Oil painting titled "Seated Figure with Pink Background" by Nathan Oliveira, 1960
Sometimes my random Jukebox pick turns out to be very timely - for instance, it's interesting to look back over the decade of Eric Bachmann's work as Crooked Fingers now. Bachmann's '90s indie-rock band Archers of Loaf is reuniting for a summer tour - I'm already planning on seeing them at Sasquatch, and I'm pretty psyched. I remember seeing the Archers on the Vee Vee tour in '95, when I was sure that I'd never love anything more than I loved the gleeful vitriol of "Harnessed in Slums" and "The Lowest Part is Free!"
When the Archers broke up and the Crooked Fingers album arrived in 2000, I really was not expecting the violin- and sadness-soaked Neil Diamond/Leonard Cohen hybrid it turned out to be. I discovered a new favorite song - "New Drink for the Old Drunk" - that pushed "Harnessed in Slums" easily out of its slot in my "favorite songs ever" list. And then you had songs like "Juliette", which pairs a lonesome, aching melody with a lyric about a woman burning to death on her living room floor. How do you go from barking punk frontman to backwoods troubadour? And, more relevantly, how do you go back to being a punk again?
Illustration from PS Magazine, the Preventative Maintenance Monthly #83, 1959
Part One by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band is an interesting album by an interesting band. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (yes, I'm going to keep using the full name) started out, for better or for worse, with a rich LA eccentric named Bob Markley. He had connections in the "biz", so he struck a deal with some talented young musicians to put together a band - they would make good music, and he would pay for stuff and play tambourine. Part One is actually the band's second record (coming confusingly in the middle of a four-album sequence, the other albums being titled Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3). I'd guess that Markley's desire to have a "far-out" psychedelic band is responsible for Part One's weakest aspects, the two spoken-word tracks that Markley contributes vocals to. "1906" is your standard psych-apocalypse doggerel track, and "Help, I'm a Rock" is a completely unnecessary cover of a Zappa novelty. For some reason, both of these tracks ended up on West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band singles, and I think they were actually A-sides (although the record on these things is far from clear as far as I can see).
In spite of Markley's dubious contributions, Part One is a very cool psych-rock album once you get past the two novelty tracks. The rest of the band was quite talented - guitarist Michael Lloyd and the Harris brothers contribute some excellent tracks to the record, including the gentle ballad "I Won't Hurt You", the folky "Will You Walk With Me", and the album's best song "Transparent Day", which has a great not-quite-Byrds, chiming guitar riff. And some of Markley's showbiz connections come through as well - Baker Knight, Bob Johnston, and P.F. Sloan all contributed decent songs to the project. I'm curious to see how the other West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band sound - from what I've heard, it was a revolving-door lineup with the bank-rolling Markley being the only constant. People say that every release has some worthwhile moments, but I'm guessing that I made the right choice by starting with Part One.
"Transparent Day" by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band
Gelatin silver print titled "Space Needle and Monorail" by Tod E. Gangler, 1980
I'd like to address a couple issues here before talking about the great bridge of the day. First, if you've been counting on your fingers at home, you've probably noticed that this is the eleventh "We Love Great Bridges", when I originally stated that it would be a ten-part series. Yeah - I lost track. That's what happened there. Second, you may notice what looks like a typo in the subject line of this post. You say you're quite familiar with "Click Click Click Click" by Brooklyn indie band Bishop Allen - you saw it in a Sony commercial or something. You say I'm missing a "Click" in that title. Well, here's what I have to say to you about that....
SHUT THE HELL UP YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. Here's the deal - in 2006, Bishop Allen released a CD EP every month to fans, and each monthly EP contained four previously unreleased, original compositions. The July EP had a picture of a Polaroid camera on the cover, and its first track was called "Click Click Click". When the song was re-recorded for the band's 2007 album The Broken String, they added a fourth "Click" to the title, and that's the version most people are familiar with. AND HERE'S THE PART THAT MAKES ME REALLY CRAZY. When you look up the song online these days, there is no record AT ALL that it used to be called "Click Click Click" - even quasi-official track lists for the original Bishop Allen July EP call the song "Click Click Click Click", not "Click Click Click". Blog posts FROM THAT TIME PERIOD call the song "Click Click Click Click". BUT GUESS WHAT? I went down to my basement and spent an hour in the middle of the night digging out my Bishop Allen EP archive, and I confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the song was called "Click Click Click" when it came out. I'M NOT CRAZY.
