Music

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The Listening Post: April 2011

Warmth starts to arrive for real, and pop music is the order of the day.

  • Mighty Baby—Mighty Baby. Rolled Gold, a collection of band demos by Sixties mod Freakbeat band The Action, was a sterling set. Though not released until 1995, the album stands up alongside such legendary albums as There Are But Four Small Faces and S.F. Sorrow. But the songs from Rolled Gold were also the end of the band, who then rose out of the ashes of The Action as Mighty Baby. Their self-titled debut was recorded in 1968 but not released until 1969 and it’s an excellent collection of late Sixties British psychedelia. While a lot of the British psychedelic scene was marked by a taste for music hall and stories of wizards and knights, Mighty Baby’s roots as a hard rock band kept their music grounded. There’s some Middle Eastern stylings in “Egyptian Tomb,” “House Without Windows” relies on the standard “I met a man while I was journeying down life’s road and we talked about the meaning of life” hippie cliche, and “At A Point Between Fate And Destiny” is as pretentious and boring as the title suggests (as well as including lyrics about an “ancient hermit”—strike three). But what makes this album more listenable today than much British psychedelia is the muscle behind the songs. There’s a high level of musicianship and most of the songs rock…something you can’t really say about bands like Tomorrow or even early Pink Floyd.
    Grade: B+
  • The Best Of The Lovin’ Spoonful—The Lovin’ Spoonful.The gentle folk rock stylings of The Lovin’ Spoonful underpinned several songs that can only be considered classic anthems of the mid-60s. There’s simply no denying songs like “Daydream,” “Summer In The City,” “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice,” “Do You Believe In Magic?”, “Jug Band Music,” and “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” Perhaps best of all is the achingly beautiful, “Darling, Be Home Soon.” Forty plus years ago the Spoonful were blasting out of every AM radio in the country, and much of it is impossible not to like. At their best, they wrote classic pop tunes. Having said that, there’s also an ephemeral air to much of this. The songs float precisely because they are lighter than air. These are songs that are instantly enjoyable coming out of a radio while laying on the beach or enjoying the summer air. But aside from the aforementioned classic tracks, most of the rest is simply lightweight, enjoyable pop. It’s as temporary as an Abba album track. The Best Of The Lovin’ Spoonful makes a compelling case for the band as enjoyable hitmakers with some high quality songs that you may never have heard. They’re not as serious or hard rocking as The Rascals, but they have more hipster credibility than Dionne Warwick. While it’s playing, it’s a great listen. When it’s not playing, you will remember only the handful of classic tracks.
    Grade: B+
  • Mars Needs Guitars!—Hoodoo Gurus. Strip away early R.E.M.’s indecipherable mumble and sinister atmospherics, and shine up the choruses and you’ve got Hoodoo Gurus. From the opening power pop salvo of “Bittersweet” the Gurus pile on hooks and catchy choruses. “In The Wild,” “Death Defying” and “Like Wow–Wipeout” are indisputable highlights, but the album is consistently solid, a triumph of songwriting and execution, marred only by a too-shiny production straight out of 1985. Unfortunately many of even the best albums from this time period struggle against the awful production that was a sign of the times, and Mars Needs Guitars! is one of those albums. The album also ends on a weak note, with the title track and “She” providing a decent, but lackluster, finale.
    Grade: B+
  • Jesus Of Cool—Nick Lowe. Homage must be paid first to the album title. How awesome is calling your first solo album Jesus Of Cool? Answer: pretty freakin’ awesome. Unfortunately, it was only released in the UK under that title. The American version, with a slightly altered track listing bore the also quite cool title Pure Pop For Now People. Nick Lowe was always something of an anachronism in popular music. He had the heart of a rock ‘n’ roller from the Fifties and Sixties, with an intense pop sensibility that rendered his music as catchy as only the very best power pop can be. He also had a very skewed lyrical sense that you can see in the works of modern day Lowes like Brendan Benson; there’s really no question about it: “Marie Provost” is the best song ever written about a dead movie star whose corpse is eaten by her pet dachshund, and “Nutted By Reality” is at the top of the short list of songs written about castrating Fidel Castro. You can also hear where early Elvis Costello got much of his sound, especially on Armed Forces, which featured the hit single “What’s So Funny (About Peace, Love, and Understanding)?”, written by Lowe and first recorded by Lowe’s band Brinsley Schwarz. Only “Shake And Pop” and “Tonight” lag a bit. “Shake And Pop” sounds uninspired, especially when compared to Rockpile’s ferocious version of the same song (called “They Called It Rock” and included as a bonus track). “Tonight” simply doesn’t go anywhere. But the lowlights are rendered irrelevant by classic pop rock tracks like “I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass,” “So It Goes, ” “Marie Provost” and a killer live version of Lowe’s single “Heart Of The City.”
    Grade: A-

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The Listening Post: March 2011

Signs of spring, lots of tunes.

