A month ago, we asked you to tell us your favorite albums of all time available on eMusic. Boy did you! Thousands of ballots later, a consensus began to emerge. Many of the picks were expected. Many more were not. But on the whole, the albums collected here reflect the spirit of eMusic: bold, iconoclastic, proud and passionate. These are your favorite albums on eMusic.
With Interpol/National producer Peter Katis behind the boards, the second album from this Glasgow trio comes invested with its share of high drama. But singer Scott Hutchison, who founded the band with his brother, Grant, prefers directness to theatricality. Overwhelming as some of the album’s lyrics can be, he assured in a recent interview that they’re “not at all metaphorical,” including the one where he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge.
Like their Edinburgh countrymen Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit aren’t afraid to let a dynamic build slowly. “My Backwards Walk” simmers for nearly three minutes before the drums kick in, pitting an anxious strummed guitar against an undulating wash of one-finger piano and gently lapping accordion. Occasionally, as on the somber sea shanty “Who’d You Kill Now,” the band harks back to the more shambling and eclectic sounds of their 2006 debut, Sing the Greys, which was essentially a collection of spruced-up demos. But for the most part, Frightened Rabbit are confident in their insecurities, with Scott Hutchison’s quavering voice fighting through the haze, riding the waves and coming home safe.
A bleary Tijuana bar band blanched by the blistering sun, Arziona's Calexico manage to cut straight down to the darkness bubbling at the center of country music. Hot Rail contains all of their strengths in one arid, ominous package. Opener "El Picador" is a bit of bloodshot mariachi, horns blowing full-tilt; just a few minutes later, though, they're hushed and haunted, throwing shadows across the grim expanse of "Fade" and "Untitled III." That Calexico can veer so effortlessly between both extremes is a testament to their versatility. Their music — at this point — was guided by the same experimental undercurrent that powers, say, Rachel's or the Sea and Cake. But instead of finding an outlet for their imagination in jazz, they push against the borders of country, nortena and ranchera. They never come off as overworked or undercooked. They're not dilettantes — they're a gang of grim, drifting cowboys for whom no place feels like home.
more.
Around the time Paul Simon heard his first cassette of South African mbaqanga, or township jive, Trevor Herman and Jumbo Vanrenen, a pair of S.A. ex-pats in England, began compiling this landmark. Their timing, as it turned out, was perfect. Opposition to South Africa's oppressive, racist apartheid system was beginning to get noticed in America and Europe, buoyed along in the pop world thanks first to the charity "Sun City" single and later by Simon's Graceland, controversially recorded in South Africa with local musicians, during the U.N.-sanctioned cultural boycott of the country. But for the lucky listeners who encountered it, the deepest impact came from Herman and Vanrenen's 12 exquisitely arrayed selections.
Like many of its sequels (there have been five additional, numbered volumes, as well as several spin-offs), The Indestructible Beat of Soweto features cuts from mbaqanga's grandmaster, the sublime, ram-throated bellower Mahlathini and a stirring album-closer from Zulu male chorale, Simon collaborators and eventual Coca-Cola pitchmen Ladysmith Black Mambazo. These are surely South Africa's most famous apartheid-era musicians, but their star power means less here than the sure-footed support of the Makgona Tshole Band (led by expert guitarist Marks Mankwane), who appear on much of the album. From Udokotela Shange Namajaha's keening violin instrumental "Sobabamba" and the towering album-opener "Awungilobolele," with its hypnotic twin-guitar leads that settle into a groove so powerful it's almost grave, to the dizzying gulps, gurgles and doots that dot Amaswazi Emvelo's "Indodo Yejazi Elimnyama," Herman and Vanrenen turned more people on to a great musical tradition than any album compiler this side of Harry Smith or the producers of The Harder They Come. There is no hyperbole in calling The Indestructible Beat of Soweto the most influential collection of South African pop ever assembled; if there's any in saying it may very well be the single best album on eMusic, we can live with it.
Hot pop stars wooing mercenary hit producers goes back to the dawn of the studio itself. LA’s Sparks, from their debut on through Indiscreet, settled for nothing less than top-tier producers — Todd Rundgren, Tony Visconti. That they were only pop stars in Europe rather than in their homeland (while a crime) is beside the point.
Like any good gambler at the dog tracks, the brothers Mael (Ron and Russell, the only two constants in Sparks four-decade career) always went with the hot hand. By 1979, the zeitgeist of pop music was wholly ensconced in the studios of Giorgio Moroder. The man-machine behind Donna Summer’s roborgasmic “I Feel Love,” Moroder was not the most natural choice for the always-game and ever-quirky Mael Brothers, but from the first analog bloops that announce “Tryouts for the Human Race,” it’s a match made in heaven. That the rapscallion Maels capsize that beatific yet salacious sound so as to sing about sperm remains their master…uh stroke. Never before have Moroder’s components and circuits been so hellbent on soaring up to Nirvana (check the divine vocodered exhalations wafting upwards on “My Other Voice”). The collaboration between the Maels and Moroder not only aims high, but hits higher. Who else could name a song “The No. 1 Song in Heaven” and have it be both cocky and absolutely correct?
Before splintering into the Mars Volta and Sparta, At the Drive-In recorded their final album, The Relationship of Command, a fiery finish to an eight-year career that elevated frontmen Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López to near demigod status in the post-hardcore world, their big hair and lanky bodies the flailing mascots of the band's deservedly heralded live shows. "One Armed Scissor" paced Command, earning modern-rock radio airplay with its shouts of, "Get away! Get away!," but it's "Invalid Litter Dept.," an epic indictment of globalism and imperialism ("dancing on the corpse's ashes"), that makes this album great and, from start to finish, their best (their Vaya EP is a close second). These are the guys that took the more traditional emo sound mainstream (My Chemical Romance owe them infinity beers), and with the Mars Volta, Cedric and Omar went on to destroy it. It's a helluva last gasp.
more.
John Prine’s never been a guy for grand gestures or fancy flourishes. When a woman enchants him, it’s the little things that catch his attention. “She uses Eveready batteries to keep/ Her electrical appliances going steady,” he sings in “She Is My Everything,” setting a new standard for finding poetry in the mundane. Fair & Square, as its title implies, eschews emotional extremes in favor of a tone of acceptance and resignation; released in 2005, it was his first album of new material after his recovery from neck cancer.
In “Taking a Walk,” a protagonist brimming with anger avoids blowing his stack by casually exiting threatening situations. And in “Clay Pigeons” — written by the late Texan Blaze Foley — a character forces himself, slowly and tentatively, to re-engage with a world that’s left him feeling bitter and isolated. The production, by Prine with engineer Gary Paczosa, is suitably low-key: the band finds a groove, establishes a melody, then steps back to let the pickers do their thing. Fair & Square isn’t as revelatory as Prine’s 1991 classic, The Missing Years, but it finds glory in subdued moments, and offers insight into the avoidance of risk.
Nuclear War is actually a live-in-studio recording, but tighter, and the material is strong and representative of the time. The title cut is a rare Ra social-protest funk-chant, and it's a doozy: "They're talkin' about, nuclear war... it's a motherfucker, don't you know? When they push the button, your ass gotta go!" Also included: simmering soul-organ grooves where John Gilmore swings as hard and brilliantly as any tenor player on this or any other planet; muscular hard-bop riffs and tautly controlled slow-tempo dissonance; a note-perfect "Drop Me Off in Harlem," one of several forgotten Duke Ellington gems Ra loved to play; and ingenious, off-beat but oh-so-right arrangements of the standards "Sometimes I'm Happy" and "Smile," with a heart-stopping June Tyson vocal on the latter.
more.
A bold about-face from the bright Beatle-esque jangle he'd plied just four years earlier with the Soft Boys, I Often Dream of Trains finds a wounded and subdued Roby Hitchcock attempting to make sense of himself. Because Hitchcock is a master surrealist, even his sense doesn't make much sense: "Sounds Great When You're Dead" is clearly a sneering insult — but to whom and over what remains just out of reach; "This Could Be the Day" ought to be a victory anthem, until halfway through we're confronted with Nubian slaves and hissing tongues of fire; and the title track is an aching, moving cipher, either a meditation on mortality or an observation of slow-moving public transit. What remains uniform throughout is Hitchcock's flair for cockeyed melody. Wistful acoustic phrases go suddenly pear-shaped, resolving from major seventh to minor catastrophe. It's Dadaism unplugged, a hushed, moody work of strange visions and wild inventions. It's quiet splendor has only grown more singular and more stubborn with age.
more.
Mitch Hedberg lived the life of a rock star-comic, and died like one, too — he passed away in 2005, found in a Jersey hotel with drugs in his blood. He spoke in the quick, clipped voice of an old-time hipster, wore his hair Seattle long and sported a goatee resembling that of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Beneath this façade, however, lay a routine that was brainy and even a little bit nerdy. "I like refried beans," he says here. "That's why I want to try fried beans, 'cause maybe they're just as good — and we're wasting time."
more.
This pulverizing (originally cassette-only) album proved what DC and NY denizens had already been marveling at for four years: not only were the all-black Bad Brains the greatest punk musicians ever (along with the Ruts), but these crazed Rastas also unleashed the most furious lightning/blitzkrieg assault imaginable. On positively jaw-dropping, astonishingly frenzied pulverizers such as "Sailing On," "Banned in D.C." and "Big Takeover," the group somehow married Motorhead's lethal, nasty chops to the Sex Pistols and Black Sabbath's power riffs and the Dickies and early Saints' speed-fueled attack. Then they added reggae, showing off singer H.R.'s uncanny pipes. It's a miracle disc.
more.
Probably the most critically acclaimed new artist of the mid '00s, Maya Arulpragasam is also among its most controversial, in two different ways. Po-faced style purists chide her grab-bag embrace of numerous urban sounds (Brazilian baile funk on "Bucky Done Gun," London grime on "Galang," vigorous neo-electro on "10 Dollar") without having "done her time" in any particular scene (as if pop forms weren't rewired regularly by tinkerers rather than apprentices). The other reason is a lot more serious: Arulpragasam is the daughter of a Sri Lankan political rebel affiliated with the Tamil Tigers, an organization devoted to armed struggle since 1983; they are said to have essentially invented modern suicide bombing. Maya not only doesn't run from this legacy, she devotes a lot of her art (her award-nominated visual work as well as her music) to invoking it: "Like PLO, we don't surrender," she chants in "Sunshowers," for instance. It might not make her a terrorist, but it certainly makes people uneasy.
Despite all of this, or maybe because of it, Arular, Arulpragasam's debut as M.I.A., is one of the most consistently thrilling pop records anyone has made. What's especially impressive about this is that while the album is hardly devoid of melody (M.I.A.'s sing-songy chatter is highly hummable), it is remarkably short of instrumental detail: These tracks' aural character is almost entirely down to their beats and bass, and their differences come across on the tiniest and tinniest of speakers. Arular is endlessly playful, which means you can play it endlessly.
Originally from New York state, Old Crow Medicine Show began life as a quintet of street-corner buskers, before a you-wouldn’t-dare-make-it-up discovery by a passing Doc Watson outside a North Carolina pharmacy led to their relocation to Nashville — where, mercifully, Music Row signally failed to rub off OCMS’s rougher edges. Substantially recorded in Nashville’s legendary Studio B and Woodland Sound Studios, O.C.M.S., their full-length debut, sounds as far as possible like something Hank Williams might have made, had he survived into his 80s (the raffish, ragged works of Williams’ grandson, Hank Williams III, are actually a decentish reference point). As on few modern country albums, it’s possible to hear the fingers hitting the strings, and the horsehair scraping on the fiddle strings.
Producer David Rawlings had the admirable sense to recognise that the biggest favour he could do these road-worn, mutually attuned and instinctive musicians was to let them get on with it. The result is that O.C.M.S. sounds like OCMS’s songs were issuing in through the window from a pitch at the end of your road, rather than from your speakers. Either way, you’d be grateful — the songs are consistently fabulous. The lament “We’re All in This Together” has something of the sepulchral fatalism of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the angry Vietnam fable “Big Time in the Jungle” a whiff of the simmering anger of Steve Earle. All are delivered in raw, throaty harmonies as furious yet finely honed as the arrangements behind them.
If The Glow Pt. 2 were six or seven tracks shorter, it might rank with Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as one of the best indie-rock albums ever made. As it is, Phil Elvrum's masterpiece gets a bit lost across its twenty tracks — but only just a bit. Despite its lack of focus (the one criticism you can pin on Elvrum), The Glow Pt. 2 is magnificent, a heartbreaking album that sprawls and burrows, wet with tears and rain.
If you are new to Phil Elvrum, a quick word on his aesthetic: lots of acoustic guitar layers that often sound like they are chasing their own shadows; he self-harmonizes a lot, but very loosely: syllables echo, words start and then start again as he finds his way to them; and his lyrics almost solely deal with longing and desire, pronounced gorgeously, and in a bucolic framework. Nature itself is often a character in his songs: Thoreau and Elvrum would have a lot to talk about.
So, the best songs, then: "I'll Not Contain You" (light and airy), "Map" (beautiful and foreboding), "I Want Wind to Blow" (precious), "I Felt My Size" (stunning and obtuse) and "I Felt Your Shape" (even more stunning and even more obtuse). And then there's "You'll Be in the Air," one of Elvrum's best songs, and one of the best songs written for long-distance love ever (the Kinks' "Strangers" and "This Time Tomorrow" being the best), except maybe it's about a plane crash. The song closes, "You'll be in the air/ You'll bear fruit, your bare feet/ Your bare arms in the heat/
You'll be able to feel your might." It's a perfect canvas for hope and pining. And along with "I Felt Your Shape" and much of The Glow Pt. 2, a perfect song for falling in love.
Although, Mark E. Smith has habitually been romantically involved with female Fall-ites, he has always claimed that Craig Scanlon and Kay Hanley pushed him into bringing Brix Smith into the band for The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… Ballsy and talented, she quickly “took the band by the scruff of the neck” (Smith’s words) and, in only a year, the whole dynamic of the group changed, especially with the arrival of Simon Rogers, the Fall’s first classically trained musician, on keyboards. Cue a James Brown-style self-aggrandizing album title, for a record which is considered — rightly (probably) — to be the band’s finest. It has all its predecessor’s widescreen production (Leckie again), but a real sense of carrying over the old experimental edge in a pop framework ("Spoilt Victorian Child," "LA"). In a nod to his roots, Smith gave props to Can’s singer ("I Am Damo Suzuki"), while on "My New House," he squawked jovially about his move up the real-estate ladder — “According to the postman, it’s like the bleeding bank of England!”
more.