So, here for your listening pleasure is the rare original version of Bishop Allen's "Click Click Click" from the July EP. It's got a great bridge.
It's not really that surprising that Euros Childs (Gorky's Zygotic Mynci) would collaborate with Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) - lately, they've both been writing songs that sound like they belong on a Gorky's Zygotic Mynci record. Blake's folky contributions to the last Teenage Fanclub record were my favorites on that album, so I was pleased to hear that he was going to do an album with Childs under the name Jonny. It's pretty clear that Blake took a supporting role in the project, putting the spotlight in the songs on Jonny on Childs' voice (vocally, musically, and lyrically). The only songs on the record that sound much like Blake at all are "Circling the Sun" and "The Good Night" - they're quite good, but they clearly aren't what Jonny is all about.
The bulk of Jonny comes straight out of the Gorky's tradition of goofy, skewed pop and heartfelt, handmade folk songs. The goofy pop numbers on Jonny aren't my favorites - the eleven-minute "Cave Dance" suite is surprisingly enjoyable, but some of the other upbeat tracks are just annoying (the album opener "Wich Is Wich", "Goldmine", "Bread"). Childs' folky songs are uniformly excellent, though, from the wistful "English Lady" and the sweet "I Want to Be Around You" to the somber album closer "Never Alone". Blake's harmonies are a welcome complement to Childs' voice, and the album has a homespun, organic feel to it that brings welcome comparisons to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's best album, Spanish Dance Troupe.
Detail of the cover illustration of Galaxy magazine Vol. 16 No. 1by Mel Hunter, October 1960
I'll admit that I have trouble getting mad at "retro" music when it's done well, mostly because I like to see how musical influences get reshaped when passed through different filters. For instance, what happens if you take an album of Sonics-style garage rock and remove all the menace and about half of the energy? What's left? San Francisco's Sonny Smith and his band the Sunsets tried this experiment, and the results are, surprisingly, quite satisfactory. Hit After Hit is garage rock made by musicians sprawled out on old couches - the results are not too far from the Modern Lovers and other post-VU bands, but Sonny & the Sunsets get there without drawing a straight line through Lou Reed.
When you slow garage rock down, the temptation is to add embellishments to make up for the lowered energy level, but Sonny & the Sunsets leave their arrangements fairly bare-bones. As a result, the songs on Hit After Hit have to have pretty compelling melodies. Album opener "She Plays Yo Yo With My Mind" is a little flat (but good for introducing the album's concept), but every other song on the album has at least one nice hook. From the feel-good vibes of "I Wanna Do It" to the muted scorn of "Don't Act Dumb", each of the songs on Hit After Hit has its own appeal, and a few nice production touches don't get in the way (my favorite being the slap echo effect in the chorus of "Teenage Thugs"). And, most interestingly, the album doesn't feel "thin", even though it has a length of under a half hour and includes two instrumentals.
Certain high-profile reviews of Hit After Hit have used the term "low-stakes" to describe the music of Sonny Smith, and I think that's misleading. Making pop music this direct and unadorned takes some real guts - an inferior set of songs would sound terrible presented like this. It's hard to say that I'm excited by this album because excitement isn't really part of the Sonny & the Sunsets equation, but I think I'm as pleased with Hit After Hit as the band must be.
Cover illustration of How to Operate the No. 19 Teletypewriter, 1962
A while ago, I observed that the 1994 album Split by British dream-pop combo Lush was ripe with Title Fight opportunities. I did "Lit Up" in that first match-up, which Lush won. But I thought it would be fun to put some of Split's other tracks up against their titular dopplegangers to see how they match up. So this is the first in a series, I guess. I was planning on putting this Lush song up against the Breeders, but when I saw the "The" in the title, I switched things up to the more appropriate opponent, "The Invisible Man" from Elvis Costello's 1983 album Punch the Clock.
I've always liked Punch the Clock, and "The Invisible Man" is a decent track from it - I'm not a big fan of the oompah-oompah horns on the intro - they're pretty corny - but as soon as the lilting verse melody comes in, backed by a staccato keyboard, I'm loving it. The whole song is a push and pull between those two elements, though, and they only really blend well on the big horn break after the second verse. It's got a nice chorus, but those horns are intrusive and lack a good deal of subtlety.
