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Tuesday, May 17, 2016

A Downloader’s Diary (46)

by Michael Tatum

I wasted much of my April on O.P.M.’s (you know, Other People’s Masterpieces), putting way too much time into records that didn’t give too much back. This resulted in lots of also rans until the last few weeks, when I was hit by the deluge. More to come soon, but already 2016 is looking pretty damn good.

Beyonce: Lemonade (Parkwood/Columbia) My favorite conspiracy theory regarding this hotly discussed item accuses Queen Bey of being cahoots with hubby to put their dirty laundry out on display – or fictionalizing non-existent marital travails outright – in order to push a few more units. That’s patently ridiculous, but no more so than my own crackpot speculation: that the dreaded “Becky with the good hair” refers not to actress Rita Ora, but Beck Hansen – you know, that has-been whose Boring Place (or whatever it was called) beat Knowles 2013 self-titled release for Album of the Year at the 2014 Grammys. “Oh, so I’m not an ‘auteur’ enough for the blogosphere?” she muttered through gritted teeth. “I’ll sample or hook up with every white male musician in the indie rock universe and then we’ll see who’s the goddamn auteur.” So two years later we now have a Pitchfork-approved gallery of heroes (Jack White, Ezra Koenig) and villains (James Blake!) joining wheelhouse buddies like the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, and to a man, Knowles plays every single one like he was a trumpet or violin. Strong from start to finish, spitting out more crotch-grabbing, shit-talking vulgarities than Jay-Z has over an entire career, I can’t testify as to whether this toes the line in regards to proper and/or current race and feminist philosophy – I’ll leave that to bell hooks. But since I probably know pop music better than ms. hooks, I’ll point out that doesn’t matter – ultimately, Knowles’ true political message is stated outright on the last line of the record: “You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation/Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.” So if you’re still scratching your head as to how Knowles can link the personal to the political, in song or in her must-see longform video, consider what she’s really doing is linking sexual power to artistic power to any other power you can think of – not once does she ever let the boys lose sight of whose in charge: “I break chains all by myself/Won’t let my freedom rot in hell/I’m-a keep running/Cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” And though I wished she had said “herself,” I’m moved to quote the old adage. You know the one: “If life gives you lemons, squeeze those lemons ‘til the juice runs down that cheating motherfucker’s leg.“ A PLUS

Bombino: Azel (Nonesuch) This excellent offering is so unsurprising I was considering re-running my review of 2013’s Nomad, altering nothing but the title, to see if anyone would notice. If he didn’t take any chances, why should I? Perhaps I’m being overly cynical – five years ago I couldn’t get enough of the so-called “desert blues” coming from Mali and the nations surrounding it, now I’m a little bored with re-explaining, for example, that the phrase “desert blues” is a lazy Anglo catch-all for several different wings of similar-sounding West African music. Unfortunately, I noticed that Omara Moctar had traded one indie rock producer for another, and since the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach was my main reservation last time, it nudged me into the marginal differentiation zone, and even if though it sometimes felt like I was comparing two swatches of off white wallpaper, eventually the contrast registered. Where Auerbach makes every artist he works with, from Dr. John to Lana del Rey, sound more “mechanical” than they actually are, the more laissez faire David Longstreth beefs up Moctar’s sound without re-wiring the band into cyborgs to do it. There are even some acoustic numbers, so the flavor here is rounder and fuller than what Moctar served up previously. If I were to recommend one album to a stranger, this would be it. But Moctar doesn’t need a silent partner any more than he needs an autocrat – like most worldbeat artists looking to cross over, an optimal pairing would be someone who brings his or her own ideas to the table without obscuring, in this case, the coruscating guitar and compelling rhythms that made Moctar a vital force. When your third record could almost be a combination of your first and second, you need something to break out of your rut. Hell, why not give his hero Mark Knopfler a call? This guy needs to sell out – quick. A MINUS

Robbie Fulks: Upland Songs (Bloodshot) The strange odyssey of Chicago’s Robbie Fulks is dotted with so much weirdness it would take several reviews to document it all. He inadvertently invented bro country in his brief late ‘90s stint on Geffen with the I-thought-it-was-a-parody “Let’s Kill Saturday Night,” made a shameless bid for rock critics by advertising the “Fountains of Wayne Hotline” for struggling songwriters, and dumped a bunch of outtakes into a CD he christened The Very Best of Robbie Fulks. More recently, he’s evolved into his true calling as a folkie, first because he’s better at quiet empathy than raunchiness or sarcasm, second because he’s the rare man who’s better at wise than wiseass. Although this is the kind of folk record where the love objects are named "Katy Kay” and “Sarah Jane” and Jenny Scheinman is credited on “fiddle” rather than the usual “violin,” Fulks doesn’t waste time romanticizing downhome living or Grandma’s feather bed – one of his protagonists says fare-thee-well to Carolina gals, while another returns from the North to the resentment of his family and neighbors. Nor for that matter is he especially interested in the usual singer-songwriter confessionals. Instead, he fashions perfect miniatures that you might mistake for a public domain classic until you read the credits, deepened by harmonic chord shadings much more sophisticated than this record’s more straightforward predecessor, 2013’s Gone Away Backward. In almost every song, from James Agee photographing “Alabama at Night” but unable to talk a single soul, to the rest home resident who loans his memories of the family who doesn’t visit him to a neighbor who has no family at all, the common theme is alienation and loneliness, occasionally lifted when one of his characters tries to understand those around him. This peaks with the stunning “Needed,” one of those songs that comes to a songwriter once in a lifetime. It’s about telling the grown daughter you almost abandoned before she was born that sometimes taking the road more traveled makes all the difference. A

Anderson .Paak: Malibu (Steel Wool) I once saw an absolutely indelible D.L. Hughley comedy routine in which he riffed through a hilarious laundry list of his impoverished childhood. A few years later however, one of his jokes hit home in an unexpected way, when my mother told me that she watered down orange juice because she knew that if she didn’t, her eldest son would polish off a carton before she would have money to replace it. That revelation is the key to unlocking this wondrous record, in which painful memories from one’s past don’t function as manipulative tropes or stock genre exercises to satisfy an audience’s expectations – as they do, say, on Margo Price’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter – but as a way to connect with fellow travelers who are “products of the tube and the free lunch” (and thank you to guest Talib Kweli for reminding us that in Oakland, the Black Panthers initiated those free lunch programs). Brandon Paak Anderson has been through some shit – both of his parents were incarcerated for non-violent crimes at different points in his life, while as an adult he was dismissed without warning from his job at a marijuana farm, rendering him, his wife, and his newborn son temporarily homeless. In response, he networked like a motherfucker, providing the few bright spots on Dr. Dre’s otherwise unattractively cynical Compton, paving the way for this, his breakthrough second solo album, which follows Venice, like Malibu a California paradise which must seem like a dreamworld to a poor kid from Oxnard whose saving grace from a dad in jail and a mom funneling her money to Chumash Indian casinos was old reruns on cable TV. Although the music is so dense it takes more than the usual three-four listen to realize it, evoking dreamworlds through color and sound is definitely his métier, as well as cajoling command performances from second-tier rappers and coaxing deep, hypnotic bass lines out of a string of session players. The result: the most visionary R&B record since D’Angelo’s Voodoo. A

Parquet Courts: Human Performance (Rough Trade) Much like rappers, indie rock wiseacres have their patented schtick: alienation, anomie, the never-gets-old inability to love. Sure, there have been very few aesthetic breakthroughs on their turf for two decades – this could have been recorded in 1994 – but because they’ve learn to fend off those subjects off with irony and sarcasm, they’re always good for a laugh, and if you have a way with a tune, all the better. But what happens after you sweep up the dust coming through the doors and windows rather than watching it collect on sills and awnings? With Rene Descartes providing their Latinate motto, you get Parquet Courts’ most human performance, in which they turn their problem into their theme: displacement defined by a barrage of street sounds keeping you indoors, your favorite Chinese restaurant closing even though you still have the leftover fried rice in the fridge, inexpensive cell phone service that takes way too much commitment to sign up for. Even the harrowing vignette recalling the 2014 murder of two on-duty police officers – ostensibly as a payback for brutality toward African-Americans, yet shooter Ismaaiyl Brinkley’s victims were not only innocent but minorities themselves – is recalled not through rhetoric or strongly defined images, but by confusion and barely registered details. And though I’m not sure whether “an extinguished crutch of a rollie inside yellow fingers” refers to the crutch of a Rollie chair (actually “Rolly”) or, more likely, a joint burned to the nub, they’re right to realize that nothing lasts, even if their idea of a metaphor is briefly rueing a wrapper that once enveloped a dӧner kebab. The shameless musical touches – from vibes to keybs to synth squibbles to good old six-string rave-ups – function as correctives to their self-imposed insularity. As does “Steady on my Mind,” a love song that is one no matter how much they might deny it. A

Pet Shop Boys: Super (x2) The year is 1990, and Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have just played a show in Los Angeles. They’re attending their own after party, when they hear a dynamite house remix from DJ Frankie Knuckles blaring from the speakers. Neil yells over the din: “Why don’t we make records like this?” Chris looks at him incredulously: “Neil, it is us!” So began the Pet Shop Boys’ superb second decade, in which the American club music they loved gave rise to a trio of excellent records: Very, one of the greatest records of the ‘90s, and two worthy sequels, Bilingual and Nightlife. Then, disappointed after their 2001 musical received mixed reviews, they mellowed out a little, churning out decent enough pop records that never relinquished their trademark cleverness, irony, or sophistication, but stinted a bit on the element that made them icons. I’m referring of course to cheese – by which I don’t mean just Brie or Camembert, but spreadable port wine and Cheddar Whiz straight out of the aerosol can (you didn’t think those horns on “Domino Dancing” were “authentic” did you?). They attempted to rectify this on 2013’s Electric by pretending to be one more hi-NRG revival act, but taking the lyrics out of the equation reduced them to “songs” that sounded more like demos. This tips the balance slightly, and though I wish they had fleshed a few of these tracks out a little, the first half in particular recalls the good old days: chiding a twenty-something who can’t find his way back to his flat without a smartphone, mocking Kim Jong-un (“The joke is I’m not even a demagogue/Have you ever heard me giving a speech?”), and recalling a biology student Neil had a crush on back in the ‘80s when he was a “pop kid.” I especially like the one line running through their opening quickie: “It’s a long way to happiness, a long way to go/But I’m gonna get there, boy the only way I know.” Note that use of the word “boy” – from a Pet Shop Man who will turn 62 this July. And you thought electric guitars were the only way to stay young. B PLUS

Gwen Stefani: This is What the Truth Feels Like (Interscope) Back when No Doubt were breaking, Entertainment Weekly ran a piece in which they asked various musicians what they saw in a set of Rorschach blots, after which their responses were analyzed by a psychologist. Stefani’s banal, monosyllabic responses were labelled by the "expert” as “childlike,” which was certainly unfair (if Stephen Malkmus had given the same answers everyone would be smirking about how “ironic” he was) and incredibly presumptive on a lot of levels (who knows how seriously stars take those quickie tests?). Yet for me, the damage was done – mentally, I dismissed Stefani as a blondie simpleton for years, chortling in sympathy when she was derided as a “cheerleader” by none other than Courtney Love, the subject of Stefani’s future classic “Hollaback Girl.” We can discuss how shallow, sexist, etc. that was on my part in the future, but in my defense until this record Stefani has never dug so deeply into what really makes herself tick, or reflected so much on the psychology underlining the two superstar relationships that have made her a gossip monger’s wet dream. With teen pop savant Greg Kurstin and the team of Mattman and Robin taking care of the perky hooks, Stefani does several things that would be extraordinary for any artist, beginning with writing credible songs about happy love. Look no further than the euphoric “Make Me Like You” – when she hits that octave jump or squeals “Oh God, I’m glad I found you,” you’ll feel the sexual charge between your legs even if you have the anatomy of a eunuch or Barbie doll. And though the second half overdoes the lust letters and revenge fantasies – or maybe I’m just sick of trap production – she also observes in her other peak performance one of the great paradoxes of romance: you never realize how much you once loved someone until resentment extinguishes that love to nothing. Both of these achievements take – sorry, kids – brains. And speaking of brains, does she call Miranda Lambert “stupid” in that terrific song that closes the regular release edition? Someone call the Enquirer! A MINUS

Wussy: Forever Sounds (Damnably) They think with the meatier sound of recent drumming/producing recruit Joe Klug they can inch a little closer to the big time, and why not? So turning up their amps, they fashion the noisiest guitar album of their not exactly bucolic career, inspiring Jason Gubbels of Spin to trot out comparisons to Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Although I’m sure Chuck and/or Lisa have a copy of Loveless on their respective shelves, the analogy doesn’t quite wash, because without exception British bands employ chaos and clamor purely as an art move, utilizing that aesthetic as a method not as personal expression but as a way to connect to the divine. As proud Midwesterners, Wussy are more akin to the Afghan Whigs on Gentlemen, in which dissonance is an aural metaphor for doubt, tumult, and anguish. With both principals happily married if no less settled in their spirituality, they turn to myth and narrative, somewhat in the vein of R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, albeit at a far higher pitch of poetry and musicality. Except where R.E.M. never shied from stooping to corn – I have no idea what “Driver 8” means other than it maybe being about a train, but that melody has encouraged me to lie to myself about its “profundity” for thirty years – the music doesn’t quite connect with the words as they have on past Wussy records. Sure, the band works up a fine wallop on the monumental riff of “Gone,” but when Lisa explores Dudeism as an alternative to Catholicism or Chuck obliquely quotes “MacArthur Park” and “Jack and Diane” I’m a bit perplexed. But these guys have an unmitigated advantage over early R.E.M., as well as hundreds of other pretenders: they may have their doubts in regards to Jesus, but they’re true believers in rock and roll. A MINUS

Honorable Mentions

Lucy Dacus: No Burden (Egghunt) “Too old to play/Too young to mess around” (“Troublemaker Doppelgänger,” “Strange Torpedo”) ***

Seth Bogart: Seth Bogart (Hardly Art) Hairdresser on Fire Hunx gets Julie-ruined (“Eating Makeup,” “Smash the TV”) **

Loretta Lynn: Full Circle (Sony Legacy) A born songwriter, her singing approached greatness when she was expressing herself – one more reason why the “Fist City” remake is pointless (“Wine into Water,” “Lay Me Down”) **

Bob Mould: Patch the Sky (Merge) Personally, I’m down with the urban myth that aspartame causes sterility in men (“The End of Things,” “Pray For Rain”) *

Nada Surf: You Know Who You Are (Barsuk) “One day, I’ll love somebody else/One day, I’ll take care of myself” – truer words were never spoken (“Believe You’re Mine,” “New Bird”) *

Hamburger Helper: Watch the Stove (free download) Somewhere, Action Bronson is wrinkling his nose in disgust (while lapping up the skillet) (“Hamburger Helper,” “Crazy”) *

