I Saw a Show! Sasquatch! Music Festival 2011 (Day 1), 28 May 2011

Image from Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles by Louis Agassiz, 1843

So I just got back from the Sasquatch! Music Festival today - it was my first time ever attending the four-day outdoor rock festival that's held at the Gorge Amphitheatre, overlooking the Columbia River in central Washington state. My brother and I elected to skip the first day of the festival (Friday) - the lineup didn't hold much of interest, so we arrived at the Gorge Saturday morning. We wanted to get there fairly soon after the doors opened because we wanted to catch Swedish electro-dreampop act the Radio Dept. We got there early enough to catch the first band to perform on the festival's main stage, a band called the Alberta Cross from the UK. Described in the always-amusing festival program blurbs as a British version of My Morning Jacket, they were predictably uninteresting, bordering on terrible.

The Radio Dept.'s set was much better - with their minimal three-man setup on a huge stage in broad daylight, they didn't make much of a visual impression, but their set sounded quite good. The vocals were mixed a little low, but the setlist had a lot of high points, including the band's best singles ("Pulling Our Weight", "Heaven's on Fire"). When they were done, we were happy enough with our spot in front of the main stage that we stuck around to see Seattle roots-pop ensemble the Head and the Heart, a local favorite. I was impressed with their musicianship, versatility, and energy, but their songwriting needs to develop a bit. LA indie-pop band Local Natives, who took the stage next, did a better job of impressing with their multiple vocalists.

We spent the rest of the afternoon watching performances on the festival's two smaller stages. J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. did a great-sounding solo set on the tiny Yeti Stage, but he was counting on using loops to layer his guitar parts and his equipment wasn't really cooperating. As a result, the set only really got any momentum going when he managed to get a long solo going. We saw Jenny & Johnny do a solid set, marred only by Jenny letting Johnny take the lead vocal on occasion, and they were followed by New York's Antlers, who sounded really good as well. After the Antlers' set, we caught the last half of the Thermals' performance on the small stage (twenty minutes is plenty to get the full Thermals experience), and then we watched a little of Iron & Wine on the big stage before deciding to pack it in for the evening. Sleigh Bells were playing at 10:00, but there weren't enough good acts on earlier in the evening to make it worthwhile. We saw almost seven full sets, so it was a day's worth of good music.

"Pulling Our Weight" by the Radio Dept.

"You take it on faith - you take it to the heart..."

Photo titled "Blizzard of 1888, 45th Street and Grand Central Depot, New York, NY", 1888

I'll be back tomorrow with a full report of the Sasquatch Festival. For now, you'll just have to wait. Have a good Memorial Day.

"The Waiting" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

It's New to Me: Icky Mettle by Archers of Loaf (1993)

Diagram titled "Mercurial-pressure Apparatus for Injecting Lymphatics" from Sir A. E. Sharpey-Schäfer's A Course of Practical Histology, 1877

I'll be going to the Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington state this weekend (come say "hi" if you see me there!), so I've been boning up a little on the bands I'm excited to see. I may be most excited about the recently-reformed Archers of Loaf, one of my favorite indie-rock bands of the '90s. Oddly, though, I've never owned the Archers' best-known album, their 1993 debut Icky Mettle. I came to know Archers of Loaf through 1994's Vs. the Greatest of All Time EP, which I still consider one of the best EP releases of the '90s. I also had great love for the Vee Vee LP and Speed of Cattle compilation during this era. So I decided it was time to go back and introduce myself to Icky Mettle.

Dismissed by many at the time as a second-rate Pavement copycat, Icky Mettle is both more "pop" and less "pop" than Pavement's stuff from the same period. Eric Bachmann's grown-growl-and-howl singing is a more melodic twist on the hardcore-punk vocal, but it takes some getting used to. And, for a debut record, Icky Mettle kind of lacks focus - "You & Me" is the only track that really works the softLOUDsoft dynamic that was center-stage on Vs. the Greatest of All Time, "Toast" is a drawn-out slow-burner, and "Hate Paste" has the rinky-dink acoustic sound of some of Vee Vee's weirder tracks.

But Icky Mettle is all about the "Web In Front" song template - "Web In Front" is a great off-beat pop song, with arty/muscular guitar riffs, doggerel lyrics, and a chorus that features a sweet hook sung over a chanted counter-melody. Icky Mettle works because the band delivers five or six variations on this pleasing formula, so that a good half of the album is composed of catchy pop songs. "Wrong", "Might", and "Backwash" are all high points, but my favorite is probably "Plumb Line" - it's not as catchy right off the bat, but it has that great "She's an indie rocker / Nothing's gonna stop her!" hook on the chorus. It doesn't get much more "90s" than that.

"Plumb Line" by Archers of Loaf

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Hobbie Galore" by R. Stevie Moore

Illustration from an advertisement for the Wylie School of Dancing, 1957

Considered by many to be the theme song or national anthem of the wacky world of home-recording pioneer R. Stevie Moore, "Hobbies Galore" is a song that I took a long time warming up to. Unlike a lot of the experimental/eccentric pop music Moore was putting on his home-recorded cassettes in the '70s, "Hobbies Galore" is a meditative and simple song built around acoustic guitar and Moore's reverb-heavy vocals. It was originally released on 1975's Stevie Moore or Less, fairly early in Moore's career, which is surprising as the song exhibits the weariness and restraint of a more mature songwriter.