Lush, on the other hand, opt for a creepy vibe on their "The Invisible Man", coming out of the gate with machine-gun snare drums, a wall of shoegaze-style guitar, and cooing vocals. The verses are no great shakes, but the best bit is on the chorus, where Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson repeat the phrase, "Please let me start screaming!" over and over in an anxious whisper. It's a nice, genuinely disturbing moment the first time you hear it, and it's enough to give Lush the "win" here, giving Split a 2-0 record. Let's see what happens next time, though, when they go up against one of Pavement's best songs.
Winner: LUSH
"The Invisible Man" by Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Photo illustration from an advertisement for Super Kem-Tone paints, 1959
I wasn't a "metal guy" in high school, and I think that it's kind of hard to become a "metal guy" later in life. Regardless, I'm open to trying new things, and I like some stuff that skews toward hard rock, so I bought my first Sabbath album last year. I got Master of Reality, purely on the strength of John Darnielle's 33 1/3 book of the same name (a fictionalized memoir of sorts about loving the album as a teenager). I was surprised by how quickly I took to Master of Reality - sure, it rocked pretty hard, but it was way more accessible than I thought it'd be. The only thing that stopped me from embracing it wholeheartedly was the fact that it consisted of only eight songs, violating my personal, stupid-but-important "10 Song Rule". And a couple of the songs are barely better than filler.
There's only one album in the Black Sabbath discography that strictly satisfies the "10 Song Rule", and it's Black Sabbath Vol. 4, which I now have a copy of. And, predictably, I love it to pieces. For me, this is the perfect Black Sabbath album (I know it's sacrilegious to say this when I barely have a passing familiarity with the band's first two records, but I also know myself well enough to know that they wouldn't make me as happy as Vol. 4 does.) Sure, people rip on "Changes", Ozzy's soppy piano ballad, but it's one element of a very diverse hard-rock record and works as a piece of the whole puzzle. Wedged between the concise, riff-heavy "Tomorrow's Dream" and the ambient "FX", "Changes" doesn't seem so weird.
Black Sabbath Vol. 4 has its share of tracks that are just as hard-rocking and catchy as the best on Master of Reality - "Supernaut", which has a great tropicalia break in the middle that I never noticed until recently, "Snowblind", and "St. Vitus' Dance". And the album's opening and closing tracks, each composed of two distinct sections, are both quite good (although each definitely has one stronger section and one weaker one). I was surprised to find that "Laguna Sunrise", the album's acoustic instrumental, was the track I liked the least - I'd heard good things about it - but, again, it fits into the album's sequencing really well. I'm tempted to be satisfied with Vol. 4 and not dig any deeper into Sabbath's stuff, but I may re-evaluate that assessment at some point, especially if this record keeps growing on me. To be honest, I'm pretty curious about the "disco-metal" descriptor I have heard used for the second side of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. We'll see.
Ambrotype titled "Portait of Young Man, Yawning" by unidentified artist, c. 1854
I'm always hesitant to post songs here that are neither new nor old - stuff that falls into that category of stuff that was new a little while ago but isn't ready to be remembered yet. Like a Super Furry Animals song from 2005, for instance. But this song came up first on the Jukebox, and I'm going to post it proudly. 2005's Love Kraft may just be my favorite Super Furry Animals album - it's definitely the most consistent with no real low points, which is unexpected considering how democratic its songwriting breakdown is.
Take, for example, "Atomik Lust", my favorite track from Love Kraft. Written by drummer Dafydd Ieuan and sung by him as well, it doesn't sound like the kind of song a band's drummer would come up with. It's basically the Beach Boys' "You Still Believe in Me" (another all-time favorite of mine) with sections of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" grafted on to it. It's an oddly structured song without a clear verse/chorus structure, but the melody is captivating, and the arrangements of the song's quiet and noisy sections creates a non-intuitive but very satisfying contrast. You could say that it's one part sleigh bells and one part Sleigh Bells. Har har har.
Detail of a Christian revival banner by an unknown artist, c. 1930
In 2009, I went to see Ezra Furman & the Harpoons play a great (if under-attended) show in town - after the show, I asked Furman when the next Harpoons album was coming out. He bemoaned the difficulty he was having getting a label interested, in spite of some great buzz around his Illinois-based band's previous album, Inside the Human Body. This was disappointing - he'd played some great new material at the show, and I'd really enjoyed two songs he'd performed for Daytrotter earlier in 2009. "Mysterious Power" and "Wild Feeling" seemed to be a big step forward from the material from his first two albums (as much as I'd loved those).