Trash

PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolition Project (Island) Although this concept record about Harvey’s trip to the poorest parts of Washington, DC contains some of her most rewarding music in years, much of it is marred by its creator’s reflexive attitude toward the world – rather than see things for what they are, she projects her value system on it. Consider her portrait of New York from 2000: a bustling locus of romance and mystery, whether talking time travel on a rooftop in Manhattan or tossing her bad fortune over the ledge. But had she been in a different mindset that year (or wanted a subject for, say, an art project) she could have made like Billy Joel and walked through Bedford-Stuy alone and Stories from the City would have been a completely different album. To be fair, that area of Brooklyn has gone through a great deal of gentrification in the past few decades, and is now more Harvey’s kind of town – I mean, one of her most indignant charges against D.C.’s Ward Seven is the dearth of, I kid you not, “sit down restaurants” (“I’ve heard the cry of the poor, and what they need is more bistros!”). Some criticize her lack of solutions to poverty and urban blight, but I’m more disturbed that rather than connecting to living, breathing people – which would be a lot harder to do – she instead portrays Ward Seven merely as an affront to her sense of proper “civilization” (“Broken glass/A white jawbone/Syringes, razors/A plastic spoon”) (and by the way Polly, no one cooks heroin in a plastic spoon). This defines ivory tower Liberalism: putting things in terms of us vs. them, here vs. there, implying “necessary” psychological distance from your subject – I mean, why not talk that area’s decrease in crime, attributed to stronger literacy programs, the razing of old housing projects, a no-questions-asked illegal gun depository, and other such positive steps forward? That’s because in a sense, Harvey isn’t interested in politics as much as apocalypse – even in her best work, the world is ending in one way or another, and her only solution is “transcendence,” whether it be sex, God, or this album’s dismayingly vague desire to “do something good.” Of course, two decades ago the end of the world was intimated by death via orgasm, or something like that. Now it’s the news, repeated in eight “climactic” lines, that Capitol View knocked down some public housing to build a Wal-Mart. Lord God! The end times are upon us! B

Margo Price: Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (Third Man) More than anything else, Jack White cultivates “authenticity” – the guy would distribute his catalog on etched metal cylinders if he thought it would earn him a hip cache. His newest find, as Stephen M. Deusner notes in Pitchfork, boasts a résumé that uncannily resembles the classic country songs she means to evoke: Dad lost the farm and Nashville screwed her over, after which she shacked up with a married man, did a brief stint in jail, and miscarried a pregnancy. And oh yes, the coup de grâce: to record this album, she hocked her wedding ring and car to pay for sessions at Memphis’ legendary Sun Studios. How early Dolly Parton is that? Unfortunately, most of the soap operas on Dolly’s early records were flat out dross – masterpieces like “Down from Dover” were the exceptions, not the norm, primarily because after a while, scenarios plagiarized from The Perils of Pauline take earnest suffering to to the point of camp burlesque. No offense to Price, who’s certainly had a harder life than mine. But regardless of how close it hews to her actual experiences, her bio sounds like the cynical creation of a savvy publicist, and her complete dependence on well-worn C&W tropes, from stock metaphors (“turn back the cruel hands of time,” “the future ain’t what it used to be”) to tired retreads of songs you’ve heard a million times (“About to Find Out” lamely re-writes Loretta’s “Fist City”), only belies the odd boast that this album was recorded in three days (Dolly recorded her early quickies in about that time, too). The melodramatic, autobiographical “Hands of Time” itself almost succeeds anyway – at six minutes you can at least say it’s designed to go over the top. But I have serious suspicions about anyone who complains about shitty tours and prays to be as lucky as Richard Manuel – not to get all big brother, but hanging yourself isn’t really the answer. I mean really, sometimes you don’t succeed because you’re not that good. B MINUS

Kevin Gates: Islah (Artist Partner Group) I don’t get why everyone is all in a tizzy about this oafish throwback to the Master P/No Limit era – tis said he updates the old model with more “sensitivity.” Which as far I can hear, basically boils down to copping to a foot fetish and admitting: “One thing I really is love is makin’ love to the pussy.” I wonder if her presence beyond that is optional? B MINUS

Kamaiyah: A Good Night in The Ghetto (free download) Finally, after all these years, Oakland produces a feminine corrective to Too Short. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but don’t feel badly – she’s not that excited either. B MINUS

Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool (XL) Asked for Steve Reich, they gave me Robert Kirby. C+

Anna Meredith: Varmints (PIAS/Moshi Moshi) Available to DJ your next coronation – provided the royals getting hitched are giant killer robots. C PLUS

Venetian Snares: Traditional Synthesizer Music (Planet Mu) In their heyday, modular synthesizers – think early Brian Eno – sounded like the future, but helmed by Aaron Funk, they sound rather quaint. Got to justify that retro cover, I guess. C PLUS

Bibio: A Mineral Love (Warp) Organic instruments instead of synthesizers aren’t better or worse – they’re just a strategy or gimmick, one that means nothing without a concept, which here seems to be imagining what the Alan Parsons Project would have sounded like with better beats and more soulful vocals. When he makes those ambitions a reality, don’t let me know. C PLUS

The 1975: I Like It When You Sleep for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It (Polydor) They’re a bit like Icehouse or Wang Chung gone “arty” – except that I don’t think either of those bands came out against orthodontia. C

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Monday, May 2, 2016

Hall of Records (14):

**DAVID BOWIE: STATION TO STATION (RCA)**

Released January 23, 1976

As every Bowie acolyte knows, the Thin White Duke is the persona that the former David Jones adopted for his tenth studio album, 1976’s beloved Station to Station. His concert photographs from the period are striking: crisp white shirt, black vest and trousers, reminiscent of pre-war German cabaret, his slicked-back hair dyed a severe shade of red or blonde, a splash of blue from a box of Gitanes cigarettes tucked in his vest-pocket. The songs from that album juxtaposed sincere lyrics about love and religion (oh, and a television set that ate David’s girlfriend) to harsh, metallic funk-rock so intense some have dubbed the effect as “ironic” or “distancing,” yet Bowie would later describe the neo-gospel devotional “Word on a Wing” as a sincere cry for help. Based purely on aesthetic affect however, whether inadvertent or not, his many biographers have summed up the character Bowie would grimly dub in hindsight “a very nasty character, indeed” as “a mad aristocrat” (Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray), “an amoral zombie” (David Buckley) and “an emotionless Aryan superman” (Nicholas Pegg). Of course, Nietzsche would never have recognized the Thin White Duke in the Superman of Thus Spake Zarathustra – what Pegg really meant was the Nazis’ warped perversion of that ideal, something Bowie unwisely referenced in contemporaneous interviews, misjudgments he would later blame on an “astronomic” cocaine, which had gotten so out of hand it ever erased the memory of recording this landmark record.

Though anyone who makes dubious claims for Adolf Hitler being the first rock star (“Look at his films and see how he moved. I think was quite as good as Jagger”) might be fairly construed to be not in his right mind, one thing that should be immediately addressed about this period is Bowie’s debt to black musicians. Not merely black music, mind you – black musicians. Much has been made of the artistic risk to abandon the edgy glam rock that made him famous for the Philadelphia soul he assayed with some success (and plenty of failure) on 1975’s spotty Young Americans, a stylistic left turn on par with Neil Young “heading for the ditch” after the comfy country rock of Harvest, or Joni Mitchell cuddling up to Weather Report post-Court and Spark. Yet this transformation would have been unthinkable without the contributions of three extraordinary African-American musicians: the late drummer Dennis Davis, bassist George Murray, and particularly guitarist and silent partner Carlos Alomar, who devised the distinctive, unforgettable riffs for such Bowie totems as “Fame,” “Stay,” and “Golden Years.” And though the usual Europhile suspects gush about influences such as Kraftwerk, Can, and Roxy Music, it was this solid trio, equally comfortable with funk as with avant-garde noise, that backed Bowie on this record all the way through 1980’s Scary Monsters – arguably, the man’s most musically inventive period. Could the former Ziggy Stardust have made these same records with Mick Ronson and the Spiders from Mars (who always sounded a trifle thin in the studio)? Not a chance.

Having said that, it’s Bowie’s taste in prog rock lead guitarists that gives each of these records its own particular flavor. As a punk rock devotee this has always been a hard pill to swallow, but his influences in this regard are not only undeniable, his charges are down for all of his games, whether it be King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on 1977’s superb Heroes (completing many of his solos in one take) or Adrian Belew, poached from Frank Zappa’s touring aggregation for 1979’s underrated Lodger (and whose cut-and-pasted contributions arose from Eno and Bowie telling him to improvise alone without giving him a tempo, key, or backing track). On Station to Station Bowie’s bedfellows are even stranger: flashy arena rock guitarist Earl Slick, who came to the Bowie camp for the last leg of the much-panned tour for 1974’s bombastic Diamond Dogs, stuck around for Young Americans, and came into his own with the piercing light-in-the-tunnel note that opens “Station to Station” and the jaw-dropping solo for “Stay.” Even better is E Street alum Roy Bittan – Bowie was an early Springsteen champion, and here the classically-trained pianist returns the favor with, among other ingenious touches, the New Orleans-styled ivory-tickling on the endlessly repeatable “TVC15” and the giddy downward piano glissandos on “Station to Station.” If you can resist not pantomiming along with the latter – ten in all, including one in the fadeout, and each perfectly timed – you’re made of far stronger stuff than me.

I would argue “meaning” is secondary with Bowie, especially since in his case “significance” often involves interfacing with his lyrics, which, despite boosters of his apocalyptic doggerel, obtuse metaphors, and arcane theological/philosophical references, has never been his strong suit. This extends to the character of the Thin White Duke himself – just who is he, exactly? A fiction, a metaphor, or an extension of his creator? He appears in the mysterious title track not by way of an introduction but as a “return,” “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes” – a nice image, but what does it imply? That brief section flutters, hovering in mid-air, brought down step by step via harmonically descending chords, surrounded by one of the most diabolical rhythms ever attempted in rock: one bar in 6/4 followed by two bars in 3/8 and one in 2/8, over and over again, hypnotic and unrelenting. The synthesized clack of an inbound train traveling from the right stereo channel to the left begins the proceedings, but that’s a slight ruse: the title refers not to the journey from Victoria to Waterloo, but the stations of the cross, the fourteen steps (or “stations”) in Christ’s journey from condemnation to resurrection, often observed by Catholics during Lent. That may seem like a pompous metaphor for a British rock star to embrace, but if you were living on a diet of milk, peppers, and cocaine and suffering through all manner of paranoid delusions, the “magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” (from the highest level of the Kabbalah to the lowest – David loves to mix up those metaphors) might have the ring of God’s truth. In other words, underneath its evasions, this song is about a journey, with the slow, funereal first half a hellish Moebius strip, the second a delirious release, a connection to the divine. At roughly the halfway mark, the song becomes a hard rocking disco inferno, the transition made complete by the couplet every fanboy knows by heart: “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine/I’m thinking that it must be love.” Does his face show “some kind of glow?” Don’t worry about that just yet – “the European cannon” is here. A play on the Pāli Canon (a standard collection of Buddhist scriptures) or a phallic boast? When I stop dancing I’ll tell you.

The remainder of the record is far less oblique lyrically, but the supposed disconnect from the impassioned lyrics and what many perceive to be detached performance has led to observations such as Carr and Murray’s description of the aesthetic being akin to “ice masquerading as fire.” Yet the luminous “Golden Years” really does look forward to future nostalgia with uncommon optimism, the white hot “Stay” really does burn with desperation when the Duke ruefully croons “You can never really tell when somebody wants something you want too,” and the gleeful “TVC15” really does concern a “hologramic” and “quadrophonic” television set from another galaxy that swallows up the Duke’s beloved. Those round out the upbeat numbers, taking up more than two-thirds of the record, and though they might not be as “sincere” in the cornfed manner of Bowie’s then-labelmates John Denver or Dolly Parton, these songs have far more outreach than anything in Bowie’s catalog save for Ziggy Stardust’s “Five Years,” in which news of impending apocalypse forces the “alien” into admitting, “I never thought I’d need so many people.” One gets the impression that too many of his fans project their own need to be cool onto a man who was so close to bottoming out emotionally that for his next three albums – the trio with Brian Eno – he completely jettisoned personas altogether. Does that justify the two weakest tracks on Station to Station, the ballads that close each vinyl side, including a very odd cover of Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind,” as strange a move as Dusty Springfield’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” on Dusty in Memphis? Well, probably not. Yet they do round out the record thematically – promises of redemption and transcendence that don’t quite accomplish what the rest of the record does without even explicitly making those promises its goal.

This record proved to be the springboard for Bowie’s much-loved “Berlin trilogy” with Brian Eno, though only 1977’s Heroes was recorded there, while Eno came on board to its predecessor, 1977’s excellent but slightly tentative Low, after most of the main recording was finished. Bowie-philes like to credit these records to a character they dub “the Berliner” (which in German translates to “the jelly donut,” but never mind), but if anything these records inaugurated a period of anti-persona – the second halves of Low of Heroes are predominantly instrumental, pretty unheard of for a major rock artist at the time, while the final Eno project, 1979’s Lodger, proved to be his most straightforward set in years. I was first exposed to Bowie through the video for that album’s electrifying “DJ,” in which Bowie plays a disc jockey who trashes his studio, and then his albums. As an eleven-year-old, I thought: what is this man doing? Destroying his record collection? Yet by the same token, raised by my parents to always be on my best behavior, it was thrilling, and certainly as a metaphor it completely sums up Bowie’s career: build it up, tear it down again when it gets old, and start over again. Bowie never again reached the aesthetic heights of those seminal records, and who would even try? Half of the British recording industry, as it turns out. Such is the fate of a master engineer: everyone chases the tail of the train long after he’s left the station.

April 10, 2016

Thursday, March 24, 2016

A Downloader’s Diary (45)

by Michael Tatum

I spent the last few months simmering in my latest, and I imagine final, annual mid-life crisis. I resolved it by, among other things, getting my driver’s license, not to mentioning immersing in music. My lesson: getting older can be fun, provided you can do it as gracefully as Bonnie (66), Willie (82), or Kenny (56). If only Elton (68) was as spry and lively as he was on his karaoke drive with James Corden. With even more material in the can than this installment, loaded with good stuff and short on the stuff you should avoid, I’ll see you again in about six weeks.