Still recognized as the greatest composer/arranger in jazz history, Duke Ellington also led the finest big bands, but recognition came relatively slowly to him in the US. His band regularly performed in concert in Europe during the '30s, but hadn't played the most prestigious American stages until his 1943 appearance in Carnegie Hall. The fact that he was finally allowed to play that venue was quite significant in itself, but became even more auspicious when it became the place he debuted his most ambitious composition, "Black, Brown and Beige," a 45-minute suite subtitled "A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro." The rest of the program contained impressive, if more conventional, Ellington performances.
Duke's band at that time included such stars as trumpeters Rex Stewart, Ray Nance and Harold Baker, and trombonists Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown and Juan Tizol, as well as saxophonists Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster and Harry Carney, who were an all-star unit unto themselves.
The first CD of this two-CD set contains a number of classics by Ellington and his songwriting partner Billy Strayhorn, from the early "Black and Tan Fantasy" to the more recent "Johnny Come Lately." Richly orchestrated, they include memorable solos by a variety of band members. Dig tenorman Webster on "Portrait of Bojangles" not only displaying his big tone, but a very modern rhythmic conception. Baker contributes lovely muted work to "Black Beauty." "Black," the first section of "Black, Brown and Beige," an uneven but often impressive work, ends CD one, its highlight a lush, gorgeous Hodges alto solo.
Enter the Mortal City and meet the bemused, the broken-hearted and the utterly bereft. Dar Williams brings the residents of her 1996 breakout album palpably, achingly to life with little more than the sweet simplicity of her voice and her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. Blending sophisticated wit with raw, unabashed emotion, Williams creates characters who feel so real, so accessible, it’s no wonder Mortal City is the kind of record that can inspire dorm room singalongs and awaken the ambitions of acoustic guitar-toting wannabe folk singers.
The anthemic girl-power classic “As Cool as I Am” kicks off the album with a rousing tell off of a womanizing, soon-to-be ex-lover. Sarcasm abounds through the song: "And if it helps, I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met." Zing! But Williams is too fun (note the song's danceable beat, enhanced by harmonicas and drums) and too empowered (the refrain: "I'm not that petty/ As cool as I am I thought you'd know this already"), to come across as truly embittered. Later, Williams hones her sense of the absurd in songs such as "The Pointless, Yet Poignant Crisis of a Co-Ed." With crisp, staccato vocals that accentuate her subject's silliness, Williams tells the story of a young idealist who has an epiphany about her boyfriend, co-chair of a student group called the Hemp Liberation Army: "You stupid pothead."
The laughs that Williams scatters throughout Mortal City serve as stark contrast to the quiet devastation she summons in "February," an elegy for a frostbitten romance that won't survive winter's relentless snowstorms: "We were always out shoveling/ And we'd drop to sleep exhausted, and we'd wake up, and it's snowing." "February" belongs on the bleakest of breakup mixes, but "Iowa" is a stunner in which hope ultimately wins out over melancholy. Its lulling, repetitive refrain (just the word, "Iowa", over and over), belies the narrator's desire to break free from routine; to go “running through the screen doors of discretion" in pursuit of a new romance. Williams’s tentative optimism also pervades Mortal City’s title track. As its occupants know, to live in a Mortal City means to embrace life's fleeting pleasures, and to try to find humor and redemption in heartbreak.
After an inauspicious start, Judas Priest took heavy metal to a new level of precision and darkness with Sad Wings of Destiny, an epic album that balanced technical musicianship with take-no-prisoners brutality. The record opened with the textural nuances and complex guitar work of “Victim of Changes” which immediately shattered the stereotype of metal musician as unsophisticated rube. Tracks like “The Ripper” and “Tyrant” proved they could also destroy like unsophisticated rubes. Only Iron Maiden would have equal influence on the next decade of metal.
more.
A big, bright, bratty clusterbomb of sound, Superchunk's sophomore effort is a hot white streak that never dissipates and never relents. To listen to it now is to hear indie rock inventing itself: the band brazenly borrows the speed-racing, sludge-laden riffs of the SST era, but uses them to power songs that are ruthlessly melodic, crowned with Mac McCaughan's proudly imperfect yawp. The group is consistently defiant — "You think you see everything with those glasses," taunts McCaughan in "Cast Iron" — and as the record evolves it becomes clear that No Pocky is serving two purposes. It's an appropriation of punk for the bored and overeducated, a shift from simply thinking nothing matters to the anger and helplessness that comes when you realize why. More than that, though, No Pocky is a testament to the power of youth, revved-up and rambunctious — proud of its imperfections, brash enough to exploit them once more, with feeling.
more.
When 16 Lovers Lane came out in 1988, Australia's Go-Betweens thought they had a good chance of ending their years spent epitomizing the dreaded combination of critical success and commercial failure — this one would sell, dammit! On this album, their sixth, co-leaders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan combined their usual literate lyrics with their most accessible melodies ever, upgrading their earlier jingle-jangle indie sound for dramatic, superbly layered arrangements (Amanda Brown's oboe and violin were put to particularly good use). While the songs are credited to both Forster and McLennan, it's always been easy to tell who wrote what, and on this release the difference between their distinctive individual styles was particularly stark: Forster was at his most melancholic on "You Can't Say No Forever" and "I'm Alright," while McLennan unleashed classic-pop chops on "Love Goes On!" and "Streets of Your Town," a minor college-radio hit at the time. And yet the album feels of a piece, a romantic study of love in all its forms that stands the test of time. Despite the beauty of 16 Lovers Lane, sales remained elusive; the feuding, disillusioned Go-Betweens broke up in 1989, then reformed in 2000, much to the delight of their faithful fans.
more.
OK, I’ll fess up: I only discovered Mali’s Tinariwen after Robert Plant raved about them in an interview four years back. But the nomadic desert blues collective has in fact existed in some form or other since 1979, their impassioned, highly politicised sound an issue-raising catalyst for the Tuareg people of the southern Sahara long before someone pulled a Ry Cooder and helped record their wonderfully stirring music for consumption outside of Africa.
On Aman Iman — as on their "official" 2001 debut The Radio Tisdas Sessions — that person is producer Justin Adams, the multi-instrumentalist and erstwhile Wayward Sheiks member who is also a member of Robert Plant’s current band, the Strange Sensation. Adams does an excellent job, acting as facilitator, not meddlesome shaper.
This time out, Tinariwen has made a fabulously skewed blues album that restores a winning exoticism to that oft-heard genre. The return of near-mythic founding member Mohamed Ag Itlale after six years in the desert (and you can take that quite literally) proves memorable, his improvised poetry on “Ahimana” intoxicating even if, like me, you don’t understand a word of his native tongue.
Gritty and wholly involving, the album is a delicious tangle of snaking Malian guitars, Möbius strip-like rhythms, fat bass, clanking percussion and call-and-response chanting. The hypnotic pulse of “Cler Achel” is such that resistance is futile, while “Tamatant Tilay” further underlines Tinariwen’s status as lords of the feral dance. But there are also gentler moods, the meditative-sounding “Izarar Tenéré” so soothing that it’s easy to forget that the members of Tinariwen are in fact fearsome, Colonel Gaddafi-trained guerrillas-turned-troubadours.
Word is that the final mix of the album had to be submitted for the approval of the Tuareg tribal elders, and that band percussionist Said Ag Ayad ferried it to them by camel. Now, how cool is that?
Forget whatever prog-induced nightmares the 43-song tracklist brings to mind -- Double Nickels on the Dime cuts a swaggering path through an hour's worth of breakneck punk-funkery. The Minutemen are known for doing a lot with a little, and for having done it first. Double Nickels finds the guys taking the less-is-more m.o. and dancing all over the musical map. The spirit is undoubtedly "punk" (scratched-out guitars, dime-store production, singer D. Boon's throat-y shouts), but the sprawling set allows for some adventurousness here. Check the faux Flamenco acoustic track "Cohesion," the noodle-y blues shuffle of "Love Dance" and the made-famous-by-Jackass twang-stomp of "Corona" for evidence of some inspired stretching out.
This slaphappy genre hopping wouldn't come off, of course, if they didn't have chops. Luckily the trio, led by rotund firebrand D. Boon (guitar/vocals), play with bluster and charm. The interplay of Boon's wild, spidery (and occasionally cacophonous) guitar with the locked-in, rubbery rhythm section (bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley) set the blueprint for "funky" followers from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Fishbone to the Rapture. Of course, they couldn't replicate Boon's bristling strut.
Balancing a shouty, Reagan-era furor with a keen (and sometimes juvenile) sense of humor, Double Nickels is a definitive '80s political screed. Tracks with titles like "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing," "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?" and (hardy har) "The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts," show how offhandedly Boon and co. could skewer politics and pop culture, and how steadfastly they refused to sit on the sidelines.
All things dark and beautiful indeed: LA combo Isis are masters of sculpting the darkness, teasing out the weird shapes that lie just out of view. The music on Panoptician is blank and searching, stark chiaroscuro whorls of sound that pitch and roll over and over and over. "In Fiction" is marvelous monotony, a single series of riffs circling over and over and over until the bottom falls out and the whole song goes rushing suddenly, terrifyingly downward. "Wills Dissolve" is like June of 44 corrupted by evil, long strings of sound dripping icicle-like. It's these reveals — abrupt, noisy, volcanic — that make Panoptician so utterly terrifying. Like a ghost leaping from a closet door, Panoptician is full of sickening surprise.
more.
The Afrobeat of Fela Kuti combines the charged socio-politics of Bob Marley, a blend of funk stylings (taut a la James Brown and elastic like George Clinton) and an instrumental helix employed by improvisational jam bands like Phish or the Grateful Dead. Because his tunes adhere to an informal template and the musicianship is of consistently high quality, there’s no better or worse place to submerge yourself in his gloriously huge discography. Mr. Follow Follow culls two vintage workouts from the mid '70s, each one rapidly adding layers to achieve a relentless groove in which soloists emerge and fade in succession, followed by Fela’s declamatory sermon-vocals (tagged by a village of backup singers numbering in the dozens), and then an equally stirring instrumental outro.
The title track — taken from arguably Fela’s most notorious record, Zombie — has more than the usual quotient of horn solos and slingshot sax riffs, chief among them the dank baritone horn Lekan Animashaun, a signature part of Fela’s sound. “Who No Know Go Know” is more string and keyboard oriented, establishing a smooth, almost acid-jazz groove. Put simply, there is something of substance going on for everyone here, be you mindless dancers, impassioned revolutionaries or all persuasions in-between.
You could say artist/musician/androgyne Antony has a certain flair for drama. Spirited by the tranny cabarets and gender-fucking performance artists that lured him to New York from California in the early '90s, Antony torches his piano with poignant songs of pain and power, alienation and acceptance, love and sorrow, all drawn from a palette of gender identity, the desire to be female never far from his thoughts. "One day I'll grow up/I'll be a beautiful woman," he promises on "For Today I Am a Boy" — and if that doesn't work, there's always surgery ("My Lady"). His melancholia is underscored by his swanlike, womanish tenor, which flutters, warbles and floats out in grand curlicues of vibrato, lifted high on a pedestal of piano and a small string section (which includes Joan As Policewoman violinist Joan Wasser). He also posses up the man-sopranos for guest spots, reminding us he's not the first pop singer flaunting his divaness; for "You are My Sister," he's joined by O.G. gender-queer pop star Boy George, while the loping "What Can I Do?" features Rufus Wainwright's clear croon; and neo-hippie hipster Devendra Banhart contributes on "Spiralling." I Am a Bird Now's real life longing is cradled in bouts of bittersweet fantasy and cushioned by hope; as such, Antony's theatricality never overpowers his humanity. "I am a bird-girl," he wails sadly on the closing track, "and bird-girls can fly!"
more.
So many musical crimes have been committed in the name of "conscious hip-hop" in the years since Labor Days was released, it's become impossible to consider this gloomy forerunner with anything other than mounting skepticism. You've been in this situation before — returned to a book you loved in college only to find it hamfisted and overwritten, stared at your once-beloved Beat Generation box set with a mixture of dread and shame.
The good news I bring you is this: Labor Days is as good as you remember, possibly better. Aesop's million-syllable-a-second surrealism is still arresting: he lets loose a barrage of sound then yawns out the final word, a weird, disorienting cadence that remains stupefying no matter how many times you hear it. "Fantastic planet urchin putting work in/ Searching for pertinent verse, minus the murderous diversions/ Apologies won't lure me to the communal sob story," he yammers in "Labor," and that's as close to a statement of purpose as he comes.
This would just be a mere parlor trick if it wasn't for the production, which is uniformly breathtaking. A string of icy arpeggios scramble up the center of "Save Yourself," Aes presciently advising: "The next time you want to be a hero, try saving something other than hip-hop." "Flashflood" is mercilessly grim, an inside-out samurai song where pan flutes crash up against swift, stabbing bass lines. And then, of course, there's "Daylight," the monolithic genre-defining song that none of Aes' disciples have come anywhere close to besting. "While the triple sixers lassos keep angels roped in the basement/ I walk the block with a halo and a stick, poking your patience," he announces over that fantastically blunted organ loop. All this time later, that prodding remains just as insistent, just as fantastically unsettling.
Between the moody English goth of 1984's Dreamtime and the pyrotechnic riff-rock of 1987's Electric, the Cult released Love, an album packed with textural rhythms, pounding beats and anthemic choruses. It was their Rosetta Stone, a revolutionary offering that helped frontman Ian Astbury make the transition from gloomy, gothy moaning to full-throated rock star howls. The album was even more pivotal for guitarist Billy Duffy, who combined his layered, ringing tones and ominous arpeggios with brazen power chords and galvanic leads. Songs like the ecstatic, driving "Rain" and the mystical metal of "She Sells Sanctuary" provided plenty of punch, while the smoky, swaying ballads "Brother Wolf Sister Moon" and "Black Angel" proved the Cult could still play softly without sounding sappy. On future offerings, the band would flex additional metal muscle with crunching AC/DC-style riffs, self-indulgent solos and flailing drums. But it was Love's restraint and balance that made it the band's brightest hour.
more.