Now, two years after that Daytrotter session, Furman's new album Mysterious Power has quietly been released through Red Parlor Records. I say "quietly" because this record is getting nowhere near the buzz it deserves. A concept album of sorts about a young man who has retreated to his bedroom after a bad breakup, Mysterious Power features some of Furman's best songwriting to date. As usual, the songs neatly divide between rootsy rocking numbers with Furman spewing lyrics in his tuneful whine and poetic Dylan-style ballads. A couple of the songs skew too far one direction or the other - "Bloodsucking Whore" tries a little too hard to be menacing, and "Don't Turn Your Back on Love" is an amusing travelogue that wears out its welcome around the five-minute mark - but Furman has a few new tricks to display as welll.
Mysterious Power's opener, "Wild Rosemarie", has some great atmospheric touches to separate it from the other ballads, and "Teenage Wasteland" has a folky boisterousness a la the Pogues. But the two songs that anchor the album are the ones that come from that 2009 Daytrotter session. "Mysterious Power" has lost none of the, er, mysterious power of that original performance and is a great slice of wistful acoustic pop, and album closer "Wild Feeling" is a melancholy number with some nice internal-rhyming lyrics that get me legitimately choked up sometimes. While Mysterious Power was definitely worth the wait, I'm hoping the word will get out about this record, and we don't have to wait so long for Furman's next set of songs. He's only 23 (24?) years old at this point, so I think he'll be writing songs for the foreseeable future but, when you're dealing with a songwriting talent of this caliber, you want to see his evolution and progress in real time if you can.
Illustration from an ad for Petrolagar constipation treatment, 1940
Are shoegaze bands becoming more derivative, or are they just increasingly becoming described as such? I think the nu-shoegaze movement was always bound to be accused of recycling the guitar sounds of the early '90s, but Austin, TX band Ringo Deathstarr is like a suspiciously too-perfect shoegaze band developed by military scientists in an underground lab. Girl who can sing like Bilinda Butcher? Check! Boy who can sing like Jim Reid? Check! Bassist who doesn't mind being drowned out entirely by layers of crazy-sounding guitars? Check! Drummer whose parts could be probably be sampled and looped if he became ill, Loveless-style? Check! (This makes it sound like there's four people in Ringo Deathstarr, but they're a trio and two of those "Checks!" are about bassist/vocalist Alex Gehring.)
Like the band that produced it, Colour Trip has a similar Frankenstein's-monster sewn-together-ness. Each of the album's eleven songs represents a distinct approach to shoegaze rock, and the band hardly covers the same terrain twice. You've got a swooshing wall-of-guitars-over-backward-vocals number ("Imagine Hearts"), a chugging, distortion-heavy song with mumbly vocals ("Do It Every Time"), a peppy song with acoustic guitar ("So High"), a floaty ambient number with tambourine ("Day Dreamy"), a song with jarring, druggy tempo changes ("Tambourine Girl"), and so on. The last song ("Other Things") even sounds suspiciously like a tribute to post-indie shoegaze homages. The songs are accessible and catchy, the guitars are suitably loud, and Colour Trip is as good a single-band shoegaze genre survey as you're likely to find.
Illustration from Eugene Morel's Tientes du Nord, 1903
I haven't done a single "I Saw a Movie" entry since the Sundance Film Festival - why? I haven't set foot in a movie theater since then because of a little bundle of "joy" that showed up at our house recently. Circumstances gave me the opportunity to sneak in a matinee this week, but I found that there aren't many interesting movies in theaters right now. I liked the idea of Source Code, but I wasn't sure I wanted to end my movie-going drought with a "small" movie. I'm glad I did, though, because Source Code is a small movie in all the best ways - tidy and self-contained in a fashion that emphasizes its strengths.
Not that Source Code is flawless - it's a movie with a central conceit that was vague to the point of straining my suspension of disbelief. Jake Gyllenhaal plays an Army officer who is repeatedly inserted into the scene of a recent terrorist bombing to decipher what exactly happened. The technology for doing this is necessarily discussed only in fuzzy terms, but the movie handles the exposition clumsily enough that I kept trying to fill in the blanks myself with hypothetical solutions. It was distracting, as was the fact that the script calls this technology "source code" for some reason, baffling to anyone who knows anything about technology. Also, the terrorist Gyllenhaal is trying to find is a contrived and ill-defined figure that you never really get a chance to sink your teeth into.
