Friday, August 2, 2019
#3508a Chance the Rapper - The Big Day
3/5 pretty enough, packed with little rhyme puzzles, with no hunger or stakes at all. Chance in a Life is Good shirt, rapping from his porch with some flow-killing skits stuffed in between. It's a bad sign that Randy Newman's the guest that fits in best. I'm glad he's made it, married his lady, is appreciating things, and is honest enough to speak from that place, it just doesn't make for an especially essential listen
#3508 Sparks - Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins
4.5/5 Sparks go away for 6 years and come back with a revelation. A wonderfully bizarre bent-pop record with songs riffing on Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Gone with the Wind, Liberace, and Chinese filmmaker Tsui Hark. You know, 90's stuff.
From its Confidential magazine cover and blaring sensationalism, its an album out of time, a frantic thrashing against celebrity, peaking with the flayed I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car. From ruminations on the ennui of owning the BBC, to trancy micro-experiments - it's a complete 180 from their pop-grasping lows.
But the signature song is The Ghost of Liberace, a pop fairy tale of what remains of fame, reflected in the story of a man once scourged by Confidential itself. It's hard not to see it as autobiographical. Elegiac and hopeful that one will be remembered fondly, it's Sparks accepting that it's better to burn out bright on your own terms. If this had been their last album, it would have been strangely perfect, but the story's got a couple twists yet
From its Confidential magazine cover and blaring sensationalism, its an album out of time, a frantic thrashing against celebrity, peaking with the flayed I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car. From ruminations on the ennui of owning the BBC, to trancy micro-experiments - it's a complete 180 from their pop-grasping lows.
But the signature song is The Ghost of Liberace, a pop fairy tale of what remains of fame, reflected in the story of a man once scourged by Confidential itself. It's hard not to see it as autobiographical. Elegiac and hopeful that one will be remembered fondly, it's Sparks accepting that it's better to burn out bright on your own terms. If this had been their last album, it would have been strangely perfect, but the story's got a couple twists yet
#3507 Sparks - Interior Design
2.5/5 the dying gasp of pop-desperate-era Sparks. Limp new-wave bopping and uncomfortably uncool ballads, it doesn't seem like their hearts were even into selling out anymore. The cover's all wrong too. An album made by nobody, mislabeled and misfiled
#3506 Ty Segall - First Taste
3.5/5 No guitars this time out? You wouldn't know it by the sound, we're spoiled by the breadth of Ty's fuzz arsenal, this all slots right in. Like many of Segall's many albums of the last few years, the gimmick is just a different route to the same place; this falls into the same blur as Fudge Sandwich, Joy, Emotional Mugger, and Ty Rex. It's no Ty Segall ('17) or Freedom's Goblin. A fine racket, but other than the refreshing Ice Plant, the clattering The Fall, and the screeching closer, nothing much sticks
#3505 Los Doltons - Siempre...Dos Doltons
3.5/5 scuzzy smooth perfection, rough-edged garage with a full-bodied Spanish croon. Some of the covers (Matrisuicidio!) out-energy the originals nicely, all a delight
Thursday, August 1, 2019
#3504 Sparks - Music that You Can Dance To
2.5/5
Sparks goes all the way down the rabbithole, making music so pop it almost goes around the horn and is _about pop music. Almost!
Layered with the tackiest possible synths, these are just songs called Music You Can Dance To, Armies of the Night, and Let's Get Funky, which more or less do what they say on the tin. Fingertips sounds like a prescient dancepunk song without the cool:
Everybody say yeah! Everybody have a good time! Just one more time! Clap your hands just a little bit louder!
Again, it _almost works, you can _almost admire it, but it never escapes the orbit of its brazen intentions. Plus the songs just aren't very good to listen to
Sparks goes all the way down the rabbithole, making music so pop it almost goes around the horn and is _about pop music. Almost!
Layered with the tackiest possible synths, these are just songs called Music You Can Dance To, Armies of the Night, and Let's Get Funky, which more or less do what they say on the tin. Fingertips sounds like a prescient dancepunk song without the cool:
Everybody say yeah! Everybody have a good time! Just one more time! Clap your hands just a little bit louder!
Again, it _almost works, you can _almost admire it, but it never escapes the orbit of its brazen intentions. Plus the songs just aren't very good to listen to
#3503 Sparks - Pulling Rabbits out of a Hat
2.5/5
if you want to understand the sixteen year, six-album fistfight with the world that this album kicked off, look no further than the title track.
You can almost picture the Maels having a beer with friends one night when, in a moment of wellmeaning drunken candor, someone drawls
"you guys are such talented songwriters! how come you've never had
you know
a hit?"
detached, one replies
"we could have, could have had dozens. If that was that's what we were going for"
And then Ron and Russel were challenged to prove it.