Not for nothing is the first track on this almost unpronounceable album called "Dark & Long." Almost all the tracks by this UK techno trio were both dark and long. The group's very name spoke of the urban subterrania that was their provenance and their subject.
With roots in late-'80s whiteboy funk-rock, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith found the missing piece of their sonic jigsaw in Romford DJ Darren Emerson, the reborn Underworld giving techno a rock makeover (or vice versa?) by mixing cerebral synth loops and four-to-the-floor pulses with flat, passionless vocals and the occasional searing guitar riff. The ghosts of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder collide here with blissed-out Orb arpeggios and skittering squirgles, creating a cold beauty and mechanized monorhythmic intensity.
If Underworld's sound hit its peak with the Trainspotting classic "Born Slippy" and 1996's superior Second Toughest in the Infants album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman stands tall as a soundtrack — at once euphoric and claustrophobic — to hip life in the London suburbs of the early '90s. While there's a certain humorless pomposity to Hyde's sub-Alabama-3 delivery and his cut-up lyrics — "Mmm Skyscraper I Love You" is both facile and dated — a dark power is still discernible on trancey epics like "Tongue" and "Spoonman."
Although the likes of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs loved their early albums, the Mekons' most widely admired work eight years after they convened in punk-era Leeds was still the 1978 single "Where Were You?" It wasn't until 1985's Fear and Whiskey, self-released on their U.K.-only Sin label back when imports were hard to find, that their legend launched worldwide. Susie Honeyman's fiddle was enough to slot the album as what was then called roots-rock, and put it at the forefront of what was later called alt-country. But in retrospect, Fear and Whiskey just sounds like a Mekons record — one driven by Tom Greenhalgh's desperate cry rather than Jon Langford's sarcastic shout or Steve Goulding's motorvating drums. What Greenhalgh is desperate about is a literally revolutionary scenario in which the government has routed rebels who swear they'll regroup but find themselves bogged down in alcoholic angst on a highway that's lost the way a beachhead is lost. Facing up to the failure of a punk idealism crippled, like the rest of public life, by the reactionary cruelty of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes, the Mekons had begun their lifelong project of keeping rock & roll leftism alive.
more.![Vs. [Remastered]](http://images.emusic.com/music/images/album/0/111/743/11174312/155x155.jpg)
Boston's leading light of the '80s post-punk explosion, Mission of Burma gained a staunch reputation for infusing art (and artifice) into their dark n' noisy guitar anthems. The prevailing attitude then (and even largely now) is that in order to feel the true brunt of the awesome Burma sound, you had to see 'em live. In part, of course, it was just a matter of sheer volume — the guys were known for sending out sheets of sound the likes of which a hi-fi could never capture. Another MoB live staple, though, was sound collagist/tape head Martin Swope's on-the-fly sound sampling. Often planted in the booth with the soundman, Swope would sample the live performance from the stage through the mixing board, run a series of delays, loops and effects and send a cascading, eerily whitewashed signal out, usually without the crowd having a clue the source of the mountainous, layered noise. This uniquely abrasive and heady sound was (understandably) never fully captured on record. Luckily, even with Swope's contributions rather buried on Vs., Burma makes a mean, inspired racket.
Largely lacking the fistpumping gusto of the preceding, insta-classic Signals, Calls and Marches EP, Vs. relies heavily on squalling and cacophonous stomps. Early highlights like "New Nails" and "Dead Pools" tell the tale nicely: scratchy, minor chord guitar rips, shout-sung sloganeering ("Don't make an idol of me!") and heavy doses of floor tom bashing. You have to sift through quite a few dark dirges before encountering anything resembling a riffy chorus, but when they hit, it's worth the wait. The rollicking "Ballad of Johnny Burma" almost entirely strips the "post" from the punk — it's a blistering three-chord anthem barely nosing over two minutes. It's the canonized (for good reason) "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" that's the true centerpiece of Vs., though, as singer/guitarist Roger Miller bashes through the downright bouncy tune with a clear sense of vigor. It's a moment of thrilling immediacy and sounds as much like a clarion call as anything Burma recorded. Coming at the end of this tough and ragged record, it plays like a melodic salve. If there's anything you can say about Mission of Burma — they sure make you work for it.
All you kids today pretending to be robots have nothing on former Tubeway Army leader Numan, whose friends were electric way before you downloaded your first MP3. The Pleasure Principle is his masterwork — every song sticks, and several are classics, including "Films" (a hip-hop breakbeat staple, included on a volume of the beat-digger bible Ultimate Breaks & Beats series), "Metal" and "Cars," a song so funky Prince used to rehearse the Revolution with it.
more.
Booka Shade's "Mandarine Girl" was 2005's premier crossover club record, an electro-house charmer whose buzzing, zapping bass line is echoed and emboldened by higher-pitched synth noises, all moving in tandem at the song's mid-length climax like Claymation robots. The single's warm sound (a mix of house's humane undertow and electro's gleeful cyber-futurism) and nonchalant air helped it get onto the year-end lists of more than just DJ aficionados. Now it anchors a full album, many of whose songs work in a pleasantly similar manner. On Movements, Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier, the Berlin producers who record as Booka Shade, grows on you in a similarly subliminal way. Sometimes they tighten their basic formula, as on "Pong Pang," whose assertive core sounds like a rapid, bouncy thumb-piano riff that's mirrored by hi-hats and buggy computer effects; it also segues seamlessly into "Mandarine Girl." When Merziger and Kammermeier loosen up, they go all the way, as on the slap-happily electro-poppy "The Birds And The Beats/At The Window." But mostly they prefer to creep up on you, each new noise emerging unobtrusively from the corners of the sound-field, not pouncing but sidling.
more.
Ornette Coleman’s first new album in a decade, Sound Grammar, documents the iconic alto-sax maverick’s stunning current band, an all-acoustic group with two bassists, at a German concert on October 14, 2005. This particular album is less about pushing in new directions and more about acknowledging and extending the strengths that have shaped Coleman's style from the very beginning: melodic generosity, a healthy disregard for rules and, always, a deep blues feel at the core of his conception. The strongest attraction here, really, is the powerful performances that this particular band produces.
Bowing his instrument in classical style, Tony Falanga provides keening accompaniment and vigorous counterpoint to the leader’s bluesy ebullience; Greg Cohen (Tom Waits, John Zorn), anchors the band with his rock-steady pulse. Denardo Coleman, the saxophonist’s son, remains an idiosyncratic drummer, but he’s at his best here. The set includes familiar numbers such as “Sleep Talking,” “Song X” and the classic “Turnaround,” but close watchers will also recognize a few more recent tunes presented here under new names. A miraculously clear recording by Chris Agovino lays clear every strand in the quartet’s intricate weave. With this release, Coleman assumes control of his artistic destiny with the establishment of his own label. With any luck, we'll see Coleman albums more frequently than we have in recent decades.
Person Pitch may not sound like a singles album, but that’s exactly what it is. Culled from 12-inches and compilation appearances, the songs on the album don’t reflect the product of an intense period of recording; instead, the album is a general expression of what Noah Lennox has been up to in the years since his second album, 2004's Young Prayer (i.e., getting married, having a child, moving to Portugal). In other words, Lennox has been busy getting happy.
You can tell simply from the song titles — “Comfy in Nautica,” “Bros,” “Search for Delicious” — but the songs themselves confirm it: “Comfy” opens the shutters on the album by slowly revealing a storefront of chanting and hand-clapping backup singers behind Lennox’s slow-motion singalong. “Take Pills” ups the tempo, gradually building its way from a waltzing lullaby into a looped verse from a forgotten Avalon/Funicello beach movie.
But the two sunny movements of "Take Pills" are trumped by “Good Girl/Carrots,” which finds time for organic trance, a nursery rhyme-esque middle and a narcotic dub coda. The undisputed highlight, though, is the twelve-minute “Bros,” which sounds built expressly for Julee Cruise, until Lennox rubs his eyes and the song goes widescreen. Judging by these results, we could stand to hear Lennox happy more often.
In retrospect, it's actually surprising that this album wasn't bigger. In 2000, an Icelandic trio called Sigur Rós cooed new age into the indie rock mainstream with Ágætis Byrjun, a contemplative collection that steers between gorgeous whale music ("Svefn-g-englar") and post-Enigma Europop ("Starálfur" and "Ný batterí"). Certainly the glacial pace and nonsense lyrics (sung in a made-up language) place some limits on its reach, but by and large Sigur Rós' music is intensely accessible, with emotionally naked cinematic flourishes pacing the compositions. There are tentative dabbles into jazz and Radiohead-style art-rock, but by and large this is a smart and progressive new age album that even the kids can dig.
more.
There’s only one bad thing you can say about Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire: it doesn’t contain career highlight “Elevator Love Letter.” Otherwise, this album is pretty much the perfect indie-pop record, replete with girl/boy harmonizing, epic choruses and the type of catchy tunes that could’ve only been created (these days, anyway) in Canada.
But it’s not just perfect pop constructions. Check the extended coda on the title track, which cuts off the propulsive tune and takes it to outer space. Or “The Big Fight,” where the group seemingly hires a different producer mid-song and turns a plodding lament into an upbeat instrumental. Or the flat-out electro-jazz-punk maelstrom of “He Lied About Death.”
At heart, though, Stars is a pop band, and pop music is about moments that make your heart swell a little bit larger than you thought it could. Fire has plenty of those, too: when drummer Pat McGee starts syncopating on “One More Night,” when the group “woo”’s are indistinguishable from the oscillating synth on “Ageless Beauty,” that one moment of silence before each chorus in “Soft Revolution”… I could go on, but what’s the point? Words are useless when you run up against this type of album. Dig in.
Too often sacrificed in the rush to create Billy Bragg, post-Guthrie socialist folkie is Billy Bragg, hopeless romantic. It's odd and unbelievable that politics somehow became sexier than, well, sex, but so goes the strange and crazy world. So let this collection stand as a testament to the other Billy Bragg, the one who pours out his heart in secret to the woman who will never know his name. The character is perfectly suited to Bragg — he's a funny-looking bloke who can't really sing and has a harsh and intrusive accent, and those imperfections only make his tales of unrequited love sting longer and harder.
"The Milkman of Human Kindness" offers tokens of his devotion, but then slips out unnoticed. The title track is a repeated plea, a little more heartbreaking each time through. "The Price I Pay" is pure straight sorrow, Bragg sighing "That's the price I pay for loving you the way that I do" over pirouetting piano. Is this the voice of a firebrand activist, or the soft plea of a shrinking violet? Bragg approaches both topics with the same directness, preferring to state outright rather than hint or imply. Case in point, the speedy, spectacular "A New England," where Bragg lays out his m.o.: "I don't want to change the world/ I'm not looking for a new England/ I'm just looking for another girl."
Joe Strummer is not dead. Just one listen of Gypsy Punks and it's clear that Joltin’ Joe’s departed spirit has slipped into singer Eugene Hutz. Gogol's banging Balkan diaspora dovetails with Strummer's world music explorations — it's arguably the summation of the former Clash frontman's global-politique-a-go-go. But Gogol don't fancy themselves rock revolutionaries in the classic sense. On "Go Revolutions," Hutz tears into karaoke culture by proclaiming that he could make a "better revolution with his dick." Humor and 4/4 rhythms aside, the soul of Gogol is still firmly rooted in the gnarled, rocking Eastern European wedding music popularized byYuri Yukanov and Ivo Papasov. It's frantic and fun, a manifesto wrapped in irony and fired with a sly urgency, especially when Hutz breaks out into the mother-tongue of all revolutionaries, singing praises to Cuba in Spanish. Somewhere, Strummer is harmonizing with Hutz on a phantom radio from the other side.
more.
The repeated mantra at the end of the opening track from Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump goes like this: "You're giving in, 2000 Man." It goes on for what seems like an eternity — 30 whole seconds! — until lead singer Jason Lytle finally breaks out of his reverie and urges "2000 Man" not to give up. This struggle between man and progress is the major theme that runs throughout Slump, as Lytle makes his way through broken household appliance national forests, drunk robots and a host of confusing chartsengrafs.
But as depressing as the subject matter gets, hope peeks out of Slump every now and again. "The Crystal Lake" may be the group's finest moment, gluing together heavy rhythm guitars, Lytle's ever-present whine and a ramshackle oscillating synthesizer that seems to have been turned on and forgotten about. The same goes for "Hewlett's Daughter." Sure, the drums plod along like a drunken robot, but the opening hook is an undeniable one: "Hewlett's daughter/ Loved her father/ And I think she/ Loved me too…for a little while."
Let's face it, though, Grandaddy is a pretty depressing band. Technology is always winning in this battle, whether it's in the sad tale of Jed, the forgotten robot, or the tinkling piano ballad "Underneath the Weeping Willow." On Slump, Lytle sounds like the American Thom Yorke — a whiny prophet that you want to hug as much as you want to punch. Luckily, with his excellent and ambitious backing band in tow, this is more Kid A than Pablo Honey.
Did he leave a "d" off the end of the title? Because the fifth release by Oregon's best neo-old-timey guitarist is decidedly post-Ward: a full-band progression from his sidewalk-busker sound. But not to fear, the indie troubadour has abandoned none of his soul-piercing profundity — on "Chinese Translation," a pretty folk jangler that drifts along to the distant, train-whistle oohs of guest vocalist Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Ward asks the Big Questions: "How can a man like me remain in the light?/And if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?" Then he goes all fatalistic when
Neko Case, guests on a cover of Daniel Johnston’s "To Go Home," singing (twice, for emphasis), "God it's great to be alive/ Takes the skin right off my hide/ To think I'll have to give it all up/ Some day."
A record that casts a warily existential eye on the future, Post-War forges links to the past: surf-guitar instrumentals ("Neptunes Net"), bare-essentials blues ("Rollercoaster") and '60s-inspired slow-dance numbers ("Afterward/Rag"). The lyrics often touch on soldiers returning from the front, and those anachronistic accents serve to underscore the idea that Johnny-comes-marching-home romanticism is, like the genres Ward explores, a vestige of a very different time. Some may call it vintage, but there's another word for it: classic.
