Offkilter indie new wave on the order of recent faves Thee Oh Sees, full of bold, simple beats and minimalist jangle. When it works, when the band finds its defiant, senseless stride, it's exhilarating, especially on the brilliantly expectation-defying (and perfectly-named) opener I Like LA.
On the most of the songs though, absent an interesting art-rock angle, the band doesn't do enough fill in the space left by all the anti-pop not-doing. Take I'm Closed or The Entertainer, songs that simmer for a few minutes without arriving anywhere, nor being all that compelling in the not-arriving. Enjoyable as hooky post-punk, but frustrating in its inability to live up to its own high-water marks 3/5
Friday, July 19, 2013
Thursday, July 18, 2013
#957 Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
Released near the end of Ray Charles' late-50's-early-60's golden age, this set of longing ballads stretches deep into the wee hours of the night like a Sinatra album, each song bathed in a signature combination of sweet strings and swooning, high-harmony backing vocals. There's the occasional stomper, but mostly everything's slow and low, about love, loss, or both, with little of what you might recognize as country or western music by any modern standard: less jangle and strum, more cowboy calling into the deep starlight that no earthly souls can hear 3/5
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
#956 Minutemen - The Punch Line
The first thing you need to know about this album is that it's 18 songs long, and only 3 of those are longer than a minute, including Tension, logging in at an epic 1:20 (and no, according to the band this isn't where they got their name). Each song is a whip crack of breakneck bass, stutterstop drums and stabby post-punk guitars played double-fast. And then gone. It's thrilling, gutwrenchingly tense, and then over, leaving you wanting more,a distilled, knife-edge version of the sprawling albums that were to follow, utterly fearless in its approach to sputtering songs rushing at you like fists 4/5
#955 Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
I'm really averse to the whole singer-songwriter thing, anything that seems like it might be about personal problems made meekly universal, anything that might by performed in a coffee shop. Also, keening female singing. And there's strong shades of all that here, but it's better observed than usual, full of nuance and ambiguity. Sure, occasionally a song leads to a brokedown rhymeless listing of sentiments, but far more often there's a salvo of knotty notions that surge past half-understood.
Most importantly, the backing is great, skyrocketing past the usual Joe Hum'n'Strum fare: here is a full band that surges and lurches, full of free-roaming bass and swerving pacing dancing against Mitchell's restless lilting. The feeling is the feeling of feelings, improbably overcoming the crusty crust on my crusty heart 3.5/5
Most importantly, the backing is great, skyrocketing past the usual Joe Hum'n'Strum fare: here is a full band that surges and lurches, full of free-roaming bass and swerving pacing dancing against Mitchell's restless lilting. The feeling is the feeling of feelings, improbably overcoming the crusty crust on my crusty heart 3.5/5
#954 Lee Morgan - Search for the New Land
Arty, angular hard bop, full of twisty structures and hooky hooks. It's nowhere near as listenable and exciting as The Sidewinder, and the doubled runs still sap spontaneity, but the songs are bright and bold and evocative of mood and place, especially the slinky Morgan the Pirate 3.5/5
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
#953 VA - Philadelphia International Records 12-Inch Singles
Disco! If you're my age, the last word you heard on disco was "sucks", the rallying cry of the rebellion against its full-fledged takeover of America. But before the takeover, before the backlash, disco was some inventive, weird, underground shit.
This collection's pretty daunting, two discs, an endless array of endless songs, outlining one scene's path through the first wave of popular dance music meant for darkened nightclubs. It's no wonder the inspiration's burbled back up from DFA to Daft Punk, an influence felt most keenly on the Edwin Birdsong tracks that rock it like it's two thousand and three.
The biggest surprise you're liable to have is how long and anti-pop these song are, and pretty darn good besides. It's really only a smallish leap from funky R&B to Philly disco, and if you like one you're likely to like the other 3.5/5
This collection's pretty daunting, two discs, an endless array of endless songs, outlining one scene's path through the first wave of popular dance music meant for darkened nightclubs. It's no wonder the inspiration's burbled back up from DFA to Daft Punk, an influence felt most keenly on the Edwin Birdsong tracks that rock it like it's two thousand and three.