--
Of course, its not that Sparks were ever _aggressively disinterested in having a hit. But they'd never stooped to making something in the basest terms of what was popular. And in the mid-80's, stooping was a pretty all or nothing proposition.
And so with much swagger does this album kick off, announcing that, for my next trick, I will make pop music, and people will love it. And this is the easiest, most basic trick there is, the pulling a rabbit out of a hat of songwriting. And I have performed so much grander tricks: made a pauper a king, raised the titanic, made legitimately great music for a decade.
And even the choice of phrasing: I am pulling rabbits, one after another, out of this hat. Not one rabbit. Not out of multiple hats. I am _churning _these _hits _out until the room looks like the cover of fucking Hello Young Lovers.
But then the crux of the matter in the song's whelp of a chorus:
_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_all I get is polite applause!
_applause, applause, applause, applause, applause
It is as fine a run of 11 words as you'll find in music, and 6 of them are the same one. A disdain for the payoff of this trick, that the applause is polite, that the appreciation is critical, but halfhearted, and certainly without commercial payoff. For all its confidence, the song betrays an anticipation that this all will fail. Polite applause, who needs it. But Russell continues!
Applause! he repeats again and again, desperate and ecstatic and failing, as if flogging one team of horses and being flogged by another.
is that all I get? god yes the applause! more, more you fallow fools!
it is cheap and hollow and its all that I want and there will never be enough.
a wracked, complicated song, sneering at the audience and desperate for its affection, wrenching itself ouroboran into operatic glam self-loathing. An overlooked art-pop gem.
--
Of course, Sparks was not successful. The album is packed cheap, bouncing pop songs, each packed with budget synths and endless repetition of the name of the song. There's flashes of wry humor, but nothing that matches the apparently-worthy-of-400-words opener, and certainly nothing unscathed by its brazen attempt to hit a single by scattershot.
It's like the Maels made this album on a bet, but they weren't really sure they wanted to win it.
--
Stick with us for Sparks Week 2 - The Repetition Era, where we'll see a descent into nothingness, a surprising resurgence, a swing at cosmic justice, and the most overrated ending since The Usual Suspects!
if you want to understand the sixteen year, six-album fistfight with the world that this album kicked off, look no further than the title track.
You can almost picture the Maels having a beer with friends one night when, in a moment of wellmeaning drunken candor, someone drawls
"you guys are such talented songwriters! how come you've never had
you know
a hit?"
detached, one replies
"we could have, could have had dozens. If that was that's what we were going for"
And then Ron and Russel were challenged to prove it.
--
Of course, its not that Sparks were ever _aggressively disinterested in having a hit. But they'd never stooped to making something in the basest terms of what was popular. And in the mid-80's, stooping was a pretty all or nothing proposition.
And so with much swagger does this album kick off, announcing that, for my next trick, I will make pop music, and people will love it. And this is the easiest, most basic trick there is, the pulling a rabbit out of a hat of songwriting. And I have performed so much grander tricks: made a pauper a king, raised the titanic, made legitimately great music for a decade.
And even the choice of phrasing: I am pulling rabbits, one after another, out of this hat. Not one rabbit. Not out of multiple hats. I am _churning _these _hits _out until the room looks like the cover of fucking Hello Young Lovers.
But then the crux of the matter in the song's whelp of a chorus:
_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_all I get is polite applause!
_applause, applause, applause, applause, applause
It is as fine a run of 11 words as you'll find in music, and 6 of them are the same one. A disdain for the payoff of this trick, that the applause is polite, that the appreciation is critical, but halfhearted, and certainly without commercial payoff. For all its confidence, the song betrays an anticipation that this all will fail. Polite applause, who needs it. But Russell continues!
Applause! he repeats again and again, desperate and ecstatic and failing, as if flogging one team of horses and being flogged by another.
is that all I get? god yes the applause! more, more you fallow fools!
it is cheap and hollow and its all that I want and there will never be enough.
a wracked, complicated song, sneering at the audience and desperate for its affection, wrenching itself ouroboran into operatic glam self-loathing. An overlooked art-pop gem.
--
Of course, Sparks was not successful. The album is packed cheap, bouncing pop songs, each packed with budget synths and endless repetition of the name of the song. There's flashes of wry humor, but nothing that matches the apparently-worthy-of-400-words opener, and certainly nothing unscathed by its brazen attempt to hit a single by scattershot.
It's like the Maels made this album on a bet, but they weren't really sure they wanted to win it.
--
Stick with us for Sparks Week 2 - The Repetition Era, where we'll see a descent into nothingness, a surprising resurgence, a swing at cosmic justice, and the most overrated ending since The Usual Suspects!
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