In Stores Now: Dye It Blonde by Smith Westerns

File photograph of Doris Winifred Poole, imprisoned for stealing jewellery and clothing, courtesy of the New South Wales. Dept. of Prisons, 31 July 1924

I was shocked - SHOCKED! - when I started hearing such great buzz about the new Smith Westerns record. As it turns out, I was confused - I had Chicago garage-rock Smith Westerns confused with Decemberists associates Norfolk & Western. I think I've been conflating the two groups for a long time - that may be why I passed on the first Smith Westerns album, even though it had some pretty good buzz when it came out last year. I picked up Dye It Blonde on the strength of the track "All Die Young", a song that evokes the feeling of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass with impressive precision - it also happens to have a great chorus hook.

I figure that, with Dye It Blonde, I have two choices - I can either pretend that I don't need to make the George Harrison comparison, or just come out with it. This album has a VERY heavy George Harrison influence, right down to the influence that Phil Spector had on George Harrison. Smith Westerns' debut had been home-recorded, but this time around the band has a studio's resources to create a "wall of sound". The album's ten tracks all have a reverb-heavy production, but the band makes some smart choices that keeps the whole thing from being an undistinguished mess. They do this by using sounds that cut through the reverb: trebly Harrison-esque guitar leads, keening organ, chiming rising-and-falling synth lines, and, occasionally, a big choir for the chorus. On tracks like "All Die Young", "Imagine Pt. 3", and the woozy closer "Dye the World", the formula comes together perfectly. It helps that these songs also have really strong hooks.

There are three or four tracks on Dye It Blonde that don't make much of an impression due to the album's limited palette, but even those tracks wash over you pleasantly enough. And, for me at least, the album justifies its existence solely with "All Die Young". We're only one month into 2011, but that song is a strong contender for my favorite track of the year. It's two verses and then a big, beautiful chorus that goes on for a long time, but part of you wishes it would go on forever. It's one part "My Sweet Lord" and two parts "Awaiting on You All", and I'm tempted to say it's better than most of the other songs Harrison wrote in the '70s.

"All Die Young" by Smith Westerns

Gladys Horton (1944 - 2011)

War poster proof by Harry Lawrence Gage, 1916

Gladys Horton, former lead singer for the Marvelettes, passed away earlier this week in Sherman Oaks. Horton was one of pop music's greatest accidental stars, and I love her story. When the Marvelettes first signed with Motown, the group's original lead vocalist, Georgia Dobbins, quit because her father didn't want her performing in nightclubs (the Marvelettes were teens at the time). Horton was thrust into a starring role when she sang the lead on the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman", Motown's first number one hit and one of the greatest songs of the modern era. She never liked the spotlight, though, and, over the next six years, Wanda Young gradually took over the lead role in the group. In 1967, Horton left the Marvelettes to get married, gradually dropping her music career entirely in favor of caring for a handicapped son.

Her time as lead singer of the Marvelettes spawned many great vocal performances beyond "Please Mr. Postman", though - she sang lead on hits like "Beechwood 4-5789" and "Too Many Fish in the Sea" as well. Even after Wanda Young took control of the group, Horton would occasionally get a chance to turn in a nice lead vocal, as on 1965's "Your Cheating Ways". The b-side of the "Danger! Heartbreak Dead Ahead" single, "Your Cheating Ways" is a beautiful track propelled by peppy handclaps and Horton's soulful alto voice. She was 65 when she passed away Wednesday, following a series of strokes.

"Your Cheating Ways" by the Marvelettes

It's New to Me: The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie by Flo & Eddie (1972)

Photo illustration from an advertisement for Pall Mall cigarettes,July 1962

What happened to '60s pop group the Turtles? Wouldn't it be weird if the band's two leaders, discovering that they were legally enjoined from using the name of their band or even their own names, joined up with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention? And then spent the '70s working with artists like T. Rex, Alice Cooper, and Bruce Springsteen? Oddly enough, that's what happened to the Turtles' frontmen Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman - in addition to working with some of the great artists of the time, Volman and Kaylan also adopted pseudonyms from two of Zappa's roadies (the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie) and started recording albums of humorous, psychedelic hard rock as Flo & Eddie.

1972's The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie was the duo's first LP, recorded with members of the Mothers of Invention and Love. It's an intriguing mix of Turtles-style harmony-heavy pop, hard rock, and other stuff. The island vibes of "Nikki Hoi" rub shoulders with the fantasy-prog-pop of "Strange Girl" and the almost-metal "Feel Older Now". All the songs are originals, with the exception of a cover of Gary Bonner's "Goodbye Surprise", which the Turtles had recorded once before breaking up. The material is eclectic, but the melodies and vocals are strong, and the Mothers provide a beefy backing that matches the hybrid material perfectly.

The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie was a commercial flop, which is too bad because it has a lot of quirky pop appeal. A song like "It Never Happened" seems like it could bridge the gap between fans of '60s sunshine pop and '70s hard rock, but it wasn't to be. However, the album was good enough to get Flo & Eddie an opening spot on tour with Alice Cooper. Volman and Kaylan quickly recorded a second album, titled Flo & Eddie, to take on tour with them. That album (which is included as a two-fer with the CD version of The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie) is less interesting, as it is heavily padded with dumb skits and hard-rock covers of '60s classics like the Kinks' "Days" and the Small Faces' "Afterglow". If this second record is indicative of the comedy-rock direction Flo & Eddie went in, I'm probably not going to track down their later records, but their debut at least is a strange and quite wonderful record.

