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february 2004
2.2.04
Mixtape: 1986
Track 19
"Fall On Me"
Lifes Rich Pageant
R.E.M.
Most people have a story about the first single they ever bought or the first concert they ever saw, and more than a few of us also doctor that story so that we look as cool as possible given our current tastes. I honestly don't remember the first single or album I ever bought, and I would love to tell you that my first concert was R.E.M.'s show at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium in support of Lifes Rich Pageant with Let's Active opening. But it's not technically true. I did attend that concert fairly early on in my show-going history, but it wasn't really my first, because I had seen INXS and the Del Fuegos on INXS's Listen Like Thieves tour at the Cumberland County Civic Center a mere six months earlier (actually, I also saw Alabama there when I was younger, but I was dragged along by my mom; I never owned an Alabama record and all I remember about the concert were the gigantic cigarette advertising banners on the stage behind the band). INXS isn't such a bad first concert (I still think their work on the Swing, Listen Like Thieves, and Kick is really solid), but for someone like me, an R.E.M./Let's Active first show combo is pretty hard to beat.
It was the first concert I went to unescorted, so I think I get some partial credit. For INXS, my mother had insisted on coming, and even though she maintained an appropriate distance, there was never a real chance of getting into any trouble. At the R.E.M. show, I was dropped off and picked up, which didn't really give me much opportunity to do anything stupid, but still, I was in there by myself, free to be who I wanted even if only for a couple of hours.
"Fall On Me" was R.E.M.'s first near-hit, the song that could have been what "The One I Love" from 1987's Document became to their career. It is not coincidentally the most commercial-sounding track that the band had yet made on an album that was self-consciously constructed to be a more accessible effort after the slow southern swamp of Fables of the Reconstruction (they even hired John Mellencamp's producer). This was an ominous sign of the awful things to come on the overly commercial Green and Out of Time, but on Lifes Rich Pageant, the loud guitars and 4/4 beats were a welcome blast of rock from a band that was in danger of meandering too far afield from their bar band roots (I'm not knocking Fables——it's one of my favorite albums——but it was nice to see them return to earth after the more ethereal works on Fable). Michael Stipe's voice is still a ghostly echo, buried under Peter Buck's Byrds-like guitar work, but for the first time in R.E.M.'s career, Stipe's voice on Pageant has a clarity that was missing from the opaque murmurs that had characterized his style on previous efforts.
The subject matter of the lyrics is also much clearer. Whereas Stipe's politicaly leanings were veiled and enigmatic on earlier records, Stipe for the first time delivers an unmistakably activist message, referencing pollution, the plight of the native americans, political prisoners in totalitarian regimes, and our nation's own corrupt political system. "Fall On Me" is a prime example of this, tackling acid rain and the industrial interests that dirty our skies. It might sound a little more heavy-handed today that it did when it was originally relased because most of us have grown weary of Stipe's holier-than-thou preachiness (which has worn especially thin given the diminishing quality of the band's output in recent years), but back in 1986, when U2's overtly political arena rock set the tone for college radio acts, the lyrics were relatively subtle.
It would have been fun to include the rollicking "I Believe" with its non-sequitor lyrics ("I believe in coyotes/And time as an abstract") or the understated beauty of "The Flowers of Guatemala", but "Fall On Me" was the first R.E.M. single to get real attention from commercial radio and MTV, and as such it deserves a place here for its historical importance. It doesn't hurt that it's a pretty good song, too, a fine representative from the band's early period. |
2.3.04
Mixtape: 1986
Track 20
"Beatle Boots"
This Ain't No Outerspace Ship
Love Tractor
Love Tractor was another Athens, GA, band who unfortunately disappeared from the stage just as R.E.M.'s success was shining the spotlight of the music industry on the small southern college town. I'm not sure if they ever would have achieved the crossover success of the B-52s or R.E.M., but it would have nice to see them get a shot. Their vanishing act (a temporary but lengthy one, as it turns out——the band returned with a new record in 2001 after a thirteen year absence) was still three years away, and seemed almost inconceivable given the frequency of their tours; it seemed like they were playing the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill or one of the other clubs in Durham, Raleigh, or Charlotte every other week. However, unlike R.E.M., who I have seen three times live, the stars never aligned to let me see Love Tractor, despite several failed attempts. The closest I ever came was while I was still at Davidson and I was going to go see them at a Charlotte club with my friend Pete. I was actually at his house and we were getting ready to go to the club when we got a call from one of Pete's friends: the guitarist had broken his hand and the show was canceled. Soon after, the band members went on their extended hiatus from the music industry.
