notes - archives - may 2004

5.3.04
Two new discs, one a recommendation from a music store clerk to whom I gave a URL where he could download Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. First is Boards of Canada's 1998 disc Music Has the Right to Children, which I've been pondering for a while (a recent endorsement on Pitchfork's front page pushed me over the edge). It's a little more abstract that I was expecting——I thought it would be more like the Avalanches——but I like it anyway. The second disc, the one recommended to me, is Danger Mouse's collaboration with Jemini, Ghetto Pop Life. Not as good as The Grey Album, simply because Jemini is not as good a rapper as Jay-Z and his lyrics linger in the thug-life boasting territory that has been typical of rap for far too long now. But Danger Mouse's beats are great, and Jemini's flow is smooth, so you can ignore the words pretty easily and just focus on the music.

5.4.04
I wasn't sure about the Jack White-produced new album from Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose, but the song samples on iTunes sound like a countrified White Stripes performing with a more twangy Lucinda Williams on vocals, so I'm probably going to invest some money in the CD. I don't know if the record will do well on the mainstream country charts, which have been resistant to acts outside the slick, pop-influenced Nashville scene like Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, and the aforementioned Lucinda Williams (not to mention countless No Depression alt country rock bands), but it should certainly get a lot of people of my generation who share my taste in music to seriously consider buying their first Loretta Lynn album ever.

5.5.04
As much as I love the Smiths, and as much as I loved Morrissey as a cultural icon and sarcastic pain-in-the-ass back when I was a teenager, I never really loved Morrissey's solo work. I don't think this is at all uncommon among Smiths fans; his voice was the voice of the Smiths, and it's hard to hear it being backed up by less than Smiths quality music. And even though Johnny Marr didn't write any of the lyrics for the Smiths, his collaboration with Morrissey seemed to push Moz to greater heights than any other songwriter Morrissey has worked with since; with one or two minor exceptions, his solo lyrics just aren't as clever and compelling as his work with Marr in the Smiths.

Like most Smiths fans, I gave Morrissey's solo career a decent chance before giving up on him. Some made it to Kill Uncle, or Vauxhall and I, but I only made it to Bona Drag, which was not a true album but rather a complilation of singles and b-sides (including my favorite of his post-Smiths efforts, "November Spawned a Monster").

But thanks to Doug's generous birthday gift of a $20 iTunes gift certificate, I have purchased my first Morrisey songs in over ten years, an EP built around "Irish Blood, English Heart", the first single from his upcoming record You Are the Quarry. It's not terrible, and it's not great, but it is good, I think. The music is a little slicker than I'm comfortable with, but Morrissey's voice sounds as perfect as it ever has, and it looks like he's been able to store up a lot of ideas in his seven year absence from the world of music (only the first song is included on the twelve track album; the other three songs are b-sides, and as far as I'm concerned, they sound as good as the single).

Still, after listening to the samples on iTunes, I'm not sure that I would have taken money out of my own pocket to pay for them, but since they were on Doug and there was nothing else good released this week, it didn't take long for me to give in and add the EP to my cart.

5.6.04
When I got to work yesterday morning, I had a surprise waiting for me on IM, which I had forgotten to sign off of when I left the night before: a link from my friend Jeff to a web site where I could download all 27 songs from the Pixies' show at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis on April 13 of this year, the first live show they played since breaking up over a decade ago.

There are two things that are amazing about the songs I downloaded: first, the quality of the recording (thanks to a mobile mixing studio that makes CD copies of the performance available to attendees 15 minutes after the end of the show), and second, the brilliance of the band's performance. I was lucky enough to see the Pixies twice before they broke up, once at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill on the Doolittle tour and then at the Carolina Union, again in Chapel Hill, for the Trompe Le Monde tour. They were great both times, but far better at the smaller Cat's Cradle venue, which is likely why they chose to kick off their reunion tour in a tiny club in Minnesota. But they sound just perfect, like no time has passed since they were playing their first shows in dive bars almost twenty years ago.