"It Never Happened" by Flo & Eddie

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Martha Marcy May Marlene

Illustration from La Dame en Bois by Roger Dombre, 1910

My special lady friend and I picked our third and final Sundance movie kind of randomly - Martha Marcy May Marlene would work in our schedule as a double-feature with Incendies, and we wanted to see at least one of the festival's official entries up for awards. We didn't really know that it was one of the "buzz movies" of this year's festival, although it doesn't take long to work out why it would be. The big story of the last few years at Sundance has been breakout actresses - Carey Mulligan (An Education) and Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) both made big splashes at Sundance with impressive lead performances. Martha Marcy May Marlene is another highly dramatic movie anchored by an unknown actress - this time around it's Elizabeth Olsen, who comes with the additional cache/baggage of being a sister to the Olsen twins of Full House. Going from cameos in her big sisters' flims straight to a movie in which she is the focal point of almost every scene is a big jump, and, it could be a big deal if she manages to pull it off. As a bonus, Martha Marcy May Marlene also has a solid supporting cast, including Hugh Dancy, Sarah Paulson (from Studio 60), and John Hawkes (who, coincidentally, got nominated yesterday for an Oscar for his role in Winter's Bone.)

So, has Elizabeth Olsen pulled it off? If you've been reading any of the reports from the Festival, you know that so far the answer seems to be "yes", and I tend to agree with the Sundance crowd on this one. Martha Marcy May Marlene opens on a farm in upstate New York, where Martha (Olsen) is living in a big house with a bunch of young people, a rough-looking middle-aged man, and a bunch of kids. It's immediately apparent that she is part of an "alternative lifestyle" group of some kind - although the word "cult" is never used in the movie, you'd be hard-pressed to keep that word from your thoughts as Martha's story unfolds.

The plot kicks off with Martha running away from "home" and calling her estranged sister Lucy for help. Lucy (Paulson) takes Martha to an opulent summer home on a lake in Connecticut, where she is staying with her husband, an English architect named Ted (Dancy). The remainder of the movie is basically watching Martha decompress painfully, attempting to unpack the emotional baggage of her recent experience. This is revealed through a simple parallel structure, contrasting her reunion with her successful but emotionally distant sister in the lake house's bourgeois opulence with her traumatic flashbacks to her time with the prophet Patrick (Hawkes) and his family. This flashback-based storytelling works very well, though, thanks to a deliberately-paced but brainy script from director/writer Sean Durkin - the narrative flow was almost on par with what we'd seen earlier in the evening with Incendies.

The performances of the leads in Martha Marcy May Marlene are quite strong, from Hawkes channeling Charles Manson and David Koresh at turns to Dancy and Paulson's uptight familial benevolence. But the whole thing hangs on Elizabeth Olsen, whose anxious energy and innocent look make a compelling emotional center for the story. Oddly, though, Durkin seems overly preoccupied with Olsen's body - her nascent sensuality is an essential element of the plot, but the camera often lingers on her curves in an almost lascivious way that is at odds with the sense of creeping dread that otherwise pervades the atmosphere.

Martha Marcy May Marlene has a spareness and stillness to it that may be entirely intentional, but they may also be circumstantial, the byproduct of limitations in the production's resources. Regardless, the lack of music and the claustrophobic use of the two houses for the setting work to the movie's overall advantage. After the movie was over, Durkin and Olsen took questions from the audience, discussing the source material that led to the movie's genesis and various details of the production. It was interesting to hear them speak, enforcing the growing impression I had that we'll be seeing more of the evident talents of Durkin and Olsen in coming years.

"Brainwashed" by the Kinks

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Incendies

Painting titled Attack Developing in the Champagne by Claggett Wilson, c. 1920

My second movie pick for Sundance this year was the Canadian film Incendies, which, I'm happy to announce, is in the running for the Best Foreign Film Oscar as of this morning! I'm thrilled because Incendies was easily the best thing I saw at Sundance and is one of the best movies I've seen in the past year - it deserves a big audience (to date, it's only been released in theaters in Canada). It's probably not the favorite for the Best Foreign award - In a Better World has more Oscar appeal - but it's a real contender, a movie with an excellent script (based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad) and some remarkable performances, particularly from Moroccan/Belgian actress Lubna Azabal.

Azabel plays Nawal Marwan, a Quebecois notary's secretary who immigrated to Canada from the Middle East. At the beginning of Incendies, Marwan is already dead - her employer, notary Jean Lebel, is reading her unusual will to her son and daughter, the twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette). In her last testament, Marwan asks her children to deliver two letters, one for their father (who they know to be deceased) and their brother (who they have never heard of until now). Driven by their love for Marwan and, ultimately, their desire to understand better the life she lived, the twins embark on a journey that takes them back to their ancestral home.

As Jeanne and Simon try to connect to their mother's secret history, we see in flashback the key events of Marwan's difficult life. It is clear that her story is rooted in the Lebanese Civil War, a bloody fifteen-year conflict between Christians and Muslims - the names of places and people have been changed to create a less political narrative addressing the affects of war, but the story is still very visceral and personal in its approach. Jeanne and Simon unravel this tale of loss and hardship along with the viewer, ultimately discovering the unthinkable personal and emotional trauma that war can inflict on a family. The whole thing is anchored by the performance of Azabel, whose emotive but often understated approach in the flashback scenes puts a lot of weight behind the impact of the film's themes.

I'm obviously trying not to give much of the plot of Incendies away, but I can say that director Denis Villeneuve did a great job with some first-rate material. The film, primarily filmed in Canada and Jordan, has a distinct sense of "place" that is Villeneuve's biggest contribution to the story - the stage version of this story, by necessity, couldn't transport the audience in this same way. But Villeneuve maintains the intensely personal approach of Mouawad's play - in the most-screening Q&A session, Villeneuve (pictured above) gave a lot of credit to the play and the filming locations in making Incendies come together.