Initially, I dismissed "Hobbies Galore" as "boring", but the haunting chorus hook started to stick after a months of repeated listens, and I started to see why people find the lyric to be so significant. The song appears to be about the joy of being in the solitary cocoon of your home, turning the place into an artistic world all its own and then sharing it with a few special people. The song is full of evocative little lines like, "Nobody's here - what do i care / painting a musical night." It's easy to apply this imagery to just about any of my favorite songwriters that spent years recording alone to a boombox in a basement or apartment - groups like Guided by Voices, the Bevis Frond, the Mountain Goats, the Magnetic Fields, and Ariel Pink all come from this "Hobbies Galore" world.

"Hobbie Galore" by R. Stevie Moore

It's New to Me: Kinda Kinks by the Kinks (1965)

Illustration from an advertisement for Antiminth pinworm medication, 1978

I'm definitely a "late Kinks" guy, rather than an "early Kinks" guy, but the recent two-disc reissues of the Kinks' early albums have been mighty tempting. I finally bit on Kinda Kinks with the feeling that I'd find the album itself underwhelming but that the second disc would make up for it. I was pretty much right - even Ray Davies was never happy with Kinda Kinks, and you can tell on listening that it was a rush job. Of course, "Tired of Waiting For You" is a great song, but a lot of the originals that Davies wrote for Kinda Kinks are undistinguished garage-blues songs that lack any real bite (album opener "Look For Me Baby", "Got My Feet on the Ground"). And the album's two covers are real low points - the bluesy "Naggin' Woman" is annoying (particularly the way Davies keeps pronouncing it "nuggin' woman"), and their cover of "Dancing in the Street" is totally disposable.

Perhaps predictably, I enjoy the more eclectic songs that are buried toward the end of the album. The last four songs are all quite good - "Come On Now" is probably the album's best rocker, "So Long" is a sweet acoustic number, "You Shouldn't Be Sad" is a lesser-known song that hits the sound of the Kinks' rowdy early singles, and "Something Better Beginning" ends the album with a pretty and wistful girl-group-style number. At 27 minutes, Kinda Kinks is a brief album that still manages to straddle two distinct styles - the rough, rocking sound of their early hits and the more interesting songwriting-focused work that was to come.

The second disc of the new Kinda Kinks reissue, though, may be one of my favorite Kinks discs. It includes the entire Kwyet Kinks EP (with the tracks out of order for some reason), as well as both sides of the singles for "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", "Set Me Free", and the ahead-of-its-time drone-rock classic "See My Friends". This disc also includes several nice demos from this Kinks period and earlier - the gorgeous piano ballad "I Go To Sleep" is probably one of the best-loved "lost" Kinks songs and it sounds great here, but I was almost as impressed with some of the other demos I hadn't heard before. "A Little Bit of Sunlight" is a very early Davies composition (and it shows), but the "whoa-whoa" refrain that opens the song is super-catchy, and I love Davies' intonation at the end of the verse where it transitions back to the refrain. It sounds like something off Something Else by the Kinks.

"A Little Bit of Sunlight" by the Kinks

It's New to Me: Up on the Sun by the Meat Puppets (1985)

Illustration from Kiplinger's Personal Finance Vol. 9 No. 7, July 1955

Last week at the record store, I made a couple used CD selections and took them up to the register - Fleetwood Mac and the Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun. The record store guy, an amiable goof with dreads and a lazy smile who's been known to chat about psych-rock comps and other obscure stuff, nodded approvingly at my selections. But what he said threw me for a loop: "I've never heard of the Meat Puppets, but this Fleetwood Mac record is great!" I let him know that I thought the Meat Puppets might be right up his alley, and he asked what they were like. I think I said something about '80s underground desert psych-punk, but I've wondered after the fact whether you can really describe Up on the Sun as a psychedelic record.

Released in 1985, Up on the Sun was the Meat Puppets' third album, following two punk-influenced, self-titled records. It was originally conceived as an effects-heavy psych-rock epic, and the band even started to record it that way, but they ended up having to return the borrowed tape recorder they were using. When they restarted the recording process, they went for a much cleaner, stripped-down sound that's much harder to pin down. The guitar-playing on this record is really impressive, much more so than later Meat Puppets records I have, I think. The other surprising thing about Up on the Sun, though, is how terrible most of the singing is. Curt Kirkwood's vocals are all over the place, and not in a charming way, either. So it's going to sound weird when I say that my only other gripe with Up on the Sun is that I'm not that big on the album's instrumentals - they'd both be better as vocal tracks (if Kirkwood would just sing less off-key).

Regardless, there are a good half-dozen songs on here that are as good as anything I've heard from the Meat Puppets, and it's easy to see why it's many fans' favorite Meat Puppets LP. The sunshine-pop of "Swimming Ground" is right up my alley, but I also really enjoy the more abstract and heavy numbers like "Hot Pink" and "Enchanted Porkfist". The best song on the album, though, is probably the opening title track with its tumbling intro riff and the awesome refrain that turns up toward the end of the song.