Seattle wasn't the only pea patch watered by kids of the ‘80s seeking to escape MTV and make punk their own. Lou Barlow and J. Mascis, two seemingly lackadaisical nerds from collegiate Northampton, Mass., turned their hardcore band into Dinosaur Jr. after realizing that the precision of thrash-and-mosh left little room for the sonic rambling that suited their hazy attitude. The resulting sound embodied one of indie rock's key emotional realities: the hormonal flux of misfit boys bent on claiming their cock rock inheritance, but scared of it as well. (Is there a sadder attempt at a romantic gesture than "In a Jar"?) Running wild with his effects pedal while mumbling insecurities into the mike, Mascis was rock's ultimate loser-hero, while bassist Barlow (who'd later found the equally influential Sebadoh) provided mind-expanding atmosphere. And don't forget the drums by Murph — the band's one unambivalent rocker, who held up its shaky treehouse with basic brute force.
more.
Animal Collective — four couch-surfing, scraggly dudes from the Northeast — write rounds disguised as songs, time-delayed melodies that swallow themselves whole before completion and search for a finite end that never arrives. Sometimes the effect is like Columbus addressing the Flat Earth Society, but on Feels, the band's new album, it's like waking up to zero gravity, the whole world weightless and untethered — and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than chilling on the ceiling?
Feels is easily the most accessible Animal Collective record yet, and also one of the best 2005 releases, period. "Did You See the Words" and "The Purple Bottle" tug from the same bottle of delirium as the Arcade Fire — it's as if everyone's in a race to see who can finish the song first. "Purple Bottle" in particular really impresses, the drumming primal but dampened, the vocals yelping and pygmy-like and an incredible "chorus" of soft yawps and falsetto sighs. "Bees" takes off on Panda Bear's excellent Young Prayer record, all harpsichord and enchanting forests. Bjork fans in particular might be surprised by how much they dig this one.
But far and beyond all of these excellent moments is "Banshee Beat." It's an absolute epiphany: chanted vocals, the strongest melody on the record, a pensive guitar drone, four chords, bombastic drums, percussion that sounds like spoon-thwacking, a too-brief crescendo rain-delayed for six minutes that still satisfies, a song that begs for the loudest stereo system ever. If this doesn't send you for the "download all" button, then nothing will.
Few 30-year-old albums sound as fresh and as ripe for rediscovery as Jesus of Cool. Unavailable or out of print throughout much of the CD era, the debut LP by Nick Lowe (renamed Pure Pop for Now People for the American market with a reconfigured track listing) was unique in its day for both embracing pop readymades and satirizing the exploitative and fickle culture that creates and consumes them. Nowadays, every indie rocker and blogger skewers the record biz while celebrating its guilty pleasures, but in 1978 such ambivalence was both radical (it was the first New Wave album to encapsulate the budding movement’s love/hate relationship with everything that preceded it) and misunderstood (Rolling Stone dismissed it as “a catalog of socko production effects held together with one-shot jokes.”)
Having struggled for years as the bassist of failed pub-rock band Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe created Jesus during his ascent as Stiff Records’ in-house producer of the Damned and Elvis Costello, and his sense of glee upon finally commanding his own destiny is palpable: No matter how cynical his lyrics get (check his still-shocking ode to fallen film star Marie Prevost, here dubbed “Marie Provost”), the music remains joyous. Nicknamed Basher for his technique of bashing out quick takes, Lowe gets remarkably kinetic performances from various members of Rockpile, the Rumour, and Elvis Costello’s Attractions that play tug of war with his spoofing side, rendering Lowe simultaneously offhand and heartfelt in proto-mashup mode: “Nutted By Reality” starts off by nicking the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” before abruptly shifting into a remarkably accurate Wings tribute, while “Tonight” recreates the teenage balladry of the Everly Brothers and climaxes on a melody cribbed from the Beatles’ “It’s Only Love.” Now including 10 extra non-LP singles, EP sides and compilation cuts that lead up to Jesus, this pop-about-pop landmark may ostensibly protest “Music for Money,” but Lowe’s clearly doing it for love.
This classic soul workout is as audacious as its title, thanks to Hayes' languid cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye" and the moody, oft-sampled "Ike's Rap."
more.
The bleak rosetta stone for complex, technical metal, Opeth's Blackwater Park proves that heavy music can absorb far-flung influences without sacrificing any of its inherent unholiness. The songs on Blackwater Park are endlessly restless. Over the course of its staggering 10-minutes, "Leper Affinity" moves from for-the-throat grind to solemn acoustic folk back to hardcore battering. "Bleak" is different altogether, becoming subdued and jazzy in its center section, mournful acoustic plucking spiraling like a crow overhead. Adding to the sense of breadth is the dual vocal approach of Mikael Akerfeldt. He's coarse and growling one minute, scraping his charred vocals across the bottom of the songs. Seconds later, though, he's crooning softly, the voice sounding like it's coming from a completely different source. The songs get richer and more dazzling each time through, and eventually Blackwater Park becomes a record not just of mere technical accomplishment, but one of power, intensity and madness.
more.
The split personality that is Ray Davies' genius is never more apparent than on this 1972 classic. Though the Kinks' initial breakthrough was built on ruffled-shirt decadence and guitar distortion, Davies early on revealed a nostalgic yearning for a simpler England, the Village Green and the local pub. But the price paid is steep: none of the many characters in Muswell Hill seem able to escape the modern world. Beset by alcoholism, starvation, jail and "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues," they take refuge in their dreams, and even those turn out badly. In "Holiday," the narrator lies on a beach only to be burnt by the sun, with the sea "an open sewer." In "Oklahoma U.S.A.," the punchline is "If life's for livin' then what's livin' for."
Unrelieved gloom? Hardly. Davies' affection for his characters and the Kinks' skill with a hook shines through. Despite the hard times amidst the omnipresent "People In Grey," his songs allow that a sense of community will grant a shoulder to lean upon, a friend to share a cuppa tea, a tune to hum. More than that, his "Muswell Hillbilly" can imagine the West Virginia he'll never see, the there of not-there, and the most powerful nostalgia of all.
Every rapper needs a creation myth — Illmatic opened with Nas and A.Z. counting money over snippets from Wild Style, the devil’s sons redeemed by hip-hop. Biggie opened Ready to Die with a gripping audio collage of his first twenty-odd years, as though his rag-to-riches tale was one you needed to learn. Jay opened Reasonable Doubt with a heartbeat, but its quickening pace suggested it was the sound of fear — of moving your first package; of holding your first gun; of seeing a man die; of the moment when you realize you have grown up too fast. This wasn’t an album deeply concerned with where Jay had been, since he had already built his name as a rather successful drug dealer. This album was about one man’s rebirth, and as soon as that ticking heart gave way to the gloss and floss of “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” it was clear that Jay, too, had arrived.
“My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me/ Tried to get a nut and he got a nut,” he bragged on that opening cut, as Mary J. Blige bellowed an achingly hopeful chorus borrowed from Mel’isa Morgan’s “Fool’s Paradise.” But was Jay really a “nut,” our “worst fear confirmed”? There is something cool and composed about Reasonable Doubt, as he plays straight man to Biggie’s true nut on “Brooklyn’s Finest” or earns his stripes on the icy “Dead Presidents II” — two of the finest songs of Jay’s career. “We used to fight for building blocks/ Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killin’,” he raps on the truly disturbing “D’evils.” But even there he sounds chillingly assured against DJ Premier’s spooked Allen Toussaint sample.
History recognizes Reasonable Doubt as evidence of Jay’s genius, but it all could have ended up very differently. Reasonable Doubt arrived during a tumultuous turn in the history of hip-hop. Nas’ disappointing It Was Written would come out a week later, and hip-hop’s obsession with the Mafioso lifestyle would soon bloat to cartoonish extremes. The Wu-Tang Clan would spool out of control, and within the next year, Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. would ascend to martyrdom. Yet the culture’s growth was still exceeding all expectations, and hip-hop would need new, larger, flashier heroes. And in Jay-Z, it found its pinnacle.
Following the disappointing Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight was a tremendous comeback for Spoon, a return to the taut, rhythmic feel of A Series of Sneaks (still their best album). "The Way We Get By" was Spoon's first real anthem, Britt Daniel flirtatiously barking, "You sweet talk like a cop, and you know it/ You bought a new bag of pot/ So let's make a new start," and then offering a raison d'etre straight outta Dazed and Confused: "We get high in backseats of cars."
The weed singalongs stop there, but the joyful punch does not. "Stay Don't Go" is the rare instance of indie rock and beatboxing (of sorts) mixing well. "Small Stakes" feels ready to be the theme song of your favorite new sitcom. "Jonathan Fisk" is straight rock, the likes of which we'd get much more of with Gimme Fiction. "Don't Let It Get You Down" is just the right amount of bittersweet. And finally, both "Vittorio E" and "Paper Tiger" bring a beautiful wooziness, and in hindsight clearly suggest "The Ghost of You Lingers," the Reich-ian single from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
Kill the Moonlight was Spoon's last moment as everyone's favorite unknown band. With Gimme Fiction two years later, the (comparative) big time was theirs. It was Kill the Moonlight that earned them those stripes.
This one's the fan favorite, the consensus masterpiece, and the easiest GbV album to love instantly and unconditionally. The combination of lo-fi-ness, unbelievable catchiness and clearly enunciated but still impenetrable lyrics, provide the sensation of picking up a faint radio transmission of the greatest band ever practicing aboard one of those “hardcore UFOs” Pollard sings about on the first song. Put it this way: There is one song in particular that you will immediately want to hear again, and will be humming for the rest of your life, and the name of that song is “Tractor Rape Chain.” Another one that has the same effect is “Echos Myron,” in which Pollard announces, “We’re finally here, and shit, yeah, it’s cool.” That pretty much says it all.
more.
"Beetles and eggs and blues and pour a little everything else." You get the sense that when Liz Fraser's voice came sliding out of the speakers on the opening track of Heaven Or Las Vegas, more clearly and brightly than ever before, most listeners did a double take. Wait…THAT'S what she's been singing all this time?!? Of course, like anything, the closer you look, the less you actually see. And, judging by the lyrics of the stunning "Cherry-Coloured Funk," we were probably closer to understanding Cocteau Twins song meanings when we didn't know what she was saying at all.
Which is a really long way of saying that Heaven Or Las Vegas is one of those rarities in the world of independent music. The pop move that actually works. Fraser's vocals were no longer hidden under ten layers of gauze and acrobatic flights of fancy, Robin Guthrie's guitar lines are as catchy as ever and Simon Raymonde holds down the low-end with his essential yet rarely celebrated bass. Whether it be the indie jangle of "Iceblink Luck," where Raymonde takes center stage or the relatively unadorned "Wolf in the Breast," Heaven showcased the band's ability to sew pop structures onto their uncommon sound palette. And, all in all, it might've been their finest hour. Now, if we could only figure out what Fraser is singing about...
Whatever you think of Belle and Sebastian, it's hard to disagree with the fact that the Scottish combo is not only remarkably consistent, but it's managed to evolve without cringe-inducing growing pains. B&S have pretty much shed their unbearably twee image, for instance, and without resorting to drastic measures, like recording with Max Martin or hiring stunt guests; instead, Stuart Murdoch and his gang have grown organically, each album building upon the previous one. The band even survived the 2003 departure of Isobel Campbell, whose cello-playing and mellifluous vocals were long thought to be an essential part of the B&S sound.
This album, the follow-up to 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress and second without Campbell, has an undeniably jaunty bounce, but B&S are hardly dance floor kings — it's the arrangements rather than the beats that sneak in sly funky/soul touches. "Sukie in the Graveyard" is buoyed by a bopping organ and subtle horns, for instance, while the clavinet intro to "Song for Sunshine" nods toward classic Stevie Wonder, before the song takes a turn into Sly and the Family Stone territory. But the overall mood is that of a paen to late-'60s/early-'70s sunshine pop ("We Are the Sleepyheads," "White Collar Boy" and its shuffling, delicately glammy Backbeat, "The Blues Are Still Blue" and its little "96 Tears"-like organ coda).
So yes, it's yet another B&S album, but it's also yet another good B&S album. Any complaints?
Hissing Fauna is the third fantastic album in a row from Athens, GA, pop band Of Montreal, but this time the band departs from the previous formula of '60s psychedelic storytelling for more confessional lyrics set with a DayGlo new wave flare. Bandleader Kevin Barnes sings of his sad-sack adventures in a breathy, eager voice with falsetto used liberally for faux-sassy ironic commentary. Find him telling tales of Norway as an electronics-only Talking Heads ("A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger"), rejecting a suitor who lacks "soul power" in an indie pop monologue ("Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider") and looking for a guru in the church of DFA Records ("Gronlandic Edit"). Put on the 12-minute "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," a goth-tinged and psychosexually-charged dance track, and let Barnes take over the room with his unique, head-trip approach to stereo production.
more.
No vocals. No lyrics. No solos and no leader. Instead, the nine-member Montreal collective known as Godspeed You! Black Emperor specialize in a surging symphonic post-rock, incorporating everything from ambient feedback drones to abstractions of hardcore punk; its second album is its masterwork.
Arranged in four continuous suites that forego conventional song structures in favor of orchestral movements, Lift Your Skinny Fists frames and contextualizes GY!BE’s compositions with automated gas station announcements and odd field recordings. Yet its multiple climaxes of sobbing strings, restless drums and sustain-drenched guitar are what define the record.
Playing off the double-meaning of its title, “Static” moans slowly, an unearthly hum merging with elegiac strings. Suddenly, a seething metal cacophony erupts until the song wears itself out, leaving behind a buzz that brings the piece back to where it begins. A spoken memory of Coney Island launches “Sleep,” which features a frantic and more rhythmic summit than the other songs, continually collapsing and starting up again. Like sequins on a black tar sea, the fourth suite, “Antennas to Heaven,” sprinkles twinkling glockenspiel over a thunderous din. Another sustained quiet passage follows, but at the album’s conclusion it turns shrill and discordant, offering neither resolution nor rest. As its title suggests, this imaginary soundtrack for dreams, revolutions, genocides and afterlives feels like a frustrated prayer, but one that's full of fighting spirit.