The only let-down in our screening of Incendies came at the end of the Q&A (I share this because it's a classic Sundance-type occurrence) - Villeneuve had gone to great lengths to give good answers to the audience questions, but there were still a lot of hands raised. When the moderator said there was time for one more question, they called on an older woman who looked kind of like Roger Ebert who had asked a question earlier in the session. She used her second question to pitch a title to Villeneuve for a hypothetical sequel to Incendies - her idea was to call the sequel "bonheur", a French word that she said, like "incendies", has no precise English translation. Villeneuve replied by saying, "'Bonheur' means happiness." And, with that, we were ushered out of the theater.

"Details of the War" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): I Saw the Devil

Ink and wash drawing titled Tarred Net by Margaret Olley, 1961

Due to some scheduling conflicts (having a baby this week!), my special lady friend and I limited our Sundance Film Festival attendance this year to three films. Of course, this meant that selecting the right films was much more important than usual - I Saw the Devil seemed like a sure thing. For one thing, the film's director Kim Ji-Woon is one of Korea's best-known filmmakers, and I liked both the slow-burning horror film A Tale of Two Sisters and his "spaghetti-Eastern" adventure film The Good, the Bad, and the Weird. Also, this film had a great cast anchored by Oldboy's Choi Min-Sik and JSA's Lee Byung-Hun. Director Kim and the swoon-stastic Lee got up before the screening to welcome us to the show, warning us that we were about to see an ultra-violent film about the limits of revenge. Lee went so far as to request that the audience not walk out of the screening.

Their warnings were easily justified, although I was impressed that I didn't see a single walk-out (although there were plenty of people shielding their eyes for certain scenes). The film begins with a middle-aged loner named Kyung-Chul (Choi) kidnapping a beautiful young girl and dismembering her in a back-woods workshop. When her body parts turn up in a river, the girl's boyfriend Soo-Hyun (Lee), who happens to be a special agent for Korea's National Intelligence Service, decides to go on a "revenge sabbatical" from his day job. Seem a little over the top? Kim Ji-Woon is not really known for his subtle touch, and I Saw the Devil is right in line with his typical approach, with plenty of overly dramatic music and borderline melodrama. Anyone expecting a slow-burning crime drama like Bong Joon-Ho's brilliant Mother and Memories of Murder will be disappointed, but that isn't really a fair comparison to make.

The over-the-topness of Kim's style is essential to what makes I Saw the Devil interesting. By setting the movie up as a face-off between a deadly secret agent and a remorseless sociopathic killer, Kim is able to play with the structure of the typical "revenge" movie in interesting and often humorous ways. The amped-up twists and turns of the plot are mirrored by the amped-up violence, which works up to a point but then threatens to cross over into "torture porn" territory. What saves the movie from descending into pure grotesquerie, though, is in the performances of the two extremely charismatic leads - Choi and Lee are both a lot of fun to watch, and they get to do some great Korean-style scenery-chewing in I Saw the Devil.

It's worth noting that this movie, in its original cut, was banned from theaters in Korea for "damaging the dignity of human values." I'm not sure if we saw the original edit or the modified one that eventually got released in Korea, but it was fairly extreme. I wouldn't recommend it for any squeamish movie fans - this is one for the "Asia extreme" crowd, although any iron-stomached fan of modern Korean cinema will find some great acting and humor in I Saw the Devil, under a liberal coating of human entrails.

"Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones

Title Fight: "Parking Lot"

Photochrome of Maria Studholme, c. 1900

Late-80s college rock versus early-90s college rock cage fight! It's not exactly a fair fight because I'm pitting a favorite track from one of the definitive underground rock albums of the '80s against...well, against a track by New Radiant Storm King. For me, Galaxie 500's "Parking Lot" (from their debut record, Today), is all about the percussion. Damon Krukowski sometimes gets a little more credit than he merits for the Galaxie 500 sound, but simple vocal melody of "Parking Lot" and the one-note guitar solo at the end don't add up to much without that "BUMP-buh-da-bump-BUMP" beat propelling things along.

New Radiant Storm King's "Parking Lot" comes from their 1994 record August Revital - I tried for a long time to get into NRSK because they were part of that cool Guided By Voices/Grifters/Silver Jews/Polvo "scene" that was going on, but they never really clicked for me. I liked the sloppy mixing of shoegaze and angular art-rock, but the band never really had a compelling vocalist or consistent full-length album. "Parking Lot" is one of their better songs, though, mixing its elements well in a brief minute-and-a-half burst. The song never really goes the same place twice but each hook that's introduced is nice for as long as it lasts, and the sudden ending provides a nice punctuation to the track.

Who am I kidding, though? This is a first-round KO for Galaxie 500, courtesy of Damon Krakowski. I don't think Dean Wareham has been playing "Parking Lot" on his recent "Dean and Britta Play the Songs of Galaxie 500" tour, but I'm willing to go on record that he should steer clear of this one unless there's an official Galaxie 500 reunion (and, based on this recent writeup, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen).

Winner: GALAXIE 500

"Parking Lot" by Galaxie 500

"Parking Lot" by New Radiant Storm King

It's New to Me: Todd by Todd Rundgren (1974)

Cover illustration of Brett Rider's Circle C Moves In, 1947

Last week, I wrote about being very pleased with my first exposure to Todd Rundgren's Utopia, via their self-titled album of 1982. I've also been "delving" into Rundgren's weirder solo records from the mid-'70s, with less satisfactory results. Todd was released in 1974, and it has a great cover photo of a weary-looking Rundgren sporting multi-colored locks and some sort of cardigan. The music on the record is similarly colorful but weary-sounding. By the time he recorded Todd, Rundgren was evidently tired of the Laura-Nyro-style balladry that had won him so much acclaim - he famously refused to let his label release "Izzat Love?" as a single from the record on the basis that it was a throwback to his earlier style.