  • Teargarden By Kaleidyscope, Volume II: The Solstice Bare—Smashing Pumpkins. The second of 11 proposed EPs by the reconstituted Pumpkins (at this point really just Billy Corgan) is yet another winner. Corgan’s released nine songs from the projected 44-song opus he’s calling Teargarden By Kaleidyscope, and every one of them has been a winner. The second EP has nothing as good as the first EP’s “Song For A Son” or “A Stitch In Time” but it’s more consistently good. Corgan has embraced the swirling psychedelia that made for so many memorable Pumpkins singles and that he abandoned on the last full-length album, Zeitgeist. The result is that Billy’s got his groove back and that this project is (so far) the best stuff he’s done since Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It even compares well against the titanic Siamese Dream. It could fall off the earth at any time, and hoping that the remaining 35 tracks will be this good is probably a fool’s hope but so far, so good. “Freak” is a hard-charging riff rocker, “Spangled” a pretty ballad about love in the moonlight, “Tom Tom” is heavy pop, and despite an awful 80s-style synthesizer riff, “The Fellowship” eventually builds into a satisfying rocker.
    Grade: A
  • Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac—Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham turned Fleetwood Mac into a California-sound hit machine in the mid-70s, but in 1968 they were rising from the ashes of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and playing a ferocious British version of Chicago blues. What makes the early Fleetwood Mac rise above most of their British blues contemporaries is the genius guitar playing of Peter Green. Green had the chops of Clapton but was capable of playing with more subtlety, and he played with more of a real feel for the blues than guys like Alvin Lee and Kim Simmonds. He also played straight blues far better than either Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page. It’s this guitar playing, sharp, empathetic, and brilliant, that makes this first Fleetwood Mac album better than most others of its type. It’s not on the level of Mayall’s album with Clapton, but it’s still excellent. Elmore James is a key figure here, and Green plays a hellbound slide guitar, particularly on “Shake Your Moneymaker.” The languid, almost underwater guitar tones of “I Loved Another Woman” and the acoustic “The World Keeps On Turning” are the other standout cuts. As a rhythm section, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are solid, but this is Green’s show, so a song like “Looking For Somebody,” which puts Green in the back seat behind an unconvincing harmonica, drags, and some of the tracks are a little on the generic side. Overall, though, this is one of the better examples of British blues.
    Grade: B+
  • One Step Beyond—The Chocolate Watchband. For me, this is the most satisfying album by the garage rockers, even if it’s the least garage rock-oriented. The sound here is based strongly on Jefferson Airplane. Songs like “Uncle Morris” could have fit nicely on Crown Of Creation. “Flowers” starts like the Moody Blues before it turns into Love. The garage roots are not completely gone. “Sitting There Standing” is a rough and tumble guitar rocker that brazenly rips off the Yardbirds song, “The Nazz Is Blue” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor” is a Humble Pie-ish rocker. Clearly originality was not the Watchband’s strong suit, and in 1969 that may have been important. From the perspective of 2011, this is a very good collection of late 1960s psychedelic-tinged rock. There are a couple of clunkers, especially the two bonus tracks, but this is a fine album and highly recommended to fans of late 1960s rock music.
    Grade: B+
  • Wrecker!—Mono Men. Seattle’s roots-oriented garage punkers deliver a decent effort with this 1992 release. It’s a very hard rocking album, with lots of punky raveups but it’s mainly a triumph of style over substance. A lot of it’s good, especially in the first half of the album. “Watch Outside,” “Your Eyes,” and “Last Straw” offer a muscular opening, but the only truly great song (“Testify”) is tucked away near the end of the album, though “See My Soul” comes close to that level. In the meantime, there are by-the-numbers rockers like “One Shot” and “Swampland,” and some strictly mediocre filler like “Tomahawk” and “Don’t Know Yet.” It’s a good album, but far from great.
    Grade: C+