These weaknesses are flaws inherent in the little narrative machine that writer Ben Ripley and director Duncan Jones have created, though. Like Inception in miniature, Source Code is a tight story built around an engaging set of plot devices and a few key elements. There are a handful characters, a couple key settings, and a very succinct time period involved. And, apart from the two gaps I mentioned, the story unfolds in a very satisfying way, anchored by competent (if not challenging) performances by two very attractive leads, Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan. After a few months of not seeing any new movie releases, I'm glad that I saw Source Code instead of an ambitious, messy epic of some kind - it didn't blow my socks off, but it reminded me how a little, well-executed piece of film-craft can be very entertaining.
Cover design for International Textiles titled "Lady in Red Dress" by Rene Gruau, 1956
Fans of Bobby Wratten, frontman of UK indie bands the Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars, know that he had a short-lived third project between those two well-known bands. It was called Northern Picture Library, and it's generally known for being a difficult in-between phase for Wratten, in which he explored some different sounds and approaches to his music. I'm only lukewarm on the later Field Mice stuff, but I was intrigued by things I'd heard about Northern Picture Library. And I was feeling adventurous, so I picked up 1993's Alaska, the band's only album. Guess what? It's just as confounding and weird as I thought it might be.
My biggest issue with Alaska is the way it's structured - there are hardly any vocals tracks in the album's first half, for one thing. You get a few lines of recognizable lyrics toward the end of the album's third track, the seven-minute languorous, acoustic "Catholic Easter Colours". The first real pop song you get is the fifth track, "Insecure", and it's a gauzy, insubstantial thing that nevertheless has a certain loveliness to it. It's sung by Annemari Davies, who handles most of the vocals in the album's abstract first half with her airy coos and sighs. Oddly, the second half of the album is much more grounded, with Bobby Wratten taking over the lead vocals and singing some pretty direct and lyrical songs like "Truly Madly Deeply" and "Of Traffic and the Ticking".
I actually quite like some of the less pop-oriented material on Alaska - I just think it would work better if it were interspersed with the other stuff. I have trouble with albums that start out doing one thing and then switching to another thing entirely halfway through - David Bowie's Low is a good example of a much-loved album that irritates me in this way. My favorite thing on Alaska, actually, is the "Love Song for the Dead Che" single that has been appended to the reissue. I'm a big fan of the original song by the '60s psych-rock band United States of America, and Northern Picture Library does two versions of the song, one that's transformative (titled "Love Song for the Dead Che #1"), and another that's interpretive ("#2").
"Love Song for the Dead Che #2" by Northern Picture Library
Cover illustration of Matt Morgan's The American War: Cartoons, 1874
Doesn't it seem sometimes like the best bands are the ones that never really existed? Dukes of the Stratosphear, the Ohio Express, Jem and the Holograms ... the list goes on and on. The New Breed was a band that didn't exist during the 1960s, in spite of releasing a couple decent 45s in '67 and '68. At the time, songwriter Ron Price was writing for a lot of the garage bands in the Dallas area - some of his best songs ended up getting recorded by a group of session musicians and released under the name the New Breed. To hook the record-buying kids, the record label spread the rumor that the New Breed were actually the popular Dallas band the Mystics. But the fact was that there was no New Breed.
"High Society Girl" is a pretty great song, though. The key element of the song is easily the sawing organ part that you hear in the intro - it sounds almost like a cello. After an appropriately menacing, snarling verse, the band kicks into a nice, anthemic chorus punctuated by some cool little guitar licks. They even pull off some nice harmonies - how is it that the session musicians often managed to sound better vocally than the real bands?
Illustration from the manual for the Atari Fire Truck arcade game, 1978
The direct progeny of the Left Banke are few and precious, but the identifiers used for them can be difficult to define - "Baroque pop"? "Pastoral"? I'm not sure what makes a band baroque-pop beyond making me think, "Gee, there hasn't been a new Ladybug Transistor album in a while!" And that was my thought when I heard the debut album by Philadelphia band Brown Recluse (formerly Brown Recluse Sings), whose new album on Slumberland has been overshadowed a bit by more high-profile releases. It's worth keeping an eye out for, though, even if the Ladybug Transistor comparison isn't perfect. Brown Recluse is a little more in line with the Ladybug Transistor's earthier cousin, the much-missed Essex Green.
The songs on Evening Tapestry have organs, tasteful horns, pattering drums, and harpsichords, mixing urban and nature themes with a surprisingly morbid bent (especially in lyrics like, "The shadows of dark clouds above, threatening to eviscerate themselves all over me and drown me indiscriminately on this filthy block.") The music is consistently well-crafted and unassuming almost to a fault, but the melodies are catchy and the band approaches the baroque-pop sound from a few interesting angles, like the hazy psychedelia of "Paisley Tears" and the moody, reverb-drenched "At Last". A few of the songs have melodies that are so familiar that I automatically grind my mental gears, trying to identify the connection, but this kind of pop record does better sticking with simple tunes anyway.