The fact is, though, that the ballads are the strongest tracks on Todd. The epic, despairing "The Last Ride" and the elegiac "A Dream Goes On Forever" are both quite beautiful, but the intentionally confounding structure of the album keeps me from ever settling in and getting into its flow. The first seven tracks on the album include a brief intro, two actual pop songs, two synth-based instrumentals (including the meandering, almost-7-minutes-long "The Spark of Life" as the album's third track), and two novelty songs. The first novelty song is a Gilbert & Sullivan pastiche about the record industry called "An Elpee's Worth of Toons" - the other one is an ACTUAL Gilbert & Sullivan song, "Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song".

The second half of Todd is easier to get into, even though it features yet another synthesizer epic (this one has the super-cool title "In and Out the Chakras We Go [Formerly: Shaft Goes to Outer Space]") - the rest of the songs are fairly accessible, from "Heavy Metal Kids" (which has a surprisingly sweet chorus that plays nicely against the hard rock verses) to the languid ballad "Don't You Ever Learn?" and ending with a triumphant choir-based pop song in "Songs of 1984". I'll not allow my frustration with Todd to dissuade me from continuing to explore his weird '70s records, but it bothers me that pretty much any shuffled track-list for this album plays better than the one Rundgren selected himself - looking at how it breaks down to four sides on vinyl, it makes a little more sense, but that Side 1 is still a real struggle.

"A Dream Goes On Forever" by Todd Rundgren

In Stores Now: Space City Kicks by Robert Pollard

Photo titled "Boy at a gate in 36, Österlånggatan street in the Old Town" by an unknown photographer, courtesy of the Swedish National Heritage Board, c. 1890

Indie-rock juggernaut Robert Pollard is back in the spotlight, and it has nothing to do with releasing a new album (he's done that four or five times every year for a long time - it's not really a banner headline at this point). He's touring with the reunited "classic" lineup of Guided By Voices, reigniting a lot of interest in his first-rate and decades-long body of work. This is a window of opportunity for him to recapture some of the old-school GBV fans with a new record of creamy pop songs, which makes Space City Kicks a surprise. It's on par with Pollard's best solo work in a lot of ways and contains close to a dozen classic songs, but it's also a confounding and deliberately weird record - some GBV fans contemplating coming "back to the fold" might balk after one listen to this record - it's unfortunate, too, because a few spins will reveal Space City Kicks' best qualities.

Space City Kicks begins with "Mr. Fantastic Must Die!", a song that rattles menacingly out of the gates like a revved-up jalopy built on pots-and-pans percussion. This is the biggest problem with the record, to be honest - Pollard's collaborator/producer Todd Tobias pulls out the Halloween sound-effect records whenever he wants to "weird up" one of Uncle Bob's less straightforward compositions. I'm used to hearing these wearying sound effects on Circus Devils records, but they pop up often enough on the first half of Space City Kicks that it seems like an intentional statement that this is a more-experimental-less-pop record. Tobias even recycles shamelessly from his "spooky sounds" repertoire, using an identical dissonant chiming sound (strumming guitar strings above the nut, probably) on both the clunky heavy-rocker "Sex She Said" and the totally weird "Children Ships". The latter song is one of Pollard's more interesting "experimental" songs here, but it's the last one that pops up in the tracklist and suffers by coming too late. There are some other gems hidden in the first half of Space City Kicks in the "creamy pop" vein I'd expected to find - "Something Strawberry" is absolutely lovely, and "One More Touch" and "I Wanna Be Your Man in the Moon" are sprightly power pop that'll get your head bobbing (even if they do suffer a little from an overly repetitious lyrical style that is an unexpected issue on this album.)

Once Tobias puts away his kooky sound effects, the second half of Space City Kicks absolutely shines with a string of songs as good as you'll find on any of Pollard's solo records. The world-weary and Kinks-esque "Tired Life" could come off as clumsy but ends up being surprisingly affecting, and "Woman to Fly" is one of the best, most focused ballads Pollard has written. Anchoring this solid half-of-an-album is "Touch Me in the Right Place at the Right Time" - like "Something Strawberry", it's all sweet double-tracked vocals and chiming guitars - pure ear candy.

Space City Kicks is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating album that seems determined to hide its best attributes, but any rock fan will find a couple choice cuts here to put into regular rotation. And, if this isn't the album that grabs the attention of curious attendees of this year's GBV reunion shows, Pollard has a couple more chances to reel them in. Next month, he releases a new record with former GBV guitarist Doug Gillard under the name Lifeguards, and March will see the release of a collaboration called Mars Classroom, made with the guys from underrated '80s indie-rockers Big Dipper.

"Touch Me in the Right Place at the Right Time" by Robert Pollard

It's New to Me: Wrong Way Up by Brian Eno & John Cale

Detail from a movie poster for Black Box Affair, 1966

I have several sizable blind spots in my music knowledge (hello, hip-hop!) - for every obvious one, though, there's one that doesn't make any sense at all. For instance, I have a predisposition to avoid albums that were released by older artists in the early '90s, when I was in junior high. At the time, I was reading Rolling Stone religiously, and I'd scoff at records like Ride the Wild Tom-Tom or Television's self-titled reunion records - I'd think, "Those records are for old people." I need to go back and give a lot of those albums a chance - Wrong Way Up was one of them, released in 1990 by veteran pop experimentalists Brian Eno and John Cale. It took a little effort to talk myself into buying it, but now I can't stop listening to it.

By 1990, I don't know if anyone expected a straightforward pop album from either Eno or Cale again. Each had worked with great bands and then had a string of amazing solo albums before turning to more esoteric pursuits. Eno had no evident interest in repeating Taking Tiger Mountain or Another Green World - by the late '70s, he was making albums with "Ambient" in the title. Cale had spent the '80s dabbling in post-punk, noise, and synth-pop, but hadn't attempted to record another pure pop album like Paris 1919. But the two of them collaborating on a full album of pop songs in 1990 appears to have been very rewarding for both of them and for listeners. The writing is consistently strong and the songs are amazingly arranged and played, with Eno and Cale's voices blending impressively on most tracks.