They don't play much from their last two records——only "U-Mass" makes it from Trompe Le Monde, and "Velouria" from Bossanova——which would be a little bit of a cop out if the stuff from their early career wasn't some of the best music in the history of rock. The big fear that all of us Pixies fans had was that they would come back and sound like the Rolling Stones playing all their old hits——half-assing it because they just don't have the ability to play the songs with all the raw energy that made them great in the first place. But if anything, Black Francis (or Frank Black, or Charles Thompson, or whatever he wants to call himself these days) sounds more vitriolic than ever, and despite the fan sing-alongs on every song, you never get the feeling the band is lapsing into the self-congratulatory remember-the-good-old-days feel that plagued more than a few of the performances on VH-1's brilliant Bands Reunited. In fact, I bet you could take a recording of any live performance they did back in the 80s and play it side by side with this show and no one would be able to tell the difference. The band is as tight and electric as ever, and if they're playing anywhere near you on this tour, you must go. I don't care if you have to sell a kidney, defraud the state, or squander the down payment on your home, you have to find a way to see them. They are legends who fortunately don't sound like legends. They sound like the best band in the world, and right now I don't know who else could lay claim to the title.

5.7.04
I know I've been promising updates on my Year Series mixtapes for a while now, but I swear, I'm getting serious about it again. Posted below is commentary for the first song on the 1987 mixtape, the tracklist for which I posted last month, and I promise the rest of the songs will follow soon.

But not that soon: I'm leaving for a few days for vacation and I won't be posting while I'm gone. As soon as I get back, though, you can expect the remainder of the commentary on the 1987 mixtape, to be followed shortly thereafter by the tracklist and commentary for 1988.

5.7.04

Mixtape: 1987

Track 1
"Tennessee Fire"
Cuba
The Silos

Back in 1987, the Silos seemed destined for mainstream success. They were named Best New Artist in the Rolling Stone critics poll that year after releasing their sophomore disc, Cuba, and were featured in the year-end wrap up along with the BoDeans, who were named Best New Artist in the readers poll after having taken the critics award the year before (in the meantime, the BoDeans had opened for U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, which accounts for their sudden popularity despite the lack of a true hit single). The Silos gutsy country-rock sound was somewhere between the BoDeans, R.E.M., and the Georgia Satellites, but the dueling voices and guitars of Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe made them stand out in a landscape that was becoming rapidly overcrowded with southern rock acts.

"Tennessee Fire" will always be the definitive Silos song for me, the one that I automatically think of when I think of the band. The only time I saw them live, they kicked off the show with this track (even though the tour was in support of the follow-up to this record, the eponymous The Silos), allowing a tape of the rain sounds that open the album track to go on for 10 minutes or more before the band took the stage and tore into the song. So many of their songs seem to take place behind the wheel of a car, moving towards some uncertain goal (a trait they share with Modest Mouse). The first few lines of "Tennessee Fire" might be the most poetic ever written about driving around aimlessly, looking for god knows what:

Driving by the moonlight
I haven't seen a service station
In thirty miles or so
I'm running out of gasoline

All your letters, photographs
So far out of reach

Sometimes rock lyricists get away with stuff in the context of a song that a poet could never get away with on the printed page, but every now and then the minimalist nature of the medium produces some brilliant poetry, and these six lines pack as much imagery, depth, and emotion as the best haiku.

5.17.04
Note to self: never go on a long vacation again without making sure the you can use your iPod in your rental car.

5.18.04
More purchases. I bought three new discs in anticipation of being cut off from new music for a week during my trip to Colorado: Loretta Lynn's collaboration with Jack White, Van Lear Rose (brilliant), Stephen Merritt's latest Magnetic Fields offering, i (pretty good), and the Beta Band's newest, Heroes to Zeroes (haven't heard enough of it to distinguish it from its predecessors).

I though this would be all the music I would buy for a week or two, but when we got to our rental car and I discovered that I couldn't use my iPod car rig with the CD player-only car stereo, I had to scavenge around a local indepedent record store to find a few things to tide me over for the week. I couldn't remember anything really new that I was desperate for, so after searching the racks for a few minutes, I settled on the There There single from Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, (which included two non-album tracks), the recent reissue of Echo and the Bunnymen's debut, Crocodiles (which boasts several early singles, demos, and live tracks as bonuses), David Byrne's Grown Backwards (which is not near as good as his previous disc, Look Into the Eyeball, but which still has a few good moments on it), and Home: Volume IV, the fourth disc in the Post-Parlo Records split CD series, featuring Bright Eyes and Britt Daniel of Spoon (really excellent).