Babyface: Return of the Tender Lover (Def Jam) Back in the nineties, when I listened to far too much guitar rock for my own good, I grumblingly acknowledged Kenny Edmonds’ clear mastery of swanky R&B on 1995’s The Day, but wondered why he skimped on the uptempo jams. Twenty plus years later, looking much the ladykiller in what looks like a corner office at Goldman Sachs, the most ebullient, outgoing record of his career makes me disappointed that these nine songs (four with the word “love” in the title) try so hard to ingratiate themselves – please tell me he’s not filling his coffers to donate more money to that creep Marco Rubio. But from “your love is exceptional” to giving his new bride a “standing ovation,” no one else in R&B gets away with this high grade of lover man bullshit – he might not be the paragon of monogamy he sells himself as, but the fact he’s devoted an entire career to exploring this persona says a lot about his character (or portends a future career as the duped husband in a daytime soap opera). He gives El Debarge a cameo because he owes him big time. He gives After 7 a cameo because, well, two of the guys in the band are his brothers. And though I don’t necessarily favor live musicians over synthesizers, in this case it serves to bolster the warmth that’s Kenny’s specialty. As for that absolutely smoking lead guitar, the credit belongs to Michael Ripoll, whom I’m assuming got the job because Clapton wasn’t available. A MINUS

Erykah Badu: But You Cain’t Use My Phone (Motown/Control Freaq) In which the former Erica Wright gives up astrology readings and conspiracy theories and returns to her greatest calling: comedy. Hiring a hapless Drake impersonator for a tribute/parody to “Hotline Bling,” offering up her dee-jaying services for your cousin’s slip-and-slide party, and telling Tyrone if he wants to send a message to her he needs to teach himself Morse Code for the old towel-and-campfire trick, she hasn’t evinced this much winning personality since Mama’s Gun back in 2000. Trading the Soulquarians for the samples and synths of producer and fellow Texan Zach Witness might bum out her neo-soul fanbase, but her music hasn’t been this formed and focused in years. It helps that this is predominantly made of a well-chosen bunch of idiosyncratic covers – Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call,” Ray Parker’s re-write of “Please Mr. Postman” for New Edition, Todd Rundgren by way of the Isley Brothers, her own “Telephone” from New Amerykah, Pt. 1. The central conceit of modern day communication is a timely one, and I’m surprised no one’s tried it before – it reminds of that time my wife and her Disneyland group met in person for the very first time – and most of them spent their time with their heads down, glued to their cellphones. Badu and babydaddy Andre 3000 teaming up for “Hello it’s Me” is downright magical, especially since I’m left wondering how much they actually call each other anymore. But please, Erykha: I don’t care how heterosexual you are, don’t replace the word “girl” with “squirrel” ever, ever again. A MINUS

BJ the Chicago Kid: In My Mind (Motown) Like Jason DeRulo, Bryan James Sledge combines aspects of the boy next door with the slavering rake, a guy whose response to the old Saturday Night/Sunday Morning dichotomy is a chorus that goes: “She says she wanna drink, do drugs, have sex tonight/But I’ve got church in the morning/Hopefully we can go to heaven, I pray/Hopefully we can go to heaven, ‘cause I’m stayin’.” After years of predators, pricks, and the usual corporate schtick, I find this an encouraging development. What mother couldn’t adore this R&B dreamboat? He’s industrious (“I wanna work that body like it’s a nine-to-five”), respectful of the opposite sex (though not James Brown, who should get royalties for “Woman’s World”), and has a way with humble ballads (“Fall on my Face” has the touch of greatness). He even lets his girl Isa get the last word on “Wait til the Morning,” which suggests pre-empting tough conversations with sex might not be such a hot idea. And since Sledge’s second career (after an abortive beginning with Kanye West) began with mixtapes, we also get cameos from Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar, both of whose sixteen bars are always welcome. As for the meaning of the title, I always thought heart and mind go together in the spirit of any credible lover man, but here are some words to live by: “In my mind I am crazy…crazy about the right things. Crazy about the things that could change my life, and honestly if you ain’t crazy about something, I can’t rock with you. So at the end of the day man, get crazy about something.” A MINUS

Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording (Atlantic) As your friendly neighborhood stickler for detail, I’d like to point out the paths of Hamilton and his nemesis Aaron Burr didn’t cross as often as much as sextuple threat lyricist/composer/actor/dancer/singer/rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda would have you believe – historically, they didn’t become especially acquainted until they practiced law in New York, which in Broadway time would put that at the end of act one. Of course, I could also kvetch Alexander Hamilton wasn’t Puerto Rican, Eliza Schuyler wasn’t half-Chinese, and James Madison wasn’t Nigerian, and what fun would that be? Because ultimately, the subtext of a Broadway cast consisting mainly of people of color reflects Hamilton’s deep belief in American meritocracy, something “the greatest city in the world” (New York City, by a funny coincidence where this musical plays seven nights a week) theoretically makes possible, and that Miranda casts white actors to portray George III and the redcoats opposite his band of upstarts only underscores the joke. So you bet the New School is one reason why this original cast recording is such a gas – my favorite is Daveed Diggs (half black, half Jewish), who plays the marquis de Lafayette more broadly and Thomas Jefferson more smugly than they were in real life, and makes you love it every time he seizes center stage. Cramming thirty years of history in two-and-a-half hours, I can forgive these mild transgressions because first, if they aren’t always true to history they are true to human nature, insomuch as Miranda understands that from battle rapping politicians insulting each other to push their financial policies to indignant soldiers dueling to defend their “honor,” regardless of the time period, mankind’s foibles are immutable. And second, I’m positive that Hamilton, a destitute immigrant from the Caribbean island of St. Croix, would completely sympathize – of all the founding fathers, he was the only one who began and ended his political career an unapologetic abolitionist. Thomas Jefferson, go hang your head, over there in the corner with Andrew Lloyd-Webber. A

Archy Marshall: A New Place 2 Drown (True Panther Sounds) Taken out of context, the title would seem to mean the weeping brook into which Ophelia threw her weedy trophies and herself; in context, Marshall clarifies with a drawl what he’s drowning isn’t himself but his sorrows. But in what, exactly? Oh, the usual things: sex, drugs, music, J.D. Salinger, a short film, and a classy tome of poetry/sketches/photographs curated by his brother Jack, not necessarily in that order. I don’t recommend this approach as a life strategy – believe me Archy, I was young once, too – but I can’t deny its seductiveness entrenched in music this haunting, compelling, cerebral, and sexy. In fact, though some claim this is some weird strain of indie rock (a la Deerhunter on Halcyon Digest) or punk jazz (James Chance was never this loose), I myself couldn’t nail any antecedents other than Tricky, so you can imagine my shock when instead of a scowling Black Briton with asthma problems, Marshall turned out to be a skinny urchin who looks like Rupert Grint’s malnourished kid brother. His slack jawed, nick-your-trainers baritone is far better suited to these stoned beats and phantasmagoric keyboard lines than they ever were to the more straightforward singer-songwriter-with-guitar moves of his former identity as King Krule, as well as his free associative verse, which mostly concerns the usual post-adolescent sexual resentment no matter how much he hides it behind Barry White and cornball BBC sitcoms. Also like Tricky, he seems to relish juxtaposing sticky sexual details (“Locked in blood, gunk, fluids and mixtures/Of sweat, grease chicken, beef and love leaking stitches”) with tributes to his mum, who in Archy’s case lives down the hall. Yeah, that’s right, down the hall – you can see her in that short film. No wonder the kid’s love life sucks. A MINUS

Willie Nelson: Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin (Legacy) Not that Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon weren’t deserving of being canonized by the Library of Congress, but Willie Nelson is the Gershwin Prize’s most spiritually appropriate recipient. Thought for much of the sixties to be out of touch with the country mainstream with his unusual vocal phrasing – either jumping ahead or lagging behind the beat, many complained – he later revealed the source of his unique style with the 1978 album Stardust, which made clear his debts both to the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition and the great pop and jazz singers that staked their reputations by endlessly toying with it. Nelson has dabbled in his penchant for standards many times since – with the glut of old fogeys indulging in them, it’s almost been a commercial necessity – but this is one is special for two reasons. First, because it features Nelson’s touring band, led by his pianist sister Bobbie and who probably have had these songs ingrained in their DNA for years. Second, because not only is Willie’s wry, poignant, playful baritone made for George’s tunes and rhythms, but his yearning brings depth to Ira’s lyrics on material you thought had been plumbed to the ocean floor. In fact, my only complaints are the duets: Sheryl Crow on “Embraceable You” (passable – did you know she was once an elementary school teacher?) and Cyndi Lauper on “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (in which she crosses Blossom Dearie with the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre). Elsewhere, this is a delightful treasure trove for those on the younger side of your humble downloader’s mid-life crisis. For those on the older side, you’re probably wondering: do I need yet another version of “Summertime?” You betcha. A

Bonnie Raitt: Dig in Deep (Redwing) I would like to credit Bonnie’s best since 1991’s Luck of the Draw to the crisp self-production – incredibly, the first time she’s manned the boards on her own in her forty-five year recording career. But really, I’m just glad she dismissed Joe Henry, who co-helmed 2012’s Grammy-winning (i.e.: zzzz) Slipstream. In truth, Bonnie has aligned herself with several top notch producers over the years, but Don Was and the team of Mitchell Froom/Tchad Blake had their names on winners as often as they did outright losers. So as always, you can boil success down to songs, some written by the artiste, some by hired guns, and all about “love” except a poignant ballad about her father and an anti-banking song even droller than Boz Scaggs’ (“I’m here to tell you your sicken loan is coming due,” right on, sister). Except these are the kind of love songs you remember, not merely because of memorable tunes per se – although there are plenty of those to go around – but because rather than muddle about in romantic vagaries, each lyric focuses on a specific aspect of a relationship dynamic. It’s an unintended consequence of love. I would have lied, but I couldn’t lie, ‘cause I knew. I’m all alone with something to say. Never could have guessed it, best friends since we were kids, but now I lose it every time that you’re near. With articulate, punchy solos from Bonnie and the band a given, you’re probably wondering if she’s come up with a more left field cover than the last outing’s Gerry Rafferty. So I direct you to her startling take on INXS’s “Need You Tonight,” the original of which always reminded of the Doors – sex as a crude art pose, or an avenue to score a top ten hit. Both noble endeavors, I say. But Bonnie delivers it like she wants you to hop under the covers pronto. Guess which version is more convincing. A

Rihanna: Anti (Westbury Road Entertainment/Roc Nation) For four years in a row, from 2009 to 2012, Robin Fenty released an album for the Christmas buying season – a pretty much unheard of level of productivity that struck me less as Beatles-Stones level inspiration and more assembly line workaholicism. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy her singles along with everybody else, but how else are you going to sell records if you don’t have a few of those coming off the presses? Then she took a breather, for aesthetic reasons I would assume as well as personal ones, and her reward is her most satisfying long player. No hit singles here, and the album has underwhelmed sales-wise, but that’s the price she pays for the independence she claims for herself in lyrics after lyric, and if this isn’t as amazing as the Beyonce album that many silly people think isn’t as good as Beck’s dreary Mourning Face (or whatever it’s called), the artiste, well, isn’t Beyonce. Give her credit, however, for jumping on the Kanye West bandwagon, joining the growing cadre of hip hop artists who are using their power and clout for creativity rather than sinking into a morass of complacency. Skipping out the dance floor to the chill out room, this sounds like it could be a Massive Attack or Tricky record, with nods to Stevie Wonder, Al Green, and, er, Tame Impala, and finally this Barbados native’s dancehall moves are organic rather than contrived. And though the bad girl act does get wearying, finally she’s unpacking the psychology that fuels it – “There ain’t nothing here for me/But I don’t want to be alone,” or the sadly knowing “Tryna fix your inner issues with a bad bitch/Didn’t they tell you I was a savage?” I’m sure there a lot of naïve young people who would describe the stoned brag about how “amazing” she’s in bed as “sex positive” or some nonsense like that, but until now it never occurred to me how many victims of abuse often suffer from the insecurity that they’re only worth a damn in bed. And if you think I’m being puritanical, I never get that feeling with Beyonce, who also offers up far juicier conjugal details. Sure Re, white knights are an icky, codependent lot. But that only means you’re selling what he’s desperately buying, and your folly is no less tragic. A MINUS

Rokia Traoré: Né So (Nonesuch) The titular concept (“Home”) signifies differently to a diplomat’s daughter than than it does to a Tuareg nomad, even if they are both angry at the same religious fundamentalists that have taken that concept away from them – do the guys in Tinariwen split their time between Bamako, Paris, and Marseille? Not to downplay their respective struggles, but the difference is between an upper middle class feminist who has the freedom to do and express whatever she wants, and a single working class mom stuck in two dead end jobs barely scraping by raising her two kids. Traoré’s music has always been “beautiful,” sometimes even compelling, but what it doesn’t have is urgency, something you can’t say about most other Malian musicians. With John Parish once again in the producer’s seat, the interweaving guitar lines and tricky time signatures are about as close as African music gets to art rock, and even if it’s more heartfelt, it’s also the music of privilege. Like 2013’s Beautiful Africa, this starts strong and winds down, especially tripping when she translates her one-world banalities to English or cedes platitude duties to Devendra Barnhart. The apotheosis of all this is covering “Strange Fruit” in 2016, rather than hiring a rapper to drop some knowledge down about Ferguson: conservatory protest past its sell-by date rather than righteous dissent in the current moment. I can’t deny this record’s prettiness, even in its most languid moments – but she could be moaning about the pleasures of gardening or home cooking and we would be none the wiser. B PLUS

The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (Polydor) If the sixties was the greatest decade for rock and roll, how come it produced so few worthwhile live albums? Between weak performances, subpar recording technology, and Berry Gordy’s unceasing desire to cram his flagship acts into dinner jackets for gigs at the Copa, classics on the order of Live/Dead and the Beatles’ Live at the Hollywood Bowl are few and far between. It says something that the only three artists who have multiple live albums worth attending to – we’ll leave the Dead out of this – are Hendrix, James Brown, and the Velvets, all of whom evolved aesthetically from album to album, toured to death, and never failed to give their fans more than rote recitals. This four-disc bonanza, which would have been deemed an “event” back when people gave a shit about CDs and would have been priced twice as much its $29.98 retail, documents two nights from the band’s intermittent month-long residency at San Francisco’s Matrix Theatre – November 13^th-15^th declares the original ticket (Barry “Eve of Destruction” McGuire a few days later!), but recorded on the 26^th and 27^th according to the slug on the cover. Does any sane person really need four versions of “Heroin,” totaling about forty minutes? Does “Sister Ray” keep the orgy going for thirty-seven? You bet. And oh, the revelations! For minimalists, they never executed a song the same way twice, and weren’t above stretching out not unlike their supposed polar opposites in the Dead – the fagged-out ennui Lou Reed masters in the slowed-down versions of “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” has been imitated to the point of parody, but never equaled. Doug Yule emerges as the greatest noise-rock organist of the decade. And guitar, guitar, more guitar. I once thought I could hear the riff of “What Goes On” ad infinitum – or at the very least, for nine minutes. Turns out I was right. A MINUS

Kanye West: The Life of Pablo (Def Jam/G.O.O.D. Music) Acts of insanity should be judged by their circumstances and levels of aforethought. If I were to bum rush Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards because I thought Beyonce deserved to win for “Single Ladies,” I could easily dismiss it in a week and blame it on booze, nerves, or the rush of the moment. This mixtape cum cris de cerveau and the Twitter meltdown leading up to and away from it are in a different realm of lunacy altogether. Rearranging titles and track listings from day to day, rationalizing a lay with Taylor Swift because “I made that bitch famous,” comparing his marriage to Kim Kardashian to the trials of the biblical Mary and Joseph, fretting whether that Tribeca model’s asshole-bleaching might stain his shirt, or completely yanking his latest opus from Tidal (its only outlet!) after a mere twenty-four hours, he’s pushing buttons to see how far he can go, then retreating into his shell when the politically correct wing of the internet spanks him for his transgressions. When he short-circuits after skipping a few Lexapro doses, I really feel for him – the dude needs a better psychiatrist, one who does more than introducing him to patients with the hip hop equivalent of a screenplay to sell. Not unlike his buddy Paul McCartney – strangely absent from the proceedings – West recycles motifs and unused fragments in the time-honored side-two-of-Abbey-Road fashion, and it completely suits both the tortured subject matter and the artiste’s angst-ridden mindset. The “real” album will supposedly come out this summer. I’ll believe it when I hear it. It may be “superior” in quality – but it won’t be nearly as revealing. A MINUS

Honorable Mentions

Tricky/Skilled Mechanics: Skilled Mechanics (False Idols) Trust me Adrian, forgive your Dad – it’ll be good for your art (”Hero,” “Boy”) ★★★

Future: EVOL (Epic/Freebandz/A1) “Your Honor: Exhibit A: on track two he boasts about how he wants to forcibly put his genitals in my mouth” (“The Program,” “Xanny Family”) ★★

Lyrics Born: Real People (Mobile Home) Killer music and unassailable flow, but the meatiest lyric is a mother-in-law lament not quite as funny as Ernie K. Doe’s (“Holy Matrimony,” “Chest Wide Open”) ★★

David Bowie: ★ (Columbia) Contemplating scary monsters (Death) and super creeps (Thom Yorke?) (“Lazarus,” “★”) ★★

Lucinda Williams: The Ghosts of Highway 20 (Highway 20/Thirty Tigers) Not even God would go on about “Faith and Grace” for twelve endless minutes (“Place in my Heart,” “Dust”) ★

Pinegrove: Cardinal (Run For Cover) Evan Stephens Hall does indeed have more soul and brains than Robin Pecknold, but doesn’t everyone? (“Then Again,” “New Friends”) ★