This Ain't No Outerspace Ship was Love Tractor's first full album with vocals, and it's also their best. Legend has it that when the band started out, they were too poor to afford the gear they needed for a vocalist, so their first three albums were mostly instrumentals, with the occasional wisp of a vocal floating through a track here and there. Who knows if it's true, but given the strength of this album, you wish they had given singing a shot a little earlier, because while their previous efforts are certainly good, they aren't compelling in the same way that this record is. I always think back to David Byrne's quote in the liner notes for Stop Making Sense: "Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily." (Another favorite line of mine from those notes: "People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.") I think Byrne meant it as an insult, implying that we're too much of an ADHD culture to concentrate on something as abstract as music for longer than 15 seconds without the anchor of language to keep us from drifting off to some other activity, but no matter what he meant by it, it's true, and the comparision between Love Tractor's wordless albums and their later lyric-filled efforts are proof of this (although the band never forgot its instrumental roots, always including at least two or three tracks sans vocals on every release).
Anyway. Enough about David Byrne. This is supposed to be about Love Tractor. "Beatle Boots" is a great song, but I could have chosen almost anything from this record. "Small Town" and "Outside With Ma" are odes to rural life that are on par with John Mellencamp's "Small Town" or Whiskeytown's "Jacksonville Skyline", while "Cartoon Kiddies" and "Amusement Park" are just plain fun. "Rudolf Nureyev" and "We All Loved Each Other So Much" are the two instrumental offerings, and they are probably the most beautiful songs on the record (hell, they're probably the most beautiful songs Love Tractor ever wrote). The songs all slide into that perfect guitar-driven pop groove that chugs irresistably along, but they also have that touch of melancholy that turns these tracks from merely excellent to brilliant (the opening lines from "Beatle Boots", sung over a thoroughly danceable beat, are great examples of this: "Well I heard you singing out of key on your way home last night/Does this mean that you're hurting down inside?"). Love Tractor would never again put as many perfect songs on a single record again, although that's likely due to the fact that their output over the past 15 years has been limited to only two successors to This Ain't No Outerspace Ship's legacy, Themes from Venus and The Sky at Night. Any of these three discs is well worth picking up, but This Ain't No Outerspace Ship will always remain the band's pinnacle. |
2.5.04
I have no idea about what to do with the rotation section of this site. Ever since the arrival of the iPod, I'm increasingly likely to be listening to some playlist or other (sometimes 20 songs, sometimes 3000, sometimes in order, sometimes randomized) rather than listening to a whole album of songs straight through in the order set by the artist. Or if I am listening to albums, they could be albums from anywhere in 1000+ strong collection because I'm not artificially constrained to just 24 at a time the way I was when I had to carry around my CDs in a bulky case with me.
But this is a good problem to have, frankly——I'm falling in love with listening all over again, and I was never really out of love with it. I'm going to have to revamp the rotation somehow or another to deal with the new reality of the iPod, but I don't want it to go away entirely. I just need to figure out how to make it relevant to my current listening habits. Any suggestions? |
2.6.04
I am no longer an iTunes virgin, having purchased and downloaded my first two tracks today. My selections: Berlin's "Metro" and Romeo Void's "Never Say Never", neither of which I had heard before three weeks ago when I exposed to them on VH-1's new series Bands Reunited. These were the showcase tunes for each group on their episode of the show, and I just haven't been able to get them out of my head. I briefly considered trying to find the CDs or even purchasing the whole album on iTunes, but I listened to clips of the other songs and none of them grabbed me the way these two did.