Cale plays more of a supporting role on Wrong Way Up, supplying the album's "mood" pieces, like the stark "In the Backroom" and the ballad "Cordoba", while Eno's tracks are the ones that really make the album soar. Eno's "Spinning Away" is the clear centerpiece of the album, a swirling, spacey pop number that is as good as anything he's recorded before or since - the ultimate testament to the song's quality is that a cover of "Spinning Away" on the soundtrack of the movie The Beach is also excellent, in spite of the fact that it was recorded by Sugar Ray (yes, THAT Sugar Ray). My favorite track on the record, though, may be the opening "Lay My Love" - it's a meticulously arranged pop song that starts with a simple violin figure and builds up to a beautiful chorus, with Eno singing, "I will lay my love around...you."

Unlike anything in either of their individual discographies, Wrong Way Up is the best kind of one-off collaboration and is now easily among my favorite releases by either of these songwriters.

"Lay My Love" by Brian Eno & John Cale

Trish Keenan (1968 - 2011)

Frontispiece by C. P. Gray from Sara Bassett's The Story of Sugar, 1917

Last Friday, Trish Keenan passed away at the age of 42, due to complications related to pneumonia and H1N1 flu. She was the front-woman of Birmingham, UK band Broadcast, and her passing came as a total surprise. Like a lot of people, I feel stunned by this sudden loss - Keenan's voice and musical vision were unique and special. Intensely interested in both electronic music and vintage psychedelia, she specialized in creating inorganic music with an organic warmth. Her precise, affectless singing style was somehow inviting and comforting, giving her songs a serenity and melodic focus I've found in few other artists.

I was shocked to learn that she was 42 when she passed away - she seemed to still be refining her sound and approach to music, and I was expecting to be hearing great new things from Broadcast for years to come. Weirdly, the first Broadcast song I ever heard was Of Montreal's cover of "Colour Me In" (a great song), but the album I always go back to is the band's first, The Noise Made by People. It is the starkest and most minimal of their full-length releases, giving Keenan's voice the greater impact. The haunting "Until Then" may be my favorite track, and it seems a fitting song for remembering Trish Keenan today.

"Until Then" by Broadcast

Title Fight: "Good Weekend"

Oil painting titled River by Carroll N. Bailey, 1933

Here are two simple, celebratory songs about a simple concept worth celebrating - having a good weekend. It being Friday and all, I'm totally feeling the "Good Weekend" vibe.

London's Art Brut appeared out of nowhere in late 2004 with a bunch of bootleg singles and a great sound, based on stripped-down guitar riffs and wordy talk-sing vocals. "Good Weekend" was the song of theirs that caught my attention. Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos was about 25 when this song was recorded, I think, but it's like a lot of songs in that it captures a very "teenage" moment - the pure exultation of having a new girlfriend. Starting with a great snare drum rhythm and snarly guitar lead, Art Brut's "Good Weekend" retells the story of how our hero came to get his "brand new girlfriend" - it basically all leads up to the bridge, which culminates with Argos shouting, "I've seen her naked - TWICE!" Art Brut's sound isn't for anyone, but it's hard to argue that this song doesn't hit the bulls-eye in what it's aiming for.

Back in the late '60s, another band tried to hit this same vibe - Amsterdam rock band Short '66 only released a few singles during their years together, but one of the best is the b-side of their "Mary Is My Sweetheart Again" single - a song called "Good Weekend". Like Art Brut's track, this one starts with a snarly guitar lead, but things kind of take some weirder turns after that. The verse of Short '66's "Good Weekend" has a shiny-happy sing-song melody and some noticeable Dutch accents - then, at the one-minute mark, the intro's guitar lead comes back as part of a shouty "Good weekend!" chorus. Probably knowing that the chorus sounds kind of stupid, the band quickly retreats back to the verse melody, then back to the chorus before a quick fade-out. No! It's a fake fade-out and, with a shrill rape-whistle, the chorus comes back one more time and the song ends with yet another quick verse.

Short '66's songs is fun in a way, but it's also a real mess. Art Brut wins this in a walk.

Winner: ART BRUT

"Good Weekend" by Art Brut

"Good Weekend" by Short '66

It's New to Me: Utopia by Utopia (1982)

Photo titled "Envelope. No label. Flowers, students by school bus, a grave, etc." by E. Don Herd, c. 1960

I've long been fascinated by pop eclecticist Todd Rundgren - from his early power-pop days with the Nazz to his Laura-Nyro-inspired ballad albums to his totally bizarre '70s records like Todd, he has always done pretty much whatever he felt like doing. This kind of approach makes sense to me, but Utopia never made quite as much sense, because it seemed like Rundgren had found a collaborative group that was willing to follow the same kind of capricious muse. The band's other three longtime members, Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and Willie Wilcox, contributed as equal partners in Utopia, each writing songs and taking turns singing lead vocals. And equally baffling is the fact that Utopia followed a similarly weird career arc - they started out as a dyed-in-the-wool prog-rock band writing crazy rock epics like "Singring and the Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale)", but sometime in 1977, they turned into a power-pop band and never looked back.