  • Whatever Turns You On—West, Bruce & Laing. One part Cream, two parts Mountain. How could it go wrong? On paper, this should work in spades. Jack Bruce is an extraordinary bassist and singer, Leslie West stands shoulder to shoulder with Eric Clapton as a guitarist, and while Corky Laing is no Ginger Baker he’s still an excellent drummer. Somewhere in the mix, it did go wrong. There are several inspired moments on this album, but that’s all it amounts to. The album opener “Backfire” is a solid rocker squarely in the Mountain tradition (and let’s give it up for Leslie West as a singer, as well as a guitarist), “Sifting Sand” is a power ballad done right, with the power surging through the entire piece, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Machine” rides a Sabbath-style rhythm with about 45 seconds of Floyd-style spaciness, and “Scotch Crotch” has a great Jack Bruce vocal over a charging piano rhythm. The problem here is that the rest of the album seems uninspired at best (“Token,” “November Song,” “Dirty Shoes”) and turgid at worst (“Slow Blues,” “Like A Plate”). West, Bruce & Laing sounds like a great idea, and every once in a while they give you a hint as to what they may have been capable of doing, but overall the album is a letdown.
    Grade: C+
  • Collapse Into Now—R.E.M. Since the departure of drummer Bill Berry, R.E.M. has been a band adrift. They piled on drum machines and electronic squiggles on the weird Up, toned down the electronic elements for the lackluster Reveal, went slow with the humorless Around The Sun, and then released a brief album of punky rockers with Accelerate. All of these albums had at least a couple of moments of greatness, but great moments on albums was a serious comedown for a band that released some of the best albums of the past 30 years. Collapse Into Now is the best album they’ve done since New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Once again, R.E.M. sounds like they’re having fun. In this case, the fun comes from going through their closets and trying on the suits they once wore so well. Collapse is almost defiantly retro, but it doesn’t imitate the past so much as it insinuates the reasons that R.E.M. was such a great band. Much of it sounds like old, unreleased R.E.M. songs from the first half of the 90s, compiled on a mix tape by a fan who knew what he was doing. The overly repetitive and somewhat dragging “Oh My Heart” is a sequel to Accelerate‘s “Houston,” “Blue” deftly combines of Out of Time‘s “Belong” and “Country Feedback” with New Adventures‘s “E-Bow The Letter.” Songs like “Discoverer” and “All The Best” rock as hard as anything from Monster without that album’s reliance on distortion, while the ballads act as a glue that holds the album together. The lush “Walk It Back” may be their best ballad since Automatic For The People. Despite a title that sounds like the punch line to a naughty joke, “Mine Smell Like Honey” explodes into the best chorus these guys have come up with in 20 years. Throughout the album, bassist Mike Mills provides prominent backing vocals, which has always been R.E.M.’s secret weapon. There are also some guest stars helping out. Electronica singer Peaches fills in for Kate Pierson on the great, but inscrutable, “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter” and Eddie Vedder provides a wordless howling backing vocal on “It Happened Today,” while Patti Smith reprises her “E-Bow” role on “Blue.” Collapse Into Now is R.E.M. playing it safe, but also playing to all of their many strengths. It isn’t on the same level of the albums from their heyday (few albums are), but it proves that R.E.M. can still deliver the goods, and do it far better than most younger bands.
    Grade: A
  • Chutes Too Narrow—The Shins. I never knew that “Indie Rock” was an actual sound until I heard The Shins. For me, “indie” was always about record label or, at least, about not conforming to any sort of mainstream conventions, but the actual bands ran a pretty wide gamut in terms of their sound. But then I heard The Shins and thought, “Oh, indie rock.” It’s a backhanded slap, or a fronthanded compliment. The Shins have a really good sound. They’re tuneful and melodic, and play a good combination of solid rock and wistful ballads. Chutes Too Narrow, their second album, is a very good collection of songs that seem to float in the ether. There’s nothing here that feels really substantial, but everything on here is thoroughly enjoyable, from the effervescent power pop of the opening “Kissing The Lipless” to the lightly plucked acoustic ballad “Those To Come” which closes the album on a bit of a down note. Along the way The Shins hit greatness with “Saint Simon” and “Turn A Square” but most often settle into a very good groove that mixes power pop, guitar jangle, and ballads. They’re the thinking man’s Rooney, with none of the annoying quirks that mar that band’s output. Very good stuff indeed.
    Grade: B+