"Up on the Sun" by the Meat Puppets

In Stores Now: Lord of the Birdcage by Robert Pollard

Illustration from Yaʻakov David Kamson's Hatunah Be-Yaar, c. 1925

For his second solo album of 2011, Ohio rock veteran Robert Pollard has switched up his usual formula a little. A lot of the material that's been written about Lord of the Birdcage suggests that this is the first album Pollard has made by writing poems first and then setting them to music, but that's not entirely accurate. I know that Pollard has used this process at least a couple times before (I'm thinking Kid Marine and Guided By Voices' Universal Truths and Cycles?), but that doesn't make Lord of the Birdcage any less of a departure, especially since the "poetry" is much more of a central part of this album than ever before.

The songs on Lord of the Birdcage feel very "writerly" - some of them tell fairly straightforward stories, particularly the opening track "Smashed Middle Finger", whose playful wordplay and narrative structure set the stage for the rest of the album. On other songs, playing with language itself is the focus, whether its real words ("Aspersion") or made-up ones (album closer "Ash Ript Telecopter"). Lord of the Birdcage is a fun exercise, and it's good to see Pollard still exploring new processes and approaches to songwriting, but I think that this is clearly an album for dedicated fans and not casual listeners (who I'd point toward Pollard's recent Mars Classroom project instead).

At under thirty-five minutes, the album seems slight, and the first six songs are a lot more interesting than the album's weaker back half. But, for music fans that are willing to go along with Pollard when he's in one of his more adventurous moods, there's plenty to enjoy here. I have to admit, though, that the album's more "song-ish" songs are the ones that grab me, like the big choruses in "Garden Smarm" and the gorgeous, shimmering "In a Circle".

"In a Circle" by Robert Pollard

Title Fight: "Undertow"

Woodcut titled Goldfish Bowl by Roy Lichtenstein, 1981

In the fourth (and final) battle in our series of Title Fights based on Lush's 1994 album Split, we have a three-way first-blood brawl of alt-rock giants. Lush is 3-0 in this series, but I don't see them emerging from the squared circle unscathed in this "Undertow" battle. Let's take a look at the contenders - first we have Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers. His "Undertow" is from his 2000 solo album Big Tobacco - it's got a nice melancholic Pernice thing going for it and some nice cavernous drums lurking in the background, but the acoustic arrangement just isn't HEAVY enough for the song's title, and the "bloom is off the rose" imagery of the chorus is a not a good match.

So it's down to REM and Lush, whose offerings are remarkably similar, actually. Both songs are based around a thick, swampy guitar sound that evokes the title quite well. Both have a despairing, minor-key melody, although, where the REM song has a big arena-rock chorus, Lush's "Undertow" eschews the chorus entirely, filling the spaces between the verses with stormy guitars and then repeating a defeatist refrain at the very end.

I think I have to give the title belt to REM here, even though, when I listen to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, "Undertow" doesn't stand out as one of the best songs on the record. I love the song because, when the chorus begins, I have a clear image in my mind of Michael Stipe clinging to his mic stand and belting out those lines - I was at the concert where REM played "Undertow" for the first time EVER live, and the thrill of that moment comes back to me whenever I hear the song. Also, Mike Mills adds some nice backing vocals to the chorus on the last go-round, and I love any chorus with Mike Mills backing vocals.

Winner: REM

"Undertow" by Lush

"Undertow" by Joe Pernice

"Undertow" by REM

It's New to Me: Flamingo Favorites by the Flamingos (1960)

Cover illustration of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, 1949

When Chicago doo-wop group the Flamingos signed with End Records in 1959, they'd already had a few hits and some decent success. But, with the guidance of End label head George Goldner, they had immediately started to have even bigger hits and more success. Goldner's secret? He had the Flamingos record two albums of standards by Gershwin, Cole Porter, and others in a doo-wop style. Their first album for End Records, Flamingos Serenade, contained their biggest and best-known hit, the #1 smash "I Only Have Eyes for You". The CD I bought has both Flamingos Serenade and its sequel Flamingo Favorites, but I'm going to focus on the Flamingos' second record because the sound quality on Flamingos Serenade is kind of poor, which is frustrating.

Flamingo Favorites may not have "I Only Have Eyes for You", but I think it's a stronger album overall. The album is still dominated by standards, but the sound is more contemporary, and the Flamingos' Terry Johnson even gets to contribute a couple originals, the peppy "Heavenly Angel" and "Mio Amore (My Love)", which rips off the haunting sound of "I Only Have Eyes for You" but actually improves on the formula a little. Other standout tracks on Flamingo Favorites include "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy" (a Coasters sound-alike, I'm told), the swaggering "Maria Elena", and the weepy closer "Bridge of Tears". My favorite track on the album, though, is probably the Flamingos' interpretation of "You Belong to My Heart", a song that was originally a hit for Bing Crosby in 1945. The Flamingos bring the song a more modern sound, however, with a cool arrangement that starts with burbling woodwinds and a percussive "chew-op-chew-bop-bop" vocal drenched in reverb. As with all the Flamingos' songs, the vocal arrangement is impeccable but recognizably Flamingos, with Terry Johnson and Paul Wilson sharing the lead vocal (I think).