The title alone indicates why Steve Earle is doomed to be an outsider. It's not the Lonesome Day Blues, it's not the Deep Sea Blues, It's the Transcendental Blues that's got Earle licked, which hands-down beats a simple dark streak. They infect everything – Earle's love is unfulfilled, so he croaks "If I pretend to hold you tight/ Out on the highway late some night/ That's alright." On "Lonelier Than This," he wanders an empty road alone, looking for solace that never comes. He spills these tales out over roughed-up country and skewed bar blues — "Everyone's In Love With You" twirls a single spiraling guitar hook over and over and over; "Steve's Last Ramble" is all barnstorming country stomp, Earle's ragged voice catching on every note. It's one of the album's brightest moments, a celebration of dedication and settling down, done up hoe-down style. The trick about having the blues, apparently, is not letting them get you down.
more.
For some, nothing is more bewildering than the present. Forget the future — for it will forget you — it's the routine of modernity that terrifies, sending us wistfully toward a non-existent past, nostalgic for a life that the cruelty of time prevented. To experience this later in life is understandable, but to be afflicted at the age of 19, like Beirut's Zach Condon, borders on criminal. And yet from this alienation arises Gulag Orkestrar, in my view one of the finest albums of 2006 thus far and one seemingly ready-made for the indie canon.
Backed by Jeremy Barnes, currently of A Hack and a Hacksaw and formerly the drummer for Neutral Milk Hotel, Condon strolls through Gulag Orkestrar's multi-instrumental estates with a certainty that could only come at such a tender age. Condon writes morose, quasi-baroque ballads that he arranges like Eastern European folk songs: accordion, multi-layered percussion rhythms, muted horns and numerous wordless syllables howled in protest toward the Balkan winds.
Neutral Milk Hotel's epochal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is an obvious signpost, as is the mid-crescendo abruptness of Arcade Fire and the Luddite-rock of Tom Waits. But in its preciousness, Beirut ventures into territories more self-consciously traditional — the gypsy street march of "Bratislava," the opening title track, the arrangements in general — and, in an unlikely feat, immediate. There is an arrestingly soft beauty in the mourning horns of "The Canals of Our City" that renders classification gauche and denies self-consciousness. The song exists so that we need not consider why.
The same is true of "Postcards from Italy," which is looking like a staple of my mixtapes for years to come. Here Condon most succinctly bridges his affection for the old immigrant songs and the indie-rock world whence he has come. His voice phonograph-distant, Condon alluringly drawls melancholy over clap-trap rhythms and a simple ukulele jaunt of love and loss, honest topics for any era. But as much as "Postcards" stands out, it's just one amazing song of 11. Gulag Orkestrar is the best indie-rock record of the 19th century.
What hath White Stripes wrought? Suddenly, blues duos are everywhere, which is certainly better than when blues "deconstructionists" (it's still unclear what they even are) were everywhere. The most buzzed-about duo, the Black Keys, up the ante over their competition from both camps by actually demonstrating a decent feel for bedrock blues. Not that they're purists — there's a reason why drummer Patrick Carney and guitarist/fiddler/vocalist Dan Auerbach wear their industrial hometown of Akron, Ohio, on their sleeves as proudly as Devo did. That's most apparent on the metallic riff-raunch of "10 A.M. Automatic," especially when Auerbach unleashes distortion and fuzztone that'd rattle Ike Turner's fillings.
Even when they're playing the most conventional blues, the Black Keys amp it up. But they're capable of doing so without sacrificing nuance on songs like "Girl Is on My Mind," and Carney swings almost as hard as he thumps on the opening "When the Lights Go Out." "The Lengths" is about as pastoral as they get, while "Act Nice and Gentle" is affectingly lyrical, and their remake of Robert Pete Williams' great "Grown So Ugly" is as earthy as some of Captain Beefheart's blues interpretations.
Auerbach is no great shakes as a singer, but does the best he can with the limited voice he has to work with. Purists may be repelled, but this pair offers as much meat, in its own way, as most of the purist revivalist bands, and a lot more surprise.
A big group doesn't always make a big sound. Sprawling Toronto-based indie rock collective Broken Social Scene, whose ranks usually hover around nine instrument-hopping members, fuss over the details on You Forgot It In People, their breakthrough full-length. Rarely dipping outside traditional rock band instrumentation, BSS somehow make a bunch of guitar/bass/keyboard/drum tunes sound uniquely sparkly and sweet. The group sounds self-assured as members trade vocal duties and scuttle between galloping, raucous indie anthems ("KC Accidental," "Almost Crimes"), strutting, faux-tropical workouts ("Looks Just Like the Sun," "Pacific Theme") and swooning melodrama (album highlight "Lover's Spit").
Rather than making an indiscriminately large racket, BSS use their bulging roster to fill the nooks and crannies of You Forgot with small sonic treasures. Layered guitars twinkle a little more when sidled-up next to a high harmony piano vamp; acoustic guitar and brushed drums are teased and textured by a winsome, dulcimer-like lead line; a plodding midtempo number is made soaring with subtle strings and a flanged, layered vocal harmony. It took every shred of every idea from the freewheeling group, but they managed the neat trick of using more to make less — luckily, it's a distinctly thrilling treat.
The highly anticipated collaboration between two of independent hip-hop’s finest, Madlib and MF Doom, Madvillainy received rave reviews upon its release and, hindsight being 20/20, they were pretty much right. Stitching together a patchwork of vintage soul, jazz, movie music and who knows what else, Madlib constructs a musical fabric that wraps beautifully around the enigmatic Doom’s lazy monotone. Peppered with references to the joys of marijuana (“Spliff made him swore he saw heaven when he was seven”) and boasts of his own surpassing villainy (“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone/ After you who’s last, it’s Doom, he’s the worst known”), Doom’s words are often too oblique to make sense of. He strings together barely-connected phrases of half-sense, near-sense and nonsense with a kind of playfulness and joy in the sheer musical possibilities of language that recalls John Ashbery. The cumulative effect is mesmerizing and a little dreamlike, creating a different kind of logic, one with its own particular lucidity — as when Doom, rapping over a beautiful accordion loop played by the electronic music artist Daedelus, casually comes out with: “Slip like Freudian/ Your first and last step to playin’ yourself like accordion.”
more.
A fecund, spacious haze seems to follow My Morning Jacket everywhere (and I don’t mean that peculiar Bonnaroo smog either). Ever since their debut, the band has been deploying spring-reverb for all facets of their sound, from Jim James’ yelp to the peculiar corners the band so skillfully carpenters. So while the echo is always evident on Z, with the help of new keyboardist Bo Koster My Morning Jacket now emphasize the “spring” of said equation, with their sprightliest, most pliant set of studio songs to date. Skankable skips and R&B shuffles cast bright lights across their grooves, the prevalent haze and hanging vines cleared just enough to reveal the architecture beneath. A calliope organ pinwheels into “Anytime”’s anthemic drive, while the radio-friendly “Off the Record” shows off a newfound reggae lilt.
Rapturous rock remains their forte, though. New Testament allusions lay just below the surface on songs like “What a Wonderful Man He Was” and “Gideon,” both songs as ebullient as anything their closest counterparts, the Flaming Lips, ever encapsulated. And am I the only one that hears Eddie Rabbit’s “Step By Step” in “Lay Low”? A cathartic crescendo makes closer “Dondante” feel mountainous, the music slowly dissipating at disc’s end like so many clouds.
The Dirty South was practically the third double-album in four years the Drive-By Truckers, its 14 tracks and 70 minutes following 2003's 15-song Decoration Day and the band's 2001 epic Southern Rock Opera. Having three strong songwriters helped: Relative newcomer Jason Isbell contributed four cuts here, most notably the dramatic closer “Goddamn Lonely Love”; lead guitarist Mike Cooley wrote four others, with frontman Patterson Hood penning the other six. Each of them has a distinctive voice, both vocally and verbally, but it all meshes remarkably well, in part because all three share a penchant for storytelling via cultural reference-points, from Isbell's “Danko/Manuel” (a nod to the late greats of The Band) to Cooley's “Carl Perkins' Cadillac” (a run through Sun Records' glory days) to Hood's “Buford Stick” (one of two songs that reference Walking Tall film icon Buford Pusser). The high point is Hood's desperate falsetto in “Puttin' People On The Moon,” a tour de force of the down-and-out Southern working-class.
more.
Bass guitarist Dominic Aitchison is listed as “DEMONIC” in the liner notes to Mogwai’s Young Team. Yep. Sounds about right. The Scottish quartet’s debut album is a vicious one, full of viscous guitar feedback, serrated riffs and a healthy dose of anger. It’s the glorious sound of guitars being unleashed to their full volume potential. It’s the sound of four dudes getting together and making a racket.
The thing that made Mogwai so beloved, though, was the presence of the complete opposite as well. “Like Herod”’s explosive climaxes would be nothing without equal bouts of patient melodicism. “Radar Maker” and “With Portfolio” would merely be ambient curiosities, if they weren’t besieged by a torrential downpour of guitar on either side.
Young Team is often called Mogwai’s finest moment, though guitarist Stuart Braithwaite once complained that when it was recorded, the group was “young and naïve and had too little time.” The truth is that it’s both. Far from the disaster that Braithwaite believed it to be, Young Team benefits from youthful indiscretion. There is raw energy flowing through it, even though Mogwai clearly were already working within the soft-loud/crescendocore template that would define them.
This recklessness is perfectly captured by Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat on the album’s only true vocal cut, “R U Still in 2 It?” He never sings, just speaks, “We should go into town and spend some money,” and goes on to offer mundane options for entertainment. A movie, a drink. But then the group comes in and reminds you what that disaffected cool is hiding: “Will you still miss me, when I'm gone?” At this point, Mogwai were still romantics—no matter how much demonic feedback they couched their work within. They were also never better.
This reissue of the album has been remastered and contains a second disc of B-sides, rarities and live performances. We recommend “Honey,” which originally appeared on a tribute to the Spacemen 3.
After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.
Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.
We all know about the "Difficult Second Album" — the oft-rushed record made amid suffocating expectations and incessant touring. But some follow-ups not only make good on a promising debut but also retroactively imbue the entire enterprise with more intrigue than could have been recognized at the start. In 2007, M.I.A.’s Kala and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver entered the ranks of this special kind of second album, and so did Burial’s Untrue.
Part of the allure of dubstep, the sound that Burial — an anonymous London musician — helped establish, is that it’s so sparse and elemental that it eludes description almost by design: To formally address the qualities of dubstep is to paradoxically do damage to its most evocative parts — the parts that aren’t there, the haunted parts, the spectral spaces that surround the tangible sounds and make it all happen through the force of their very absence. It’s complicated, but it’s also extremely compelling — and more immediately so on Untrue than it was on the self-titled 2006 debut that made Burial’s name.
Untrue benefits from the conspicuous presence of vocals that prove newly forceful and free. Whereas voices served as atmospheric agents on the debut, here they drive tracks into the space of certifiable songs. “Archangel” announces the change at the start, with a mercury-mouthed male diva singing about “kissing you” and “holding you” in desperate, unsettling tones. A similar strategy plays out in “Near Dark,” in which the vocal sentiment in the refrain “I can’t take my eyes off you” applies just as much to ears.
The way that Burial foregrounds vocals as melody-makers veers back toward 2-step garage, the poppy post-jungle sound that ultimately evolved into grime and then into dubstep. The formal lures of dubstep proper remain here, but they also sound more kinetic and progressive. Even when the voices fade and drift like mist in the background, there are moods to be gleaned from the beats — the ticks and trips that toggle like drum ’n’ bass risen from the grave as something irretrievably decayed but also irresistibly angelic.
Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein blew indie hip-hop wide open in 2001, collapsing the false distinction between “street” and “backpack” rap way before Kanye (and with way different results). Vast Aire and Vordul combined Raekwon’s airtight, stressed-out crime dramas with crackpot Egyptology (“Pigeon”), Marvel Comics pulp (“Battle for Asgard,” possibly the first time African-American rappers referenced Norse mythology) and even a little emo (“The F-Word”). But for all the duo’s rhyme virtuosity and brutalist detail — “You was a stillborn baby/ Your mother didn’t want you/ But you were still born/ Boy meets world/ Of course his pops is gone” — it was El-P’s production that really flipped conservative indie wigs and garnered the duo attention outside of the rap world. At the same time that producers like Swizz Beatz were using high-gloss Casio keyboards to start the party, El-P was power sanding his beats and soaking his hooks in brine. El fashioned a wheezing machinefunk full of biting synth winds blowing through subway stops and sonic quotes from Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” The end result was a grimy classic of 21st-century NYC hip-hop that kicked off El’s well-regarded Def Jux imprint and that both rappers and producer have yet to top.
more.
John Fogerty stamped himself as the voice of the working-class rocker with Green River, one of three albums CCR released in 1969. This masterful collection of songs profoundly influenced the direction of '70s songwriting: Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Ronnie Van Zant and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few, were clearly inspired by its populist vision. "Wrote a Song for Everyone" summoned up an inclusive brotherhood of humanity at a time when rock rhetoric was stridently partisan. The title track and "Cross-Tie Walker" celebrate rural life and use the metaphor of train tracks to capture the restlessness of the American spirit.
Fogerty was also adding to his substantial catalogue of material dealing with the shadow of death and evil in the world — "Tombstone Shadow" and "Sinister Purpose" are impressive, but "Bad Moon Rising" was the most potent of these darker songs, a dramatic contrast to the feel-good sounds of the bigger CCR hits, not to mention the prevailing smiley-face approach of the pop music of the era. "Lodi," one of Fogerty's greatest songs, is ostensibly about a going-nowhere rocker playing for drunks in a one-horse town, but it became a metaphor for anybody stuck in a dead-end job. The terrific rocker "Commotion" and another of CCR's brilliant covers, "The Night Time Is the Right Time," fill out this pivotal American album.
Even with a musician as prone to musical self-reinvention as Andrew Bird, you'd think that by the seventh album, he'd have revealed pretty much everything he has up his sleeve. And yet Bird manages to come out of left field with Armchair Apocrypha. Here, the usually self-reliant Bird reached out to a small group of Minnesota musicians, and, perhaps paradoxically, the resulting music only highlights Bird’s singularities, notably his surreal — both musically and lyrically — take on Americana.