The biggest surprise you're liable to have is how long and anti-pop these song are, and pretty darn good besides. It's really only a smallish leap from funky R&B to Philly disco, and if you like one you're likely to like the other 3.5/5
#952 The Smashing Pumpkins - Vinyl Tracklist: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
I'm very tempted to use this as an excuse to visit one of the (probably the) formative album of my teenage year, or to go on and on about the ways that formatting and physical packaging affect listening, or otherwise to make the entire article as longwinded and unreadable as this opening sentence. But! Let me just briefly go over what this packaging's effect has, splitting as it does the album into 6 sides, 5 songs each (the original 28 plus two bonus tracks), across 3 discs.
First of all, this is in no way a triple album. Each of the 3 discs would read as a desperately offkilter combination of sides with no reason or flow. Rather, perhaps inspired by the Mellon Collie era's The Aeroplane Flies High boxed set, which packaged 5 singles onto their own thematic EP-length discs, this plays as 6 individual EPs. This is a fun way to break up a sprawling double album that was necessarily jarringly sequenced by the expansive range of its contents.
Another reason to take this as 6 separate offerings? The first and last are clearly the worst of the lot, making for a drearily halfhearted opening and a whimpering end. Considering the former. So, sure, the Mellon Collie / Tonight Tonight opener was a strikingly bold move on the original disk, completely baffling the expectations of anyone coming at this fresh from Siamese Dream. But then it kicked directly into the payoff of Jellybelly. Here, we follow with a swap into disc 2's anti-two-punch 3-4 combo of Thirty Three and In the Arms of Sleep, into the whimpy wafering of Take Me Down, which is all to say, 5 of the album's whimpiest, whiniest songs all back to back with no payoff: it doesn't work on its own, and it doesn't work as a first half or third or sixth of anything that comes after. The last side similarly just packs too many of the weak-spirited songs that were vulnerable and refreshing on the original but that just puddle together here. Infinite Sadness is a welcome new track, but it follows Farewell and Goodnight, adding up to too many goodbyes.
Rounding out the "low" sides, the clear winner is the 1979/Beautiful/Cupid/By Starlight/We Only Come Out at Night side that builds a wonderfully misfit crew of sensitive weirdos into something far more touching than the sum of their parts.
The hard ones though? This is where you get your money's worth. I don't want a return to Siamese Dream's (to say nothing of Zeitgeist's) comparative homogeneity, but its thrilling to hear the rougher, tougher, noisier crush of the album's heavy element clench up into little 5-track fists. The Jellybelly / Bodies rush is bracing, if sunk by To Forgive, and thereafter sinks into some of the middle-ground songs that I guess had to go somewhere.
But hearing Fuck You into Love into XYU is a rush, topped only by the reason for this whole thing to exist:
1. Bullet with Butterfly Wings
2. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
3. Muzzle
4. Galapagos
5. Tales of a Scorched Earth
All I can say is that I'm glad that never existed as an EP when I was 15, because it would have blown my goddamned mind. That's about as fine a slice of this era of the Pumpkins as you could hope for, sandwiching some of Corgan's most underrated, soaring anthems between two of his most searing screeds. The frustration of Bullet bleeds into Ruby, the wondering and the "the night has come" bleeds into Muzzle's "the silence of the worlds" and on into Galapagos's desperate search for feeling, into a blistering comebacker of a climax that begs to loop right back into another go at Bullet, that the ebb and flow of stress and beauty never find its rest. Its moments like this that excite me about this artifact.
Is that all ridiculous? Probably, but in the highly unlikely event that anyone ever reads this far down this mess I can safely guess that you are (were) reasonably fanatical about this band and this album, and the mere idea of considering how it might be differently composed is itself might be cause for interest for you, damn near however it was actually done. This was an album for those who wanted to feel music deeply at just the moment they were just finding the need to feel deeply, and to listen to this album in a new way is a route to revisit and rethink those fecund, halcyon days.
