivers the Boston Spaceships goods again, equaling the quality of the previous albums and taking a fun, new British-Invasion bent that is a perfect complement for Pollard's songwriting.
Slusraenko's formula is deceptively simple: two or three old GBV demos fleshed out into arena rock arrangements, a couple songs that hearken back to primetime GBV days, and several songs that put a new twist on Pollard's power-psych stylings or pay tribute to one of his influences. Cubehouse does all of these things well, and the album adds up to a sum of more than its parts through consistent execution and sequencing. Old Pollard melodies show up in the form of Suitcase demos "Fly Away (Terry Sez)", "Unshaven Bird" and the hard-rocking "Freedom Rings", and they blend well with the straightforward guitar pop of tracks like "Track Star" and the album's highlight "Come On Baby Grace" (which has some great guitar leads by GBV veteran Doug Gillard). Slusarenko carefully recreates the sound of GBV classic "Echoes Myron" on "John the Dwarf Wants to Become an Angel", and has some fun with pastiches of Ziggy Stardust ("Airwaves"), early Bee Gees ("Trick of the Telekinetic Newlyweds"), and Cheap Trick (the stunning album closer "In the Bathroom (Up 1/2 the Night").
Our Cubehouse Still Rocks is dominated by that classic British rock sound - the overall vibe is definitely mid-era Who circa Sell Out. Funnily, though, the one song that really grates for me is the full-fledged Who homage of "Bombadine" - it's all the Townsend/Entwhistle moves that bug me compressed into a two-minute burst. But this is the sole stinker in the bunch, and it blends in with the rest of the album's Who-tasticness. It's good to see Chris Slusarenko playing Bob's Peter Pan with his never-grow-old ethos, while Tobias plays inward-looking Jiminy Cricket on Pollard's solo albums. Together they are coaxing Pollard to make albums like Cubehouse, and they contain some of the freshest-sounding music of his whole career.
Illustration by Ratomir Ruvarac from Miodrag Borisavljevic's children's book Riverbanks of the Forest, 1961
I was thinking about Smokey Robinson (see my non-sequitors about him in yesterday's Sam Cook writeup), and I realized that I had mentioned one of my favorite "Why Does This Exist?" songs a while ago, a song called "It" by written Smokey Robinson. In 1959, Motown's Barry Gordy was releasing cheap rip-offs of novelty hits to get some quick cash, and he tasked up-and-comer Robinson to write a song like "The Flying Purple People Eater", which had been a hit in '58. This was several months before "Shop Around" broke as a hit, so Smokey was willing to take a break from the Miracles to record the song with fellow Miracle Ronnie White under the name Ron & Bill (Robinson's first name is William, apparently.)
The resulting song, "It", is surprisingly awesome - Robinson and White replicate the sound of the Everly Brothers over a calypso backing track, singing about a monster that showed up at Robinson's house in the middle of the night. After running away, the monster (called It) apparently called Robinson on the phone to sing him the song's wordless chorus. I like to imagine a world where "It" was a smash hit, and Ron & Bill toured the land as the country's preeminent acoustic folk duo, singing close-harmony versions of "Shop Around", "Tracks of My Tears", and "I Second That Emotion." Alas, it was not to be, and Ron & Bill never recorded a second single.
Illustration by Andre Helle from Fables de la Fontaine, 1924
You know who your real friends are because they are the ones who buy you box sets. My special lady friend bought me The Man Who Invented Soul recently, and I've been digesting its four discs slowly over a couple weeks. I'm not a natural admirer of great voices - if you sing on key, I'll listen, and if you have a voice I find interesting, I pay attention. But I was blown away by the voice of Sam Cooke in a way that I wasn't entirely comfortable with at first - his voices is supernaturally smooth, nuanced, and beautiful, matched only, maybe, by Smokey Robinson. I was also surprised at Cooke's songwriting skills beyond the big hits he wrote that are now standards - everyone knows "Chain Gang", "Twistin' the Night Away", "Cupid", and "Another Saturday Night", but there was much more to Cooke's songwriting. He's almost a match for Robinson in that category, putting them more or less even as the two geniuses who shaped the world of soul music.