Bird’s trademark sound relies heavily on the violin and whistling (yes, whistling). On Armchair Apocrypha, these two elements help form an otherworldly ambiance, compounded by Bird’s soothing voice, obtuse lyrics and uncanny melodic sense. Even more than the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, he can graft lyrics like “Scythian empires, horsemen of the Russian steppes/ Scythian empires, archers of an afterthought/ Routed by some Achaeans, thwarted by the Thracians” (from “Scythian Empires”) onto melodies catchy enough for a singalong.
Elsewhere, Bird offers some of his most anthemic choruses to date on “Plasticities” and “Spare-Ohs.” Don’t expect U2 or Coldplay, however: Bird prefers pizzicato violin and that forlorn whistling to big guitars and pounding keys. The closing instrumental, “Yawny and the Apocalypse,” starts with birds singing before a ghostly violin supplants them. The effect is uncommonly spooky, suggesting, at least to this listener, the dawn of nuclear winter.
Don't let the title fool you: while there is plenty of soul here, and all the productions fall into this eight-year window, the actual years covered and genre reach is far greater. While Soul Jazz's similar overviews of soul stay within Coxsone Dodd's Studio One confines, the net is cast wider here, allowing producers like Sly & Robbie and Lee Perry to slip into the mix. The set ultimately showcases Jamaica's longstanding love affair with African-American pop music: from Blue Note to Motown, Stax to Curtom, on up to Sugarhill.
The opening "Ghetto Funk" harkens back to Jimmy Smith's Hammond-fueled bop while Welton Irie's closer "Hotter Reggae Music" jumps off from "Rapper's Delight." Strutting island instrumentals readily assimilate '70s funk icons like Kool & the Gang and War. In between, there is indeed lots of soul to be had: three Curtis Mayfield compositions get interpreted by the likes of Junior Murvin, and it's a treat to hear legendary vocalist Alton Ellis croon a Stevie Wonder obscurity ("It's a Shame"). Ken Boothe steals the show though — his lustrous voice scuffed with tears, his versions of powerful soul staples like "Is It Because I'm Black?" and "Ain't No Sunshine" stand right alongside the originals.
If some lunkhead ever tries to tell you that jazz is boring, just play them Sonny's Saxophone Colossus, one of the most exuberant and sheerly enjoyable discs ever carved in wax. Apart from his awesome technical accomplishments and inexhaustible stamina, Rollins' playing has always been infused with humor and joie de vivre, which are immediately evident from the opening piece here, the loose-limbed calypso "St. Thomas" (named after one of the Virgin Islands). "Moritat" is a droll Rollinsisation of Kurt Weill's "Mack the Knife," and he delivers a deft master class in balladry on "You Don't Know What Love Is." But it's the closing track, "Blue Seven," which established itself as the critic's tipple. Based on a feline walking blues theme, it provides the platform for one of Rollins' finest-ever extended improvisations, though much kudos must be lobbed at his sidemen, drummer Max Roach, pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassman Doug Watkins. Ah, bliss.
more.
The Pixies were alt-rock before the steroids kicked in. Black Francis used clever arrangements to get the quiet/loud dynamics that Lollapalooza bands, with the help of massive studio compression, turned into floating money. These two records introduced the Pixies. "Levitate Me," from the earlier Come On Pilgrim EP, has all their core elements: a hooky chorus, darkly suggestive lyrics, surf music atmosphere and Francis's wheedling voice: think Neil Young as Chucky from the Child's Play slaughter fests.
Surfer Rosa, recorded in 1987 by Steve Albini (who Nirvana would turn to on In Utero, looking for even more of the Pixies sound), has several other classics, like "Bone Machine," "Broken Face" and David Bowie's favorite: "Where Is My Mind?" It also highlights the vocals of bassist Kim Deal (referred to in the credits only as Mrs. John Murphy), who significantly reduces the band's sweaty palm component on tracks like "Gigantic" and "Tony's Theme." Not always as listenable, song by song, as the Pixies would later become, these records are nonetheless the place to hear them showcase the prototype sound that let '80s indie rock become the '90s alternative juggernaut.
more.
A classic New York story. A couple fresh-faced lads move from their safe college town to the big city and fall in love with the freedom of making tomorrow's sounds today. Pavement were modernist noise makers like Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker inventing bop at their late night jam sessions, or the Bronx revolutionaries who wrought hip-hop out of the rotten Apple in the '70s. Slanted is beauty collapsing, sweetness fading into static, a soft-rock séance amidst the clatter and drone of lo-fi legends like the Fall and Swell Maps. It's a summer record recorded mid-winter in a recession year, a beach record Ingmar Bergman would have liked. About 100,000 people liked it too, making a small thing seem bigger than it ever had before.
more.
If the Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto of 13 Songs and Repeater had been offered a glimpse into their future, it's hard to tell how they would have reacted. Would MacKaye have recognized his own voice, softened with age? How would Picciotto feel about Fugazi's shift from strident punk-rock to relatively subtle post-hardcore? The evolution is not total, certainly — the verses to The Argument's "Full Disclosure" could have appeared on Red Medicine — but the bookends to The Argument, arguably Fugazi's finest album, are striking in their subtleties and intricacy.
"Cashout," which basically sets the stage for all that MacKaye has done with his excellent other band, the Evens, could only come from DC. It strongly recalls the early work by neighbors Q & Not U, for example, and the push and pull between the verses (where MacKaye's tense voice at times hums along with the backing guitars) and the chorus (unleashed, but still with cello buttressing the melody) just straight slays; drummer Brendan Canty's little snare stutter-beat and Joe Lally's head-nodding bass line make it almost funk-like. There's never been another song like it in the Fugazi discography.
Then there's "Life and Limb," Picciotto pirouetting on the apocalypse, again the rhythm section incredibly tight and restrained, matching Picciotto's breathy sighs in self-discipline. A sense of maddening control drives The Argument, and even now, after hearing this album hundreds of times, I find it startling. "The Kill," "Strangelight," "Ex-Spectator," and "Argument" all feeling just as much like tests of will as they do absolutely incredible songs.
And how incredible is "Argument"? Here's the (pre-9/11) opening lyric: "When they start falling/ Executions will commence," which is intro'd by a gorgeous little swirl of percussion and rich guitar tones. And that middle eight! Piano and strings from the bottom of the ocean, the song bubbling back up, MacKaye murmuring, "I'm on a mission/ To never agree," and then the fuse is ignited, the guitars sparked, and MacKaye's ohm-like intonation: "Here comes the argument… Here comes the argument… Here comes…"
John Darnielle has built a career on writing pointed vignettes about optimists, pessimists, romantics and miscreants but it turns out his most affecting story is his own. Turning to autobiography for the first time, Darnielle documents his terrible childhood with alarming focus. It's the immediacy that makes the record so affecting — in Darnielle's songs his stepfather's abuse and his own desperate attempts to escape from it aren't sealed off by memory but always happening in the present tense, making the wounds seem eternally fresh and open. He's dressed up the dry strum that defined his early cassette-recorded outings, but just barely — a piano plinks softly down the bridge of "Broom People" and a violin scrambles across the tense "Lion's Teeth." But mostly it's just Darnielle, his guitar and his memories, delivering equal parts hope and despair.
more.
Back in the late '90s, a burnt-out A&R guy told me he was jealous I lived in Minneapolis because it had the "most beautiful boys and girls in America." Back then the city also counted a beautiful, jabbing, jabbering punk band called Lifter Puller among its delights. That band's frontman Craig Finn named the third album of his new band, the Hold Steady, for Minneapolis kids, so worthy of hot-fingered Kerouac reverie. In his NYC ex-pat incarnation, Finn has risen to bard-band godhead by cataloguing their charms, hurtling his snow-plowed Twin Cities scene dreams — full of imperial losers, re-lapsed Catholics, smacked-out hoodrat friends and hangover headaches — into epic Springsteenian spinouts of invincible, yet reliably evincible youth.
Having left Minneapolis's Block E for E Street back on Separation Sunday, Finn and his muscular band flirt still more overtly with jukebox heroism here. "Chips Ahoy!" rockingly outs love as an anxious racetrack bet, and the cheeky "You Can Make Him Like You" grudgingly admires those insouciant girls who simply let their "boyfriend deal with the dealer." The beer-teary "First Night" could be the "Same Auld Lang Syne" of the faded indie-rock regency, and if fellow topophiliac Sufjan Stevens can make Carl Sandburg a parlor-rock star, Finn can resurrect the river-soaked ghost of drowned poet John Berryman who "loved the Golden Gophers/But hated all the drawn-out winters." On the Berryman homage "Stuck Between Stations," Finn's empathy flows deep and wide for his hometown's most famous suicide: "He was drunk and exhausted/He was critically acclaimed and respected." Finn's banking on better, and for his sake, here's hoping Sal Paradise gets to the Promised Land.
In rock music, as in life, being in the right place at the right time is everything. Into the grave new world of 2002, New York quartet Interpol released a debut album that embodied a seemingly paradoxical blend of melancholy and desperate hope, a romantic sense of depression. The Germans call it Weltschmerz, and it fit the times like an Armani suit.
While singer Paul Banks delivers dire lines like "You go stabbing yourself in the neck" in a foreboding baritone brimming with dread, it's redeemed by catchy drums, propulsive melodies and bass lines that lumber and veer like a practiced drunk. And yet for all its drama, Turn On bears the comfort of the familiar, echoing early '80s English bands like Joy Division, the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen — bands who also happened to hail from troubled northern towns.
It's a city album — every immaculate surface of the recording is spit-shined with carefully calibrated reverb redolent of skyscraper lobbies and urban canyons. Declaring "Subway is a porno," "NYC" nails the love/hate relationship New Yorkers have with their city; the song is the very soul of urban sophistication. Elsewhere, things can turn sentimental, but only to affirm a re-emerging faith in rock music as vehicle for salvation. When Banks intones, "We have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight," you believe him.
After three albums with cultishly adored alt country troupe Whiskeytown, it was widely appreciated that Ryan Adams was a smart, literate songwriter and a distinctive singer. However, Heartbreaker, Adams' 2000 solo debut, marked the moment at which the artists he'd already been compared to — Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Steve Earle, Gram Parsons — began to seem less like useful reference points and more like Adams' peer group.
Though Heartbreaker was only the beginning of what has been a prolific and enthralling solo career, it seems some way more than likely that it will be recalled as Adams' masterpiece. Every note and breath here is suffused with swaggering confidence. The album's weird start — an obscure argument about Morrissey with collaborator David Rawlings, followed by a false start to the opening track — can only be intended to evoke Dylan's double-take on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream." The song that follows, the swinging bluegrass romp "To Be Young," doesn't disgrace the association.
It is, though, a somewhat misleading opening bid. The rest of Heartbreaker is a match for the title, a collection of exquisitely mournful ballads to which Adams' careworn croon catalogues the wreckage of a relationship, and articulates with wracking plausibility the ensuing derangement. "Why Do They Leave?," "Winding Wheel" and "Oh My Sweet Carolina" — the last of which is haunted by Emmylou Harris's backing vocals — are impeccable examples of the sort of monologues that the deserted deliver to indifferent bartenders. "Come Pick Me Up" and "Damn, Sam (I Love A Woman That Rains)," meanwhile, are gorgeous, wry exercises in doing what country music does best: wringing comedy, bleak though it may be, from tragedy.
Conventional wisdom, which in this case may be right, holds that Bill Evans' storied career peaked on June 25, 1961, a date that yielded two live records, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, the final two documents of Evans' first, and best, trio, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. In the two years he'd been playing with Evans, LaFaro had opened up new possibilities for the jazz bass, playing with a harmonically oblique, melodically flexible style that was, at the time, unprecedented. Ten days after this record was made he died, just 25 years old.
Sunday at the Village Vanguard may be the ultimate monument to LaFaro's talent; it features two of his compositions, "Gloria's Step" and "Jade Visions," and he plays lengthy and dazzling solos on nearly every track. It's not just LaFaro who was playing well, though — the whole trio was in top form for this date, a delicately balanced unit anchored weightlessly by Motian's ever-shifting, reactive timekeeping, with Evans' limpid, impressionistic harmonies floating above like clouds. There are no missteps in this set, but a highlight is the dark, mournful reading of Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now."
From George Clinton's own mouth, I was told Eddie Hazel dropped that traumatic solo on "Maggot Brain" in one take after George told mama's boy Eddie to imagine he'd been told his mother was dead and then found out it wasn't true. Now that's what we call record producing! Bob Rock, take note — instead of spending one year in therapy with your uninspired band, just say some shit that will send them into therapy and run the tape.
The title track is your brain on LSD buried alive in a coffin and resurrected on the third day. There's a handful of guitar players who stand up to comparison to long-form Coltrane and Dolphy, not to mention Stravinsky and James Brown. There may in fact only be three fingers on that hand, and their names are Hendrix, Hazel and Pete Cosey (see Miles Davis' Agharta if you haven't already been-there-done-that).
Most great rock guitar solos last only a few bars longer than the average male orgasm. As Hendrix had tapped into the big O's infinite feminine side on "Machine Gun," so Hazel did likewise on "Maggot," and left us with a symphony's worth of memorable acid-torched ideas and transcendental catharsis. Like jazz when it's really happening, you want to drown in and dissect the notes at the same time. You also come to know every note, because every one blows a wide-ass hole in your solar plexus.
The rest of the album has its psychedelic-soul charms — Eddie sings on the snorted-heroin ode "Super Stupid" (think of it as an outtake from the Black Zeppelin-type album he coulda-shoulda-didn't make, likely because of one toot too many), and "Wars of Armageddon" is electric Miles without Miles and before Miles even got so wildly electric. But my favorite of the batch is the acoustic guitar-sweetened mid-tempo ballad "Can You Get to That," which has always brought to mind the Eagles singing about karmic redemption with guns at their heads in a south side Chicago Pentecostal church.