By 1982, Utopia had done a lot of different kinds of records (including a whole album of Beatles sound-alikes with 1980's Deface the Music), but they hadn't made a straightforward "new wave" record. So they did that, as the skinny ties, blazers, and Ray-Bans in the cover photo of Utopia can attest. True to the band's chameleonic powers, it's an impressively high-quality set of pop songs composed in the jittery, synth-heavy '80s pop style, best exemplified on the two excellent singles "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" and "Hammer in My Heart". The record has a couple of nice Rundgren piano ballads ("Chapter and Verse", "There Goes My Inspiration"), but some of the best songs are sung by the other Utopians. The only exception is Roger Powell's unfortunate "Burn Three Times", a song with a cringe-inducing fast-food metaphor that actually includes the line, "I'm no burger king, I'm no pizza pie spinner / Don't come sniffin' round here for something to eat!"

Drummer Willie Wilcox sings lead on "Princess of the Universe", which I love in large part for its awesome title. It's the first song of the album's unofficial "Side 3", a set of five bonus songs that have always been included with Utopia without being considered part of the proper track list. The gang vocals on the chorus are one of Utopia's specialties on this album, as are the clever lyrics. At times, it's easy to forget that this is a group of older musicians pretending to be a new-wave band and not a first-rate record from a group of young post-punk upstarts.

"Princess of the Universe" by Utopia

Why Does This Exist?: "Let's Go Somewhere" by R. Dean Taylor

Miniature titled "Fortune Turning Her Wheel" from the L'Epistre d'Othea folio, 1450

R. Dean Taylor's an interesting character - a pianist and songwriter from Toronto in the '60s, he somehow ended up working at Motown, releasing singles on the label's VIP imprint. He was a goofy-looking white dude with a bad haircut, and his songs were definitely on the odd side as well. His first single for VIP got yanked at the last minute, robbing the world of the potential hit "My Ladybug (Stay Away From That Beatle)". In '67, he released the spooky "There's a Ghost in My House", possibly his best-known song because the Fall had a minor hit with their excellent cover version in the late '80s.

Between those two singles, Taylor released this track, "Let's Go Somewhere", in 1965. It's a song about discrimination, so you can see why Motown might get behind that - until you listen carefully to the lyrics, which are clearly about the persecution of "hippies" by "squares". Co-written by Brian Holland and produced by Lamont Dozier, the song has a great sound to it - that kinetic tambourine line creates an interesting energy, and the backing vocals on the chorus by Sally Furman give it a "northern soul" vibe, but I can't help but picture this guy singing the song. I'll never understand how Taylor ended up at Motown but I'm glad he did, if only because he went on to co-write one of my favorite songs, the Four Tops' "I'll Turn to Stone".

"Let's Go Somewhere" by R. Dean Taylor

It's New to Me: Warehouse:Songs and Stories by Husker Du (1987)

Panel from Slave Girl Comics issue #2, April 1949

I haven't even started, but you can already tell I'm not a true Husker Du fan. How? I don't do the umlauts, and I'm sorry about that. I don't have a key for them on my keyboard. Well, here's a brief anecdote that also shows how I'm not a true Husker Du fan - I had a friend in high school that would lend me CDs from time to time, in an attempt to broaden my horizons. He lent me a copy of Warehouse:Songs and Stories at one point, and I hated it. I remember telling him that the songs all sounded the same, and how they sounded was terrible. No choruses, no hooks, no appeal.

What album was I listening to? When I came back around to Husker Du just in this last decade, I was shocked to find that a lot of people say that Grant Hart was the band's best songwriter. I had always assumed that Bob Mould (whose solo and Sugar albums I owned) was the front-man and real songwriter in the band. So I went out and bought New Day Rising and, sure enough, Hart's songs were my immediate favorites. And now, listening to Warehouse:Songs and Stories again almost two decades later, I'm hearing a totally different record. Maybe because, this time around, I'm expecting the drums to sound like wet Wheaties boxes being hit with thawed Ball Park franks - I understand now that that's part of the Husker Du charm.

Husker Du's final album, Warehouse is an album everyone knows about, so there's little I can say about it. It's twenty songs by two great songwriters who were totally sick of each other, it's a very impressive, emotion-filled songwriting showcase. At almost 70 minutes, it somehow doesn't seem long, and (most surprisingly to me) Bob Mould's songs here are finally what I always thought his Husker Du tracks would sound like. There are still some of the angsty Mould numbers more common to earlier Huskers' records ("Visionary", "Bed of Nails"), but most of his tracks are virtually flawless power-pop with amazing hooks. Interestingly, Hart's tracks mostly sound phoned-in to me on Warehouse - sure, "She Floated Away" is the album's best song and "You Can Live at Home" is a great closer, unlike anything else in the Husker Du discography, but the other tracks just kind of sit there. And they don't shine in the your-song-my-song setup of Warehouse - for example, "You're a Soldier" is an okay Hart song, but it comes right after Mould's "Ice Cold Ice", which uses almost the exact same hook in a much better way.

Some people say that the last quarter of Warehouse sputters out, but it's really the best part of the album - I think that the last five songs might be my favorites, particularly Mould's "Up in the Air" and "Turn It Around". The latter song in particular is great to me for that moment where Hart switches up the rhythm unexpectedly and Mould sings a great new melodic hook. I owe my old friend Amir an apology - I wonder what he thought of me when I told him that this album has no hooks?

"Turn It Around" by Husker Du

It's New to Me: For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night by Caravan (1973)

Illustration from an advertisement for White Horse Whiskey, 1958

So, I'm still waiting for the new 2011 releases to start coming out - in the meantime, I'll review a couple more of these weird records from the '70s that I got for Christmas. And, going by titles alone, the probably don't get much weirder than For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night. I've been a fan of Canterbury/prog outfit Caravan since I picked up In the Land of Grey and Pink (1971) a while back, in spite of that album's very "jammy" tendencies. Caravan were a "jam band" in the truest sense of the word - they are interested in pop and jazz, and they felt that the best way to incorporate these two interests was to create pop songs that work as jumping-off points for extended instrumental jams. I tend to tire of "jams" quickly - they just don't hold my attention - but I can hang with a long instrumental interlude if it has two halves of a pop song for bookends.