I have nothing insightful or critical to say about Cooke, but I do have some comments on how The Man Who Invented Soul is arranged. I don't think there's any doubt that it is the essential document of Cooke's career, even though it doesn't cover his early gospel work with the Soul Stirrers or his last albums with ABKCO before his untimely death in 1964 at the age of 33. But the set hits all the highlights from the meaty middle portion of his career, presenting his best singles and album cuts in amazingly pristine audio - recordings from 1957 sound like they could have been made last week.
The first disc starts with his first big pop hit, "You Send Me", and covers the stuff Cooke recorded for Keen Records between '57 and '60. It's the shortest disc in the set with only 21 tracks, but these early recordings are impressive in how contemporary they sound for pre-1960 pop. The second half of the disc covers several tracks from 1959's Tribute to the Lady, Cooke's LP of Billie Holiday covers. These songs sag a little in comparison to the "singles" tracks, particularly Cooke's excellent compositions, but the disc ends strong with the awesome Cooke original "(What a) Wonderful World" (not the Armstrong one, the "I don't know much about history..." one).
This disc sets the pattern that is followed by discs two and three of The Man Who Invented Soul - each disc starts with a great string of pop singles before devoting several tracks to one of his covers-heavy "standards" LPs and then ending with a couple more great singles. The second disc presents Cooke's first singles for RCA, including "Chain Gang" and "Cupid" - the latter song has always been a favorite of mine, but repeated listens to Cooke's definitive version make it an "all-time Top 10" song for me. The ten tracks from My Kind of Blues on disc two are okay, but some of his blues covers are ho-hum. This disc also makes the classic box-set mistake of putting alternate versions of songs next to each other, which reduces the disc's listenability - I like "Sad Mood" and "Tenderness", but I don't need to listen to two almost-identical versions in a row. Disc Three covers more of Cooke's pop material, hitting highlight singles and tracks from the Twistin' the Night Away LP, but also devotes seven tracks to the less accessible Mr. Soul album.
Disc four of The Man Who Invented Soul is perhaps the most essential document in the set, composed of the Night Beat and Live at the Harlem Square Club LPs in their entirety. I have a pet peeve about mixing studio tracks and live tracks, so I can't listen to this disc straight through, but I love the two halves of it. Night Beat, in particular, is the definitive document of Cooke's amazing vocal ability, as the minimal arrangements and great song choices give him ample room to showcase his singing.
All you have to do is buy a Soul Stirrers collection and a copy of Cooke's last LP (Ain't That) Good News to supplement The Man Who Invented Soul, and you have the bulk of Cooke's amazing work. You don't have everything, of course - I noticed that this box set excludes some of Cooke's less successful singles like "You Understand Me", which is a really good song. Oddly, the set does include the b-side from the "You Understand Me" single, a reworking of Jacques Brel's French-language hit "Quand On N'a Que L'Amour" titled "I Belong to Your Heart" - this is a great song as well and could have been an a-side. The opening reveals an old-fashioned-sounding backing track, but that becomes irrelevant as soon as Cooke starts singing. The song immediately becomes removed from time, and Cooke delivers what I consider one of his best vocal performances.
"Oh, cool! A song from Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake! There's a lot to say about a song from that album - classic Brit-psych epic, shaped like a tobacco tin, basis for the Dukes of the Stratosphear record, etc." These were my initial thoughts when this song popped up on the Jukebox. Then I realized that "Up the Wooden Hills from Bedfordshire" isn't even on that album - it just sounds like it belongs there. It's actually on the Small Faces' previous album, their second self-titled record and first for Immediate Records in 1967. With its organ-based sound and freakbeat drumming, "Up the Wooden Hills from Bedfordshire" is one of the more psych-rock tracks on Small Faces, and the lyric about "slipping into sleep" is classic Brit-psych fodder as well. Interestingly, the song is the only one on Small Faces that was written by keyboardist Ian McLagan (Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane wrote most of the Small Faces' songs). It's cool that McLagan was keyed in on the direction the band was headed with their sound, which flowered in full on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake the following year.
"Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire" by the Small Faces
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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