One of my favorite tracks on the record is "Impressions of a City Morning", with its chugging rhythm and lilting melody line. I'll admit, though, that my ardor for this record waned a little when I got the news that the Ladybug Transistor finally have a new record coming out this spring. It seems funny to point to one band as an imitator when you're dealing with a whole genre of imitators, though - when it comes down to it, if a band can do this kind of winsome pop well, more power to them.
Photo illustration from The Mirror, annual of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, 1973
I become excited when someone I know has that moment where they "get" the Mountain Goats - for a lot of people, the simple melodies and distinctive voice of John Darnielle are off-putting to the point where it's hard to appreciate the excellent songwriting skills the man has. But, if you can get past a potentially grating first impression, there is an amazingly deep and rewarding songbook to get acquainted with - simply put, if you can get with what Darnielle is doing, you will find that he is the best at what he does, bar none. And it looks like the new Mountain Goats album, All Eternals Deck, is another excellent entry point - it's the third that the band has produced in its new power-trio line-up with Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster. Darnielle has continually refined his ability to optimize the musical assets at his disposal, and this new album takes his ability to mold arrangements to lyrical content to new levels.
Recent Moutain Goats records have roughly fallen into one of two categories - theme/concept albums and song anthologies. His theme albums are the best known because they are easy to reduce to a blurb - Tallahassee's ruminations on alcoholism and co-dependency, The Sunset Tree's memories of troubled youth, and The Life of the World to Come's biblical study of mortality are easy to warm to. But Heretic Pride, Darnielle's last "short-story" album, had some of his best songs in recent memory, and All Eternals Deck could be seen as a sequel. The songs come from multiple sessions with different producers, and each set of songs adds a different facet to the album, from the big anthems produced by John Congleton to the more atmospheric mood pieces from the Scott Solter sessions.
Some common threads run through the songs on All Eternals Deck - the ghosts of Charles Bronson, Judy Garland, and Liza Minnelli are conjured to evoke the decay of fading Hollywood, and this theme casts its shadow across the more personal tales of fighting tooth-and-nail against fate. A couple of the album's song pairings fall a little flat ("The Autopsy Garland" and "Beautiful Gas Mask", for example, are decent songs but don't flow together well), but Darnielle is becoming increasingly deft with nuanced arrangements. "The Age of Kings" features a heavenly string arrangement, "Prowl Great Cain" has a fierce energy, and I'm a total sucker for the "keep-fighting" anthems like "Never Quite Free" that Darnielle does so well. The most surprising and pleasing number may be "High Hawk Season", which inserts Darnielle and his acoustic guitar into an eerie barber-shop quartet arrangement by the North Mountain Singers - like the best songs on the Mountain Goats' post-lo-fi records, it's an affecting combination of Darnielle's songwriting and a few musical elements that make the lyrics cut with a visceral force.
Illustration by Fritz Bergen from F.W. Hacklander's Namenlose Geschichten, 1800
During their initial run of albums, UK pop band Squeeze was defined by the songwriting of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook. I'm naturally more drawn to the conventional pop writing style of Tilbrook, but Difford's songs are fascinating as poetic character studies, giving them a different feel and structure. His best-known narrative song is probably the teen romance single "Up the Junction" from Cool for Cats, but I'm also quite fond of "Vicky Verky" from the following album, Argybarby. "Vicky Verky" is a mirror image and companion piece to "Up the Junction" in a way - both songs are about teens in love and pregnancy. But, where the couple in "Up the Junction" is driven apart by the birth of their daughter, things play out differently in "Vicky Verky".
Here's how my reading of "Vicky Verky" goes - a boy gets his 14-year-old girlfriend "in a family way" and is driven to burglary to try to support her. He ends up getting incarcerated, which is where this song's great bridge comes in. While in the borstal, our boy gets a letter - as he reads the letter, in which the girl lets him know that she's decided to terminate the pregnancy, the song modulates into a different key and strings and harpsichord enter the arrangement. In the break after the bridge, the song returns to its original key but the strings stay in the arrangement, possibly indicating how these kids' lives have been changed irrevocably. In the final verse, the lovers are reunited and decide to stay together and make their relationship work. It's a good example of how song structure can elevate a song's narrative, and I also just really like the melody and vocal delivery on this bridge - one of my favorites.