Caravan also gets a pass from me because their pop instincts are quite good, and they do a good job of compartmentalizing their jamming. For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, for example, starts with the nine-minute "Memory Lain, Hugh/Headloss", but this long track is really two pop songs pinned together. The first half is one of those jumping-off songs with a nice verse and then several minutes of instrumental vamping on that melody, but "Headloss" is a hard-rocking pop song with Pye Hastings' usual slightly-goofy melodic sense. This song also features a violin solo from Geoff Richardson, who was a new addition to Caravan's revamped lineup on this record - his flute, violin, and viola contributions are great additions to the band's sound. The tracks that follow that initial salvo, "Hoedown" and "Surprise, Surprise" are both solidly in the pop idiom, as well (and "Hoedown" is nowhere near as terrible as you might guess from its title.)

So it's not until "C'thlu Thlu" that we get our first real jam-oriented track - it's an unfortunate slog of a song, too, simultaneously evoking the boringness and headache-inducing qualities of Lovecraft's writing in song form. But this track is followed by excellent and creepy (and pedophilia-themed?) pop of "The Dog, the Dog, He's At It Again" and the rock-song-stitched-to-ballad epic "Be Alright/Chance of a Lifetime". By the time I get to the album's true jam, the ten-minute "L'Auberge Du Sanglier" suite, I'm willing to give Caravan a pass because of the album's hit-to-miss ratio up to that point. And "L'Auberge" isn't bad - it does go on a bit, but it has a few different sections to it and that makes it more palatable.

For me, Caravan is appealing because they take the pastoral psych-pop vibe of those Rubble bands I love and they stretch it into something more ambitious, with a smooth '70s production style. And, quite simply, Pye Hastings could write great pop songs - the fact that he wrote almost all the material for Girls Who Grow Plump... gives that album a great cohesiveness. Check out "Headloss" if you haven't heard this band before - I think it benefits from being separated from it's "other half", the album opener "Memory Lain, Hugh" - it's better as a self-contained pop song than half of an ersatz epic.

"Headloss" by Caravan

It's New to Me: Judee Sill by Judy Sill (1971)

Photo of a "moussaka" from James Beard's Homemaking with a Flair, Winter 1973

Judee Sill came more or less out of nowhere in 1971, the first release on a brand new label (David Geffen's Asylum Records). The record cover was a simple profile of portrait of Sill, obscured by her long hair except for a beaky nose, dark glasses and a cross pendant. A former junkie with a prodigious talent and a very sketchy background, Sill's songs were, at first blush, simple religious folk with a surprising classical influence. Based on either her plucked acoustic guitar lines or piano melodies, the songs were bolstered with some nice production touches like strings and horns. The album flopped, in spite of support from well-known musicians like Graham Nash and, after a second album in 1973, Sill turned back to drugs and passed away at the age of 35.

I kind of thought that Judee Sill would be up my alley, but I was still surprised with how quickly I took to this album. The songs are just so pleasing and accessible - her voice and lyrics elevate them above other early-70s folk for me. Her vibrato-less soprano has a very distinctive twang - she has a natural way of phrasing that makes her singing very appealing. And I think that knowing her background makes her songs more interesting as well. You can see all the stages of Sill's troubled life in her lyrics - the redemptive themes of her then-recent religious awakening battle against darker metaphysical images from her troubled years and the exaggerated whimsy of a lost childhood.

The Graham-Nash-produced single "Jesus Was a Cross-Maker" is a stand-out track on Judee Sill, obviously, and her "Lady-O" is known to many because it was covered by the Turtles. But the song on the record that is the most "Judee Sill" to me is "Crayon Angels". It starts with a simple acoustic picking and folky melody backed by a single oboe, and her distinctive mix of imagery comes across immediately in the lyrics. Her talent for phrasing comes through in the second verse, particularly in the way she pronounces, "The Angels come back and laugh." Because of Sill's recent popularity among the new-folk set, some people have declared her to have gone straight from under-rated to over-rated, but you'd be missing out if you dismissed this album on that basis - there's a lot to enjoy in Judee Sill.

"Crayon Angels" by Judee Sill

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Walk Into the Sea" by Low

Cover illustration of the Groundbreaking Booklet of the Masonic Brotherhood Center of the 1964 World's Fair, 1963

I'm glad this song popped up on the old jukebox today - what better reminder that Low has a new album coming out this spring? It will be the first album from the Minnesota indie-rock band since 2007's Drums and Guns. That album had some strong songwriting on it, but I always had issues listening to it because of the vocals-in-one-channel-instruments-in-the-other production. The production of Low's previous album, The Great Destroyer, also prompted a lot of production-related complaints, mostly from people who didn't like indie-superstar producer David Fridmann's style (or how it interfaced with Low's style).

I liked The Great Destroyer well enough - my issues with it had more to do with a very patchy second half, which is more redeemed by "Walk Into the Sea", a monster of a closing number and one of my favorite Low songs ever. For me, this song has a lot of the charm of early Low albums, which might seem odd - on the surface, the big drums and chugging tempo has little connection to the sparse, dark hymns of early Low. But, as some music writer noted years ago, Low's music is often about what happens in between the notes. The use of phrasing and "spacing" comes into play in "Walk Into the Sea" - Alan Sparhawk uses brief pauses in his singing to create tension, and the instrumentation has a similar ebb and flow. And, of course, it's about how Sparhawk's voice blends with Mimi Parker's.

Low's new album C'mon doesn't have a release date yet (I think) - watch for it around April or May.

"Walk Into the Sea" by Low

Why Does This Exist?: "Suspended Animation" by the Millennium

Diagram titled "Alternate Prone Throwing Position" from the pamphlet Grenades and Pyrotechnic Signals published by US Army Material Command, 2000

I don't know why, but I've always been uneasy about science fiction references in '60s rock music - it never quite seems to work for me. Songs like the Byrds' "Space Odyssey" just don't seem hit that outer-space vibe like that later sci-fi musicians like David Bowie and Gary Numan were able to tap into. So it's probably no surprise that I'm more than a little creeped out by "Suspended Animation", a song by '60s super-group the Millennium. Headed by producer Curt Boettcher (who produced the Association's first record), the Millennium also included members of Sagittarius and the Music Machine. The band only released a single album of sunshine pop, Begin, but there are a bunch of other tracks by the band out there - they had a second record lined up before getting the ax from the record company.

"Suspended Animation" is one of these demos,one of only a few written and sung by Boettcher. Sung from the point of view of a person floating through space in - you guessed it - suspended animation, Boettcher describes how the Earth was taken over by mind-stealing androids and laments his inevitable death, separated from his true love before his stolen space ship reaches a habitable planet. Uh, yeah. And all this is set to a folky/flamenco acoustic arrangement, with Boettcher intoning the line "Far out in deepest space..." repeatedly in a heavily treated vocal. "Suspended Animation" has a yearning feel to it that almost sells the song's concept, but I really have trouble getting past the mind-stealing androids.

"Suspended Animation" by the Millennium

It's New to Me: Drowning by Tommy Keene (2004)

Illustration titled "My Mother Isn't Old, Irene" by Louise Clark from Isabella Alden's novel Ruth Erskine's Son, 1907

Power-pop fans may argue endlessly over whether Tommy Keene should have been a big star, but there's no doubt that, while mainstream success has eluded him, he's made a name for himself as one of the best sidemen in the business. I saw him play with Robert Pollard's Ascended Masters a few years ago (he was amazing!), but he's probably better known for his work with Paul Westerberg. For example, check out Keene on Letterman, playing an excellent solo and singing backup on "Love Untold" with Westerberg in 1996.

One of the reasons it's hard to pin down Keene's solo work is that it's all over the place - he had a run of bad luck with record companies, and many of his albums are out of print. As a result, I've been picking up anything by Keene that I can find, starting with the older stuff. When Not Lame Records announced that they were closing their shutters at the end of last year, I realized I needed to snag the Keene odds-and-ends compilation they'd released before it went the way of his '80s records. I'm glad I did - Drowning is quite appealing and tidy for an assortment of unreleased tracks. It almost plays like a slightly-too-long Keene album - his clean power-pop sound hasn't changed much over the years, so the time-line that goes with these tracks is not obvious (and Keene doesn't provide any dates in the liner notes, only apologizing for certain out-of-date sounds).

Keene often works with winding melodies that don't hook me on first listen, but his voice and guitar-playing are so good that I go back to the songs until they sink their hooks into me. This tendency is more pronounced on Drowning, obviously - some of these are songs that were rejected by record labels for not having "hit potential", after all - but there's plenty of first-rate Keene tracks here. The title track has a surprisingly immediate chorus and dates back to the mid-'80s, as do several of the other strong tracks on the compilation ("Karl Marx", Disarray"). Keene's cover of the Hollies' "Carrie Anne" (one of my favorite songs ever) is quite nice, up there with his Chilton and Who covers as a great reinterpretation of one of Keene's power-pop progenitors.

There are a handful of unremarkable tracks (I've never heard a power-pop compilation that didn't have at least two songs that seem to meld into one muddled blob of jangle), but most of these castaways "coulda been contenders." My favorite is probably "The Scam and the Flim Flam Man" a song that Keene rightly says should have been on Songs from the Film, although it's no surprise that Geffen didn't give the nod to such a cynical (but sunny-sounding!) song about the recording industry.

"The Scam and the Flim Flam Man" by Tommy Keene

It's New to Me: Little Music (Singles 1997 - 2002) by Dressy Bessy (2003)

Photo of Father Rupert from the Balliol College Archive, c. 1910

And so I emerge, blinking sleepily, in a new year of music with arms full of new stuff to listen to, thanks to Christmas well-wishers. But, truth be told, I'm still sifting through my Black Friday purchases from a month ago, and it's getting harder and harder to process all the input. Hopefully, before the 2011 new releases start to trickle out, I'll be able to cover some of these new acquisitions with "It's New to Me" entries.

And what could be more current than writing about Dressy Bessy? Caught with all the negative stigmas within their Elephant 6 enclave (not from Athens, recording for Kindercore, more Apples in Stereo than Neutral Milk Hotel), Dressy Bessy were a 60s-influenced twee-pop band that was definitely in the second tier of its little music clique. But I always liked them - Tammy Ealom's chirpy voice and sugary pop hooks are sometimes just what the doctor ordered, and I finally picked up a key piece of the Dressy Bessy puzzle when I found a cheap second-hand copy of the Little Music singles collection.

Like a lot of the bands of its ilk, Dressy Bessy put first-rate songs on EPs and singles, and this 18-track compilation covers the non-LP tracks from the band's peak period. Little Music starts with some surprisingly strong stray tracks from comps and Kindercore releases, but the real story is in the band's two EPs. The record's low point is easily the "You Stand Here" EP, primarily because it contains three of the band's earliest recordings from 1997. These songs are pretty rough, compositionally and recording-wise, and it would have been a good idea to tuck them away at the back of the tracklist. Or maybe not - I like that Little Music ends quite strongly with the "California" EP. The five songs from this second EP are among Dressy Bessy's best, from the appropriately sunny title track to the bare-bones oom-pah sounds of the closer "In the Morning". My favorite might be "Some Better Days" - the corny "trumpet" synth at the beginning is a fanfare for a crunchy guitar riff and one of Ealom's most elastic, bouncy melodies.

"Some Better Days" by Dressy Bessy