In retrospect, this record's darker themes seem to echo with the gravity of 9/11, though in fact it was released a few weeks before that fateful day. Coincidental prescience aside, Time (The Revelator) stands as Gillian Welch's crowning achievement to date, loaded with emotionally resonant lyricism lit afire by the brilliant musicianship of her partner David Rawlings. Previous albums proved Welch's mastery of traditional form and feel; on Revelator, she and Rawlings struck a more personal chord of artistic expression. The result, from the spellbinding title-track opener to the epic 14-minute closer "I Dream a Highway," firmly established the duo as one of the major talents of their generation.
more.
No indie rockers have done more to transform noise from rebellious assault to domestic accoutrement than Yo La Tengo, and no Yo La Tengo album has been more conceptually upfront about this process. With feedback swelling and ebbing like the creaks you've grown to fondly expect in an old house, the trio collects sonic details, from distortion blasts to organ doodles to looped Bacharach snippets, the way other homebodies do Hummel figurines. As always, the action pivots around the two voices and their distinct grains: guitarist/husband Ira Kaplan and his comforting warmth, drummer/wife Georgia Hubley and her delicate chill. On the raving "Sugar Cube" Ira pledges devotion with near-adolescent yearning, on the hushed "Shadows" Georgia pledges devotion even if unrequited and on the light samba "Center of Gravity" the couple pledge devotion as a form of shared stability. Kaplan murmurs the Beach Boys' "Little Honda" so dreamily that no matter how recklessly overdriven his guitar or propulsive Hubley's beat, the promised trip clearly isn't cross country but through his record collection. In fact, the band so thoroughly depicts its small patch of emotional turf that Hubley's charmingly warbled coda, "My Little Corner of the World," almost seems redundant.
more.
"I don't think I'm a great piano player," Vince Guaraldi once said, "but I would like to have people like me, to play pretty tunes and reach the audience. I hope some of those tunes will become standards. I want to write standards, not just hits." As even those with limited exposure to Guaraldi's work can tell you, he didn't just write standards; he set them. His cool jazz–infused compositions for Charles Schulz's Peanuts TV specials — music that was by turns spirited and poignant — certainly qualify as classics, not just within the genres of children's programming or of jazz but in the popular imagination.
Guaraldi's much-loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, a soundtrack originally released way back in 1965, is the most classic of this self-effacing piano player's classics. It's also a big seller. No wonder, then, that Fantasy Records reissued it, first in 1988 and then again, with Concord Records, in 2006. Naysayers have grumbled on various websites, including this one, about the remastered A Charlie Brown Christmas Album (with bonus tracks). They say it's too pristine sounding and that the alternate takes are not on par with the perfection of the original. In the case of the former, hey, it's a matter of taste; some people like tape hisses and such, and some prefer a sleeker sound. The merit of the bonus cuts, however, cannot be debated.
The additional versions — of "Greensleeves," "Christmas Time Is Here" and "Christmas Is Coming" — are more of a good thing, period. There will never be an album of fresh material from Vince Guaraldi; tragically and unexpectedly, he died from a heart attack in 1976, when he was just 47. We're fortunate to have newish songs like these, especially when they're this good. The restrained "Greensleeves" on the 1965 album seems almost ponderous compared to alternate take 6, which has a hep pizzazz resulting from looser piano playing, a more-prominent bass, the stirring use of what sounds like an egg shaker and snappy drumming in place of the original's gentle, splashy brushwork. If Charlie and Lucy grew up and went to sophisticated jazz lounges on dates, this is the kind of song a skillful trio onstage would be playing.
Alternate take 13 of "Greensleeves," on the other hand, is at least 13 shades darker than both of the other versions. At times, it sounds like Guaraldi is sinking his fingers right down through the ivories, like he's implanting the notes in his piano. A snare drum kicks in protest, while the cymbals shiver. The three renditions of "Greensleeves" make the case for this reissue all on their own, I would argue. The alternate "Christmas Is Coming" is also both a real find and a real joy. Guaraldi and his fellow musicians deliver a performance that is rangy and sly, and the sheer aliveness of it is — dare I say — a gift that keeps on giving.
Originally released in 1993, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 effectively launched the career of Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James; though he had already gained a degree of notoriety for his single "Digeridoo" and the Analogue Bubblebath EP, SAW 85-92 was his first foray into long-player territory. Listening to the album today, it's almost hard to believe that it's the work of the same artist who would go on to create tracks like "Windowlicker" and the notorious "Come to Daddy." Pensive, melancholic, even understated, the album foregoes James' later interest in shock value in favor of emotive melodies, hypnotic rhythms and spine-tingling electronic timbres.
But James — infamous for bizarre stunts like DJing with sandpaper disks — subtly seeds his reputation as a prankster in a few crucial ways. First there's that nagging titular modifier, "Ambient." Unlike the placid, beatless manna with which the genre is generally associated (thanks in large part to Aphex Twin's 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a far more tranquil affair) SAW 85-92 thrums with the shuddering rhythms of Chicago house and European EBM (Electronic Body Music). This is hardly hard house, however; despite the distorted drums of opening track "Xtal," bright chimes and childlike vocals lend it a beatific feel, while uptempo cuts like "Pulsewidth" and "Heliospan" are about as jarring as a crash-landing in a pillow factory.
The other tricky business here concerns the music's provenance. The album's title suggests a compilation of material reaching back to 1985 (when, as Allmusic's John Bush points out, James would have been only 14 years old). While age may be a red herring, style isn't: in 1985, Chicago pioneers like Phuture and Fingers Inc. were just beginning to invent the rhythms and timbres of acid house, a sound that wouldn't begin migrating to the UK until 1987 and 1988. It's possible, of course, that in assembling the album James fleshed out youthful synthesizer sketches with contemporary techniques.
In any case, the album's cohesion moots such fact-checking anxieties. For all its restraint and even its primitivism, the record is as inventive as anything James has ever done. Electro's machinic rhythms ("Ptolemy," "Ageispolis") recall Kraftwerk and Model 500 while breakbeat hardcore's diced drums ("Heliosphan") preface the breakneck intensity of drum & bass; distorted electronics and melting tones suggest something like laudanum industrial ("Schottkey 7th Path") and one properly ambient track foregoes beats entirely to revel in an expansive drift of sound ("I").
James-watchers will note the origins in SAW 85-92 of numerous Aphex tendencies: recurring titles, a fixation upon chemical sounding names, an affinity for kitsch. (The spoken-word sample in "We Are the Music Makers" comes from Gene Wilder's 1971 classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) But you hardly need to be a completist to appreciate the record; indeed, casual electronic-music fans may find this to be the only Aphex Twin record they need. But it's certainly one that anyone with any interest in the genre owes it to him- or herself to check out. Despite its age, it hasn't dated one bit.
"Don't get any big ideas," goes the first line of "Nude," the third song on Radiohead's haunting seventh record, "they're not gonna happen." This is, of course, hogwash — a willful bit of Thomfoolery designed to accentuate a theme by understating it. In Rainbows is a record full of big ideas, ideas about solitude and desertion and depression and dislocation — to say nothing of its notions about record distribution.
And let's, please, say nothing of its notions about record distribution. For weeks after its arrival all anyone could talk about was how much (if anything) they paid for it, obscuring any discussion of what Rainbows actually is: a stunning sustained consideration of loneliness set to a somber, underplayed score.
Musically, In Rainbows — like Hail to the Thief before it — finds Radiohead winding their way back towards something like conventional songwriting. That an album where the opener boasts jazz guitar, drum 'n' bass rhythms and bursts of cheering children can be considered even remotely "conventional" is a testament to how far afield Radiohead were before this. They're calmer now, constructing songs from blue bands of synthesizers and delicate, twinkling arpeggios. With the exception of the ragged "Bodysnatchers," which hurtles forward on the back of briny guitar, most of Rainbows is disturbingly serene. The songs maintain a kind of steady cruising altitude: "Faust Arp" threads solemn strings through Brit-folk finger-picking; "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" speeds along on galloping percussion and swooping, sine-wave guitars. It's a welcome reminder of how good Radiohead still are at writing plain old pop songs, even if those pop songs are full of ruminations on loss and mortality.
Which, of course, is where Thom Yorke comes in. His writing has grown more direct — on In Rainbows he's fonder of plain old declaratives than on much of his past work — but most times that superficial glibness conceals a deep-seated unrest: "I don't want to be your friend," he sings at one point, "I just want to be your lover," a sentiment that sounds sexy until you realize what it means is that he's not going to call you the Day After. Ditto "All I Need," where he unspools a series of distressing pledges of devotion ("I'm an animal trapped in your hot car" is one) only to end up at "I only stick with you/ Because there are no others." Not the valentine everyone hopes to get.
In the album's final scene, Yorke finds himself before God who, apparently as resistant to new technology as he is sin and death and canoodling, plays back Yorke's life for him on a VCR. As he is for most of Rainbows, Yorke is there by himself, but instead of rifling through his regrets, he has an eleventh hour epiphany. "This is one for the good days," he croons as the piano death-marches behind him, "And I have it all here in red, blue and green." It's a startling redemption, ending album-length isolation with the refrain, "I know today has been/ The most perfect day I've ever seen." This, to say the least, isn't what we were expecting. Where's the longing? Where's the dread? Where’s the hopelessness? Who's the wiseguy? What’s the big idea?
Somewhere, armchair critics and befuddled Yankees are quibbling, neatly filing the first two records of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell away under "power pop." Yet, like Elvis and obvious Chilton precursor Jerry Lee Lewis, what else is Big Star's music really, released as it was on Memphis' own Ardent label (distributed through Stax, home of Otis Redding), recorded at the city's Ardent Studios by Dixie Fried auteur Jim Dickinson and named for a local supermarket chain? 'Spose if they'd been named "Piggly Wiggly" or "Winn-Dixie," there'd be less palaver. Of course, the long unsung quartet ascended to Rock Snob Encyclopedia fame mostly from laurels tossed their way over the past two decades by fellow Southern modernists R.E.M., who spearheaded the renaissance of Big Star-philia, Brits with Americana-envy and Midwesterners like the Replacements and Wilco, but the current Southern rock vanguard is hip, and includes tacit reclamation of Memphis' finest among the twisted skeins of their respective aural missions.
To be sure, Bell's post-band masterpiece I Am the Cosmos more overtly alludes to every suhthuhn boy's primary concern -- God -- but the lyrical themes, attenuated gospel-derived harmonies and underdog perspective of the mostly gorgeous, magnificent songs throughout both these albums sketch a peculiarly Southern point of view. So what if they openly adored the Beatles? The Allman Brothers were spurred to action by Cream and the San Francisco Sound and no one thought they were Anglophiles or Haight Street hippie wannabes. "Thirteen," that quintessential tale of young love, is like the sonic rendering of a William Eggleston photograph, and "The Ballad of El Goodo" is often like one shot by Eudora Welty. Crossover was king of the late modern epoch and Big Star -- Chilton, especially -- were masters of the game, wedding their collective Southern gothic demons (and guitar-as-snake in the grass) to girl group-worthy pop on "When My Baby's Beside Me," "In the Street" spiced with sun-kissed SoCal beach-canyonisms, virtual Witchseason folk "The India Song" and the twang riff-happy, mongoloid Cousin of Boogie "O My Soul." Chilton himself remains an idiosyncratic purveyor of hardcore blue-eyed soul at its very best.
Most of the time, pop-rock albums start strong and then dip in quality, either a little or a lot. One of the most unique things about the third album from Canadian indie-rock powerhouse the New Pornographers is that it does the opposite: Play Twin Cinema beginning to end and it gathers strength rather than shedding it. The album is noticeably scrappier than its predecessors: Where 2000's Mass Romantic and 2003's Electric Version are each compressed to a polished finish, Twin Cinema has a rangier sound, with more of a played-live feel and looser tempos than the jittery earlier discs. As a result, the scrappier compositions of Destroyer majordomo Dan Bejar, who always contributes a few songs to each NP album (here, "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras," "Broken Beads" and the intriguingly languid "Stacked Crooked"), fit in more neatly with A.C. Newman's jumpier songs. Newman's own work is looser, too: "The Jessica Numbers" even ends with a wayward guitar solo rather than a reiteration of the chorus, while the chorus of the album's highlight, "Star Bodies," jumps out of a verse that runs in happy circles rather than surging forward.
more.
Christmas Eve, 1954, was an auspicious night for American music. Down in Memphis, original rocker Johnny Ace shot himself while playing Russian Roulette. Up in New York, Miles Davis teamed with Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver and the Modern Jazz Quartet's rhythm section (Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke), and helped define the parameters of hard bop to come. Often viewed as a transitional album, Bag's Groove contains echoes of Davis' Birth of the Cool octet, and looks forward to his triumphant Kind of Blue without quite cohering in its own right. And yet, the album is famous in jazz circles not because Monk and Miles are said to have come to blows in the course of recording it, but because it's here that Davis mastered the bone-dry tone he's best remembered for, and Sonny Rollins matured into a true virtuoso. Highlights include take two of the title track (listen for Monk's furiously staccato solo), and Rollins' Latin-tinged "Airegin" (which prefigures Davis' own work on Sketches of Spain).
more.
In interviews, Chan Marshall insists her songs come to her from dreams and the air surrounding her. There's no questioning the dreamlike quality of her best work — where subtle, haunting melodies are backlit with spare piano and elemental guitar — and there's no denying that whatever space she occupies, she completely takes over. This is one moody woman.
You Are Free was Marshall's first collection of original material in five years, and it rushes forth in a briskly moving stream-of-consciousness, no matter how slow the actual tune in question. Special guests include Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder (background vocals), Nirvana/Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (drums, three tracks) and producer Adam Kasper, who twirls the knobs for a slightly brighter hue. But they're mostly a cheering section. The real focus is the songwriting, which remains eerily private, whether it's concerning the music business ("I Don't Blame You," "Free") or child abuse ("Names"). Marshall sings with a quiet desperation and honesty — and often in angelic, multi-tracked stereo — that makes it seem as if you're not actually hearing these thoughts but reading her mind.