"You Belong to My Heart" by the Flamingos

In Stores Now: Burst Apart by the Antlers

Illustration from The Tatler magazine, September 1921

Burst Apart is the follow-up LP to my favorite album of 2009, the Antlers' Hospice. A lot has changed for the Antlers since that album, though. For one thing, they've become a real band - Hospice was the third of a trilogy of albums made more or less solo by NY-based songwriter Peter Silberman under the name "the Antlers". After Hospice, however, the Antlers became a real band, capable of touring and recording in the studio as a unit. Burst Apart is the first album made by the new "band" version of the band, but it's not that much different from the Antlers' sound I'm accustomed to. Which raises an interesting question.

If the band's sound hasn't changed, is this album just Hospice all over again, minus the engaging theme and concept that made it such a rewarding listen? Kind of, but there's still plenty to like about Burst Apart. The first half of this album is really, really good - the songs are more accessible than much of Hospice, but they still have a lot of that album's cool atmospheric touches that made its songs so immersive. Silberman is also still exploring Hospice's main themes - loss, fear, and relationships are found in all of these songs, from the late-night disco of "French Exit" to the soaring "I Don't Want Love". The best of this almost-flawless set of five songs is "Parentheses", a song that starts with a clattering bed of skeletal drums and gradually adds guitars and synths to become a spooky, dramatic pop song of the kind that's quite popular with the kids lately.

Where the first half of Burst Apart is consistently good, though, the second half is wholly lacking in balance. It begins and ends with songs that are way too over the top ("Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out" and the admirable-but-not-quite-there classic R&B closer "Putting the Dog to Sleep") framing a set of three completely forgettable songs. I've listened to the three-song sequence of "Tiptoe", "Hounds", and "Corsicana" over and over, and I can't think of anything distinguishable about them. They're just there, taking up space. Burst Apart is still a fairly satisfying listen overall, but it doesn't quite live up to Hospice for me (how could it?), and it's as frontloaded an album as I've heard in 2011.

"Parentheses" by the Antlers

It's New to Me: You Won't Forget Me (The Complete Liberty Singles Vol. 1) by Jackie DeShannon (2009)

Cover illustration from Matthew Head's mystery novel The Accomplice, 1947

Jackie DeShannon is best known for her 1965 hit "What the World Needs Now Is Love", but her skill, range, and influence go far beyond what that sappy single might suggest. She was a prolific songwriter and collaborator, and she worked with some of the best musicians and producers of the time, creating memorable and top-notch songs. The You Won't Forget Me compilation tells this story (or the first part of it at least) by collecting all of DeShannon's early Liberty singles. This collection is particularly valuable because Liberty Records released a lot of non-album singles during the early '60s, and this is the best way to get all of DeShannon's early work in one place.

Presented chronologically, You Won't Forget Me reveals right off the bat that Liberty Records (and possibly DeShannon herself) didn't know what to do with this talented spitfire. Her early ('60-'61) singles are an odd mix of rockabilly and doo-wop influences, colliding in a way that evokes both the girl-group sound and country music. By early 1962, though, DeShannon had some key pieces in place for her rise to prominence - she was cranking out some great songs with her songwriting partner Sharon Sheeley and working with the crack production team of Dick Glasser and Jack Nitzsche. The string of singles she made during this period was an impressive move forward for DeShannon, starting with the "The Prince" and "Just Like in the Movies" and culminating with the almost-hits "Needles and Pins" and "When You Walk in the Room".

DeShannon also recorded some covers of older songs as singles during this period - notable "Little Yellow Roses" and her first real hit "Faded Love". These songs seem pretty "retro" compared to her more edgy material, although (like almost all the singles compiled on You Won't Forget Me) they have really solid b-sides. One of my favorite songs on the compilation is the deleted b-side from the "Little Yellow Roses" single, a lovely version of the folk song "500 Miles", but the flip-side of "Faded Love" may be even better. A DeShannon/Sheeley original titled "Dancing Silhouettes", it has a great, yearning DeShannon vocal over a lush arrangement of woodwinds and girl-group backing vocals.

"Dancing Silhouettes" by Jackie DeShannon

I Saw a Movie: Bridesmaids (2011)

Image from a postcard by the Shiseido company, c. 1940

The movie Bridesmaids poses a lot of interesting questions. Can you make a movie about a solipsist without the movie itself becoming solipsistic? Can a comedy have a workable structure while occupying the space in between the standard formats of buddy-comedy, rom-com, and road-trip-comedy? Does the world need a chick flick with one hundred f-bombs in it? The answer to all these questions is, apparently, "yes" - Bridesmaids is a funny, interesting, and occasionally raunchy movie that walks the tightrope between the vast chasms of movies women will watch and movies men will laugh at. Does that make any sense? Not really - beginning with the fact that you can't exactly have a tightrope strung between TWO chasms, can you?