Stereograph titled "Woodlake" by James T. Hendrick, c. 1885
The intersection of late-'60s bubblegum pop and psychedelic music is a tricky one - a lot of pop bands gave the "psych" thing a try and it didn't really work. For every success like Odessey and Oracle, Head, or Smiley Smile, there's a greater number of failures and botched experiments. I don't know why I thought Progressions by the Texas band the Five Americans might be a good bet - the band straddled the line between legit band and pop throwaways from the start. They wrote their own material and toured with some of the best bands of the time, but their two big hits, "I See the Light" and "Western Union", were pretty lightweight.
These two sides of the Five Americans' music dominate their third album, Progressions, as well, with the additional factor of shoehorning some psych-pop style to their sound. It doesn't all come together in a very cohesive way, but the variety and strong songwriting make it a fun listen anyway. "Zip Code" is straight-up bubblegum pop, with some great harmonies and handclaps, but it's hard not to hear the Five Americans straining to recapture the magic of "Western Union". "Stop-Light" and "Rain Maker" do a better job of showing the band's better pop instincts, coming across as a mix of the Association and the Kinks, and a couple more "serious" rock songs (""Black Is White-Day Is Night" and "Come On Up") show the band flexing their musicianship muscles a little.
The album's most successful psych-pop composition is easily "Evol-Not Love" (unfortunately only included in mono where the rest of the album was given a roomier stereo mix). With a martial drumbeat and Byrds-y guitar jangle, it has some of the best vocal harmonies on Progressions. The only really "psych" elements involved are the keening organ and the heavy reverb on the vocals, but it's enough to give the track a floaty vibe that mixes with the bubblegum-pop melody just right. It's the kind of thing I look for in an album like Progressions - it's too bad that there aren't more songs like "Evol-Not Love" to be found here.
Illustration from the children's book The Dirty Child, c. 1890
Most people think of Erasure purely as a "singles" band - when they think of Erasure at all, that is. For a band that had some really good, really popular songs, it's kind of weird how they seldom they are mentioned in the general music discourse these days. I decided to see how Erasure's albums stand up, so I picked up a copy of 1988's The Innocents to see how it holds up. It's surprisingly solid end to end, with the less-well-known album tracks standing their own alongside the hits ("A Little Respect" and "Chains of Love").
The one puzzling track on the album is "Sixty-Five Thousand" - stuck between two of my favorite songs on The Innocents ("Hallowed Ground" and "Heart of Stone"), it's an instrumental interlude that totally wrecks the album's momentum for me, and it definitely raises the question, "Why does this exist?" A melody-less mess of cowbells, samples, and synths, the weirdest thing about "Sixty-Five Thousand" is how it clearly quotes Glenn Miller's big band hit "Pennsylvania 6-5000". Does this have something to do with 1985 Ed Begley Jr. vehicle Transylvania 6-5000, which may have brought the song back into the public consciousness? Or does it signify that this is Vince Clarke's attempt at creating a "big-band" number? It's a real head-scratcher.
Detail of an advertisement for Gordon's Vodka, 1975
As I start to really dig into late-'80s British indie, I'm starting to discover that most of it is not quite interesting enough (derivative of things I've already heard) or too interesting (doing something a little too odd for me to get into). Cath Carroll's band Miaow falls into the latter category - the Orchids fall into the former. This isn't really a shocker, I know - "Extra! Extra! Sarah Records band found to be somewhat twee and whiny!" But I had to listen to my recently acquired Orchids records several times just to get past the strong initial impression that this was Lawrence from Felt fronting the Field Mice.
Once I came to terms with the Orchids not being mind-blowingly original, though, I started finding things to like in the wimp-pop stylings of their first full-length release, the 1989 mini-albumLyceum. I had to laugh when the liner notes refer to one of the songs ("Caveman") as being a "great punk rock rush" - there's nothing even close to punk rock in the polite and brittle pop of the Orchids. But there's plenty of tidy guitar jangle, bouncy rhythms, and winsome vocal melodies to be found, particularly in songs like "It's Only Obvious", the vaguely country-ish "A Place Called Home". The highlights of Lyceum are the two songs with big, yearning choruses ("Carrole-Anne" and "Hold On"), as well as "The York Song", a more low-key but lovely bit of wistful pop.
I'm not a big fan of mini-albums, so Lyceum's eight tracks don't really make for a satisfying listen on their own. Luckily, the LTM reissue of the album includes the singles the Orchids released in 1988 and 1989, more than doubling the original release's length. Most of these stray singles don't really live up to their names ("Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom", "Underneath the Window, Underneath the Sink"), but they give a fuller picture of where the Orchids were coming from.
Photo titled "Gowdy Trapped Between the Bases" from Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, 1915
Robert Pollard is having quite a year - the Guided By Voices reunion tour is chugging along and getting ready for the summer festival circuit, but Uncle Bob's tour schedule is apparently not affecting his ability to turn out quality releases. The New Theory of Everything is his latest, a power-pop collaboration with Gary Waleik of '80s college-rock radio heroes Big Dipper. It's a nice companion piece to Pollard's recent collaboration with Doug Gillard (Waving at the Astronauts), a more laid-back and accessible cousin to that album's labyrinthine prog-rock. Gary Waleik doesn't bring the whole Big Dipper sound with him here - we get some of those noodly guitar leads that does so well, but the guitar tones and riffs are more "conventional power-pop" than the edgier stuff Big Dipper did. This is okay, though - we know from Pollard's collaboration with Tommy Keene (the Keene Brothers) that he can work in that power-pop palette with great agility.
The New Theory of Everything starts with a bang, too - the opening title track is what Pollard calls "creamy pop", heavy in hooks and harmonies, with some nice drumming from Bob Fay (formerly of Sebadoh). "Man. Wine. Power!" is the second half of the opening one-two punch, a good example of how Pollard can take a preexisting piece of music and exert an amazing degree of ownership over it by imposing a melody and lyric that meld seamlessly. Starting with the melancholy ballad "There Never Was a Sea of Love", though, the album settles into a slow-song/fast-song rhythm for the rest of its length. What's interesting about this is that Pollard doesn't ever load his albums with this many ballads - moody songs like "I Am an All-Star" and "Lumps" force him to stretch out a little and rely on his voice (not hooks and lyrical turns) to keep the listener captivated. It works quite well, making The New Theory of Everything a uniquely somber and vocal-focused work in his solo discography.
The downside to the sequencing of The New Theory of Everything is that the strict alternating between upbeat numbers and ballads (with none of the weird interludes we expect from Pollard) threatens to get monotonous toward that album's end. Luckily, Mars Classroom saves some of the best for last two songs - "It Had to Come From Somewhere" is as direct a power-pop single as the album's infectious opener, and the closer "Wish You Were Young" is easily the album's best ballad. It's got a lovely wistfulness and a longing for lost innocence that make a fitting ending to an album with a loose "school-days" concept.
So Pollard's tally for 2011 so far: one quirky post-punk record (Space City Kicks), one hard-rocking prog record (Waving at the Astronauts), and one creamy power-pop record (this one!) And, this summer, we'll get a psych-rock double LP from Boston Spaceships (Let It Beard) and a "poetry" record called Lord of the Birdcage. It never ends with this guy.
Early color photograph titled "Children in the Tenement District" by Jack Delano, 1940
For me, Cheap Trick is all about the contrast of "ugly" and "pretty" (the two aspects that arguably make up the respective halves of power-pop). Cheap Trick's second album, In Color, had a picture of the band's two "pretty" members (Robin Zander and Tom Petersson) on the front, hiding the band's - uh - less photogenic dudes (Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos) on the album's back cover. This was a good reflection of the band pretty-ing up their sound for their second record. The third record, Heaven Tonight, still features Zander and Petersson on the front cover, which has always bugged me - this is the album where the band found a balance of "power" and "pop", and I think Zander should be sharing the front cover with Rick Nielsen (the guy who wrote most of Cheap Trick's songs, incidentally).
These were my thoughts on Heaven Tonight when "Stiff Competition" popped up on the ol' jukebox. It's my third favorite song on the record, maybe - the open homage to Who's Next may not be totally original, but it was probably a gutsier move in 1978 than it looks like now. That Townsend-style riff is the backbone of the whole song, although there's no real verse/chorus divide here - instead, there's an acoustic bridge-like section after each verse. It's cool that the acoustic arpeggios in this section also have a distinctly Who-like sound, like bits of "Behind Blue Eyes" spliced into "Won't Get Fooled Again". The only aspect of the song that doesn't work for me is the lyric, particularly the line, "I screw you, you screw me, they screw us". It's not as edgy and cool-sounding as they probably thought it was at the time.
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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