By the time we got back, I was sick of everything except the last disc, and before I even started the car I plugged my iPod back into my tape deck and cranked up Van Lear Rose (which, thanks to Jack White, is probably the only Loretta Lynn record you can actually crank up). I don't ever want to be without my music libary again.

5.19.04
The new Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, isn't nearly as good as their career-defining The Moon and Antarctica, but it's still pretty good (well worth buying, in case you were wondering). And every now and then Isaac Brock can still drop a devastating line, like this one from "Bukowski":

Nine times out of ten
Our hearts just get dissolved

Maybe it's his delivery, but that line evokes the sense of despair and futility that was the hallmark of Antartica as well as anything on that disc.

5.20.04
I don't listen to much hip hop or rap, and the stuff I do listen to tends to be stuff far outside the mainstream of the genre, so I guess it makes sense that I am completely taken with the Streets' (aka Mike Skinner) A Grand Don't Come for Free. It's hard to describe this record, a slang-spewing Brit mumbling spoken-word raps about the minutiae of the everday existence of a jobless twenty-something slacker/hooligan over lo-fi bedroom beats and synths. Listen to a sample of the first song, "It Was Supposed to Be So Easy"; if you're at all intrigued, buy the disc immediately. If nothing catches you, the rest of the record will probably be a wash for you, too. But I love it; it has been dominating my listening since I got it, even though it's competing with a new Good Life release and the latest from the Faint side project Broken Spindles.

5.21.04
More new purchases. This should be it until Wilco comes out in June, because I'm pretty well stocked with good new stuff after the last few weeks.

The main thing I was after was the new EP from the Good Life, Lovers Need Lawyers. I'm a big fan of Tim Kasher's bands (the other one is Cursive), but even though the Good Life is technically his side project and Cursive is his main band, I think the Good Life is actually my favorite of the two. This EP is being released in anticipation of a full length that will come out later this summer, and it signals a new (and not necessarily welcome) direction in their sound. Whereas the previous two Good Life discs have been quieter and built their foundations on synths and subtle electronica, this EP is more guitar-oriented, but honky-tonk rather than the metal-influenced licks that Cursive uses. The lyrics are also wandering into Cursive territory, complaining about the demands of being a performer (The Ugly Organ, Cursive's last disc released more than a year ago, was a concept album built around this theme). It's not that bad, though, and it definitely gets better the more I listen to it, but it's not really what I was hoping for.

I was also intrigued by another Saddle Creek release from Broken Spindles, a side project from the musical mastermind behind the Faint. It's decent, but it feels a little sparse since half the tracks are instrumentals. I'd much prefer a new Faint album, but hopefully this record is the first sign that they are back in the studio and working on their follow-up to 2002's brilliant Danse Macabre.

I was still undecided about Morrissey's new one, You Are the Quarry, despite liking the four tracks on the iTunes EP I downloaded a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't resist the allure of a potentially decent Morrissy album. And it is reasonably good, I guess, but it still pales in comparison with any of his work with Johnny Marr and the Smiths, and honestly I'd have to say that it's not even on the same level as his first solo record, Viva Hate. He's lost a lot of his lyrical subtlety over the years; comparing the title track from The Queen Is Dead, which was a criticism of England, with "America Is Not the World", a criticism of his adopted nation (he has resided in Los Angeles for several years now), you can see how he has lost the ability to mock and parody with wit and now just snipes openly. "Irish Blood, English Heart" covers the same ground, and does a little better job, but it's still got the force of a blunt object hit compared to the delicate rapier incisions of his social critiques with the Smiths. Still, if you're desperate for a Morrissey fix, this will do fine; it's listenable, and almost good, and a couple of the tracks rank among the strongest of his solo career.

The final two discs I grabbed were just whims. I wrote yesterday about the Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free, so there's no need to cover that ground again except to say that so far it's my favorite of these five discs. Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell (which was originally planned as the official follow-up to Gold, then rejected by his label and split into two EPs, and now recombined into their originally planned album form) rounded out my purchases of the day, and the only thing I can say about it after one listen is that it's better than I expected, and it may actually be the best solo disc he's released so far. But final judgment will have to wait until I get off the Streets and have time to examine it more closely.

5.24.04
I didn't buy anything new this weekend, but I finally got around to downloading two more remixes of Jay-Z's The Black Album: The Slack Album, which mixes Jay-Z's vocals with samples from Pavement's indie classic Slanted and Enchanted, and The Double Black Album, which uses samples from Metallica's own Black Album (which, like the Beatles' White Album, was actually self-titled, drawing its street name from the single color of the album cover). I've only listened to the remixes a couple of times each, but I don't think either of them is anywhere near as good as Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which I've been enjoying for several months now. The indie kids on MetaFilter seem to think The Slack Album is pure genius except that it has Jay-Z rapping all over it, which says to me that they just love Slanted and Enchanted so much that all they're really doing is reaffirming their love for the source of the samples and not really listening to the remix as its own thing.

What makes The Grey Album a stronger work is that Danger Mouse actually spends a lot of time mixing his own beats in with Jay-Z's vocals and short but recognizable samples from the Beatles, whereas the remixes I downloaded this weekend seem to just lay Jay-Z's vocals over more extended song snippets from Metallica and Pavement; in other words, Danger Mouse put more of his own original material onto The Grey Album, so he has more ownership of the finished product, and that leads to a better result. Plus, the Beatles' pop classic just seems like a better match musically than the swirling darkness of Metallica's work or the lo-fi, barely-in-tune sloppiness of Pavement.

5.25.04

Mixtape: 1987

Track 2
"Mandinka"
The Lion and the Cobra
Sinead O'Connor

When I went off to NCSSM for my junior year of the two-year, science and math oriented high school, my first roommate was named Alan, and he was a complete tool, especially when it came to music. And at that age, I had opinions about music that bordered on fascist, meaning that I just couldn't tolerate you if you had bad taste. No matter what other redeeming qualities you might have, if you enjoyed listening to Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, New Kids on the Block, Melissa Gibson, or Madonna, I couldn't really forgive you for it and found it hard to be your friend (I'm slightly less radical now, but people still lose points in my book for liking crappy music). The day I knew that the BoDeans were lost to me forever after a brilliant first album was when I was playing their newly-released second album on my stereo and Alan wandered in from class and said, "Hey, I like that. Who is it?"

We had other conflicts besides music, however, and so within a month I found myself a new roommate, a senior whose first roommate (another junior like me) had flamed out and gone back home less than two weeks after classes started. His name was Greg, and he was completely insane (he did his work study in the chem labs, and he was fond of bringing dangerous but entertaining chemicals back to the dorm for everyone to play with, including mercury, liquid nitrogen, and pure sodium, a chunk of which will explode violently if you throw it into a tub of water). But his taste in music was decent, and he was out of the room so often that we only got into screaming matches every other week.

All year long, however, we waged a stereo war between our two favorite CDs: Throwing Muses' eponymous deput (mine) and Sinead O'Connor's The Lion and the Cobra (his). Whoever got back to the room first would put on their favorite of these two CDs and play it endlessly, and even though I still really love the Throwing Muses disc, after a while I was simply playing it out of spite, since I usually managed to make it back to the room before he did (he had more friends). At one point, he got so sick of the Muses that he hid the disc from me and claimed that someone must have stolen it, or that I must have misplaced it, and so he was able to play Sinead without competition for a solid month before I discovered where he had stashed my missing CD.

So you might think that, because of those circumstances, I would have to hate The Lion and the Cobra, but I don't really. I don't love it as much as Greg did, but I think it's far and away Sinead's strongest release, before she had her first big hit with the Prince cover and she started thinking it was her job to become the female Bono. There are several gems on here, the best of which is, of course, "Mandinka", with its strong, muscular guitar line and club-worthy beat. It's a no-brainer for this mix, and if the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" hadn't been released the same year, it probably would have been a contender for song of the year.

5.26.04
I don't want to get my hopes too high, but the new preview singles from the Cure ("The End of the World") and P J Harvey ("The Letter") certainly give me reason to be optimistic about their upcoming new albums. Both artists have been on extended hiatuses after delivering fairly weak albums in 2000 (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea from P J, Bloodflowers from the Cure), but both have come back into fashion during their absences thanks to revivalists who echoed their styles. Bands like the Gossip, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Raveonettes have female singers with strong personalities and voices and play raw, smart punk, while the Rapture, Hot Hot Heat, Interpol, and the Faint (and even Bright Eyes and the Good Life) have borrowed elements from Robert Smith's early songbook. As much as I like some of those bands, I would like nothing better than to see the artists who inspired come back and show them up with strong releases of their own.

5.27.04
Also posted on iTunes recently is a three-song EP from a newly reunited Camper Van Beethoven. They were one of my favorite bands in the late 80s, but I never liked Cracker, David Lowery's next band after Camper Van, and it sounds like this EP is more in that vein than classic Camper Van (except that it's not even as good as Cracker). I don't know if there's a new full-length on the way, but if there is, I have to hope that touring together for several months and playing all of their old songs will remind the band members what it was that made their music so special in the first place and they'll be able to recapture that magic before they settle into the studio.

5.28.04
Freaky. After seven weeks, Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News is currently sitting at 25 on Billboard's album chart, having peaked at 19. And Morrissey's You Are the Quarry debuted at 11, which has got to be the highest American chart position in his entire career, solo or with the Smiths. And holy crap, even Franz Ferdinand is sitting pretty at 50.

That's a good start, people, but now you need to forget about the soon-to-be-manufactured album from the latest American Idol winner and start thinking about the upcoming discs from P J Harvey (who sounds like she's roaring back to her original sound) and Wilco. And don't you even think about touching Avril Lavigne's new product. You should know better than that by now.

5.28.04
Have I told you how much I like the Beach Boys' "Vega-Tables" demo from the lost Smile sessions? Well, I like it a lot. I hope the newly recorded version that Brian Wilson will release this fall doesn't change a thing.

5.31.04
I had never heard Rufus Wainwright before hearing what I thought was him sing "Hallelujah" in Shrek, but since first viewing that movie, I've become a fan of his, especially Poses, which is his best work so far. But I recently watched Shrek again in preparation to go see Shrek 2, and the singer didn't sound at all like the Rufus that I know and love. I was so doubtful that it was him that I actually looked up the soundtrack on Amazon and All Music Guide just to make sure that there wasn't some sort of mixup in the credits on one of the sites. But there it was, "Hallelujah" by Rufus Wainwright (well, really by Leonard Cohen, but you know what I mean). But to me, it still sounded more like Jeff Buckley than Rufus Wainwright (I don't know Buckley that well, but his voice is so distinctive that you only have to hear it a couple of times before you can start to recognize it).

So I did some further digging around, and found to my surprise that Jeff Buckley had actually recorded a version of this song for his 1994 album Grace. Hmmmm. That was certainly odd. Maybe, I thought, Rufus had simply recorded new backing music for Buckley's vocal track. That would be weird, but it was the only thing that could reconcile the voice I was hearing in the movie with the piano-centric version of the song that played behind it. I nosed around Google for a while longer and actually found a sample of the song from the Shrek soundtrack, and it was definitely Rufus...but it was definitely not the version I heard in the movie.

Now things were getting interesting. After some more research, this is the explanation I finally came up with: the version that is used in the movie itself is a 1991 version of the song by John Cale (formerly of the Velvet Underground) who recorded it for the Leonard Cohen tribute album I'm Your Fan. The version that shows up on the soundtrack, however, is the one by Rufus Wainwright, who apparently recorded his version specifically for the soundtrack, since it doesn't seem to be available anywhere else. What's really strange is that, although Cale's is the earliest of these three versions, it seems to prefigure the best things about the Buckley and Wainwright covers, with Cale's voice echoing the wobbly, emotional tone of Buckley's singing while using nothing but a piano as accompaniment a la Rufus. I like all three versions of the song (it's just a great song), but I must say that Cale's is the best, and it's hard to understand why they would have substituted Wainwright's version for Cale's.

Actually, now that I look at it closer, it's not hard to understand at all: Shrek was produced by Dreamworks, and they also released the soundtrack. And I'll give you one guess as to which label Mr. Wainwright is signed.