There are songwriters and then there are songmakers — artists whose craft extends beyond lyric and melody. As the sprawling Illinoise shows, Sufjan Stevens is a songmaker of the highest order. Intricately orchestrated and handed forth with a gilded touch, songs like "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." and "Jacksonville" jostle through different parts and movements with hardly a note out of place. Whether he's picking a banjo or guiding a horn section that matches indie-rock glee with actual chops, Stevens knows exactly what he wants to hear before he hears it. Then he listens; his vocal delivery, so tender and unassuming, leaves the impression that he's just as curious about his creations as an unwitting listener left to puzzle over a concept album about the most Midwestern state in the union. The Illinois theme neatly links songs about everything from Abraham Lincoln to UFOs, but it's better to think of it as merely one element of an album guided by magic and wonder.
more.
Monk's third album for Riverside was the first devoted to the pianist's own original compositions. But Monk's stellar, ever-shifting quintet — which includes Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Paul Chambers and Ernie Henry — transformed Brilliant Corners into much more than a solo outing.
Recorded in New York in December of 1956, the album is endlessly inventive: "Pannonica" features Monk playing the piano with one hand and a celeste with the other. On "Bemsha Swing," Max Roach doubles his drumming with a series of tympani rolls. On the 13-minute "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are," the group stretches the blues almost beyond recognition. And on the only piano solo to appear, Monk burrows so hard into "I Surrender, Dear" that he reaches the emotional depths Louis Armstrong only hinted at in his own, 1931 recording of the ballad.
Better yet, Monk's spare, percussive playing gave his sidemen plenty of room to work with, his own genius bringing out the best in some very exceptional musicians: Sonny Rollins' solo on "Pannonica" is one of the finest he recorded, and the four tracks recorded with Ernie Henry (who died in a car crash not long afterwards) capture the precise moment in which the young alto sax prodigy came into his own. As a pinnacle of Monk's recording career, Brilliant Corners deserves a spot on any jazz lover's top-ten list.
To call Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga one of the year’s two or three best rock albums is to overstate how much it sounds like a rock album. There’s no mistaking its imperturbable swagger and seething refrains for anything else — Spoon still knows how to write a song that could fit into each of rock’s past five decades without tipping toward any one in particular. But even songs on Ga Ga that traffic in guitars don’t sound like they were written with guitars in mind. Spoon sounds more interested now in drums and empty space, both of which sparkle and boom in ways that make singer Britt Daniel sound positively electrified to be in their presence.
The sparse and experimental lean of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga places it closer to the group’s 2002 breakthrough Kill the Moonlight than its bash-minded follow-up Gimme Fiction. “Don’t Make Me a Target” opens on a note of resignation and rage, with portentous guitar and piano that build toward a sort of atonal rockabilly jam about two minutes in. From there, though, the album takes on an air of mystery with “The Ghost of You Lingers,” a gorgeous and terrifying ballad in which Daniel’s distended voice duels with blasts of static and more reverb than could ever sound earthly. The jarring tonal shift into “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” proves perverse but, as goes for most of Spoon’s moves at this point, not overly pleased with itself: After bells and slappy drums enter like Phil Spector as summoned by David Lynch, the buoyant tune takes over and lodges into that part of your brain where pleasurable pop hooks go and stay mum.
What sticks most on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the grain and range of Daniel’s voice, which must have been miked a dozen different ways to capture his timbral moods in tracks as disparate as “Don’t You Evah” (Spoon’s most funky song yet, by a good measure) and “The Underdog” (Spoon’s most Billy Joel-like song yet, to the same degree). Nothing Daniel does has ever sounded labored, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga finds him and his band with a newly refined balance between craft and restraint.
A tiny, subtle diamond in a field of ten-foot neon exclamation points, Boxer, the stately, flawless fifth record from the Brooklyn group the National, draws strength from the power of suggestion. "Let's not try to figure out everything at once," Matt Berninger sings softly in the glowing opener "Fake Empire," and that line could be a statement of theme: On Boxer, the epiphanies take their time.
Since their relocation from Ohio to New York, the National has built a career on writing wry songs that express sympathy for the bedeviled. 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers found them merging grizzled Americana with a Flannery O'Connor kind of fatalism, crafting stories about misanthropes whose dreams had dried up and whose only recourse was to blame everyone around them. Alligator, released the following year, took that same anger and internalized it, turning the gun around and tying up acrid metaphysical aggravation in thick, silvery ropes of guitar. That record was mainly about exhaustion, but Boxer is about resignation. Its title is a clever bit of misdirection: they don't mean someone who fights, but someone who confines. The characters here are either burned out or walled in, aware of their limitations but working to accept them instead of becoming incapacitated by them.
Fittingly, the songs are coiled and quivering — no release or eruption, just a steady, insistent simmer. Sound arrives not in distinct notes but reverberations: guitars echo, organs pool, bass hums and buzzes. The jittery, insistent "Mistaken for Strangers" builds to a groan instead of a shriek and "Guest Room," which is as close as Boxer ever comes to an anthem, blots its big finish with inky smudges of bass and rolling clouds of feedback. This temperance is the album's ace up the sleeve: rather than betting their worth on one hook writ large, the songs unfold a little more with each pass. What starts out foggy and puzzling is gradually revealed to be a bounty of small, elegant moments. Drummer Bryan Devendorf is the group's anchor; his percussion is odd and atypical, strange thrilling bursts of sound that knock the songs off balance. His playing is completely counterintuitive, loaded with sudden stops, unlikely drops and improbable rolls.
Berninger, in his early 30s, is a Tennessee Williams kind of frontman: tired of parties, hyper-aware of his own age but roaming the nighttime city anyway in the restless — and fruitless — pursuit of something more. But instead of getting bitter or nostalgic, Berninger seems to be moving toward a kind of acceptance. "Tired and wired, we ruin too easy," he sings on "Apartment Story," and the key there is the pronoun — it's not the ruining that matters, it's the peace that comes from knowing you have someone to be ruined with. Again and again Berninger finds comfort in companionship, and even when he's singing "walk away now, and you're going to start a war," it doesn't sound so much like an ultimatum as it does a sly, gentle plea to come back to bed.
This, in the end, is what Boxer is all about: the first step after the Big Dream fails. It's a record about the implication but not the explanation, the clues but not the mystery. It's a record full of down-payment dreamers, ruined princes and glowing young ruffians who are learning to be satisfied with everything they haven’t got. They're beaten but grinning — half awake in fake empires, but waiting around to see the sun.
Belle and Sebastian's delicate pop-folk tunes and wry wordplay only work if you put some effort into unraveling their shy subtleties; that and the distribution problems that initially plagued the sprawling Scottish group ensured that their embryonic fan base would consist of no one but the keenly committed. Such humble and seemingly doomed beginnings actually helped this cult band/case study: Released first in late 1996, B&S's second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, is the sound of marginally skilled musicians struggling to manage the deceptively difficult feat of singing and playing soft yet fast, and it's just barely within their grasp. Years before he and the band perversely hooked up with mega-producer Trevor Horn, singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch crooned in an unsteady cry that hit only a few more notes than it missed, and the sprightly tempos continuously fluctuate, but the effort of the performances and the beauty of the compositions will astound if you let them. "All I wanted was to sing the saddest songs, "Murdoch ruefully admits in "The Boy Done Wrong Again," but there's too much joy in the punkishly twee instrumentation and darkly humored lyrics for him to achieve this goal. True to the perversity of the cult hero, Murdoch's failure remains our gain.
more.
Doolittle is the Pixies album that endures — virtually as harsh and radical as their earlier Surfer Rosa, but balanced with production and melodies to match; proof that leader Black Francis cared as much about Brian Wilson as Charles Manson. Titles along the lines of "Debaser," "Waves of Mutilation," "Gouge Away" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" don't exactly evoke a party in the woods, but Francis, like another of his favorites, David Lynch, had a knack for draping the psychopathic and sexually repressed in overlit sweetness. Only "Here Comes Your Man" arguably tries a little too hard, coming off as an attempt at R.E.M.-style jangle pop. So many elements went into the Pixies' desert flower sound: the roll of Kim Deal's bass, Francis' Spanish-tinged vocals, the guitar attack choking off cold. Deal doesn't really have a standout lead vocal this time, but she and Francis use their harmonies (more back-and-forths) to evoke an eternal war between the sexes: the passion sounds they turn into a bridge on "Tame" are rote, robotic, numbed — anything but sexy. Does "Hey" sum up Black Francis' view of romance? "Uh/Said the man to the lady/Uh/Said the lady to the man she adored, and the whores like a choir/Go uh all night." A foul worldview, but here, at the height of postmodernism, it made for sublime pop.
more.
With the indie boom in full swing, its little princes took a whack at alt-rock, though trying to write bigger tunes just meant they had a wider backdrop for their worries. Songs like "Range Life," "Silence Kit" and "Gold Sounds" turn quarter-life anxiety into classic California sunburn jams, filling in the melodic broad strokes with tired romance. "Say good night to the rock & roll era," Steve Malkmus sings near the end. What's so exciting is that he has no clue what might come next.
more.
John Coltrane established himself as a solo artist with a prolific series of recordings in 1957 and ’58, yet the sessions comprising Lush Life still stand out amid this creative torrent for a couple of reasons. Because Red Garland failed to show up at the studio, the first three tracks put Trane in the relatively rare context of a piano-less trio, and bassist Earl May’s judicious style provides further elbow room for the lyrical gushes of sax on the love songs and the blues — soulful yet quicksilver phrases demarcated by rhythmic eddies and reveries.
But most of all this collection is renowned for Coltrane’s ability (abetted by a full quintet here) to vividly convey both the grandeur and the intimacy of “Lush Life,” during his 14-minute treatment of Billy Strayhorn’s classic composition. His emotional discernment and restraint enhance the poignant turns-of-phrase, an acute sensibility perhaps indebted to his own struggles with drug addiction at the time. But “Lush Life” is hardly a solo triumph: both arco and pizzicato, this is one of bassist’s Paul Chambers’ more noteworthy accompaniments, and Garland’s lengthy piano solo nourished his reputation as a master of silky ballads. The disc closes with the nascent, relatively pacific, hard bop of “I Hear a Rhapsody.”
For a tiny moment it seemed that Elliott Smith was going to be the "new Dylan" of Generation X; his exquisite balladry so perfectly captured the wistful dance with hope and hopelessness enacted by the shadow children of the Baby Boom. But it wasn't to be, not only because of Smith's struggles with depression (which led him to suicide in 2003), but because Smith's moment called for something more subtle. Hear it on this exquisite disc, a homemade charm bracelet strung with anger and hope and lovely broken dreams. Smith was a lo-fi pop perfectionist — his melodies and simple song structures aimed to match the Platonic ideal of his heroes, the Beatles, but his arrangements were raw as punk, as was his fragile tenor. In love songs like "Between the Bars" and tales of cosmic disappointment like "Ballad of Big Nothing," Smith grasped the beating heart of that old ennui, the dark side of the indie rock spirit.
more.
The title of Arcade Fire's debut was inspired by a succession of bereavements afflicting the band during its creation. Forced to the creative brink by such an accumulation of sadness, Funeral finds them delving into some odd corners, particularly in the four-part "Neighborhood" suite, a fantasy about children living in the snow, developing without adult input during a prolonged power-cut. Despite the prominently keening violins, the band's dense, layered sound has some similarities with the Flaming Lips, especially since Win Butler's strained squawk of a voice inescapably recalls Wayne Coyne's. The inevitability of aging is the album's main theme, with "flowers growing on the grave of our love" in "Crown of Love," and Butler observing in "Wake Up" how "now that I'm older, my heart [is] colder." Regine Chassagne's "In the Backseat," meanwhile, brings a bittersweet poetry to bereavement, as she notes how "my family tree's losing all its leaves."
more.
Where were you when you first heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? I was a college radio DJ, and I remember seeing the CD on a table (it had just come out), and someone had put a piece of masking tape on it that simply read: "I LIKE TRACK #6!" And so I played it that day on my show (track six is "Holland 1945," the fuzzy, bombastic one), and fell in love. No other record mattered as much. But here's what's great about that: I am not special. So many people have a story like that with this record — a girlfriend put "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" on a mixtape, a friend tried to pass off "Two-Headed Boy" as his own. This album is not only intensely personal in its perspective (we all felt like we knew leader Jeff Mangum after hearing it), but intensely personal in its reception. It is also, to put it bluntly, one of the greatest albums ever made.
Broad strokes first: yes, the album has roots in the tragedy of Anne Frank and the Holocaust. In a tremendous interview at the time in Puncture with eMusic's own Mike McGonigal (read it here), Mangum said:
"While I was reading [The Diary of Anne Frank], she was completely alive to me… So here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine, having the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank."
It's an album of empathy, of fear, of the everyday horror of insecurity and doubt. It's an album that has "Oh Comely," its streams and streams and streams of words anguishing between religion and sex and love and death, Mangum, broken, singing, "I know they buried her body with others/ Her sister and mother and 500 families/ And will she remember me 50 years later?/ I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine/ We know who our enemies are," and then a muted trumpet mourning like at a Gypsy funeral. It's an album where Anne Frank dies but "now she knows she will never be afraid." It's an album by a man whose nerves are so raw, his senses so acute, that all pain is his pain, all life is his life, all death is his death. And he can't escape it. Ever.
Yet it is a glorious album, too. It is intensely sad, perversely morose, and yet there is so much joy. There is the exaltation of "Untitled," the horns of heaven welcoming him and little Anne home. There is the unreal beauty of "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," "What a beautiful face/ I have found in this place/ That is circling all round the sun," it begins, the Theremin ringing and the saw singing, and then the heartbreaking end jumps up before we can turn away: "And one day we will die/ And our ashes will fly/ From the aeroplane over the sea," the words' beauty so striking that it takes a moment to realize their horror, and yet still a romantic shock lingers. Would this be so bad a way to go?
Mangum hasn't made a Neutral Milk Hotel album since. It's been more than a decade, and yet Aeroplane looms like the truest possible words at the worst possible time. It could not be more beautiful. It could not be more vulnerable. In that interview with McGonigal, Mangum said something else that reveals so much. "I don't consider myself to be a very educated person," he said, "'cause I've spent a lot of my life in dreams." With In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, he released those dreams to the world. And they were perfect.
© 1998-2009 eMusic.com Inc. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks in the USA or other countries. All rights reserved.
© 1992 - 2009 All Media Guide, LLC
Portions of content provided by All Music Guide, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC
