It's New to Me: The Raindrops by the Raindrops (1963)

Cover illustration by Al Marshall for the Purple Parrot journal of Northwestern University, December 1921

The Raindrops may be my favorite group from the early-'60s girl group boom, but it's not really fair to say that because they didn't really exist. The Raindrops were Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, the married songwriting team that wrote dozens of hits, including "Leader of the Pack", "Be My Baby", "Then He Kissed Me", and "Do Wah Diddy Diddy". When other artists started hitting the charts with their songs, Barry and Greenwich decided to record their own songs as the Raindrops. To create the illusion that they were a "legit" group, they included Greenwich's sister Laura in their group shots (apparently she also took the stage with them on the rare occasion that they performed live, singing into an unplugged mic!)

The Raindrops never had a Top Ten hit, although some of their tracks ended up being big hits for others. Their only LP, 1963's The Raindrops, contains what could be considered the purest, closest-to-the-source versions of now-famous songs like "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Not Too Young to Get Married", and "Hanky Panky". I know it makes me a bit of a "rockist" to care when the song is sung by its writer, but Barry and Greenwich were a machine at this time and could churn out amazing, memorable, hook-filled pop tunes. It's just amazing to hear a whole LP of their material in undiluted form - Barry's vaguely goofy bass voice pulls the songs out of the pure girl group sound, but he and Greenwich sound great together on a non-stop set of perfectly poppy numbers like "What a Guy", "The Kind of Boy You Can't Forget", and "Every Little Beat". The reissued version includes their non-album singles as well, including "One More Tear" and "That Boy John". The only downside to The Raindrops is that the recording quality is a little spotty - some songs have an almost pristine sound, but others (particularly "Hanky Panky") sound very muddy. I wonder what master source was used for this Collectables reissue.

"Every Little Beat" by the Raindrops

We Love Handclaps: "Love's Made a Fool of You" by Buddy Holly

Cover illustration of A.E. Van Vogt's Silkie by Jack Gaughan, 1969

This is the beginning of a new series of "We Love..." posts that will probably span many, many weeks - I have a long list of favorite songs with handclaps (be warned that I will continually and incorrectly be spelling "handclaps" as a single word the whole time as well). I wanted to start with an early example of handclaps in pop music, but I was having trouble pinning down pre-1960 songs that use handclaps prominently (my music collection is sadly lacking in records from that era). Then it came to me - Buddy Holly's tracks always had interesting percussion because of Crickets innovative drummer Jerry Allison!

The Buddy Holly song with the best handclaps is "Love's Made a Fool of You", recorded in 1958 - at the time, it was an old song, one of the original compositions he'd written with Bob Montgomery. A single handclap punctuates the end of each line, treated with that recognizable reverb from Holly's producer Norman Petty. "Love's Made a Fool of You" was recorded by the post-Holly Crickets and by the Bobby Fuller Four, but Holly's version didn't get released until 1964, several years after his death - it was included in the posthumous Showcase collection assembled by Norman Petty. The funny thing about the song is that Holly didn't record those handclaps - Petty added them when he was preparing the track for its posthumous release. It's hard to fault him for the addition, though - the handclaps make that song SO much better.

"Love's Made a Fool of You" by Buddy Holly

In Stores Now: Come and Get Me (The Complete Liberty and Imperial Singles Vol. 2) by Jackie DeShannon (2011)

Passport photo of Ernest Hemingway, 1923

Come and Get Me is the second in a planned three-part series by Ace Records, covering all the singles released by Jackie DeShannon on Liberty and Imperial Records (I wrote about the first collection, You Won't Forget Me here.) As I get to know DeShannon's career, I'm left with the distinct impression that she was an impressive songwriting and singing talent who was doing her best to share her gift in a record industry that wasn't too good at helping her put her best foot forward. DeShannon's best ideas were shot down by her record label - early in her career, her label refused to let her record an LP of songs by a then-unknown writer called Bob Dylan, and a couple years later, they wouldn't let her release a folk-rock album that would have been ahead of its time. Instead, DeShannon's label saw albums as a way to cash in on bundling together sets of previously released songs - their focus was on finding a say to get DeShannon a smash hit single.

As a result, her singles collections (and Come and Get Me, which covers her '64-'67 singles, in particular) are scattershot, genre-hopping exercises. They had her record and release a single of Buddy Holly covers to appeal to fans of the Beatles when DeShannon was on tour with them. When that didn't work, they had her write a pair of songs with an obscure young writer named Randy Newman. Then they had her record a glossy Christian pop song ("He's Got the Whole World in His Hands") with Jack Nitzsche and, after a jaunt in England working with guitarist Jimmy Page that failed to spawn a hit, they had her record a schmaltzy "message" ballad by Bacharach/David - that song, "What the World Needs Now Is Love", was the DeShannon hit the label had been looking for, and they steered her toward doing more material of that kind. But she continued to experiment with different sounds, having some success with Motown-ish R&B/pop with songs like "Find Me Love".

This may make it sound like Come and Get Me is a hopeless muddle, but the twist is that DeShannon pulls off almost everything she tries (which makes it that much more frustrating that she had trouble breaking through). And she ended up working with a dazzling array of contemporary talents, particularly in the "guitarist" department. This collection includes songs recorded with Glenn Campbell ("It's Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)"), Jimmy Page ("Don't Turn Your Back on Me"), and the Byrds ("Splendor in the Grass") - how cool is that? And DeShannon's voice melds itself to the contours of a rockabilly song, a smoky ballad, or a bouncy slice of folk-pop with equal dexterity. It's just unfortunate that, during this period, she didn't get a chance to record cohesive LPs that presented her vision for pop music in a bigger way.

"Don't Turn Your Back on Me" by Jackie DeShannon

In Stores Now: Bon Iver, Bon Iver by Bon Iver

Photo from The Fledgling, annual of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, 1976

Bon Iver's Justin Vernon has finally released an album that has caught my interest, which is to say that the new Bon Iver album has more than nine songs on it. I've been aware of Justin Vernon's progression from the alone-in-the-woods debut For Emma, Forever Ago through his more recent experimental-pop collaborations with the Volcano Choir and Gayngs, so I was ready for the sound of his new record Bon Iver, Bon Iver to be different from the lonely folk sound of his debut. The songwriting and arrangements seem heavily informed by late-70s-early-80s art-rockers like 10cc (also a big influence in the Gayngs sound), but the songs' complicated arrangements rarely seem sludgy or overly fussy. Things get a little out of hand in a couple spots (like the ending of "Michicant"), but the layers of martial drums, chiming guitars, KORG patches, and horns are judiciously executed and suprisingly affecting through much of the album.

Vernon unintentionally revealed the big weakness of Bon Iver, Bon Iver early on, publishing the album's lyrics on-line - most of the songs are filled with awkward and mundane lines of verse, but they only read that way on paper. Set to music, the better-sounding lyrics stand out - the weaker lines either sound better in melody or are unintelligible in Vernon's falsetto delivery. Only a couple songs have overtly memorable hooks, so Bon Iver, Bon Iver isn't going to be an album that I reach for because I need to hear a certain amazing song, but the hazy, sun-drenched vibe of the album is so pleasant and note-perfect that I can see myself putting this on frequently this summer just to bask in its soft-focus radiance.

"Towers" by Bon Iver

Title Fight: "Smokeless Zone"

Illustration from Randolph Caldecott's Hey Diddle Diddle and Baby Bunting, 1882

I've known the term "smokeless zone" for years from the XTC song of that name, but I didn't know that such zones actually existed. Under the UK's Clean Air Act 1956, some heavy-pollution urban areas were designated as smokeless zones - certain kinds of chimneys and industrial activities were not allowed in these areas to help reduce the smog. However, the term "smokeless zone" was mostly used as a shorthand descriptor for these terribly polluted inner-city neighborhoods. In 1970, Danny McCulloch, a former member of the Animals, released a psych-rock single "Colour of the Sunset" and it had a b-side called "Smokeless Zone". The song is built around a jumpy acoustic guitar riff and McCulloch singing the title phrase in a faux-blues growl. The song is fun if overly repetitive, but it doesn't wear out its welcome as it's just barely two minutes long - it even manages to squeeze in a couple brief guitar solos and one long "yeaaargh!" yell from McCulloch.

A decade later, XTC released a 7" with an A-side called "Smokeless Zone" - it wasn't a real single, though. It was the bonus 7" that came with the "Generals and Majors" single (one of my favorite Moulding compositions). "Smokeless Zone" is also a Moulding song, and, like the McCulloch song, it focuses on the grime and desolation of smokeless zones, going so far as to suggest that living in one can kill you. Built atop a bed of clattering, swirling percussion and chugging harmonica, XTC's "Smokeless Zone" is more psychedelic than McCulloch's psych-rock-era tune, and, frankly, it's more fun to listen to. It's interesting, though, that both songs are kind of environmental anthems, so I have to give McCulloch some credit for being ahead of the curve on that.

Winner: XTC

"Smokeless Zone" by Danny McCulloch

"Smokeless Zone" by XTC

It's New to Me: Coat of Many Colors by Dolly Parton (1971)

Illustration from the cover of Home Arts magazine, April 1937

Lately, my special lady friend has been helping me fill in a few of my many pop-music knowledge gaps, buying me budget 5-album collections of artists like Otis Redding, the Cars, the Jackson 5, and Dolly Parton. Working my way through the Dolly Parton set, I've been surprised and delighted by things that I guess everyone has known about Parton all along - her amazing voice, her storytelling ability as a songwriter, her great sense of humor, and even her guitar-playing chops. My favorite album so far has been 1971's Coat of Many Colors, best known for its title track, which was one of Parton's earliest pop hits.

The title track is one of several excellent story-songs on the album, detailing her family's struggles with poverty when she was a child, but I enjoy the less serious "Traveling Man" just as much - it's about a girl who hides her relationship with a salesman a secret from her mom only to find that her man was boinking her mom on the side all along. The one narrative song on the album that doesn't really work for me is "If I Lose My Mind", in which a young married woman asks her mother to take her in because her husband's sexually deviant practices are threatening her sanity. I wasn't shocked to find that this song was actually by Porter Wagoner and not Parton - Parton gives Wagoner a lot of credit in helping her career, but her albums clearly demonstrate that she was a superior talent in most ways. The three Wagoner tracks on Coat of Many Colors are clearly among the weakest.

Coat of Many Colors has a couple tracks of Parton-written filler as well, but some of them are distinguishing themselves on repeated listens to the album. For instance, "Just as Good as Gone" is among the bonus tracks on the reissue I have - it was the b-side of the "Washday Blues" single, but it's quickly becoming one of my favorite Parton songs. I also really enjoy the two folky tracks on Coat of Many Colors, "My Blue Tears" and "Early Morning Breeze". The latter track is particularly affecting with its picked acoustic guitar and lilting melody - it bears a striking similarity to the songs from the Billy Bragg/Wilco Mermaid Avenue album.

"Early Morning Breeze" by Dolly Parton

In Stores Now: Secrety Thinking by Kleenex Girl Wonder

Illustration titled "Agnes Meditates on Heavenly Things" from The Life of Saint Agnes by Helen Walker Homan, 1938

After a string of excellent solo albums, including 2008's Yes Boss (one of my favorite albums of the last decade), New York songwriter Graham Smith has resurrected the Kleenex Girl Wonder monicker of his rambunctious youth. This time, though, Kleenex Girl Wonder (or Klccncx Girl Wonder, as the cover says for trademark reasons, I'm sure) is an actual band, including former Get Him Eat Him frontman Matt LeMay on Drums. LeMay also used to work for Pitchfork, and the Secret Thinking liners cheekily include a scan of a very negative LeMay review of one of the early Kleenex Girl Wonder records.

Even though Smith has organized an actual band this time around, the sound of Secret Thinking doesn't depart too much from the sound of Smith's recent solo records. The songs that make up Secret Thinking keep to Smith's standard pairing of dense wordplay set to standard indie-rock arrangements. The acidic invective of Yes Boss is long gone, though - now, the lyrics have a more playful, laid-back and, at times, even celebratory feel to them. This means that the songs lack some of the stinging rawness that Smith does so well, but the songwriting is strong and the hooks come through.

The weak spot on Secret Thinking is "Does Your Back Hurt?", which inadvisedly has a guitar lead play along to the vocal melody, a trick that rarely works unless you're the Shaggs. The highlights include the album's single "Thanks!...for the Emotional Disease", which is not as bitter as it sounds, and the solo/acoustic track "You Know You Want It, Anyway You Can Get It", which is just crazy bitter. The album also ends with a string of four very pleasing songs, including the internal-rhyme-and-wordplay-playground title track, so that Secret Thinking makes for a very pleasing (if short at thirty minutes) listen.

"Thanks!...for the Emotional Disease" by Kleenex Girl Wonder

Clarence Clemons (1942 - 2011)

Photograph titled "He Lets Her Steer While He Gets Her Ear" by an unknown photographer, c. 1907

Saxophonist and E Street Band veteran Clarence Clemons led a very interesting life. He was nearly an NFL lineman. He played with some of the biggest and most interesting musicians in the business - Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Todd Rundgren, Janis Ian, Lady Gaga - the list goes on and on. He had a small part on HBO's The Wire. He had a larger-than-life persona that was both cool and lovable, and he played a big part in the E Street Band's memorable concerts. Most people who saw Springsteen in concert will remember his introduction of Clarence Clemons to the audience as one of the show's best moments - I'm still kicking myself for never having had the opportunity to see that band play together.

The truth is that I ignored Springsteen's music altogether until very recently. And a large part of my aversion was that I was afraid of Clarence Clemons. Or, more accurately, I am afraid of saxophone solos. Or, even more accurately, I hate saxophone solos. Over the past few months, though, as I've gradually accumulated Springsteen's albums, I've noticed something. My allergy to saxophone is not triggered by Clemons' playing - his sax solos have a "singing" quality to it that emphasizes the melody over the voice of the instrument itself to the point that it doesn't even register to me in the same way. For now, pretty much any other sax solo causes me to go into a conniption fit, but I think that long-term exposure to Clarence Clemons' playing may heal me eventually. Until then, I'll listen to songs that have great Clemons solos, like the one from the great instrumental break in the middle of "The Promised Land" from Darkness on the Edge of Town.

"The Promised Land" by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

I Saw a Movie: Super 8 (2011)

Etching titled Globe Aerostatique, 1783

Of his work in the early '80s, Steven Spielberg is best remembered for making two kinds of movies: (1) touching suburban dramas with a fantastic twist (E.T.), and (2) genre/adventure flicks that centered on the nostalgia of his childhood (i.e. Raiders of the Lost Ark). So it's not surprising to see that Spielberg-idolizing producer/director J.J. Abrams combining those two visions - Abrams appears to have a great deal of childhood nostalgia for Spielberg's domestic sci-fi movies. But Super 8's greatest asset isn't that it's a small-town suspense film with a lurking supernatural element - it's the naturalistic script and strong ensemble of pre-teen actors at the center of the action.

When a group of Ohio kids see a military train crash in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances and a "something" escapes from a locked train car, an increasingly frantic series of events begins to shake up their town. But the fun comes in watching the group of young friends react and grow as they struggle to keep it together. Joel Courtney provides an emotional center as the main character, Joe, and his film-director friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) is great as well, but the best performance might be Elle Fanning as Alice. Most memorably, she does an "acting" scene that's basically the adolescent equivalent of Naomi Watts' audition scene in Mulholland Dr. The focus on the kids makes it okay that the adult cast, including a lot of top-notch character actors, doesn't get to do that much - even Kyle Chandler (who's been one of my favorites since Friday Night Lights) spends most of his scenes doing a patient, tight-lipped squint.

Super 8's major weakness is that the climax with the monster doesn't live up to the build-up. I'm not sure if audiences are actually harder to please these days in the "movie monster" department or if this is just another new movie that didn't put enough effort into the design, but it just doesn't really work. However, the conflict with the kids and their parents is more compelling and resolves nicely, so the monster plot kind of works in context. And I really liked some of the filmic visual touches - the lens flares are used to good effect here, and he does a neat trick where the picture distorts when the camera's depth of field shifts (intended to create the impression of amateur-level optics, I think.) Overall, Abrams has shown that he can do nostalgia films well (see also Star Trek) - it would be nice to see if he can eventually match the original and innovative side of Spielberg's peak-period work.

"The Monster's Loose" by Polaris

Title Fight: "Condition Red"

May illustration from the Marchbanks Calendar by Harry Cimino, c. 1950

'60s Memphis girl group the Goodees is best remembered (when they're remembered at all) for the song "Condition Red", a minor hit that rips off "Leader of the Pack". The Goodees really amp up that Shangri-Las-style drama, though, with spoken-word sections and goofy sound effects that make the song something of a three-act play. Regardless, the song's plinking-piano intro is quite memorable, and the song has some catchy sections. And a fatal motorcycle crash, of course (spoiler alert!) - who doesn't love one of those? My favorite part of this song is the monologue she delivers to her boyfriend after he's ridden away on his bike.

In 1976, another little-known band, Sneakers, recorded a song called "Condition Red", and it was an homage to a contemporary group. Sneakers was an early band of Chris Stamey and Mitch Easter, who both later became idols of the '80s power pop scene, and their '76 EP has been called one of the first releases of the American indie scene. "Condition Red" comes from that EP, and, like a lot of the Sneakers material, it's all over the place, with a variety of great hooks executed sloppily and organized haphazardly into songs. The verse starts out in the Sneakers style but quickly mutates into a clear Alex Chilton imitation circa Radio City, complete with cowbell and that Big Star vocal reverb. The song also has a nice chorus, with a confusing lyric featuring the lines "We'll be American/let's be Americans!"

So basically it comes down to choosing between a fun Shangri-Las ripoff or a fun Big Star ripoff. I'm in a Big Star mood today, and the cowbell bit in the Sneakers song is really doing it for me.

Winner: SNEAKERS

"Condition Red" by the Goodees

"Condition Red" by Sneakers

It's New to Me: The Power of Negative Thinking - B-Sides & Rarities by the Jesus and Mary Chain (2010)

Panel from Hit Comics #26, February 1943

If I was a real Jesus and Mary Chain fan from back in the day, I'd probably be experiencing The Power of Negative Thinking very differently. I'd be more enamored of the band's early sound, and their later records would be the period when "they got boring". Coming to the JAMC records later in life, though, I tend to like their mid-period sound the best, even though I acknowledge that their debut album Psychocandy was the real game-changer. Listening to a four-disc collection of their non-album tracks, though, I'm drawn to the meaty middle of their discogaphy, and I find I'm less interesting in their first and last recordings.

The first disc of The Power of Negative Thinking is devoted to the band's first recordings before and concurrent with 1985's Psychocandy. For the diehard fans, this is the valuable disc in the collection because (a) these tracks are the sound of a band exploring brand new territory and blowing minds, and (b) the band has never released a prior collection covering all these early recordings (much of the other material in this set has been released across three previous compilations). To me, though, the best tracks on this disc are the ones that ended up on the album Psychocandy in a different form and, if I wanted to listen to Psychocandy, I'd listen to Psychocandy. The songwriting on the early b-sides is pretty spotty - unlike the superior Psychocandy tracks, the melodies aren't good enough to combine alchemically with the waves of noise.

The second and third discs of The Power of Negative Thinking are excellent, though, with a great mix of album-quality songwriting and loose-and-fun covers (including songs by the Temptations, 13th Floor Elevators, and Prince!) I tend to think that the band's non-album material peaked during the Automatic/Honey's Dead years, and there are some nicetunes here that were omitted from earlier b-sides collections like Barbed Wire Kisses, The Sound of Speed, and Hate Rock 'n' Roll. For instance, "Terminal Beach" from the "Head On" single is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite JAMC tracks, with a delicate application of their earlier surf-rock influences to the chugging, drum-machine style of the Automatic era. The fourth disc of The Power of Negative Thinking has a slight dip in quality, but I find myself enjoying even the band's last single tracks a bit, making me wonder if the post-Stoned-and-Dethroned albums may be worth getting after all.

"Terminal Beach" by the Jesus and Mary Chain

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Leash Called Love" by the Sugarcubes

Advertisement for Sil-O-Ette panty girdles, 1957

Lyrical analysis is one thing I've been wanting to to more of on this blog, regardless of whether anyone wants to read that kind of thing. I told myself that I'd look at lyrics in my next Probabilistic Jukebox entry, and look what song popped up. Iceland's Sugarcubes sang in English, but it wasn't their native language - add to that Bjork's distinctive singing style, and you have a kind of music that doesn't really force you to pay close attention to lyrics. But I think that there is something interesting going on in "Leash Called Love", one of my favorite songs from the last Sugarcubes album, Stick Around for Joy.

It's one of the few Sugarcubes songs I can think of where Bjork sings the first half of the song, and Einar Orn "sings" the second half. It suggests a specific kind of lyrical structure that becomes confusing when you look closely at each singer's words. Bjork's first two verses are admonishing a girl who is in an abusive relationship with a man - she first implores the girl to leave him and then, in the second verse, recommends emphatically that she "do him IN." The chorus lyric connects the concept of love itself to abuse and unfair power dynamics, which may explain the departure in the song's second section. Here, Einar departs from the verse-chorus structure somewhat, leaving Bjork to sing the chorus's wordless vocal hook while he speaks from the point of view of the victim. I'm uncertain whether he is speaking as the girl addressed by Bjork earlier or whether he is drawing a parallel to a separate relationship where he is a male victim. It's not clear, but it is kind of interesting, and Bjork's vocal on this song is one of my favorites from her time in the Sugarcubes.

"Leash Called Love" by the Sugarcubes

In Stores Now: Attention Please by Boris

Illustration card titled "Where the Rainbow Ends, Night in the Dragon Wood" published by C.W. Faulkner, c. 1920

I've been on the fence about Japanese experimental-metal band Boris for a while now - on the one hand, I don't really listen to metal and it seems like Boris might rock a little too hard for my delicate sensibilities. On the other hand, though, I've been very impressed with some of their more accessible songs, and video clips I've seen of them have blown me away, particularly performances by the band's female guitarist Wata. So, when I heard that Boris had two new albums, a "heavy" album and a "pop" album featuring songs all sung by Wata, I decided to take a chance on the later. It's an interesting album but, oddly, I think that my problem with it may be that it doesn't rock enough. Not what I expected.

Attention Please begins with its title track, a drone-rock-style song that features Wata singing the title phrase in English over muted guitar riffs. This is one of my favorite tracks on the album, and it works as a lead-in for two of the album's more rocking tracks, "Hope" and "Party Boy". These songs have a heavy-alt-rock sound, but the motorik-style beats of these songs prevent them from sounding even vaguely metal. In the middle section of the album, however, almost-ambient drone tracks like "See You Next Week" and "You" dominate the album's mood. As much as I like Wata's vocals on these tracks, I wish she'd give us some real riffage as well. The album has one more real rock song toward the end, "Spoon", but overall the album comes across as unfocused. Boris is a band that's never reluctant to try new things or strike out in new directions, and there are some really cool things about Attention Please, but I think I need to hear one of their albums that sticks closer to their core competency.

"Hope" by Boris

It's New to Me: Songs for Beginners by Graham Nash (1971)

Illustration from Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth", printed in Amazing Stories magazine, April 1926

I usually start the week by writing about a new release, for the obvious reason - because of a thing called "relevance". Most of my other entries are of questionable value - who wants to read a three-paragraph capsule reaction to a random old album? Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to write about a new release today, so I thought I had a somewhat relevant reissue to write about. When I went to the record store last week, a new-looking reissue of Graham Nash's first solo album Songs for Beginners was sitting on the NEW RELEASES shelf. Doing a little research now, it looks like this reissue came out in 2009, making it less relevant than I'd thought. This remaster of the album sounds great, though, and I'm pretty impressed with the songs as well - Songs for Beginners is a nice little album.

And being a "little" album seems to be the thesis of Songs for Beginners - it comes across as a reaction to the ambitious, important solo albums that Nash's peers were putting out at the time (e.g. David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass). In fact, the personnel of Songs for Beginners is quite similar to the players on If I Could Only Remember My Name, including Neil Young and members of the Grateful Dead. Notably missing is Joni Mitchell, who sang on Crosby's album but doesn't sing on Nash's, probably because she and Nash had just messily ended their relationship, an event that is a central theme on the album.

So the songs on Songs for Beginners are, for the most part, introspective vignettes written in Nash's embarrassingly plain verse, set to effortless, beautiful melodies. The album is bookended by two "bigger" songs, opening with the catchy buy corny anti-war anthem "Military Madness" (built around the rhyme "military madness/solitary sadness") and ending with the album's big single "Chicago" (written about the fallout of the '68 Democratic Convention). These songs haven't aged that well, an interesting contrast to the other songs' more timeless quality. "Better Days" has a suite-like structure of multiple parts, but the other feel-sorry-for-me numbers ("Be Yourself", "Simple Man", "Man in the Mirror") are the real focused and simple embodiment of the album's title. For me, the sweetest songs are the most stripped down, like "Sleep Song" and "Wounded Bird". The latter song is all Nash with no guest players - just him and a guitar, singing a corny lyric that culminates with a line about a "coat of questions" and an "answer hat" and then, when I'm in mid-wince, the layered vocals of multi-tracked Nash being a one-man CSNY kick in and it's the best song ever.

"Wounded Bird" by Graham Nash

Title Fight: "Borderline"

Image from a catalog for the Evans Vanishing Door, 1927

I use the word "borderline" on this blog a lot (or so I noticed when I did a Google search for the word's appearance), and I find that I usually use it in questionable ways. In an attempt to educate myself on the word's finer points, I listened to two songs that put the word in the headline. Camper Van Beethoven's "Borderline" comes from Key Lime Pie, the band's last album before their 1990 breakup. As someone who wasn't always a fan of CVB's ska influence, I started to miss it toward the end of the band's run, and I like the way that the ska rhythm is used here in a way that emphasizes the rambling, rolling feel of the song's lyrics. It also has a great distorted harmonica riff by David Lowery and some lovely violin accents (not played by the band's longtime violinist Jonathan Segel, though - he'd quit the band before Key Lime Pie was recorded.)

A decade and a half earlier, Thin Lizzy recorded a song called "Borderline", co-written by Phil Lynott and guitarist Brian Robertson about a girl Robertson was in love with. I guess you could call it a power ballad - it has a nicely swaying singalong chorus and some great interwoven guitar parts by Robertson and Scott Gorham. My issue with this song is that it uses the word "borderline", employing the way I use the word "borderline". As a result, it doesn't quite convey the angst of unrequited love that Thin Lizzy was going for, I think. It's a pretty cool song, but I think that Camper Van Beethoven wrote a song that better conveys the title word's "borderline"-ness.

Winner: CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN

"Borderline" by Camper Van Beethoven

"Borderline" by Thin Lizzy

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Burnt Out Car" by Saint Etienne

Illustration from Popular Science magazine, December 1955

At first blush, "Burnt Out Car" sounds like the kind of annoying synth-pop I used to hear on the radio when I was living in Singapore in the '90s, but I suspected from the beginning that there was more more to this song under the surface. It's considered a redheaded stepchild among Saint Etienne singles, and it's because of the interesting way the song came into being. Originally written as a spooky mood piece for the X-Files movie during Saint Etienne's post-Tiger Bay "wilderness years", the first version of it that got released was the "Burnt Out Car (Belearico Remix)" version that came out on the Casino Classics Saint Etienne remix collection in 1996. Balearico was a pseudonym of songwriter/producer Brian Higgins - his better-known "AKA" is Xenomania, the name he used in collaborating with UK girl-pop stars Girls Aloud. That explains the high-gloss, electro-pop sheen that the song has.

Never really intended as a single, "Burnt Out Car (Belearico Remix)" was put out on a promo CD for Casino Classics, giving it quasi-single status. This version of the song was also included on the Continental compilation of non-album tracks, which is where I first heard it. The original version of the song didn't surface until the X-Files movie finally came out in 1998. For Saint Etienne fans with mainstream pop tastes, "Burnt Out Car" is a big favorite, probably explaining why it has been lumped in with the band's real singles on more recent greatest-hits releases. I think that the song works so well because of the contrast between the pop-radio remix production and the melancholic melody, originally intended for a very different kind of song.

"Burnt Out Car" by Saint Etienne

It's New to Me: Pain in My Heart by Otis Redding (1964)

Image from an advertisement for Tareyton cigarettes, 1966

So my special lady friend bought me a set containing all five of Otis Redding's studio albums for my birthday. Of course, this set doesn't include "(Sittin' on the) Dock of the Bay" because that was a posthumous single release, but it does contain an embarrassment of riches. Like a lot of people, I was surprised that Redding's albums are interesting for very different reasons than I'd anticipated - for one thing, he really doesn't have a great singing voice. His singing talent is in singing with feeling, and his emotive croak and howl get a message across as well as the beautiful singing voices of his time (Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson, two of Redding's favorite artists to cover). I was also surprised by the split between originals and covers on his albums - it's pretty much 50/50, and, although I hear that people often say he was more of an interpreter than a songwriter, I almost always prefer his compositions to the covers. I was also surprised to find that Booker T & the M.G.'s were Otis Redding's backing band on these albums - maybe that's common knowledge, but it was a very pleasant surprise to me because the musicianship on these records is great.

Take, for instance, Redding's first album, 1964's Pain in My Heart. It sets the formula that Redding used for all five of his albums. It has five Redding compositions, including the single "These Arms of Mine", a Sam Cooke cover ("You Send Me"), a couple recent pop hits ("Stand By Me", "Louie Louie"), and a couple older soul/blues numbers (Little Richard's "Lucille", Rufus Thomas's "The Dog"). Almost without exception, my favorite songs on the record are Redding's, even though he's often said to have been a journeyman songwriter at this point in his career - the Little-Richard-wannabe "Hey Hey Baby" is the only less-than-good song on Pain in My Heart written by Redding. "These Arms of Mine", "Something Is Worrying Me", and "That's What My Heart Needs" are all great, but my favorite is probably "Security". It's not one of Redding's best-known songs, but it features some awesome horn arrangements from the Mar-Keys with guitar counterpoints by Steve Cropper.

"Security" by Otis Redding

It's New to Me: Fleetwood Mac by Fleetwood Mac (1975)

Cover illustration from If - Worlds of Science Fiction magazine, April 1974

I think I don't cop to my actual level of ignorance often enough on this blog. The truth is that I'm ignorant of most everything, including the chronology and lineups of the great Fleetwood Mac. A while back, I was introduced to Tusk, their too-arty, too-ambitious double-album follow-up to their biggest record, 1977's Rumours. I thought it might be one of the most perfect albums I'd heard, with a great mix of songwriting and musicianship, with an unearthly weirdness about it that can only come from doing craploads of cocaine. For me, the record stood alone, and I didn't feel any need to educate myself on how it fit into the band's larger oeuvre (I love using that word). But now I've ruined it by buying the band's 1975 eponymous record, which does nothing BUT bring questions to mind about where it comes from and why it is the way it is, forcing me to do a little research.

So Fleetwood Mac is actually the band's second eponymous album - the band's first album in 1968 was also called Fleetwood Mac, the beginning of the band's first incarnation with frontman Peter Green. The band's second well-known lineup featured guitarist Bob Welch, but he dropped out of the band by 1975 - this is when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band, prompting a second self-titled record to emphasize that the band was "rebooting" itself. This is important context for this album because it does a lot to explain how the record sounds and why. The songwriting duties on the record are split between Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie - the new implants were suddenly two-thirds of the band's creative input.

As a result, Fleetwood Mac is glossy but tentative-sounding. McVie's songs have an unadventurous, middle-of-the-road feel to them, even though "Over My Head" and "Say You Love Me" are undeniably poppy. Nicks' songs are arguably the most confident-sounding and less reliant on synergy with the rest of the band, particularly in the case of "Landslide" (a song I'd like a lot if the Smashing Pumpkins cover hadn't ruined it for me). The most disappointing thing about Fleetwood Mac for me is that Lindsey Buckingham's personality (such a big part of what I loved about Tusk) is nowhere to be found. His contributions to the album are fairly slight - "World Turning" is an unsuccessful attempt at tough-sounding rock, and the paranoid "I'm So Afraid" is an embryonic version of the weirdness that would come out of him later on. My favorite thing on the album is Buckingham's opening track, "Monday Morning", probably because it sounds the closest to a song that could have been on Tusk.

"Monday Morning" by Fleetwood Mac

In Stores Now: The Double Cross by Sloan

Illustration from Anales del Museo Nacionale de Chile, 1982

With The Double Cross, we're three albums into the big Sloan comeback that started with 2006's Never Hear the End of It, and Sloan's not showing any signs of slowing down. In fact, their openly celebrating the fact that they've been together for twenty years (the album title's roman-numeral reference) and now have ten albums under their collective belt. After the 30-song opus of Never Hear the End of It, Sloan has gone back to their typical format, in which each of the band's members contribute two to four songs. With 2008's Parallel Play, this approach felt like a bit of a letdown but, with The Double Cross, they create a very similar record with much better results.

A couple tweaks make all the difference. As its title suggests, Parallel Play was all about the four songwriters who make up Sloan each doing their own thing, but it didn't hang together very well. The Double Cross feels much more collaborative - you can almost hear them suggesting improvements to each other's songs, and the songs flow together as one long suite, extending this feeling of overlapping work. The other thing that The Double Cross has going for it is consistently stronger songwriting. Chris Murphy contributes four tunes this time around, and they're all excellent, particularly the bouncy disco-pop of "Your Daddy Will Do" and the closing ballad "Laying So Low" (one of the least smirky things Murphy has ever written). Jay Ferguson also delivers three solid songs, the highlight being "The Answer Was You" (featuring Ferguson's typical creamy power-pop sound).

On the "rock" side of the Sloan songwriting cadre you have guitarist Patrick Pentland and drummer Andrew Scott. Scott is always a wild card, and his two contributions are slightly out of step with the rest of the band, as usual. "She's Slowing Down Again" is an unremarkable bluesy number, but I really like the laid-back drone-rock of his other composition "Traces" (the album's longest track). Pentland does what he often does, dividing his time equally between punk ("I've Gotta Know"), Stones-y rock ("It's Plain to See"), and muscular power-pop ("Unkind"). "Unkind" is easily my favorite (and probably my favorite on the album) - it has a beautifully simple chorus lyric and hook, and the guitar harmonies give it that '70s pop sheen that few bands go for these days. If Sloan had reversed the release order of Parallel Play and The Double Cross, I'd be tempted to say that we are getting diminishing returns from this band, but instead all I can say is that Sloan can still deliver a solid and fresh-sounding record with a few delightful surprises after two decades.

"Unkind" by Sloan

Why Does This Exist?: "When I Was Born, I Was Bored" by Shudder to Think (ft. Billy Corgan)

Panel from Will Eisner's The Spirit comic strip, September 29, 1940

From what I can tell, DC art-rock band Shudder to Think was on the verge of falling to pieces by the time they did the First Live, Last Rites soundtrack in 1998. After a string of well-regarded albums, they'd released the underwhelming (if not-so-bad in retrospect) 20,000 BC album the previous year, and guitarist Nate Larson was on the verge of leaving the band. Regardless, First Live, Last Rites is a pretty cool idea, with the band writing a variety of retro-tinged songs to be sung by some of their favorite vocalists. They came up with some inspiring combinations, like having Jeff Buckley sing the soaring soul song "I Want Someone Badly", putting Cheap Trick's Robin Zander's vocals over the goofy power-pop of "Automatic Soup", or giving Mimi and Alan from Low the Spector-ish duet "Just Really Want to See You".

And then there's "When I Was Born, I Was Bored", a shrill, pointless, angst-ridden exercise in aping the then-current style of Smashing Pumpkins - in case you missed what they were going for, they went ahead and put Billy Corgan's singing on the track. It's under two minutes long, but it almost negates the argument that the rest of the soundtrack makes - that Shudder to Think could strip away their eccentricities and focus on pure songcraft with a set of rewarding genre exercises. The melody is just annoying throughout, and then it ends with a repeated line about a werewolf for some reason. One interesting footnote about this song - the drums are played by Kevin March, formerly of the Dambuilders and shortly hereafter recruited to play in one of the later incarnations of Guided By Voices. So there's that, I guess.

"When I Was Born, I Was Bored" by Shudder to Think (ft. Billy Corgan)

I Saw a Show! Sasquatch! Music Festival 2011 (Day 3), 30 May 2011

Detail of the cover illustration of Geoffrey Homes' The Case of the Mexican Knife by Bob Doares, 1948

The last day of Sasquatch! was worthwhile for Guided By Voices' set alone - although they had a mid-afternoon set on the main stage, performing right after Chromeo (a group targeting a very different set of demographics), they were in good spirits and sounded great. My brother and I got to the venue in time to see the end of the Chromeo set - as soon as they were done, the younger two thirds of the audience vacated the area, so I went and stood right in front for the Guided By Voices set. Like the last time I saw them on their "classic lineup" reunion tour, they stuck to their early-'90s material, although they did a couple numbers I hadn't heard before. The highlight was an electrifying version of "Always Crush Me", the closing track of Alien Lanes.

After Guided By Voices, we stayed at the main stage to see Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - they did a great set, but the fun was entirely in the performance, and I didn't hear anything that would convince me that their records would be anywhere near as good as seeing them live. We then relocated to see Surfer Blood, who did a decent job in spite of having recently lost all their equipment to theft in Seattle. The problem with their set was in frontman John Paul Pitts' wobbly vocals - maybe it was nerves, but he didn't sound great. Much better was the set by Best Coast, whose sunshine-y surf pop translated better live than I'd guessed. Beth Cosentino seemed to be having a great time - her voice sounds really good live, and her between-song patter was cute.

In the evening, we caught a decent but not extraordinary set from the Decemberists - I don't know why they still do the nine-minute shanty "Mariner's Revenge Song" - and then an unappealingly amorphous and jam-heavy set by Deerhunter ("Little Kids" sounded good, but the rest was *meh*). I was running out of gas at this point, and rainstorms had been threatening throughout the day, but we decided to see how the Wilco set was shaping up back at the main stage before heading out. It turned out that they were just starting, and it sounded good. We made our way down to the front and watched most of the set, which was thankfully light on material from the last two albums. They played nice versions of "Kamera", "Company in My Back", and "Misunderstood", but the best thing they did was "Airline to Heaven" from Mermaid Avenue 2. We headed to the car when they started playing "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" for the obvious reasons - we could hear them still playing it in the distance as we drove away from the Gorge. I guess we missed a brief encore, but we'd had our fill by that point. Twenty-two bands in three days - not bad at all, I think.

"Airline to Heaven" by Wilco (with Billy Bragg)

I Saw a Show! Sasquatch! Music Festival 2011 (Day 2), 29 May 2011

Photo titled "Friends in a Boat" from the collection of Mrs. B. Malpus, c. 1915

On Day 2 of the Sasquatch! Festival, the morning lineup was pretty spotty. My brother and I had hoped to see the Smith Westerns start the day off on the main stage at noon, but there wasn't anything else we really wanted to see until the Archers of Loaf at 6:00. So we decided to skip the Smith Westerns, spend the day hiking, and head over to the Gorge in the early evening. I think it was a good call, too - I heard that the Smith Westerns' set was disappointing. We ended up getting to the festival's middle-sized stage before the Archers' set, so we watched a bit of a band called City and Colour - except for a cover of Low's "Murderer", it was pretty unremarkable. As often happened this weekend, though, the hordes of body-painted teens cleared out of the area after some terrible act finished, leaving one of my favorite bands to play to a way-too-small crowd.

The Archers of Loaf played a great set, though. They played almost all of the Vs. the Greatest of All Time EP, confirming my suspicions that they (like their fans) prefer that release over all the others. Starting the set with the raging "Audiowhore", they also did great versions of "Freezing Point" and "The Lowest Part Is Free". They rounded out the set with a few tracks from each of their albums, at one point introducing their best-known song "Web in Front" as "our only good song." When the Archers were done, we stuck around and watched smooth soft-rockers Gayngs do their thing, which was also pretty good (even the sax solos!)

After that we went over to the main stage to see what the Flaming Lips were doing, although we really should have known what they were doing because (a) their live show has more or less been the same for a decade, and (b) it was widely publicized that they would be playing the Soft Bulletin album in its entirety at the festival. We missed the memo somehow, but it was a pleasant surprise to hear them do The Soft Bulletin, as my brother and I both love that record. Perhaps predictably, Wayne Coyne's rambling monologues and other attempts at "showmanship" ended up taking too much time, and they had to strip two songs out of the set (admittedly, "The Gash" and "Sleeping on the Roof" are ones you can really live without) in order to vacate the stage in time for Modest Mouse. We weren't really feeling like seeing Isaac Brock and company, so we headed out, catching some of the Yeasayer set (they sounded quite good, if a little too much like the record) on the way to the parking lot.

"Suddenly Everything Has Changed" by the Flaming Lips