Bridesmaids is not really a buddy picture, even though the plot centers around lovable loser Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) and her friendship with successful and engaged-to-be-married Lillian (Maya Rudolph). The two real-life friends don't really have many scenes where they get to play off each other (except for a great scene toward the beginning where Wiig does an unforgettable impression of Jon Hamm's penis) - their friendship is the backdrop for the strictly internal existential conflict that Annie ends up going through. Part of Annie's journey involves meeting and mistreating a potential love interest, traffic cop Rhodes (played by the not-really-rom-com-material Chris O'Dowd of The IT Crowd fame), but the relationship isn't central enough or turbulent enough to frame the movie as a romantic comedy. And most of the plot's propulsive force comes from Lillian and her bridesmaids (rounded out by frenemy Rose Byrne, burnt-out mom Wendi McLendon-Covey, peppy newlywed Ellie Kemper, and Gilmore Girls' Melissa McCarthy) doing pre-wedding activities, but these sequences are too scatter-shot to fit the pattern of recent ensemble road-trip movies like The Hangover.

So, yeah - Bridesmaids is kind of sloppy structurally, but it's still consistently funny and manages to navigate a satisfactory plot arc in spite of this. The smart script by Wiig and collaborator Annie Mumolo benefits from Paul Feig's nimble directing style and a really solid performance by Wiig herself. There are a few dead spots in the movie, notable the scenes with Annie's mom (played by Jill Clayburgh, who passed away recently, causing the filmmakers to cut all her raunchy and probably hilarious lines), but the dialogue is snappy and the principal actresses deliver some great moments of physical comedy as well. Your mileage may vary if you don't like Kristen Wiig or are (like me) mostly unfamiliar with her work on SNL. But for me, only knowing her from likable performances in smaller films like Extract, Whip It!, and Adventureland, this was just the kind of comedy I wanted to see Kristen Wiig make.

"The Brides Have Hit Glass" by the Guided By Voices

It's New to Me: Talk Talk Talk by the Psychedelic Furs (1981)

Detail of the oil painting The Apparition of Christ to the People by Aleksander Ivanov, 1837

So this falls into the category of "albums I'm embarrassed to admit I'm hearing for the first time" (along with most of my other "It's New to Me" entries, I guess). I never owned a Psychedelic Furs album somehow, and it was starting to bother me, and Talk Talk Talk seemed like a good place to start. It's good - it has the basic ingredients I was expecting: Richard Butler's distinctive raspy but smooth vocals, a post-punk-gone-pop sensibility, and guitar riffs that are commonly described as "angular" for reasons that cannot be explained by the rules of conventional geometry. But there is a prominent ingredient on this album that I wasn't expecting and that really isn't welcome at all - the saxophone.

For me, the songs on Talk Talk Talk fall cleanly into three categories: 1) the really good songs that have no noticeable saxophone taint ("Pretty in Pink", "Into You Like a Train"), 2) songs that are that are terrible and have saxophone ("I Wanna Sleep With You", "Dumb Waiters", "Mr. Jones"), and 3) songs that are pretty good in spite of having some saxophone in them ("No Tears", "She Is Mine", "All of This & Nothing"). I can't tell you how my heart fell when I heard the saxophone break in "Mr. Jones" for the first time - I knew suddenly that Talk Talk Talk was going to be a different listening experience for me than I'd been hoping for. It's the most heartbreaking when a song has so much promise - "She Is Mine" has a lovely melody, poignant lyric, and chiming guitar riff, but Duncan Kilburn's pointless sax ejaculations (shall we call them "sax-jaculations"?) just about ruin it. Tragic.

"She Is Mine" by the Psychedelic Furs

We Love the Ronettes: The "Be My Baby" Drum Intro (Part IV)

Photograph titled "Dog Rides this VW Everywhere" by Mark C. Glunz, 1967

This is the fourth installment in my series of posts about the "Be My Baby" drumbeat (the first three can be found here, here and here).

I don't have a thesis or unifying concept this time - these are just three songs I've been enjoying lately that make use of the great "Be My Baby" drumbeat. "What's a Girl To Do?" by Bat for Lashes is a great song I've just recently become acquainted with - it took me a while to get around to getting the group's first album Fur and Gold, even though I really enjoyed the second one Two Suns. The use of the drumbeat in this song is cool because it appears in the first to measures and then disappears, not coming back until the chorus. This song extends the girl-group comparison beyond the drumbeat, using Shangri-Las-style spoken word sections that have Natasha Khan doing a quite-decent Mary Weiss impression.

This combination of using the "Be My Baby" drumbeat in combination with a spoken intro works well on the Super Furry Animals' "Run-Away" as well. They dirty up the sound a little, but the song is a fairly straightforward Ronettes/Shirelles/Shangri-Las homage. Unlike the Bat for Lashes song, "Run-Away" uses the "Be My Baby" drumbeat through the verse section and then drops it for the chorus. This is one of my favorite SFA songs, and it's a fair argument that any band can and should do a girl-group homage. Does it ever NOT work?