Corgan confides freely that he wrote this album specifically to be for and about that longing segment of youth, and it was the perfect artifact for your moment when the world opens too big and we need to find ways to frame it into songs and albums and scenes and stories and stages to keep from being overcome. Hearing these songs again, maybe I just couldn't resist the pull of doing it all again.
This does nothing to replace the original: if you're not already ardently familiar with it, start there. But if your worldview was ever framed by this album, the opportunity to see it from another angle is recommended with a whole heart 4/5
First of all, this is in no way a triple album. Each of the 3 discs would read as a desperately offkilter combination of sides with no reason or flow. Rather, perhaps inspired by the Mellon Collie era's The Aeroplane Flies High boxed set, which packaged 5 singles onto their own thematic EP-length discs, this plays as 6 individual EPs. This is a fun way to break up a sprawling double album that was necessarily jarringly sequenced by the expansive range of its contents.
Another reason to take this as 6 separate offerings? The first and last are clearly the worst of the lot, making for a drearily halfhearted opening and a whimpering end. Considering the former. So, sure, the Mellon Collie / Tonight Tonight opener was a strikingly bold move on the original disk, completely baffling the expectations of anyone coming at this fresh from Siamese Dream. But then it kicked directly into the payoff of Jellybelly. Here, we follow with a swap into disc 2's anti-two-punch 3-4 combo of Thirty Three and In the Arms of Sleep, into the whimpy wafering of Take Me Down, which is all to say, 5 of the album's whimpiest, whiniest songs all back to back with no payoff: it doesn't work on its own, and it doesn't work as a first half or third or sixth of anything that comes after. The last side similarly just packs too many of the weak-spirited songs that were vulnerable and refreshing on the original but that just puddle together here. Infinite Sadness is a welcome new track, but it follows Farewell and Goodnight, adding up to too many goodbyes.
Rounding out the "low" sides, the clear winner is the 1979/Beautiful/Cupid/By Starlight/We Only Come Out at Night side that builds a wonderfully misfit crew of sensitive weirdos into something far more touching than the sum of their parts.
The hard ones though? This is where you get your money's worth. I don't want a return to Siamese Dream's (to say nothing of Zeitgeist's) comparative homogeneity, but its thrilling to hear the rougher, tougher, noisier crush of the album's heavy element clench up into little 5-track fists. The Jellybelly / Bodies rush is bracing, if sunk by To Forgive, and thereafter sinks into some of the middle-ground songs that I guess had to go somewhere.
But hearing Fuck You into Love into XYU is a rush, topped only by the reason for this whole thing to exist:
1. Bullet with Butterfly Wings
2. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
3. Muzzle
4. Galapagos
5. Tales of a Scorched Earth
All I can say is that I'm glad that never existed as an EP when I was 15, because it would have blown my goddamned mind. That's about as fine a slice of this era of the Pumpkins as you could hope for, sandwiching some of Corgan's most underrated, soaring anthems between two of his most searing screeds. The frustration of Bullet bleeds into Ruby, the wondering and the "the night has come" bleeds into Muzzle's "the silence of the worlds" and on into Galapagos's desperate search for feeling, into a blistering comebacker of a climax that begs to loop right back into another go at Bullet, that the ebb and flow of stress and beauty never find its rest. Its moments like this that excite me about this artifact.
Is that all ridiculous? Probably, but in the highly unlikely event that anyone ever reads this far down this mess I can safely guess that you are (were) reasonably fanatical about this band and this album, and the mere idea of considering how it might be differently composed is itself might be cause for interest for you, damn near however it was actually done. This was an album for those who wanted to feel music deeply at just the moment they were just finding the need to feel deeply, and to listen to this album in a new way is a route to revisit and rethink those fecund, halcyon days.
Corgan confides freely that he wrote this album specifically to be for and about that longing segment of youth, and it was the perfect artifact for your moment when the world opens too big and we need to find ways to frame it into songs and albums and scenes and stories and stages to keep from being overcome. Hearing these songs again, maybe I just couldn't resist the pull of doing it all again.
This does nothing to replace the original: if you're not already ardently familiar with it, start there. But if your worldview was ever framed by this album, the opportunity to see it from another angle is recommended with a whole heart 4/5
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