Trash

El Guincho: Hiperasia (Nacional) Supposedly inspired by the eclectic music played in the Hiper Asia chain of Chinese bazaars Pablo Díaz-Reixa frequented in Madrid, GOOD AFTERNOON SHOPPERS AND WELCOME TO HIPERASIA [*Berryz Kobo on the intercom] Chinese broccoli on sale this week for a 1.1 Euros a pound, Kenji cleanup on aisle fifteen, would you like to sample the new Sangria-flavored Ramune GOOD AFTERNOON SHOPPERS AND WELCOME TO HIPERASIA how fresh is this tuna 好的下午购物 wouldyoulikepaperorplasticwiththat I’m sorry we only have the narrow rice noodles excuse me I need to get into this aisle 清理在过道 Aquí está su cambio, Señor GOOD AFTERNOON SHOPPERS AND WEL B MINUS

Jeremih: Late Nights (Def Jam) Like most English majors, I have a deep appreciation for dirty talk, and in rock and roll as in literature, there’s a gold standard: Marvin Gaye and Madonna, Prince and Liz Phair. The four of them have something in common, which is the knowledge that the genitals don’t get aroused by manual stimulation alone – you also have to move the heart and/or spark the brain. For example, Prince Charles’ desire to be reincarnated as his beloved’s tampon disgusts not because of the literal reality of the metaphor, but its dunderheaded banality – this is the woman that gets you hotter than Diana and that’s your best come hither? Hailing from the same city as the far sweeter BJ the Chicago Kid, journeyman R&B mack daddy Jeremy Felton likewise can’t tell the boudoir from the locker room – laying down an offer to join the Mile High Club, comparing her vaginal juices to Crown Royal Regal Apple, sticking his finger in her ass without buying her a nice dinner first, or coaxing J. Cole to spit a couplet about how his dick is so big it’ll feel like “a foot in your mouth,” these are the puerile sexual fantasies of a smug dimwit whose marijuana brag – I can’t get over this – actually references Ray-J’s “I Hit it First,“ his infamous yes-but-I-made-a-sextape-with-her reminder to Kanye West. And, if I may indulge myself in a little semantics, he confuses the concepts of “climate” and “weather” like a goddamn Fox News meteorology “expert.” He needs that gaggle of pinch-hitting rappers to distract from his mundanity, and none do him any favors. As for dull beats, I’m betting it’s part of his end game – putting her to sleep as a prelude to sticking it in seems about his speed. C PLUS

Elton John: Wonderful Crazy Night (Island) First of all, shut your goddamn mouth – back when I was a kid and this guy pounded the 88s in a Donald Duck suit, he was my hero. Even as a five-year-old I knew that the first side of Caribou rocked and the second was lame, so when Sir Reg’s press machine promised us an album solely of uptempo rock and roll, I remember nodding off through the maudlin Peachtree Road material ten years ago at Cox Cable arena, telling myself “Love Lies Bleeding” and “Rocket Man” would be in the second half of the show. So fuck naivety: I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Except this isn’t 1974 – a lot has happened to Elton since then: The Lion King, electric pianos, vocal nodules, tours with Billy Joel. And, I would also argue, AIDS benefits, Ryan White, coming out of the closet, Princess Diana’s death, sponsoring Eminem’s sobriety, marriage and kids. In other words, he’s “matured” enough so that he thinks his fans don’t expect product from him, they expect significance. Unfortunately for Elton, he’s always left significance to Bernie Taupin, whose lyrics were inconsistent even at Elton’s peak, and were almost always mush whenever he aimed for depth or candor. Especially in the team’s vaunted “assembly line” mode, many of their best moments were tossed off – the buoyantly light doggerel of “Solar Prestige a Gammon,” the catty “The Bitch is Back,” the committed-but-to-what anthem “Philadephia Freedom.” This begins with a hopping-bopping ditty that makes “Crocodile Rock” sound like “Search and Destroy” and read like “All the Young Dudes.” Later, it “peaks” with a hoary paean to lost bluesman Utah Smith, who deserves more than a lyric that romanticizes his "old Gibson” but delivers T. Bone Burnette’s sanitized production values. Personal to Elton: bring back Ann Orson and Carte Blanche. Now those were some lyricists. C

Milk Teeth: Vile Child (Hopeless) I’m intrigued by the notion that England is warming to the notion of American indie rock – even if it’s twenty, thirty years too late – but key touches like amateurish singing, alternate tunings, and dodgy production values are beyond them. I imagine this quartet gets ink because they’re actually two bands in one – or were, since Josh Bannister left three weeks before this was released. I say good riddance – sounds like he wanted the band to emulate the Melvins. That leaves the more interesting Becky Blomfield, who I bet thinks Linda Perry sold out when she started working with Pink. C PLUS

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Monday, January 11, 2016

David Bowie meant the world to me, especially when I was around 20 years old. I was skinny, quirky, and non-macho – for years I felt like I was an unattractive person, insecurities amplified by much of the abuse I suffered through junior high school. Discovering Bowie was like finding my place in the world – there were other people like me, and they were cool beyond belief. Bowie was the gateway to a more interesting world: glam, punk, indie, bohemian, you name it. Thank you, David – safe travels from station to station.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

A Downloader’s Diary (44)

by Michael Tatum

Those who have suffered through my brief introductions to this column over these past few years know two things about them. First, I hate doing them. And second, the dark days of November/December are my least productive weeks of the year. So there aren’t as many records discussed below as have been knocking around my download folder. However, unlike my usual practice, I’ll keep plying through 2015 well into 2016 – and will certainly find time to say nice things about Courtney Barnett, who certainly has earned a slot in my top five.

Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch) Because I’ve absorbed this companion record to Anderson’s documentary of the same name over a dozen times on headphones, I disagree that this gorgeous song cycle doesn’t contain any “music.” In any case, without her deep, rich backgrounds, her natural speaking voice has always been musical in its timbre, cadences, and timing, as in this well-turned joke: “Now I had heard rat terriers could understand ‘about’…five-hundred words, and I wanted to see…which ones…they were.” But what makes these meticulously structured remembrances of Anderson’s mother, childhood, and artistically-inclined dog Lolabelle endlessly fascinating aren’t individual parts per se, but rather how these strands of memory, when tied together, explore how we approach death, and how discovering what connects the living, the dead, and the things we leave behind doesn’t make the process any less impenetrable. Like Anderson, I keep my own mysteries. Why did I burst into laughter when the mariachi band began to play “De Colores” at my grandfather’s funeral – the song I associated with him – before I broke down crying? When our beloved beta Ruby passed away, why did I sob about him being “my little boy” while sitting with my wife in the office of Forever Friends Pet Cremation? Anderson explores her own riddles by connecting parallel lines of thought: between a diving board accident that puts her younger self in traction and trying to pinpoint the one moment she thought her mother loved her. How Kierkegaard’s observation that “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards” recontextualizes a Lou Reed song she doesn’t cover, but lifts wholesale from Ecstasy. Then there are paradoxes she leaves unresolved: casually mentioning she’s seen three ghosts in her lifetime, but only reveals the identity of one. How the meaning of a repressed memory – the self-serving nature of storytelling – negates the driving force of her entire career. And what is the meaning of Anderson’s dream, in which she invents a way for doctors to sew Lolabelle into her stomach so that she can give birth to her? “It’s just the way…things had to be,” Anderson notes sadly. I think of Ruby and I understand. Like Lou and Laurie, my wife and I never had children either. A PLUS

Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (Sub Pop) “If there was nothing left to lose/Then you’d have something to prove,“ coos Victoria Legrand to the twirling majorette on the bewitching opening grabber, and she’s not kidding. What I don’t understand is why August’s dull Depression Cherry garnered such strong notices from the usual suspects (Pitchfork, cough cough) and this one, released a scant three months later, has been completely ignored – is everyone embarrassed about overrating them then that they’re hedging their bets now? In any case, this has to be the nuttiest marketing scheme by an indie rock band to date – it’s like Springsteen decided to drop Human Touch in autumn as an apology for putting his fans to sleep with Lucky Town in the summer. And yet it gets weirder: without sounding drastically different, this material, supposedly recorded during the Depression Cherry sessions yet not considered “outtakes” or a “companion album” by the duo, has me scratching my head in a side-by-side comparison. What exactly makes this one superior to its drab predecessor? Slightly more emphasis on the backbeat? More attention to melodic detail? Chewier chord progressions? Legrand’s casual use of the word “peridot” (gem-quality olivine, a deep green, magnesium-rich mineral)? The songs are on average a measly five to ten beats-per-minute faster? It isn’t a peppier philosophical outlook, that’s for sure (first couplet: “Imitation red carnation/Nothing is new and neither are you”). The differences are subtle – as you’d figure with this band, probably too subtle. Yet this recaptures the stately grandeur of Bloom without sallying further into “the larger stages and bigger rooms” they complained about crafting their music for in the note they published on their website – this sounds more organic and “homemade” without falling into the trap of being chintzy. Now if only the majorette didn’t drop le bâton on the well-titled “Elegy to the Void.” B PLUS

Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (OGM Recordings) Especially since they’ve been dormant since 2005’s excellent The Craft, this Sacramento duo’s undiminished chops are pretty inspiring from guys on my side of forty – like, say, Steely Dan resuming after an equivalent amount of time on Two Against Nature, they’ve lost nothing musically or lyrically, with the enjambment-loving Gift of Gab spitting out breakneck rhymes so rapidly the transcribers on RapGenius have been throwing in the towel and resigning themselves to a parade of bracketed question marks. So given this constitutes their fourth full-length in a decade and a half, I’m chomping at the bit for the two other volumes they promise in this fan-funded trilogy in the next two years. Yet though I’m hurt that they stoop to the moldy canard that critics don’t have the talent they do and therefore should keep their opinions to themselves (I thought we compared musicians to each other rather than to ourselves, but never mind) I’m nevertheless moved to point out they waste far too much time reminding us how dope they are – content does occasionally present itself as a problem, especially if they’re going to waste a couplet on the presumed color of Jesus’ skin like it was 1991. But Chief Xcel’s old school beats and samples are so strong such nitpicking will only occur to you if you stop and think about it. And anyway, I approve of sentiments like: “Funky like Good Times, Soul Train, or What’s Happening/Darker than the random check of passengers/Traveling first-class/Blacker than the President/Well, half of him.” And before you inquire about the blackness of that episode of What’s Happening where Re-Run humiliated the gang by bootlegging a Doobie Brothers gig, send out good vibes that consequential installments contain more material like the grim "Escape,” about an aging gangsta operating past his sell-by date: “Being respected as an OG/Someone no one dares/To cross, but what he doesn’t realize is/No one cares.” A MINUS

Eric Church: Mr. Misunderstood (EMI Nashville) Between the thinly-veiled racial paranoia of “Dark Side,” the unnecessarily misogynistic tone poem about Nashville, and the noxious cover art modeled from action movie posters, 2014’s The Outsiders was exactly the type of reactionary horseshit Church dodged (or at least muted) on the 2011 breakthrough Chief. Released in physical form solely to the members of his fan club but available to everyone else via iTunes, this gets back to basics, with a twist – first track imagines an alienated teenager who consoles himself with Elvis Costello, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Wilco, with the latter’s Jeff Tweedy singled out for being “a real bad mother.” Later, the stack of vinyl a girlfriend leaves behind in “Record Year” – a basic country music conceit, right? – turns out to contain not just Willie and Waylon but Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. Some may find such references as apologetic pandering to Liberal rock critic types, but in a genre in which cynical citations of classic country songs are offered as actual lyrics (did anyone actually believe Brad Paisley when he claimed he broke down crying recording “This is Country Music?”) this is a startling declaration of faith from someone who lives for strong melodies with a good story attached. I could do without the bloated melodrama “Knives of New Orleans,” narrated by yet another one of Church’s good-men-pushed-too-far – scared white men with itchy trigger fingers should not be romanticized as underdogs. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind the cornball closer about all the things Church has learned from his three year old son – “Say ‘I love you’ all day long/And when you’re wrong, you should just say so” – because it’s the only time he realizes empathy is for other people, rather than something you want people to give to you. “Love’s in Need of Love Today” – first song on Key of Life, remember Eric? A MINUS

Leonard Cohen: Can’t Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (Columbia) This octogenerian has taken his sepulchral croak all over the world since his ex-manager absconding with his life’s savings coaxed him out of the Mt. Baldy Zen Centre, but how much of it should be documented? The two-disc Live in London was definitive, but the 2010 quickie Songs from the Road, released a mere fourteen months later, shuffled his most overexposed tracks (“Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “Bird on a Wire,” arrrgh) into a deck of minor classics to no great effect. And 2014’s three-disc Live in Dublin chronicled nothing exciting other than a guessing game as to what major metropolis might generate this sacred cash cow’s next doorstop. But this strange beast, assembled from concerts and sound checks, really does attempt to present itself as “new” product: one bemused comedy routine (good for a laugh), two recent copyrights (negligible), two covers (would you believe George Jones?) and two more minor classics (“Night Goes On” and “Joan of Arc”), led by three songs you might have missed on I’m Your Man, The Future, etc. because stronger songs upstaged them, but sound terrific here with the help of Cohen’s crack touring band. I’m especially taken by the brilliant “Field Commander Cohen,” written for New Skin for the Old Ceremony in response to his time in Israel and, given his later role in a controversy over twinned concerts at Tel Aviv and the West Bank, I fantasize about being an envoy to Ariel Sharon types to lay down their guns for bourgeoisie pleasures: “Waiting rooms and ticket lines/Silver bullet suicides/And messianic ocean tides/And racial roller-coaster rides/And other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.” One thing about Fidel Castro, the putative subject of that verse – he never wasted much time “working for the Yankee Dollar.” Put a fiver in an old man’s cap, will ya? A MINUS

Drive-by Truckers: It’s Great to be Alive! (ATO) Based on the RIAA’s very strange calculating practices, in which each disc of a release counts as one copy sold, Bruce Springsteen’s Live 1975/1985 has sold thirteen million units – this boils down approximately to four million actual copies, mostly as a five-disc vinyl or a three-disc CD set. So however many beads you swipe to the right on your abacus, this item materialized on a shitload of coffee tables, leaving me to wonder – how often did fans rummage through it at the time, and how often have they listened to it since? Tallying up roughly to an epic three hours and thirty-five minutes (longer than Dances with Wolves but shorter than Lawrence of Arabia), this three-disc set, which supposedly recreates the experience of an actual Truckers show rather than documenting a year-by-year artist evolution, clocks in at a more modest three hours and a quarter – realistically, how much utility is there in that, even for fanatics? Yet I’m sure the fanatics have already picked this package up – like the Boss, these Alabamans do inspire rabid devotion in their base. More or less foam-flecked at the mouth for them myself, I’ll objectively note two-thirds of this reprises songs from their four best albums without redefining them, and that it offers no new originals or covers to compensate, save for the minor “Runaway Train,” from Hood and Cooley’s old band Adam’s House Cat. But the remaining fifteen songs recapitulated from their lesser albums are impressively choice – Hood’s brutal “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” about the pissed-off working class of Huntsville toiling in the shadow of the Marshall Space Flight Center, Cooley’s “Birthday Boy,” told from the point of view of a cynical stripper offering to wipe the nose of the mama’s boy too nervous to know what to do with his hands, and many others. And the band resists the temptation to squeeze a bunch of material into a small space – an hour for each disc is the perfect length. Sure, they do tour to death – I’ve had plenty of chances to see them myself. But I work retail five nights a week, and I don’t get out much. Hood and Cooley, who’ve spent their entire lives singing the working class blues they know so well, would understand. A MINUS

Future: DS2 (A1/Freebandz/Epic) Boy, am I naive. Supposedly a sequel to his download-only Dirty Sprite mixtape, Atlanta’s Nayvadius Wilburn shortened the title of this blockbuster sequel to a three-character acronym because he was nervous Coca-Cola’s legal team might force him to blow some commas, apostrophes, umlauts, and various other bits of punctuation on trademark violation. Why, I thought – doesn’t “sprite” refer to the elfish, mythological creature? Nope, he’s really alluding to his boy Drake’s favorite product endorsement – which Wilburn and other junkies mix with the purple-hued cough syrup Actavis, supposedly discontinued because of its rampant abuse, but findable if, like Wilburn, you’ve got connections. Some muse whether or not the unrelenting monkey on his back might be digging harder into his shoulder blades because of his painful breakup with Ciara, especially since the first track candidly boasts “I chose the dirty over you” as he pisses and sees codeine coming out. But there’s a serious chicken-egg paradox in effect here – Wilburn’s slavish devotion to the “M.O.E.” code (“money over everything”) reveals a more twisted pathology, particularly in a deep-seated paranoia not only toward outsiders to the perceived loyalty of his friends, a theme that appears often enough that suggests a level of self-awareness. Mind you, after repeated listenings I’m still not sure how many layers of consciousness this troubled man has – when he needs therapy turns not to Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years a Slave, but Alexander McQueen, the late fashion designer, and his disturbing shout-out to overdosed rapper and friend A$AP Yams is: “Love live A$AP Yams/I’m on that codeine right now.” With his spare music and tuneless delivery reinforcing his anomie, this is the sound of a black hole sucking everything in its path – drugs, pussy, a false sense of security – into the event horizon. That Wilburn knows the cycle won’t end until he’s dead or in jail only makes it more compelling. A disquieting glimpse into one man’s season in hell, here are a few pages from the diary of a damned soul. A

Jlin: Dark Energy (Planet Mu) Jerilynn Patton’s unnerving music is often described in the context of Chicago’s “footwork” subgenre, a form of electronica related to street contests in which quick-stepping dancers showcase their best moves. This is useful, but I’m more fascinated by the fact she hails from Gary, Indiana. Located in the state’s northwestern Lake County, the “City in Motion” is most famous for being the birthplace of the Jackson clan, but it’s also one of the the centers of the American steel industry, and much like Flint, Michigan, fell apart economically when the industry shifted much of its operations overseas. Currently, the city’s demographic is eight-five percent African-American, disproportionately high compared to the national average, which is about thirteen percent. Patton, who is both black and works at a steel mill, firmly denies her churning, industrial backdrops have anything to do with the disquieting music of conveyor belts and blast furnaces, describing her music to Fact’s Laurent Fintoni as coming from an emotional place, “the belly of the beast.” Yet there’s something coldly mechanical even in the subtle Afro-Cuban influence, which juxtaposes 6/8 figures over 4/4 rhythms to nerve-wracking effect. I’m also struck that she limits her samples to the stray disembodied voice, and that two of them address a daughter’s relationship to her mother: one from the horror movie The Ring (“You don’t want to hurt anyone,” “But I do, and I’m sorry”), another from Mommie Dearest (“I am not one of your fans!”), and neither played for camp or ho-hum shock horror. It may be a minor record, but she’s a major talent, and either way someone needs to send her demos to Beyonce or Kanye pronto – this is one woman who needs to get the hell out of town. A MINUS

Peaceful Solutions: Barter 7 (free download) For comedic purposes, let’s do a quick recap. L'il Wayne, known to his mama as D'wayne Carter, releases a string of numbered albums titled The Carter. While his sequel to the lukewarmly-received The Carter V languishes in legal and label limbo, his shameless idolator Jeffrey “Young Thug” Williams considers christening his first release for Atlantic Records The Carter VI as an homage, but because Wayne can afford better lawyers, at the last minute alters its title to Barter 6 because Bloods find any word that begins with the letter c a “burseword” (what silly bunts!). Meanwhile, somewhere in Brooklyn, the alt-rap duo Peaceful Solutions name their new opus Barter 7, because, why not? “Peaceful Solutions” is the new handle of the former Kool and Kass, appropriated from the title of their highly amusing 2013 mixtape. Confused? Isn’t that the idea? Guys like these don’t have neat and tidy discographies – their output is akin to magazines in a dentist’s office, stray issues lying across a white plastic cube table, bent and thumbed-through, arranged in no particular order, entire weeks and months missing. But to those of us who have been following Kool AD’s scattershot and somewhat repetitive post-Das Racist career, 2014’s Right OK served as a kind of summation, an anthology of his choicest jokes, forcing him to start from scratch. In other words, no more jokes about Justin Bieber, Drake’s pathetic beginnings on DeGrassi, or the Maybach Music mixtape assembly line, but plenty of new yuks, my favorite being a parody of Trina’s “Real One” in which he rolls out an uproarious Auto-Tuned marathon of minutely-varied and often muddled brags about his authenticity: “First verse I said 'I’m deep like a Navy SEAL’/I’m a real one/So then I was about to rhyme that before the hook came I was about to say/'At the club like a baby seal’/Cause I’m a real one/Cause I used to club baby seals.” If that doesn’t make you chuckle, consider once again Club Bandcamp isn’t charging a two-drink minimum. Although when Kool requests several times in a breakdown for silent partner Kassa to “spit some boars,” make sure you’re not sitting in the front row. A MINUS

Honorable Mentions

The B-52’s: Live! 8-24-1979 (Rhino) Ricky’s so on fire you’ll wish Kate and Cindy had stayed in tune on “Rock Lobster” (“52 Girls,” “Devil in my Car”) ***

Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home (Hardly Arts) From digging casual sex to finding it wanting – not much of a story arc, is there? (“Cool Slut,” “Time to Go Home”) **

Motorhead: Bad Magic (UDR) If the devil’s in your rear view, put the pedal to the metal (“Fire Storm Hotel,” “Sympathy for the Devil”) *

Trash

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings (Deluxe Edition) Previous Nirvana exploitations have been notable for not being especially exploitative – from 1994’s MTV Unplugged in New York to 2009’s Live at Reading, one gets the sense that no matter how much Courtney Love and Dave Grohl squabbled, they knew they had an important legacy to protect. Conceived as the “soundtrack” to Brett Morgen’s documentary (also in quotes, perhaps?) of the same name, this ragtag collection of fragments, noodlings, and endless stretches of mental masturbation is a greater transgression than the dribs and drabs on the With the Lights Out box set, which at least offered, you know, songs. Here we have stoned ramblings, Roarschach blobs, varispeed experiments, juvenile stabs at improvisational comedy, and a skin-crawling version of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” that would have made me call Child Protection Services. Its most accomplished piece of music is a painful spoken word piece about false bravado and sexual humiliation more revealing than anything else here, especially when you can hear Cobain turn the page solely to get to the final sentence (“I hated everyone, for they were so phony”). It’s followed by the grunge version of “We Three Kings” – out of tune, of course. E

Lana del Rey: Honeymoon (Interscope) My Lana del Rey problem is similar to my Melissa McCarthy problem. Some argue that for a heavy-set woman to garner leading roles in films constitutes a sociocultural breakthrough, others counter that every single comedic role she has taken has been written specifically for an overweight woman, and that her girth figures into the punchline of many of her jokes. For my own part, neither of these two points of view are relevant, because McCarthy’s movies offend me only on one basic level: they aren’t funny. A woman who falls over on a motorbike because her heft throws off her balance – how is that remotely witty? Similarly, I don’t care whether the florid, romantic fatalism of Lizzie Grant’s alter ego is good for feminism or sets women back to the dark ages, whether she’s “sincere” or “ironic.” Quoting Goffin/King’s “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” or bemoaning how she fucked her way to the top fails creatively both ways – if she’s sardonically role-playing she’s not saying anything particularly new or compelling, and if she’s writing from heartfelt personal experience, she’s pathetic, and her Marilyn-Monroe-Goes-to-Julliard vocalizations and Julie London-styled arrangements of her collaborators only make things worse. 2011’s Born to Die at least had the benefit of coming first, while 2013’s Ultraviolence boasted two undeniably seductive tracks: “West Coast,” which incorporated an actual tempo change, and “Brooklyn Baby,” which hooked me because I’m a sucker for songs that romanticize Lou Reed. The tempos here are unbelievably turgid, while the references are perplexing, and arbitrary when they’re not ridiculous: A History of Violence, “Ground Control to Major Tom,” “Rapper’s Delight,” “Lay Lady Lay,” T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the oral sex conceit of “Like a Prayer,” and in the dire “God Knows I’ve Tried,” two Eagles titles. Rhyming “ghetto” with “Art Deco” – is that a joke? When she rhymes “ciao amore” with – I’m not kidding – “cacciatore,” is she referring to the chicken dish, or is she aware that word translates into Italian as “hunter?” Who cares? Opening line of the year: “We both know it’s not fashionable to love me.” B MINUS

Grimes: Art Angels (4AD) Though this is more fully formed than 2012’s Visions, I’m a little alarmed that from her pre-pubescent squeals to middle school epiphanies the art angel of Claire Boucher’s better nature is a j-pop princess gunning to cross over. Especially since her twee electropop negates the possibility she’s playing this role for irony, I have no idea what strong-minded female critics see in her – the popularity of an act like Tokyo Girls Style could only be possible in a country where middle-aged businessmen sneak off to Akihabara sex shops to grab a pair of used panties from one of those creepy vending machines. Is this philosophically akin to that demonstration I once saw on television about young Muslim-American women choosing to wear or not wear the hijab – that when it comes down to it, it’s “her choice?” Beats me. As for what male critics might see in her, that they spend too much time wanking to anime porn presents itself as an all too-real possibility. B MINUS

Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (Rhythm Nation/BMG) From “Let’s Wait Awhile” to “Throb” and cupped breasts on the cover of Rolling Stone was quite a fascinating journey, but this snoozy reunion with Jam/Lewis ponders what she doesn’t know much about – “The Great Forever,” or something like that. In other developments, if you ever wanted to know what Michael would have sounded like with botox injections in his larynx, you now have your answer. B MINUS

St. Germain: St. Germain (Nonesuch) Ludovic Navarre’s idea– admittedly a great one – is to do for African music what Moby did for blues and gospel on Play. Now if only his highest aspiration wasn’t to land a spot on the next Buddha Bar compilation. B MINUS

The Mantles: All Odds End (Slumberland) Initially, I warmed to this because its mild glow recalled the naivete of the great New Zealand bands. Except this ain’t 1986, this quartet hails from San Francisco, and their “naivete” isn’t quite organic or willful to justify what it really signifies: they can’t write or play. C PLUS

Trust Fund: Seems Fair (Turnstile) American-inspired British indie rock has always seemed a little too neatnick for my tastes, but the right singer and songs might compensate for that. Ellis Jones’ squeaky tenor is a little too appropriate to someone who describes his bedtime piss as “doing as wee.” C PLUS

Neon Indian: Vegas Intl. Night School (Mom + Pop) A few weeks ago, my boss informed me that Indians “always” seemed to fill out customer surveys. Wondering how scientific his data was – if he had tracked every single Indian customer in the store, divining their DNA through security cameras and whatnot – I asked him if he meant Native-Americans or those who hailed from the country of Gandhi and Bollywood. Part of his reply involved breaking out into what I assumed was an authentic rendition of a rain dance ceremony, his open palm striking his pursed lips as he emitted a low, monotonic hum. So for the purposes of clarity, I should probably tell you what kind of Indian this Mexican-born electropop dude is: the kind that really digs Howard Jones. C

Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (Warner Music Norway) If you call “compositions” that split the difference between Frédéric and Kate Chopin “love songs” this lyric: “Here I stand with a gun in my hand/Waiting for the water to calm.” Wouldn’t it be ironic if Kate Bush pushed her in? C

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Sunday, November 15, 2015

Anonymous asked: Top 10 favorite albums?

Answering this question is so tricky, because one is trapped between picking things like Rubber Soul and Highway 61 Revisited (accurate answers, but boring ones) and picking records comforting to you personally (things from my childhood/teenage years, like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or The Queen Is Dead). I selected these ten because they mean something to me, they pushed me forward in my musical “education,” and they’re flat out great records.

1. The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I was raised to believe country music wasn’t too cool, but this record changed all of that. The first time I heard Gram Parsons’ voice, it truly moved my spirit. Because of this (and I don’t normally do this) hunt down the deluxe version on Sony (2 cds) because they contain Parsons’ original vocals on several songs that McGuinn had to re-record himself for legal reasons. “Hickory Wind” and the Parsons original version of “One Hundred Years From Now” – I could hear those over and over again.

2. The Disco Years, Vol. 1: Turn the Beat Around. I wasn’t raised to believe dance music was too cool either. I guess the Pet Shop Boys might have softened me up (Very could be on this list) but they are intellectuals trying to put things over. KC and Vicki Sue Robinson and Thelma Houston just want to entertain, and what’s wrong with that? My love life improved after I bought this record, that’s for sure.

3. R.E.M.: Out of Time. Every song on this record is magic. Yes, Murmur is more “important,” and Document is notable because they actually started writing lyrics that were “about” things. But these songs are absolutely gorgeous. My favorite, not counting “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People” (you know where you can stick it, college kids), is “Country Feedback,” a brooding masterpiece that was apparently improvised in one take.

4. Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. There were the days I didn’t care for rap, and then this record came along. “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got” – what a spellbinding piece of music. One of the most radical, audacious records ever made.

5. Sebadoh: Bakesale. This is on the list for the dumbest of reasons: I fell in and out of love to it. “Careful” (Jason L.) and “Together and Alone” (Lou Barlow) – those could have been observations on what I was going through at the time.

6. The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs. Three CDs, almost every song is a classic, styles shift and change with the singers. How can I possibly leave this one off the list? This record kept me company when a girlfriend of mine was in Japan teaching English, so I guess you could say this was a soundtrack to my life also.

7. Kanye West: The College Dropout. As someone who wasted his college education, this record…well, let’s say it signifies. “Allow myself to introduce myself” is one of the funniest lines ever. And the music, absolutely inexhaustible.

8. Brad Paisley: American Saturday Night. One of the greatest albums of the last few years. Actually makes me tear up on several songs, without fail.

9. Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra. Of all the records I’ve reviewed in the last few years (since the beginning of A Downloader’s Diary), this one really stands out. Not perfect, but just a remarkable piece of work. Probably the greatest artist to emerge in the ‘10s (that I can think of off the top of my head).

10. The Go-Betweens: The Friends of Rachel Worth. Figured I’d end with one of my favorite bands and albums that aren’t the usual Beatles/Velvet Underground. I saw Robert and Grant perform as a duo a year before this album came out, and they did “He Lives My Life.” Rarely have I been so honored to hear a new song. I never forgot it.

This was off the top of my head, written in about ten minutes. I figured it would be more “fun” that way. Left off the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Miles Davis, Prince, Al Green, Sonic Youth, Youssou N’Dour – all huge favorites of mine. I will say that the new Kendrick Lamar album could be on this list – given me a great deal of pleasure for the last few months.

Hope I’ve hipped you to a few things you might not have heard!

Michael.

Postscript: Court and Spark? Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Maggot Brain? Submarine Bells? Dusty in Memphis? Katy Lied? Radio City? Specialists in all Styles? Milestones? I could go on…

Thursday, October 29, 2015

A Downloader’s Diary (43)

by Michael Tatum

A little late by my usual five to six week turnaround, but I spent a great deal of time on two records below, one of which happens to be the best album of 2015, the other which happens to be the worst. I promise to be back with the next column by the end of the year, with a few surprise bonus installments, including perhaps notes for Pazz and Jop, assuming of course it’s in the works. My top ten is starting to look (and sound) pretty damn good.

The Chills: Silver Bullets (Fire) Between the death of his second drummer, his former label yanking financial backing in the middle of a 1992 tour, anti-depressants, alcohol, low-grade home-cooked opiates, and a staggering thirty-three different lineups of his band, Martin Phillipps has seen more than his share of anguish. Currently clean and sober but in stage four of the Hepatitis C he contracted from a fellow junkie, he told The Guardian’s Michael Hann last year, “If I’m around in 10 years, I think I’ll be very lucky.” Yet even though the last proper Chills album dropped in 1996, between occasional concert appearances and uploaded tracks-in-progress, he never quite closed the book on what without question remains New Zealand’s greatest rock band. And now we have the impossible: this impassioned return to form, as sweeping in its modest grandeur as the sublime 1990 masterpiece Submarine Bells. Musically, the hypnotic guitar and keyboard lines aren’t played so much as plotted, labyrinthine constructions that wend and detour, criss-crossing latticeworks to get lost in. Lyrically, Phillipps retains his gift for naturalistic metaphors, a Shelley or Tennyson beamed into the twenty-first century, whether he’s writing about the comfort of a sleeping woman’s “warm waveforms” or the despairing “underwater wasteland” of American class war. He offers an uncommonly tender gesture of atonement to the tomboy he taunted in grade school, but now knows was more confident in her skin that he’s ever been in his. And though he remains bitter toward Americans unaware that Wall Street’s gravy train has long been de-railed, more than anything else this radiates gratitude for this small shot at redemption. Spiritual but without much use for the literal Almighty, his only prayer isn’t to the Man in in the Sky for another decade, but to Gaia to forgive us for the damage that won’t be apparent until after he’s dead. A

Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD) “Combien de temps?” asked Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s 1983 hunger song “Talk About the Passion.” The next year, Lionel Richie wrote the more forthright “As God has shown us by turning stone to bread/So we all must lend a helping hand” for Willie Nelson and Al Jarreau – a slightly different approach, no? Yet R.E.M. couldn’t be mumbling obscurantists forever – eventually they had to embrace a more direct avenue to connect to larger audiences. Although Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox shares with Stipe a stream-of-consciousness approach to crafting lyrics (please Bradford, not “automatic writing” – that’s for Ouija board apostles), in the past what we might call his “wall” has not been, as in Stipe’s case, what psychiatrists refer to as “clanging,” i.e. randomly associating words by sound rather than concept, but utilizing “transgression” as an emotional avoidance scheme – you know, like playing “My Sharona” for an hour to ridicule a heckler, or titling their debut record Turn it Up Faggot. Supposedly spurned to reconsidering his life by a near-fatal car accident, this dispenses with the occult and aspires to be lyrical: “I’ve been spending too much time out on the fading frontier/Will you tell me when you find out how to recover the lost years,” he declares wistfully, resolving to “live his life” regardless. There’s even a lovely song that appropriates the old folks homes of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet zine for a metaphor, climaxing with a gorgeous, fuzzed-up harpsichord passage that you might say balances the band’s newfound expressionism with its trademark experimentalism. But though I won’t argue this is their most exquisite record – prettier than R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People if not Out of Time, and certainly weirder than either – the indecisive rhythms, whether live or programmed, don’t quite carry the melodies emotionally, but plod them forward. So I suspect this will appeal more to Deerhunter zealots than it will attract new converts. As for myself, I’m addicted solely to 2013’s grungy Monomania – and mourn the departure of one-stand-only lead guitarist Frankie Broyles, who would have tempered this lyricism with as much noise as Cox would have let him get away with. A MINUS

Robert Forster: Songs to Play (Tapete) In a 2006 interview I would cite if it weren’t for the brief lifespan of online music magazines, Grant McLennan noted that when “Bobby plays you five songs and four of them are the best he’s ever written, that’s a pretty good start to a Go-Betweens record.” Forster added that McLennan traditionally would offer as many as two dozen completed songs during their pre-production sessions, and that he (Forster) would whittle them down to the best five. That’s how their non-collaborative Lennon/McCartney-style partnership functioned – separately, with McLennan a one-man assembly line and Forster a more painstaking craftsman. Now McLennan is dead, and Forster waited seven years before releasing a follow up to 2008’s elegiac The Evangelist, because by his own admission the accessible, ingratiating melodies that were his late partner’s specialty don’t come to him as easily. Here, the modest tea-and-crumpet arrangements support Forster’s amiable baritone like embroidered throw pillows on a coffee shop sofa – his Velvet Underground cops sound as civil as that simulated Mariachi trumpet on “A Poet Walks.” Granted, the mundane violin passages of Forster’s wife Karin do make me wonder what delicate filigrees the more accomplished Amanda Brown would have coaxed from the same space. But I’m delighted how much mileage this lifelong bohemian ekes out of bemused self-deprecation – his beatnik existence is demystified as often as it’s romanticized. Sure, he’s a “songwriter on the run” who skipped the ballet to polish up his memoir, but what kind of free-spirited troubadour lives by a credo as banally workaday as “I got a notebook/I got a light?” Or would rhyme the sweeping declaration “A poet walks” with the more prosaic “shits and talks,” and then cap it off with a breezily aloof “just a thought?” He claims only to stop for petrol or Dylan once he “gets to moving,” but he never gives you the impression he would overtake Sammy Hagar on the Autobahn – more likely he’d wave politely and let him pass. Usually when rockers cry out “All right!” it’s to express and/or generate excitement. When this one does – graciously, of course – he’s telling the band, “Oh my, that’s pretty good.” And indeed, it is. A MINUS

Heems: Eat Pray Thug (Megaforce) “When I go to AA man, I always feel too dark,” complains this son of Indian immigrants, an offhand revelation illustrating why his long-awaited “proper” debut (after two free mixtapes) arrives carrying so much psychological weight. While his former partner Kool AD remains enamored with flip surrealism, puckish humor, and off-kilter freestyling, Himanshu Suri instead chooses (step four) to make a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of himself, which on this record includes working through his drug and alcohol issues, confessing to mental health struggles, deconstructing an imploding relationship, and wondering if he should have sought counseling after watching the Twin Towers fall from Stuyvesant High School, two blocks away. Unlike Suri, my own vantage point was from an insurance office’s meeting room, the visual an antiquated combination VCR/television set, which was distressing enough with the volume turned down – I can’t fathom what it would have been like for someone whose school served as triage, who moans “I seen things that I never wanna see again/I heard things that I never wanna hear again.” And while for most of us, particularly those of us outside of New York City proper, the aftermath consisted of drifting though vague numbness to a surreal detachment – the most significant impact on my life was consistently getting frisked every time I went through airport security – for Suri, a post 9/11 world meant being lumped with the “Islamists” of Fox News saber-rattling, shopping for American flags emblazoned with the legend “I am not Osama,” and wondering after another Pakistani cab driver was beaten to death if he might be next. With dense, difficult, but ultimately rewarding music amalgamating the best of both Bombay and Brooklyn, he drops the second reference to Alex Haley’s Roots this year on a hip hop record: “They want a shorter version/They want a nickname/They want to ‘Toby’ me like Kunta Kinte.” Says the rapper who goes by the name of “Heems” – who knows adopting a catchy moniker isn’t merely a good way to endear yourself to the advertising agency for whom you do data entry: it’s also crucial to winning over the crossover audience, i.e. you and me. Rarely has an identity crisis been a more powerful affirmation of the human spirit. A

Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope) To begin, that “butterfly” trapped underneath the jewel tray as if encased in a stylized shadowbox is actually an Ascalapha odorata: a black witch moth. So you say Compton’s favorite son fails the grade in lepidoptery – what about sociocultural analysis, his supposed raison d'etre? Do I believe, as he posits in “Wesley’s Theory,” that America is far too hard on noveau riche black men for mismanaging money, because as struggling inner city kids they didn’t learn basic economic lessons in school? Not really – those lessons are the responsibility of parents. Even so, Wesley Snipes was the son of an aircraft engineer and a teacher’s assistant, a graduate of Orlando, Florida’s prestigious Jones High School. Do I approve of Lamar using a woman as a metaphor for the temptations of greed, power, and money? Absolutely not (and by the way, Kendrick – the white bar streaking across the wings of that moth indicates your specimen is female). But more than any competing media artifact, this music gets me thinking. I recall watching an argument between two black men on a Santa Monica Boulevard bus, one proud his talented son might someday be drafted by the NBA, the other angry investing too much hope in a pie-eyed dream would be unrealistic for his son and detrimental to the black community. I remember Taylor Branch claiming to Stephen Colbert the billions the NCAA generated from unpaid college athletes being tantamount to slavery. I remember Arthur Agee of the documentary Hoop Dreams, plucked from an inner city playground when he was fifteen, held back from graduating because the high school that recruited him to play basketball – and promised a scholarship – demanded $1,300 in back tuition his family couldn’t afford. I’m betting Lamar knows stories like these and many more, and those experiences provide the backdrop for a sprawling, ambitious, musically varied album that even months after first listening never stops unfolding. I’m especially taken by, to choose one among many standouts, the brutal “The Blacker the Berry,” which begins with a painful litany of broadly-drawn black stereotypes, then segues to Lamar declaiming in the voice of the archetypal street thug he’s “the biggest hypocrite of 2015” because although he might weep for Trayvon Martin, “gang banging make me a kill a nigga blacker than me.” And this isn’t a stray track tucked away on the back half of a record – this is a hit single. That popular artists have the freedom to express such devastating sentiments shows how far we’ve come. That it remains necessary to do so is a disgrace. That Lamar is conscious of and can make triumphant art of the paradox doesn’t make him 2015’s biggest hypocrite – but one of its greatest heroes. If he wants to hatch from a cocoon rather than a chrysalis, he’s more than earned that right. A PLUS

Jill Scott: Woman (Blues Babe/Atlantic) Geffen Records urged the Roots to replace Scott with Erykah Badu on their 1999 classic “You Got Me” because they thought the single would make a bigger commercial dent with a proven brand name attached – even though Scott wrote the chorus. The band went out of their way to rectify that slight on their live album from the same year, assiduously explaining to the audience who was responsible for what, yet even now, the native Philadelphian has never captured the public imagination as much as her Dallasite counterpart. You’d never see Scott in a head wrap unless she was playing a TV role that required one, nor would you see her arrested for disrobing in Dealey Plaza, nor would she date a series of rappers in a string of high-profile relationships. Partial to comfy sweaters and somewhat critical of hip hop even though she got her start in that scene, Scott is very much in the mold of the girl next door, so it’s easy to take her for granted. Yet although she’s never produced anything as stellar as Badu’s 2000 landmark Mama’s Gun, she’s also been a hell of a lot more consistent – not counting the dregs coughed up periodically by her former label, she’s never released anything remotely approaching a mediocre album. Sure, she’s staunchly aspiring to middle-class R&B a la Alicia Keys, but she displays more personality than that genre usually requires: bragging about recipes she’s nabbed from Epicurious, longing for a night with her man because she had to “reprimand a grown-up,” telling that ex she’s fucking solely for “Closure” and better not expect those strawberries in agave in the morning. Though the extended pussy metaphor “Wild Cookie” makes a dandy beginning, the interlude about her man’s double standards should have been developed into a full-fledged song. And the lame attempted Stax/Volt number “Run Run Run” has nothing on her cover of Carl Hall’s (really, Lorraine Ellison’s) “You Don’t Know Nothing About Love.” A MINUS

Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (Harbinger Sounds) Remember when we all thought Mike Skinner of the Streets represented the voice of the British working class? Well, funny thing about that – Skinner, who once described his upbringing in the Barratt residential estates in West Heath as “not poor but not much money about, really boring,” now seems as comfortably dull as Noel Gallagher. Hailing from Grantham, the same market town that gave the world a grocer’s daughter named Margaret Thatcher, and looking far more grizzled and sinewy than his forty-three years, Jason Williamson is my kind of working class hero: where Skinner toiled behind fast food counters and Gallagher put in time as a roadie, Williamson worked in a benefits office. In other words, while Skinner and Gallagher collected the dole in their leaner years, Williamson has been on both sides of the counter. While curiously remaining somewhat mum on Skinner, to whom he has been lazily compared, he’s blasted Gallagher in the UK newspapers as “an elitist apologist, a withered victim of luxury” and “a secret Tory.” I mention all of this because Williamson, hectoring and haranguing in a tangy East Midlands accent against Andrew Fearn’s minimalist backdrops, strikes me as the first British rock and roll hero since John Lydon to (as Lydon himself once sang) “really mean it, man,” and like Lydon, class isn’t just his pet subject, it’s his driving force. Castigating aging ‘90s Brit pop heroes as “old cows graz[ing] on grass from the boom” and indicting them with a brutal “You pretend to be proud of ya own culture/Whilst simultaneously not giving two fucks about ya own culture,” he also has harsh words for former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who resigned after controversially raising university tuition fees, but is now gunning for a political comeback: “This daylight robbery is now so fucking hateful/It’s accepted by the vast majority/In chains years from now/Who’s that tit?/Don’t matter who that tit is/He’s still with us/In our arses, in our food, in our brains and in our death/In our failure to grab hold of what fucking little we have left.” With Fearn’s terse samples hanging on for their dear lives to the bare essentials – drums, bass, and little-to-no top end – he recalls Rick Rubin’s austere early productions for Def Jam, albeit punker and more lo-fi. Which means he doesn’t want to grab your attention – he wants to stay out of the star attraction’s way. This is their eighth album, their third for their new label, and you know what I like best about them? Their indignation and outrage are so tangible and timely you can tell they’re just getting started. A MINUS

Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami (Monkeytown) It’s been said that Souleyman, not unlike Ladysmith Black Mambazo or the Ramones, mines a basic style so unwaveringly that it’s impossible even marginally differentiating one record from another. Though I haven’t sampled much of the output from the supposed 850 quickie CDs he doled out when he worked Syrian weddings, music later excerpted on loving compilations from Sublime Frequencies, his amalgam of electronic production techniques and the Syrian nuptial music known as dabke is approached differently here than on 2013’s excellent Wenu Wenu. Though at the time I praised producer Kieran “Four Tet” Hebdan for taking a hands-off approach, this new set, incredibly the prolific Souleyman’s second proper studio album, recorded in Istanbul rather than Brooklyn but remixed by western DJs, strikes me as more carefully produced even as the instrumentation leans more toward the traditional – a nice trick. It’s also a tad slower, which might disappoint the ranters, revelers, and roisterers at Bonnaroo, but might move me to describe the result as more “song-oriented” than what he’s offered previously if only I could speak Arabic. The arrangements and improvisations are certainly more detailed and thought-through, thanks not only to returning synth genie Rizan Sa'id, but also fresh new recruit Khaled Youssef, who contributes intricate lines on the electric saz (the bağlama to my Turkish readers), a stringed-instrument native to the Middle East, and a close cousin to the lute and the bouzouki. In this thrilling context, the only failure is Danny “Legowelt” Wolfers’ lame, lo-fi tweaking of the killer title cut, which sacrifices a compact, precise mix for one mired in a style its creator describes as “a hybrid form of slam jack combined with deep Chicago House, romantic ghetto technofunk and EuroHorror Soundtrack.” The remainder however, is so trenchant and persuasive it might have me pensively fingering my misbaha as Souleyman does in his videos if I actually owned one – the perfect melding of the āmīn and the hey-ho-let’s-go. Not many electronica wizards would graciously thank you for listening after a particularly banging track. This one does. A MINUS

Honorable Mentions

The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness (XO/Republic) Best production since House of Balloons, but really: if you can find a woman who will blow you all night, make you come three times, and you’re not sobbing for her to stop by 9:30, you’re in the wrong fucking business (“Losers,” “The Hills”) ***

Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (RCA) You can’t fool me with all this “condemnation of our tabloid news-obsessed society” stuff, Jazmine – I saw you tending bar on Watch What Happens: Live (“Silver Lining,” “#HoodLove”) ***

They Might Be Giants: Glean (Idlewild) So hooked on novelty this time around that when a song is actually “about” something, you notice (“All the Lazy Boyfriends,” “Good to Be Alive,” “Aaa”) **

Daniel Romano: If I’ve Only One Time Asking (New West) The problem with playing it straight: he might become Bobby Braddock, but he’ll never be George Jones (“Strange Faces,” “Learning to do Without Me”) **

Maddie & Tae: Start Here (Dot/Big Machine) Since their attention-getting hit deconstructs country cliches so well, you wonder why the rest of the record revels in them – until you realize the follow-up single ponders their careerist ambitions (“Girl in a Country Song,” “Your Side of Town”) *

Trash

Ryan Adams: Live at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note) Comprising ten songs in the physical version, an endless forty-two in the digital download, this record is damn near critic-proof – to anyone in Adams’ fawning, sycophantic claque, this is a treasure trove of sensitive, heartfelt singer-songwriting. To those of us unimpressed by his portentous tenor, nebulous tunes, self-involved lyrics, turgid tempos, and lazy instrumental technique, this is torture akin to being wrapped in a straitjacket and forced to watch a turtle on Quaaludes attempt to crawl out of a half-filled bathtub. The enraptured silence that surrounds Adams during this unceasingly lugubrious, all-acoustic showcase is unfathomable, unless they’re checking their cell phone feeds as often as he jokes. As for the revealing, self-aware between-song patter, it could make a companion disc at least as useful as 1974’s notorious Having Fun With Elvis on Stage. “We’re not gonna make it louder – you’re just gonna have to listen harder.” “I don’t remember writing [this song]. I was just super, super fucked up…and then I woke up the next day…in my serial-killer handwriting it was written on a cereal box or some cliché like that…like a cry for help.” “I don’t know if this kind of, like, sadness is interesting for this long.” “I can’t fucking play [piano] at all…in fact, when I learned this thing, I only learned what barre chords were on the black keys because there were less of them…because apparently I had something else to do like…probably drugs.” “Oh fuck, wrong key.” “This song is so sappy.” “[I’m sure] 86% of you are on Paxils [sic], so you understand about depression…you’re at a fuckin’ Ryan Adams show.” “This song is really long, so if you have to go to the bathroom, go now.” “I made this record…and I didn’t like it because it was stupid…and then I made another one and I really liked it, but it totally was stupid…and then I made another new record that just has my face on the cover.” “I don’t even know what capo position [this song] is in…I’m assuming it’s in [this one] because I’m usually too lazy to change it.” “Thank you for coming to see me play this depressing shit.” The latter of which, naturally, earns him resounding applause from the front row to the box seats, as the poor, piteous testudine sinks dejectedly under the surface of the water, glub, glub glub. D PLUS

Dr. Dre: Compton (Aftermath/Interscope) Andre Young has shelved two projects since 2001’s creatively-titled 2001, and though he credits “perfectionism” as the reason, I’m more convinced he nixed them, particularly the long-awaited Detox, because he wanted to protect his “brand.” Never one you looked to for deep thinking or original ideas, Young is less a passionate craftsman than a consummate businessman. Most of his “greatness,” at least the parts he didn’t mooch off George Clinton, belongs to his proteges. As a performer, his greatest “accomplishment” is creating and popularizing the G-funk paradigm, which from its lazy musicality to its cynical embrace of casual sexism and rationalized violence stunted hip hop evolution. Nevertheless, 2001 was the swansong for his schtick –one of the many things you can say about Eminem is that he subverted the form with irony, humor, and psychological complexity, setting a standard that made the old modes passe, as he himself illustrated on the retrogressive “horrorcore” homage Relapse. Dre was responsible for much of that disaster’s music, and don’t think its commercial failure didn’t scare him, especially when his own 2011 single “I Need A Doctor” failed to (as they say in board meetings) perform to expectations. Supposedly what this offers in penance is “consciousness,” which basically means Dre wants to impress Kendrick Lamar fans with a few gratuitous references to the injustices of police brutality. But in fact what we get mostly are retreads of the usual palaver: preaching the same small-minded rugged individualism, shutting up his numerous detractors, likening his “art” to badass street thuggery, and of course, lyrically recapitulating past successes. Meanwhile, Kendrick and Eminem rap from the back pages of their notebooks, Dre re-stages the scenario of “Kim” while stripping it of its context, and various no-names provide so much ghostwriting one suspects Eazy-E is earning some royalty points. “One day I'mma have everything” boasts one of his underlings, a brag so much more one-dimensional than anything on To Pimp a Butterfly, which doesn’t bullshit about the high price tag of the African American success story. But what do you expect? Lamar’s main man is Wallace Thurman. When Dre wants an inspirational speech (“And to do better than the next guy, I just had to kill”) he channels famed civil rights leader Jimmy Iovine. Only one mean street walked down here, and it’s not in Compton – it’s in Santa Monica. C PLUS

Muse: Drones (Warner Bros./Helium-3) I always figured this British pop-prog power trio were what Queen would have sounded like had they been into manscaping, which I suppose is one of the many things that makes them attractive to swooning teenage girls. Nevertheless, if they want to challenge their tween demographic with a concept album about the dehumanization of technological warfare, or in leader Matthew Bellamy’s words, “a modern metaphor for what it is to lose empathy,” between the football stadium fascism of their here-come-the-choppers pomp rock and their sanctimonious two-dimensional tracts, this doesn’t connect with anything resembling compassion or reason. Branding those in service as drones, psychos, reapers, and puppets but somehow never abandoning his overblown metaphors to call out the true jingoists and warmongers out by name, Bellamy is as philosophically hollow as the straw men he condemns. Ever met any Marines, Matthew? I have – many are filled with regret, guilt, and anger toward their country, far from the Orwellian stooges that populate your songs. For every unhinged sociopath there is a misplaced poet, like the literal one who read his harrowing, versified experiences to a writing group I once proctored, and who within minutes reduced us to babbling brooks. All of which reminds me that Freddie Mercury dug a man in uniform – and was smart enough to have a sense of humor about it. C PLUS

Destroyer: Poison Season (Merge) Dan Bejar is not a lounge lizard – he’s a lounge Gollum, scampering across a cramped stage in an abandoned Ramada Inn, hissing about “his precious.” I suppose this is intended to be “ironic” – but does that make it listenable? B

Lou Barlow: Brace the Wave (Joyful Noise) I was initially going to go easy on the archetypal indie rock balladeer’s best batch of tunes since the ‘90s – sure they’re essentially demos, but half a great Sebadoh album could come from them, right? Then I realized that not one song radiated the magic of 1993’s essentially-a-demo “Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)” B MINUS

Ryan Adams: 1989 (Pax-Am) I’m sure there are many bepenised twits who secretly think Adams “ennobles” Swift or some bullshit like that, but I say it’s about time he had top drawer material. Now if only he could do something about his drummer. Hell, his whole band. And his cheapjack production values. And while he’s at it, do something about being Ryan Adams. B MINUS

Tame Impala: Currents (Interscope) Evolved from being indie-rock’s Todd Rundgren to its Mannheim Steamroller. C PLUS

The Clientele: Alone and Unreal: The Best of the Clientele (Merge) In which London’s Alasdair MacLean wonders what the Left Banke would have sounded like with the Auteur’s Luke Haines as the frontman. Creepy and “beautiful,” I guess – but after seven albums, where’s their “Pretty Ballerina” or “Walk Away Renée?” C PLUS

Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle (Domino) “And while [Yannick] Ilunga frequently incorporates elements of his half-Congolese, half-Angolan ancestry, his music shouldn’t be shoved off into that condescending, colonialist hangover, ‘world music.‘” So sniffs Pitchfork’s enlightened Miles Raymer, and fair enough – but who said we King Leopold II types pined for someone on the African continent who evoked David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and Peter Gabriel? C

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Thursday, September 10, 2015

A Downloader’s Diary (42)

by Michael Tatum

Figuring I’d break up what I’d missed in 2015 in easily manageable chunks while still pushing forward, I’d envisioned this to be Afropop month. Well, it was – but indie rock came out on top. With any luck next month I’ll finally get to cases on Kendrick Lamar.

Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (Bella Union) Initially, I balked at the term “genderfluid,” not because I object to guys in dresses kissing other guys who want to feel like girls, but because of the delineation’s collegiate fustiness. Since Furman clearly cherishes the New York Dolls as much as I do, whatever happened to David Johansen’s “try-sexual,” or Arthur Kane’s delightful “I think we’re just a bunch of kids looking for a good time?” Then I remembered those French Structuralists I pretend to have read at ritzy dinner parties, particularly Ferdinand de Saussure’s “binary oppositions,” the theory that the human mind works best as a dichotomizing machine (man/woman, black/white, and so forth), and the third wave feminist critique that such thinking inherently favors the status quo. I also factored in my not-so-novel opinion that such dogmatism makes life, well, a lot less interesting. However, speaking as someone who was dragged into a junior high school football field sewer on the pretense of being the “faggot” he never was, and who later relished donning drag in a student movie because doing so (excuse the metaphor) stuck it to the macho hard line, Furman’s songs made me realize he isn’t a jaunty tourist playing dress up – this is where he lives. Or doesn’t live, as the case may be – as this record’s trenchant line “I can’t go home/Though I’m not homeless” reminds us, there are too damn many kids tossed into the street by their parents for being gay, lesbian, transgender, or indeed, “genderfluid.” Suffice to say, this epiphany occurred long after this huge leap forward in songwriting and performance convinced me this was my kind of coming out party – the kind which I’d hope would inspire everyone across the gender spectrum to break out the pleated mini-skirts and Cover Girl Colorlicious Lipstick #318 (“Eternal Ruby”). Boasting he’s a tip of a match who longs to “strike himself on something rough,” Furman declares the novelty-hungry human mind gets “way fucking sick of beauty,” suggesting that amelioration begins with “burning it and starting over again,” a process that might include the very album he’s recording. Showing up for a congressional hearing in an Indian headdress, ecstatically tearing off a dinner jacket to reveal the cheap five-dollar dress underneath, he opines to an arrangement swiped from Blind Willie Johnson that “one day I will sin no more” because “one day heaven and earth will be like one.” I’d like to think the perfect simplicity of that line would have given de Saussure pause. And if that’s not philosophical enough for you, there’s always my favorite: “Lose yourself completely, but stay alive/Ditty bop sha lang lang/Ditty bop sha lang, sha ditty lang/Ditty bop sha lang lang, ditty lang.” A

Freedy Johnston: Neon Repairman (Singing Magnet) An anachronism in the era of grunge, gangsta rap, Madonna, and then-we-called-it-techno, Johnston’s 1992 Can You Fly remains one of the greatest singer-songwriter documents – not a fossil, but a living, breathing organism, a flawless album. After that, he struggled matching that watermark, and how 1997’s spare Never Home (helmed by James Taylor/Jackson Browne buddy Danny Kortchmar) came closer than 1994’s overrated This Perfect World (produced by Nirvana/Sonic Youth vet Butch Vig) remains one of the great mysteries of rock paleontology, until you pay attention to how much punch and snap Kortchmar engendered from Stan Lynch’s snare. This new set is quieter than either of those, and too subtle by half – the only songs that leap out on first listen are the lovely “Baby, Baby Come Home” (Alan Jackson, please cover) and the wry rocker in which a luckless gambler craps out at the casino, but wins over a trailer park cutie who appreciates him for bringing ‘round a television set so antiquated he can still carry it through her front door. But after a few spins you’ll be able to recall almost every tune, from the spooky title protagonist, who considers darkness his friend not because he’s a Smiths fan but because it pays the rent, to the downcast closer that sounds like a formulaic country ballad until you notice the subject matter concerns a traumatized veteran: “You know I saw the others/Bloodying the gutter/And that’s the last thing I know.” Sure, his stasis could use a little jolt of punctuated equilibrium. But with his adenoids more relaxed in his middle age, his singing has gained so much grace and presence you won’t mind even when he spends a verse or two chewing the scenery. B PLUS

Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (Glitterbeat) When François Hollande sent French forces to quell Mali’s attempted coup by Sharia fundamentalists in January 2013, they minimalized civil unrest, enabling legislative elections to be held the following November. So the stakes aren’t as high now for Kouyaté as they were when he and his world class rock band recorded 2013’s masterful Jama Ko. “With the help of the thorn in my foot, I spring higher than anyone with sound feet,” Kierkegaard once declared, but I ask you: did the Danish philosopher ever record an album with a faction of the state military ousting the president from the capitol a half mile down the road? Between enforced curfews, random power outages, and the grim knowledge that reactionary forces could execute you merely for playing music, is it any shock that the electrifying climax of “Ne Me Fatigue Pas,” the song that Kouyate wrote in direct response to this turmoil – which I swear he nicked from the Doors – suggests Jim Morrison setting the night on fire with pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails rather than with killer weed and lava lamps? With the drums and rhythms more forceful, the arrangements denser and more complex, and new labelmate Jon Hassell providing nice texture on trumpet and keyboards on “Aye Sira Bla,” this comes reasonably close to making life during peacetime sound as urgent as it did when they thought their world was ending, even with the weak instrumental “Bassekouni” ending the record on an indecisive note. Thanks at least in part to Violet Diallo’s English and French translations, which reveal the steely lesson underlying the otherwise spirited “Te Dunia Laban,” which spells out for the extremist opposition the inevitable connection between such heroes and villains as Sekou Toure, Patrice Lumumba, and Nelson Mandela: no matter how much power you accrue in this life, sooner or later you wind up dead. A MINUS

Nellie McKay: My Weekly Reader (429) Cabaret types, they’re not like you and me, are they? I recall my good friend Scott, who back in 1987 insisted that Barbra Streisand’s self-serving The Broadway Album should rightfully win the Grammy over “Short Stuff,” his bemused epithet for Paul Simon (when I demurred Graceland was far superior, his jaw dropped indignantly). Scott later chronicled his adoration for Doris Day in a well-received one-man show, which brings me to Threepenny Opera veteran McKay, who follows her own tribute to Ms. Day with a normal-as-blueberry-pie selection of sixties covers. Given the green light, “cool” people like you and me might plump for the Kinks and the Impressions, “Candy Says” and “Alone Again Or,” but though we get the swaggering “Sunny Afternoon,” we also get “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” all performed and arranged so that naive young people might think they all sprang from the same genre, which I guess by now, they do. With McKay’s New York stomping ground represented solely by Mimi and Richard Farina (oh, I forgot Short Stuff’s commissioned “Red Rubber Ball”), much of the remainder perversely comes from the hippie claque in California, and not who you’d think either: Frank Zappa, Country Joe & the Fish, Steve Miller’s “Quicksilver Girl,” and the perennially uncool “Wooden Ships,” all gussied up in McKay’s perky lounge pop, with genders changed when she thinks it might be funny, unaltered when she thinks it might be poignant. And for timely social commentary we have her slipping in the phrase “bloviated turd” into Moby Grape’s “Murder in My Heart for the Judge,” as well as these painfully funny asides: “What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!” And: “I cannot believe I still have to protest this shit.” A MINUS

Ashley Monroe: The Blade (Warner Bros.) I’m sure you’re bored with reviewers comparing the Pistol Annies’ solo projects to each other every time a new one pops into the racks, but damn it, this time indulging the critical cliché bears rewards: if Miranda Lambert aims for the pop jugular and Angeleena Presley opted for the modest route on that fine record she self-produced with her husband, Ashley Monroe plots to take her more sophisticated vocal technique to the realm of “adult contemporary” country in the vein of Lee Ann Womack. I don’t care if Vince Gill produces her records, in the wider scheme of things that’s a commercial risk, especially considering that Monroe is only twenty-eight – three years younger than the spunkier Lambert, ten years younger than the earthier Presley, and a mere two years older than kiddish fellow traveler Kacey Musgraves, who on her disappointing new Pageant Material pretends she’s still a local girl waiting tables. Monroe’s transformation is so complete that if you took the two best songs here and subbed them for the two weakest songs on 2013’s Like a Rose, they wouldn’t fit, even the bubbly (and of course thematic) hit “On to Something Good”: “I’m better moving on than going back/I’ll ride this train till it runs out of track,” she chirps, her weed and whipped cream days behind her. If this means that she’ll subject us to borderline dreck like “Has Anybody Ever Told You,” it also means she’ll display strong command on masterful strokes like the stirring ballad “The Blade,” which is the title track for a good reason: neither Miranda nor Angaleena could have delivered it half as well. A MINUS

Giorgio Moroder: Déjà Vu (RCA) Back in the Me Decade, Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, and the unjustly forgotten Pete Bellotte made the best kind of dumb dance music – the smart kind. But though no rock critic has given this throwback anything but shade, it succeeds in ways that Moroder’s buddies in Daft Punk do not – perhaps because Moroder isn’t especially interested in making an art statement. On his own, he churns out highly generic fluff suitable for those who think “cardio” is a noun. With Sia Fuller, Kylie Minogue, and Charli XCX however, he detonates Bürgerfest skyrockets. Unlike other records where these three might cameo, you don’t get the feeling they’re cashing a paycheck or paying back an aesthetic debt: they’re doing it for love. For wallflowers and milquetoasts who carp about “songwriting” we have Mikky Ekko (who?) re-purposing Kanye West re-purposing Billie Holiday, and Matthew Koma (right, exactly) quoting Elvis Costello. And if that’s not “literary” enough for you we have the pièce de résistance, Britney Spears covering DNA tweaking Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” presumably because Britney has even less command of the English language than Giorgio does. The latter track might be the key to how you feel about this record: as students of audio engineering know, one of the charms of DNA’s original remix lay in hearing Vega’s disembodied but prepossessing, warm but technically flat contralto against synthesizers that know nothing else but the key in which they were programmed, while Britney, not unlike Darth Vader, is at this point in her career more machine than woman. When I’m feeling persnickety, I think: is this the busty automaton with whom I want to spend an intimate breakfast? Most of the time though, I think it’s glorious, especially during the break in which a heavily Auto-Tuned Moroder steps out from the behind the curtain, slaps us on der Rückseite, and boisterously welcomes us into his Bavarian ale house. Someone tell Britney that Suzanne Vega didn’t know who the fuck William Holden was either. A MINUS

Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (Merge) An excellent writer can fascinate you with a subject that would not otherwise pique your interest. For example, while repulsed by Hemingway’s gauche Death in the Afternoon (he knows where to find Madrid’s finest whores, but is oblivious to bulls being red-green colorblind), I can objectively appreciate how he connects the dots between the romance of a centuries-old tradition and his own peculiar notions of masculinity and the creative process. Something similar happens with John Darnielle’s concept album about professional wrestling – such colorful character sketches as “Foreign Object” and “Choked Out” would be compelling from anyone, but when he struggles to translate a Spanish telecast in his head because “I need justice in my life/Here it comes,” fans know he means to evoke the memory of his abusive stepfather. As with 2012’s Transcendental Youth, he continues to frame his songs in arrangements that incorporate strings and woodwinds, like the oboes that linger a few feet above the Route 60 asphalt as a repentant father looks back on his life in the sport. A few holdouts may rue the sparer approach with which Darnielle made his reputation, but anyone who can take that oboe arrangement and wed it to a wistful vocal in which that father waxes nostalgically about the night he “nearly drove Danny’s nose back into his brain/All the cheap seats go insane” has officially earned the Randy Newman Seal of Approval. And if you’ve still got doubts, here’s the astonishing last verse of the song that contrasts Darnielle’s stepdad with the legendary wrestler Chavo Guererro: “He was my hero back when I was a kid/You let me down but Chavo never once did/You called him names to try to get beneath my skin/Now your ashes are scattered on the wind/I heard his son got famous, he went nationwide/Coast-to-coast with his dad by his side/I don’t know if that’s true but I’ve been told/It’s real sweet to grow old.” A MINUS

Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (Atlantic) In a scenario you’ll find all-too familiar, they fled their homes for Bamako when radical fundamentalists occupied Northern Mali – the next time that drummer friend of yours complains about couch surfing all over Brooklyn, tell him what musicians in Northwestern Africa have to endure. Extraordinarily, Aliou and Oumar Touré formed a band because of this experience, befriending Blur’s Damon Albarn, impresario Marc-Antoine Moreau, and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner, all of whose names show up in pieces about the band more often than the names of the band members themselves. Sure would be nice to know how the tough songwriting splits – these guys have clearly studied their Chicago blues: the steamrolling tribute to “Nick,” who also produces and contributes guitar throughout, will have you scouring your Muddy Waters records in search of the original. Zinner also deserves credit for the terse production – guitars and drums are turned way up, as if he thinks he’s twiddling the knobs on the Bamako version of Some Girls. In other words, this “sounds” like traditional American rock and roll more than Tamikrest or Tinariwen, heavy on the four-four and not especially interested in incorporating too much Western audiences will find esoteric. If this were a Chicago blues album, I might find it impressive sonically, but wanting spiritually. But these Johnny-Winters-Come-Latelies invest their memorable riffs and vocal hooks with charisma, authority, and youthful vigor – even if you’ve encountered these coruscating guitar licks before, you’ll be temporarily tricked into thinking you haven’t. And if you want to grumble you’ve heard one too many songs titled “Mali,” even ones as lovely as this acoustic closer, think for a moment how many of our homegrown musicians would dare a song called “America.” Don’t bow down your head, listen up. A MINUS

Tal National: Zoy Zoy (Fat Cat) Afropop records can be a challenge to describe, mainly because most of the non-compilations/albums-as-albums that reach our shores fall into two categories: variations on the American and/or Cuban inspired music we’ve come to know and treasure, or crossover bids heavily saturated with modern-day production techniques and guest stars. Amazingly, these ambitious Nigeriens, comprised of a shifting line-up of musicians from Songhai, Fulani, Hausa, and Tuareg backgrounds, fall into neither bracket: they achieve their radical synthesis of homegrown rock and roll and complex song structure, the latter inherent mostly in concussively abrupt changes in tempo and time signature, without the “civilizing” benefit of a Damon Albarn- or Nick Gold-type catapulting them into the modern age with samples, synthesizers, or, um, Ry Cooder. The merciless ouragan (windstorm) about which they sing could be the literal one tearing through the Ténéré desert, the sociopolitical changes sweeping their embattled homeland, or their cataclysmic drum sound, achieved by two players and suggesting Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann being thrown down a flight of concrete stairs, their kits and risers ricocheting off steps behind them. Yet they remain remarkably tight rhythmically – Richie Troughton of The Quietus intriguingly dubbed this bracing bricolage “Afro math-rock.” I sure can’t envison Battles or Tortoise fans dancing to these catchy chants and wild ululations – not that they’re known much for dancing anyway. But I’d give anything to see this band’s passionate fans twerk through one of their legendary five hours sets to show them how it’s done. A MINUS

Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (Matador) “One thing classical music types don’t understand about singing is that any opera-trained tenor can belt out a technically flawless version of ‘Yesterday,’ but as a song it’s far more moving in Paul McCartney’s plaintive original.” This would be a visiting choral music conductor addressing my high school’s elite madrigal group, a bold statement which made me (the skinny black-haired tenor in the back row) cheer to myself – not merely because I loved the Beatles, but because I secretly felt alienated by the decorum and sterile formality of the European choral tradition. Sure, the Korean expat who sat next to me had a dynamite voice for arias, but his melismatic vibrato sounded flat out dumb on that Beach Boys medley. Little did I know how much this vocal approach would play into the music I would treasure as an adult, beginning with Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who realized their thoughtful, empathetic murmurs were their secret weapon circa 1995’s Electr-o-pura, not coincidentally also when their songwriting blossomed. This collection of covers, remakes, and bonus originals welcomes such unlikely bedfellows as Goffin/King, The Cure, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Great Plains, George Clinton, and Sun Ra into their kind, comforting tradition – steadfast devotion expressing itself not as a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, but as a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Georgia mournfully sings “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to the twinkling stars from her balcony, while Ira stands below on the veranda with his acoustic guitar, wondering what’s on her mind to a pensive tune they wrote together twenty years ago. As always, they sing to each other pretending the other can’t hear – the inside photo portrays them in the studio as I’ve always imagined them: staring into each other’s eyes. Almost. That may not define them as a “real-life” couple, but that does sum up their synergy, their intimacy, their aesthetic, and their music’s modest spell. Me myself, I’ve seen a lot of hot, hot blazes come down to smoke and ash. Embers can be beautiful, too. A

Honorable Mentions

Rhett Miller: The Traveler (ATO) Most Messed Up Pt. 2 – or do I mean The Grand Theatre Pt. 3? (“Wanderlust,” “Jules”) ***

Shamir: Ratchet (XL) Not really a “countertenor” – countertenors have ranges (“Make a Scene,” “On the Regular”) ***

Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (Southeastern) Caveat auditor: not only doesn’t “To a Band That I Loved” memorialize the Drive-By Truckers, it doesn’t even rock (“The Life You Chose,” “24 Frames”) **

Gang of Four: What Happens Next (Metropolis/Membran) Give Andy Gill this: he’s better at being a Gang of One than the Talking Heads were sans David Byrne (“Broken Talk,” “Isle of Dogs”) *

Kasey Chambers: Bittersweet (Sugar Hill) Divorce inspires her most substantial record in years – now if only her current God fixation didn’t lead to that appalling ditty in which she plays midwife to Mary and Joseph (“I’m Alive,” “Oh Grace”) *

Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop) Cannibalizing entire reviews from other writers signals monumental laziness on my part, but this is one instance in which the temptation proves too strong. Now, ahem: “In general, this record shows a return to simplicity, with songs structured around a melody and a few instruments, with live drums playing a far lesser role. With the growing success of Teen Dream and Bloom, the larger stages and bigger rooms naturally drove [the band] towards a louder, more aggressive place, a place farther from [their] natural tendencies. Here, [they] continue to let [themselves] evolve while fully ignoring the commercial context in which [they] exist.” All right, calling these vaporous tunes “melodies” might be stretching it a bit (c.f. Bloom, even the overrated Teen Dream), but that’s about as accurate a review as I could write – should adorn the record like a Parent’s Advisory warning sticker on an Eminem joint. Actually, I admire any reviewer who can endure this morass of molasses without slipping into a coma. So where did I pilfer this bit of prose, you ask? From the Sub Pop Records website. The authors: Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand. Impressed? B MINUS

Iris DeMent: The Trackless Woods (Flariella) Her once-miraculous contralto now shriveled to a tremulous warble, unable to hit the low notes she insists on slipping into her new songs, and her monotonous arrangements pure drawing room respectability, this is where DeMent takes her secular audience to church, the humorless solemnity of which this record resembles in every way except actual religious content. I remember when DeMent wrote poetry rather than appropriating it – not that the magniloquent poesy of tribute subject Anna Akhmatova connects emotionally on the page any more than it does wedded to such lifeless music. Consider “Not With Deserters,” written for those who fled her native land of Russia after Lenin’s Revolution (punctuation hers, not mine): “Poor exile, you are like a prisoner/To me, or one upon the bed/Of sickness. Dark your road, O wanderer,/Of wormwood smacks your alien bread.” Now consider this parody of Akhnatova by one of her more bemused detractors, shameless deserter Vladimir Nabokov, from page 56 of his novel Pnin: “I have put on a dark dress/And am more modest than a nun;/An ivory crucifix/Is over my cold bed./But the lights of fabulous orgies/Burn through my oblivion,/And I whisper the name George –/Your golden name!” Anna didn’t find that the least bit amusing – which really says it all, don’t you think? C PLUS

Neil Young & the Promise of the Real: The Monsanto Years (Reprise) Some fret that after a series of releases that include a concept album about electric cars, a collection of folk songs retooled for garage rock, a scratchy batch of covers captured through a Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth I’m sure sounds hot on Pono, and now this, an album-length protest against agribusiness behemoth Monsanto, Neil has regressed to the bonkers unpredictability of his Reagan Years. Speaking as someone who plays 1980’s Hawks and Doves and 1982’s Trans (not to mention 2012’s Americana) more than he does 1989’s Freedom or 1990’s Ragged Glory, this doesn’t bother me a whit – Neil’s respectability had gotten way too dull. But the problem here isn’t consistency per se, it’s the nature of protest music. It was one thing for Neil to ask America what they would have done if they had found Sandra Scheuer on the Kent State green, shot dead by the tin solders of Nixon’s National Guard, but it’s another when he wants us to get as riled up as he is about the dangers of genetically modified food. I’ll probably get some angry feedback for saying so, but no reputable research has ever found anything dangerous in consuming GMOs, and though I agree more investigation should be done in that area, a well-informed friend of mine who knows something about the subject claims they are the “modern day equivalent of putting iodine in drinking water, science at its best.” Yet here we have Neil, who I suspect fears the “rules of change” more than he does corporate greed or environmental catastrophe, making the highly questionable claim that pesticides are “causing” autistic children, as hysterical as Michele Bachmann’s spontaneous outburst on national TV about the HPV vaccine being a a trigger for “retardation.” He also seems to think our access to higher truth is blocked by our cultural preference for silly love songs, forgetting the asinine “It’s a New Day For Love” two tracks previous (I guess loving the planet’s more “profound”). In spite of his well-intended objectives and skill at pulling decent tunes, an unmitigated disaster, heavy-handed with nothing actually in the clenched fist. And that’s without considering the graceless musical presence of Willie Nelson’s talentless sons, who I heard are hitting the bar band circuit as Tame Gelding. C PLUS

Best Coast: California Nights (Harvest) Same catchy tunes within the same octave, same block harmonies, same romantic confusion, same middle school sad-bad, girl-world rhymes, same ne’er-do-well-boyfriend. The Disney gloss, well that’s new. B

Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt. 2 (Warp) “Interesting” I guess, but my antipathy toward Richard James goes back to a sycophantic college roommate, who under the influence of two pathetically weak tabs of acid swooned “It’s almost like mathematics!” while forcing me to listen to the first track of the supposedly “seminal” Ambient Works, Vol. 2 on interminable repeat. He also swore the churning dishwasher in our college commissary made more compelling music than the Everly Brothers and didn’t intend a jocose metaphor. Bet he loves this. B

Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge) For symphonic punk-prog, this is listenable enough, and as the subject of interest of many a mental health professional, I guess I should be grateful for the overarching concept (bipolar disorder…yay?). But even if the point of these things is to exceed the sum of its parts, there are a lot of fucking parts – twenty-nine, to be exact. And resident Pete Townshend wannabe Patrick Stickles didn’t even write the best one: Daniel Johnston’s “I Lost My Mind.” B

Colleen Green: I Want to Grow Up (Hardly Art) A Descendents fan’s concept album about Veruca Salt – not the band, the Roald Dahl character. C PLUS

Joss Stone: Water For Your Soul (Kobalt) Despite her semi-miraculous beginnings as a white soul natural, the barefoot contralto has always cultivated an aura of hippie retro, which meant it was only inevitable that after humoring her record companies nudging her to sell out she would regress to the trappings of, Lord help us, “authenticity.” Dennis Bovell and Damian Marley’s presence aside, I don’t know much about white reggae, but I do know one thing: no fair-skinned Dover lass should ever write an original called “Sensimilla.” C

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