Bruce Springsteen was another rocker who could pull off an excellent girl-group-style song. Springsteen's late-'70s songs bore a lot of early (late '50s and early '60s) rock/pop influences, and his lightweight girl-group songs from the era were a lot of fun. However, they often didn't fit into his album concepts like The River and Darkness on the Edge of Town, so these songs often got shelved, turning up on releases like the Tracks box set or, in the case of "Gotta Get That Feeling", on The Promise. Springsteen doesn't do a spoken-word intro, but he does make good use of "sha-na-na-na" backing vocals, another excellent girl-group ingredient.

"What's a Girl To Do?" by Bat for Lashes

"Run-Away" by the Super Furry Animals

"Gotta Get That Feeling" by Bruce Springsteen

It's New to Me: This Sensual World by Kate Bush (1989)

Panels from Boy Illustories comic book issue #66, 1951

Next week, Kate Bush will release Director's Cut, an album of reinterpretations of songs from her previous albums. I thought it would be a good time to check out 1989's This Sensual World, the album that several of the Director's Cut songs are taken from. I've listened to it a lot during the past week, and I've also seen the video for Bush's new version of the computophiliac love song "Deeper Understanding" (starring Hagrid from Harry Potter or, as I like to call him, "The guy from Nuns on the Run!) Surprisingly, I actually much prefer the original version - and, overall, I find that This Sensual World I actually much better than I'd heard.

There are two problems with This Sensual World - the first is that "This Woman's Work", possibly the best song Kate Bush has written, easily towers over everything else on the record. The other problem is that the glossy, boring production of the album makes the songs blend together and seem more unremarkable than they should be. After the first two tracks, the excellent title track (a rewrite of Molly's final maturbatory monologue from Joyce's Ulysses) and the thrilling "Love and Anger" (with Dave Gilmour on guitar), my attention begins to drift during the appropriately-titled "The Fog". I come to my senses about ten minutes later when I realize that Bush's vocals are suddenly being heavily processed through a vocoder - oh right, she's now the computer in "Deeper Understanding".

There are some good songs hidden under the Vaseline-lens production of this middle section ("Never Be Mine", "Heads We're Dancing"), but the album doesn't really rally until its final tracks, "This Woman's Work" and the crazy-in-a-good-way "Walk Straight Down the Middle". The final track is remarkable in that it makes me like all the ticks and eccentricities in Kate Bush that I found so unsettling in The Dreaming. I feel like I'm underselling This Sensual World a little here - I actually enjoy it quite a lot. As I said, I think it's quite a bit better than its reputation led me to believe. I think it ranks up there with Hounds of Love as the best Kate Bush album I've heard.

"Love and Anger" by Kate Bush

In Stores Now: Dancer Equired! by Times New Viking

Poster for the film Romance on the High Seas, 1948

When Times New Viking moved to Matador Records in 2008, fans worried that the Ohio band would give up their ultra-mega-lo-fi scuzz-pop sound for a cleaner, more accessible approach. But the two albums that Times New Viking released for Matador were just as full of fuzz and noise (with great songs underneath!) as the two they'd released on Siltbreeze. It was a good fakeout, and it may have left some fans unprepared for another label switch, this time to Merge Records and this time accompanied by a risky change in sound. I think the time was right - four albums was plenty to explore the original Times New Viking aesthetic, and sometimes you have to risk an "Emperor's new clothes" moment. For me, though, the slightly cleaner, poppier sound of Dancer Equired! evoked the opposite response - this is how I'd hoped their albums would sound ever since I heard "Devo and Wine" in 2007.

I'd been a little worried because, when I saw Times New Viking live earlier this year, the songs blended together to the point that I was thinking, "Maybe they really DO need that production overlay for the songs to work at all!" But Dancer Equired! isn't monotonous - it has an alternately chugging and droning pop sound and bouncy boy-girl vocals of a kiwi-pop band circa 1990, and the songs have a downcast, melancholic edge that characterized that scene as well. A couple of the short songs don't really stand up on their own, which is a criticism I've seen in a lot of reviews of Dancer Equired!, but I think that the filler quotient is lower here than its been on any past TNV album.

Dancer Equired! is a little front-loaded, with the grubbily wistful "Ever Falling in Love" sitting as the centerpiece in a solid string of five songs that show off Times New Viking's dialed-back-a-little-but-still-pleasantly-distorted sound. The second half of the album is more depressive, with songs like "Downtown Eastern Bloc", "Somebody's Slave", and "Want to Exist" showing the band experimenting with creating something moodier and more atmospheric (two words I would never have used to describe prior TNV releases). The band even has some fun with the inevitable "sell-out" claims, including a note on the back cover that the album includes the hit single "New Louie Louie", referring to the song "Ways to Go", one of Dancer Equired!'s least interesting tracks. But, after five albums, I doubt anyone's buying a Times New Viking record expecting to hear a new "Louie Louie".

"Ever Falling in Love" by Times New Viking

It's New to Me: Supercluster: the Big Dipper Anthology by Big Dipper (2008)

Illustration from the Young Ladies' Journal Complete Guide to the Work-Table, 1888

For me, late-'80s college rock is a tangled mess of earnest dudes in vans criss-crossing the American landscape - in addition to the big Our Band Could Be Your Life bands, you have the second-tier bands like Camper Van Beethoven, Game Theory, Guadalcanal Diary, and the Long Ryders. I can't be blamed for having overlooked Boston band Big Dipper for so long (although anyone who collaborates with Robert Pollard is going to get some attention eventually). Supercluster is a good way to get acquainted with Big Dipper, as it includes the band's highly regarded debut EP and two albums for Homestead Records (omitting the band's final album on Epic, which is not a big loss by all accounts). The three-disc set also includes a bunch of comp tracks and a full CD of demos from the band's last days.

The thing that separates Big Dipper from its contemporaries is the way the band combined a dazzling Television-style two-guitar attack with a matching multiple-singer approach that could do shouty gang vocals or honeyed harmonies. The band also had a good variety of songwriting resources - its core members had all been contributors in previous bands. The first disc of Supercluster combines the debut EP Boo-Boo with the band's first album Heavens, and both releases have an ingratiating rough-around-the-edges energy and some great songs. The weakness for me in the early Big Dipper stuff is that the vocals aren't quite polished enough, and the songs that lean more heavily toward the post-punk style of their progenitors Mission of Burma don't really play to their strengths.

For me, the band's best work is easily Craps, which came out on Homestead Records in '88. This is where the band's vocal skills catch up to the guitar heroics, and the balance is very rewarding on songs like "Meet the Witch" and "Bells of Love", providing a nice balance to the heavier sound of some of the other numbers ("Stardom Because", "A Song to Be Beautiful"). The bonus tracks on this second disc are also quite good for the most part - they fare better than the scatter-shot demos of the third disc, of which only a third are really worthwhile. As much as I favor, Craps, though, Big Dipper had a fair number of coulda-been-hits from all their releases, like "Faith Healer" from the first EP and Heavens tracks "She's Fetching" and "All Going Out Together". My favorite of the bunch is probably "Bells of Love", where the frenetic, intertwining guitar riffs play nicely against the serenity of the chorus harmonies.

"Bells of Love" by Big Dipper

Title Fight: "Blackout"

Illustration from an advertisement for the Rums of Puerto Rico, 1951

This is the third part in a little series I'm doing of Title Fights with songs taken from Lush's 1994 album Split. I know that I said last time that I'd match Lush up against Pavement for this one, but it turns out that the Pavement song is called "Black Out" (big difference!) I know that there's a great Bowie song called "Blackout", but this song from Sloan's 2007 album Never Hear the End of It (my favorite Sloan album, incidentally) was a good contender. Sloan's "Blackout" was written and sung by Andrew Scott, and like a lot of his songs from recent Sloan albums, it's very concise and simple. The gang vocals on the chorus are nice, but the faux-tough hook isn't too convincing. For me, the most impressive thing about the song is how many lines of verse lyric Scott squeezes into the song - it's barely over ninety seconds and manages to tell a pretty fleshed-out story.

Lush's "Blackout" is similarly concise and energetic - it starts notably with a fade-in that includes Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson already singing a two-part wordless hook. Lush seem just as angry as Sloan was, but they aren't griping about the outdated Canadian power grid. Their "Blackout" is all about relationship dynamics or something - the lyric is all "you" and "I". This one is a toss-up, but I think that I prefer the Lush song slightly - I really like the way they bring the wordless intro vocal at the end of the song. It's provides a nice symmetry, and it gives Lush a 3-0 record in the Split Title Fights.

Winner: LUSH

"Blackout" by Lush

"Blackout" by Sloan

Probabilistic Jukebox: "The Complete History of Ruth, Nevada" by the Capstan Shafts

Illustration by Rudolf Waldemar Åkerblom from Pekka Juhani Hannikainen's Pictures from the Life of Finnish Children, 1882

The Capstan Shafts, in their original incarnation (i.e. New England home-recorder Dean Wells), were one my favorite bands of the late '00s. Not that I'm upset with Dean morphing the project into an actual band that plays live and everything - last year's Revelation Skirts was one of my favorite releases of 2010.

Still, there was something magical about those home recordings - "The Complete History of Ruth, Nevada", for example, comes from one of Wells' last self-released CDs, the 2008 mini-album Miles Per Famine. It has several of the key Capstan Shafts components: 1) a history-referencing, humorous title (see also "Songs for Monometallists", "Anthropecene Stealers", etc.), 2) a verse that lasts just a couple bars before being abandoned for a wheels-coming-off chorus, 3) and a full-band-ish arrangement with Wells playing electric/acoustic/piano/drums/tambourine. The piano on the song's abbreviated outro is particularly nice - the only downside to this song is that you can't actually learn much about Ruth, Nevada in the ninety-second song's garbled lyrics. So I recommend reading about the town here to fill in the blanks.

"The Complete History of Ruth, Nevada" by the Capstan Shafts

In Stores Now: Belong by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Illustration from a flier for the Miami Serpentarium by Pete Porter, c. 1970

On their second album, released last month by Slumberland Records, NYC band the Pains of Being Pure at Heart haven't messed with their winning formula too much. Their approach to noisy pop is clearly derived from '90s shoegaze bands, but the Pains of Being Pure at Heart always keep things mainstream-ready and accessible, with the hooks up front and the guitar-effects craziness reined in at the appropriate times. This is clearly in evidence in the album's second single and opening track "Belong" - the guitars' overlapping overdrive roar and bouncy arpeggio riff play off in a way that is so obviously Smashing-Pumpkins-derived that one out of four reviews of the record today reference Siamese Dream by name. The vocals of Kip Berman carry this comparison further, reminding me of Billy Corgan circa "Disarm" in a way that a detractor of this band would probably describe as a "mewling vocal style".

Belong won me over right away, which is unusual. I usually favor albums' second halves, but the first four songs on Belong are pretty hard to argue against. The highlight is probably the charming "Heart in Your Heartbreak", although Belong's Side 2 has another favorite of mine in the soaring "Even in Dreams". The albums' one misstep is "Girl of 1,000 Dreams", which brings back the ugly guitar sound used to great effect on "Belong" but doesn't deploy it properly - the song is a muddy mess. The album's other nine tracks really shine, though, and are likely to appeal to fans of Velocity Girl, Jesus and Mary Chain, and early-'90s college-rock production touches. Check out that use of the reverb on the vocals in "Heart in Your Heartbreak" - it takes me back to 1993 every time.

"Heart in Your Heartbreak" by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart

It's New to Me: When It All Comes Down by Miaow (2002)

Cover illustration of Il Libro Delle Stelle, the Italian translation of Ian Watson's The Book of the Stars, 1988

How good or important can a band have been if their entire recorded output barely constitutes a full-length compilation when scraped together? Miaow, the best-known band of music writer and Unrest song subject Cath Carroll, was barely a blip on the radar of Manchester bands who put out records in the '80s, but they managed to hit a couple important landmarks. They released two of their three singles on the groundbreaking Factory Records, and they had a song on the historic C-86 compilation to boot. These tracks, plus two sessions done with John Peel, make up the When It All Comes Down compilation, covering the band's '85-'87 lifespan.

As you might expect, When It All Comes Down is the shotgun blast of a band in a fast-evolving musical environment. The early Miaow songs owe a lot to Joy Division and Orange Juice, but their influences were always a moving target. It's not a very apt or useful comparison, but the band that springs to my mind most often is Swiss girl-punks Kleenex/LiLiPUT. The scratchy guitars, staccato vocal delivery, and not-always-wise use of saxophone are the post-punk ingredients that the bands have in common, but Miaow pretties things up a bit with a fair number of sweet hooks. Of the band's three singles, though, only one of the a-sides (this comp's title track) really nails the Miaow formula. The "Belle Vue" debut single sounds like a work in progress, and "Break the Code" is the sound of flailing around for something to grasp onto.

But, while "When It All Comes Down" might be their only absolutely indispensable track, I find that the Peel Sessions on When It All Comes Down do the band justice as well. "Thames at High Water", from the band's '87 Peel Session is the kind of track that might have made it onto the Miaow LP if they'd hung in there long enough to put one out. It has some great proto-Wedding-Present hyper-rhythm guitar, but the song slows down at the mid-point for a nice bridge with wordless, cooing vocals from Carroll.

"Thames at High Water" by Miaow

In Stores Now: C'mon by Low

Illustration titled "With a Lusty Cheer They Bid Good-by to the Ship", cover of Beadle's Half Dime Library Vol. XL, No. 1020, February 2nd, 1897

The best rock band from Duluth is back (yeah, I said "best" - I don't care what the Black-Eyes Snakes' fans think!) with their third Sub Pop album, and it's interesting to see how Low's nine full-length fit into three fairly tidy trilogies. The first three albums on Vernon Yard exist in their own universe of "space between the notes", while the Kranky trilogy stand as the band's apex for most casual fans of the band. The three albums for Sub Pop have traded focus for eclecticism, and C'mon is arguably the best distillation of the band's highlights over seventeen years of making records.

C'mon actually reminds me a lot of Trust, my least favorite of the Kranky albums, but it hits the bulls-eye that the earlier album overshot by a fair distance, nailing every feeling and melodic turn just right. It has some very accessible moments, as well as a couple tracks like "$20" and "Majesty/Magic" that bring the oppressive drone of Trust's longer tracks. But the key elements of C'mon for me are 1) Mimi Parker taking a prominent role with excellent lead vocal performances for the first time in a couple years (nailing it on "You See Everything" and "Especially Me", and 2) the album has great sequencing. The penultimate epic "Nothing But Heart" is a highlight not only because Nels Cline's Neil-Young guitar heroics - Parker's unexpected counter-melody, which enters the mix at the six-minute mark, seems awkward at first but then meshes with the arrangement perfectly to kick the song to a higher plane. And then the album ends on a sweet note with the simple and cute "Something's Turning Over", which features the Sparhawk children on backing vocals.

I wouldn't have expected Low's ninth album to be the best entry point into their work for new fans, but it may just be that. And, with their third trilogy complete, I'm interested to see if Low jumps to another label to start fresh yet again.

"Especially Me" by Low