The immediate gratification factor of buying from iTunes is outrageously high, and I can see how people can get sucked into spending hundreds of dollars at a time cherry-picking their favorite songs from a library of half a million songs. You see something you like, you press a button, and twenty seconds later it's yours forever. I am a little worried that the iTunes/iPod combo is going to corrupt my ability to listen to albums and turn me into a singles buyer, but since there isn't much indie music on iTunes, I probably won't have to worry about that for a while. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy my new acquisitions and wait for you guys to start sending me those winning codes from your Pepsi caps. |
2.9.04
The Grammys sure do suck. Thank god that, in this digital age, we can get instant updates from the web whenever we want so we don't actually have to watch the damn show. Not that too much of what I listen to is nominated for anything anyway, but it's fun to see just how ridiculous proud the industry is of its star manufacturing machine. I mean, five Grammys for Beyonce, who had one hit record this year that was written for her by her boyfriend Jay-Z? Please.
It's sad that, given how much good music is out there now thanks to a thriving indie scene bolstered by the cheap marketing and sales engine of the internet, obsessive music fans are forced to learn about new music mostly from corporate fashion magazines like Rolling Stone, who will occasionally deign to mention a group that isn't signed to one of the mega-labels, or the obscurer-than-thou pedantics of zines like Pitchfork (whose tone irks me to no end, despite the fact that it has turned me on to some really good stuff). |
2.10.04
Mmmm...Cure b-sides. I finally got Join the Dots last week, the Cure's b-sides and rarities collection, and it's amazing. The stuff from the b-side of the Standing on a Beach cassette is just as good as I remember it (this disc alone is worth the price of admission as far as I'm concerned), and there's plenty of other good stuff on the last three discs as well. The lengthy and detailed text on all the tracks just makes it all the more valuable (although I've noticed that Robert Smith likes to use a lot of exclamation points! In almost any context! Sometimes it's about a trumpet solo! Sometimes it's about wanting to kill himself! But he just can't resist this dynamic punctuation!). I was fully prepared to pay the $55 list price for this box set, but luckily my local record shop had it for $45, and with my $1 off everything membership card, I ended up paying exactly the same price that Amazon had listed. And I didn't have to pay for shipping or wait a week for it to get here. Life is good. |
2.16.04
Three more purchases from the iTunes music store. First up, of course, was the new single from Modest Mouse from their forthcoming LP Good News for People Who Love Bad News, which was ready last September but which was delayed by their record company a la Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The single is called "Float On", and aside from a precious few vinyl 7" copies in independent record stores, iTunes is the only place you can get this song (I was hoping they would make the b-side available for download, too, but no such luck so far). It's not too bad——a little poppy, but there are always a few relatively upbeat, catchy tunes on Modest Mouse records, so I'm not too concerned about it setting the tone for the direction they're going to take on the new disc. I was worried that they might really miss Jeremiah Green, the longtime drummer who quit the band during the making of this record, but the new guy fills in for him nicely on this track.
While I was poking around other exclusives, I also got two tracks from the Strokes. The first is a live version of "New York City Cops", a song that was scheduled for inclusion on the American version of their debut, Is This It (the track made it onto the European version that was released a few months earlier), but which was nixed at the last minute after the 9.11 attacks. The second is a new single called "Modern Girls and Old Fashioned Men" that looks like it is actually the b-side to the single release of "Reptilia", a track from last year's Room On Fire.
This is how iTunes is going to get me: offering downloads I can't get anywhere else, or selling me singles from groups that I don't like enough to purchase the whole album. So far I've only given in to five impulses, but there are already dozens more that I would purchase if I suddenly had unlimited purchasing power. And I haven't even looked around that much——those dozens could easily turn into hundreds. It's just best not too spend too much time in the iTunes music store for now, saving it for special occasions like the Modest Mouse release. Otherwise, this could turn into a dangerously addictive pasttime for me. |
2.17.04
So there's this guy who bought an iPod and loved it. He loved it so much that when the battery failed 18 months later, he cheerily went to his local Apple Store to have it replaced so he could get on with listening to his music on his favorite new toy. But his friendly Apple representatives informed him that the battery couldn't be replaced, and encouraged him to buy a new iPod since the old one was out of warranty and couldn't be replaced for free. Instead he and his brother embarked on a guerilla ad campaign to tell the public about their negative experience with the iPod's battery and documented their activities for a video that they posted to the web.
A few weeks after their film started to get serious attention from the blogging community and even the mainstream press, Apple announced a program to replace the batteries in out of warranty iPods for $100 (pretty steep, if you ask me), and claimed that the brothers' work had nothing to do with their decision. Rather than taking Apple up on this offer, the iPod-owning brother tried to replace the battery himself using a $60 DIY kit, but ended up comletely killing the hard drive in the process.
You might be surprised to learn that this guy then went and did exactly what Apple had suggested he do in the first place and bought a brand new iPod for $400. But as an iPod owner, I can tell you that I totally get it. The iPod is like a broadband connection or a TiVo: you probably viewed it as a luxury before you had it, but once you've integrated it into your life, there's no going back. So here's hoping that my battery lasts a bit longer than a year and a half, because one way or the other, I'm going to have a functioning iPod by my side from here on out. |
2.18.04
I don't understand why the Gossip aren't freaking huge. They're what the White Stripes would be if Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker had joined the band, insisted on doing the vocals, and beat the crap out of Jack White until he played faster. They're really, really good. |
2.19.04
My first free iTunes song from a Pepsi bottlecap came courtesy of my officemate Mark, who doesn't use iTunes and was about to throw away a winning cap from his morning diet Pepsi before I claimed it for myself. I spent a little while poking around the iTunes store before deciding what to buy: should it be another early 80s song inspired by VH-1's Bands Reunited, like my first purchases, Berlin's "Metro" and Romeo Void's "Never Say Never"? An exclusive track from an EP that I couldn't download anywhere else, like R.E.M.'s Vancouver Rehearsal Tapes, the Cure's Trilogy EP (which has one song each from Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers, performed live), or Sigur Ros' Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do EP? Or should I buy a track that I'd likely never own otherwise because I don't want to buy the whole album?
In the end, the latter option won out, and I chose Outkast's "Hey Ya!", which has been buzzing in my brain for months (as it likely has in yours——if you don't like this song, there's just something wrong with you). I've listened to the song samples from the rest of the record, and there really wasn't much else that appealed to me, but I sure do love "Hey Ya!". And now, thanks to the combined efforts of Apple, Pepsi, and Mark, it's mine. |
2.20.04
I'm not a big fan of Sinead O'Connor's music, but "Mandinka" is a great song (yes, the 1987 mixtape is coming soon). |
2.23.04
No more delays. Here is my personal top 10 for 2003:
- Her Majesty the Decemberists——Decemberists
- Give Up——Postal Service
- The Ugly Organ——Cursive
- Think Tank——Blur
- Hearts of Oak——Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
- Hail to the Thief——Radiohead
- Send——Wire
- Elephant——White Stripes
- Mary Star of the Sea——Zwan
- Movement——Gossip
I had a hard time narrowing down the larger list this year because of the abundance of quality releases, so I included a few records that didn't show up as much on other best-of lists, most notably the releases from Cursive, Wire, Zwan, and the Gossip. These are all really great albums that were virtually ignored on most end-of-year lists, maybe because they were released early in 2003 and had time to drop off the radar after all the other great records that followed them. Whatever. I would heartily recommend every disc on this list, especially the top 5——at some point during the year, each of these dominated my listening for at least two weeks.
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2.24.04
Time to get you caught up on some recent music purchases. In an outing a couple of weeks ago whose primary purpose was to get the new Cure b-sides and rarities box set Join the Dots, I also picked up the Walkmen's new disc Bows and Arrows and stumbled on Duran Duran's eponymous debut used for $6, which was just too cheap to pass up, especially given my rekindled interest in the early 80s. The Cure set is amazing——there's tons of good material spread across four discs, the best of which covers the period from 1978 to 1987 and includes personal favorites like like "I'm Cold", "Happy the Man", and "A Man Inside My Mouth" (which is not about what your filthy mind thinks it is about, by the way). I've been so obsessed with that disc that I've hardly listened to the other three yet, but I can tell from the brief exposure I've had to them that there are good number of undiscovered gems buried in their tracklists as well, songs like "Harold and Joe", which is a b-side from the single to their remix album, and "Halo", another b-side from the Wish era.
I haven't heard the Walkmen before, but I saw them perform on Conan and the record was getting favorable reviews, and I was in an adventurous mood, so it ended up in the pile along with the Cure box set and the used Duran Duran. I like it pretty well——they have elements of the Strokes, U2, the Beach Boys, and Spoon without being derivative. Given how difficult it has become for me to concentrate on any single album given the ready availability of over 4000 songs on my iPod, it says something about this record that I've probably listened to Bows and Arrows 20 times straight through over the last couple of weeks.
I wasn't really planning to buy anything else until the slew of new releases arriving in March, but while waiting to meet Julie for lunch, I ducked into a record store to check out the used bin and came out with Stereolab's latest, Margarine Eclipse (don't ask me what this was doing in the used bin——probably a discarded promo copy from one of the local crap rock stations), Rufus Wainwright's self-titled first disc, and U2's War, which I owned once upon a time but which I haven't heard in years. I haven't really listened to any of these much yet, having gotten distracted by my other recent purchases and a downloaded copy of an underground remix record (Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, about which I'll write more soon).
My final purchase was from the iTunes music store, a three song EP from Sigur Ros called Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do. The three songs? "Ba Ba", "Ti Ki", and "Di Do". It's different from their other work——it reminds me a lot of Godspeed You Black Emeperor!, but softer and not quite as dense. It won't be out in traditional formats until later this year, so I'm going to burn it to a CD for Tom so he can get a preview without having to sign up for an iTunes acccount (I know he'll buy the real thing when it's released, so I don't feel like I'm violating the spirit of any copyright rules). I think he'll like it——it's going to take a few more listens for me to really digest it, but I think it will be right up his alley. |
2.25.04
Gotta love that internet. For years I have contemplated buying a CD-R copy of the Beach Boys' (really Brian Wilson's) lost masterpiece Smile from eBay, but I could never bring myself pull the trigger. But my interest in the record has been newly rekindled by Brian Wilson's current european dates, where he plays the whole album straight through, and by rumors that he will finish the record and release it by the end of this year, and I was happy to see that there are still plenty of copies up for auction.
But before joining the bidding wars on eBay, I decided to give Google a shot, and lo and behold, within three pages I found a site that had 30+ tracks from the Smile sessions. Not every song is included, and many of the tracks are in pretty raw form and are more like demos or experimental snippets rather than fully realized songs, but even still, you can hear the brilliance of this record shining through. It's quite possible that the best new album released this year will be based on foundations that were laid down almost 40 years ago. |
2.26.04
According to the liner notes, there are only three songs on Stereolab's latest, Margarine Eclipse, that are sung in french. But I've listened to it three times through now, and I swear I have yet to hear a word of english. |
2.27.04
Man, I'd forgotten how good U2's War is. But as good as it is, it's nothing compared to the follow-up, the career defining The Unforgettable Fire. It's amazing to see how far they progressed between War, which is probably the first truly mature record of their career, and Fire, the first truly coherent artistic statement of their career. War is the pinnacle of U2's early years, their third record with producer Steve Lillywhite, and you wonder how much further they would have gotten if not for the influence of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who helmed the boards for Fire. The ethereal atmospherics that this production tandem added to the band's sound on Fire created a more opaque, concept-driven work than most fans and critics expected after the college-radio-friendly anthems on War like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day". Nonetheless, Fire spawned their first real hit, "Pride (In the Name of Love)", a memorial to Martin Luther King (who is also name-checked in the album's closer, "MLK") and set the stage for the mainstream success that came with Fire's follow up, The Joshua Tree (also produced by Eno and Lanois, along with last year's comeback record, All That You Can't Leave Behind). U2 had a lot of musical ups and downs in the 90s, but the sequence of War, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree in the 80s was as good a trio of albums as the Cure's Head on the Door, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, and Disintegration, or the Smiths' The Smiths, Meat is Murder, and The Queen Is Dead. |
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