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Rebecca Black And The Cult Of Fame

There has been an enormous amount of Internet buzz in the past couple of weeks directed at Rebecca Black, a 13-year-old girl who has become an Internet phenom thanks to the song “Friday” and the slickly done video that accompanies the song. As I write this, the video has nearly 30 million YouTube hits. Rebecca Black, it seems, is a star.

The buzz surrounding this young girl is for all the wrong reasons. Put simply, both the song and the video for “Friday” are bad. Not just normal, run-of-the-mill, bad. Not even way-over-the-top “We Built This City” bad. No, this song is so bad it will make your ears bleed. It may well be the worst song ever written and recorded…and the video makes it even worse. It’s the Plan 9 From Outer Space of music. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen or heard it, watch and listen at your own peril.

So this puts me in the very strange position of standing up for Rebecca Black.

Much of the gleeful mockery that happens in discussions and on comment boards comes at the expense of the girl, but I think those comments miss the mark. The most frequent criticism of her is that she can’t sing, that her voice is beyond awful. It’s certainly true that the vocals in this song remind me of Twiki, that annoying little robot that used to provide comic relief in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. But it’s also not her real voice. For whatever reason (oh God, maybe her real voice is worse…no, can’t be), the producers of “Friday” have used Auto-Tune to compress Black’s voice into a robotic monotone. There is almost no trace of a real human voice left anywhere in the song. I haven’t heard such a digitally processed vocal since Neil Young butchered “Mr. Soul” on the Trans album, but at least Neil was trying to sound like a computer. It’s more Kraftwerk than craft work.

The other criticism of Black is that it’s virtually impossible to see a trace of genuine emotion or feeling in her face. Even as she’s croaking about “fun fun fun fun fun” she looks like somebody’s pointing a gun at her baby sister’s forehead.

For this, I can’t blame the girl one bit. On some level she had to know that this song was bad. Even a 13-year-old can read these lyrics and come to the rational conclusion that this brings “suck” to a whole new level. Don’t believe me? Run this past the average 13-year-old and ask them if they think it’s good:

“Yesterday was Thursday
Today it is Friday
We we we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards”

Add in lyrics about trying to decide whether to get in the front or back seat of a car and about eating cereal in the morning and you no longer have a song, you’ve got a Kenny Bania routine, and listening to it is like being beaten with a bag of oranges.

Still, the hate directed at Rebecca Black is unfair. She’s a young girl with stars in her eyes, like a million other young girls and boys out there. The villains of this piece are the folks behind Ark Music Factory. For a fee (no doubt a very high fee), Ark Music Factory will write a song for you, record you singing it, produce it, create a professional looking music video, publish it on YouTube, and put your song on iTunes. They’ll even guest star in your video, throwing in a Vanilla Ice-worthy rap about how cool you are.

The entire enterprise is cynical in the extreme. This is not a new Brill Building of talented songwriters churning out songs to be matched to appropriate singers. This is a group of people who have tapped into a new market in the American Idol landscape.

The arts have always been populated with people seeking fame. Somewhere inside every musician is a kid who desperately wanted to be on stage, basking in the glow of devoted followers. For generations, kids would practice, practice, practice in order to get to Carnegie Hall. They paid their dues. Elvis Presley, close to being an instant star with his first single, was a poor kid from the slums of Memphis, singing at talent shows and hanging around tiny Sun Records until they took pity on him. The Beatles played hundreds of shows in The Cavern, a dank, claustrophobic basement in Liverpool, when they weren’t slogging through all-night sets for hookers and thugs in Hamburg, Germany. Whether it’s dodging bottles being hurled at you in a seedy club or struggling through a set at another Bar Mitzvah, it’s called “paying your dues” and most every musician has done it. At least, the good ones have.

In the past 15 years, there has been a new path to stardom. A revival of The Mickey Mouse Club, backed by the strong arm of Disney’s media outreach, turned Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake into stars. The Backstreet Boys and ‘n Sync, among many others, were molded by faceless entrepreneurs to appeal to the widest cross section of young female fans available. American Idol has turned the concept of getting a record contract into a popularity contest. None of this is really new. The Monkees were created for television, and the original Mickey Mouse Club gave us Annette Funicello. What is new is the notion that anybody can become famous if they just get a lucky break. The Monkees were cast as actors because they could also sing, and Annette Funicello had talent that reached past the small screen. But as anybody who’s ever watched the audition episodes of American Idol can tell you, the world is full of people who are completely devoid of artistic talent who nonetheless believe with every fiber of their being that they can become stars. When they are told that singing is not their game they look crushed or defiant, and sometimes both. Who is Randy Jackson to take away their dreams?

Enter Ark Music Factory, willing to provide what may be a shortcut to fame. No auditions, no dues, no dodging bottles…just pony up the dough and maybe it’ll happen for you, too. The folks at Ark clearly don’t care whether their charges can sing or not. As long as the check clears, you’ll be up on YouTube in no time. Ark Music Factory has no skin in the game. They’ll be happy to exploit Rebecca Black and so many others like her. So she becomes a national punchline because she’s been saddled with the worst song ever written? Not their problem. My guess is they console Rebecca and her parents with the notion that 30 million YouTube hits is a screaming success. But for Rebecca Black, high school awaits and that poor girl is probably going to be tormented because she believed that fame is won or bought, not earned, and because she had parents willing to open their checkbooks to buy that fame, and because Ark Music Factory was willing to take the money with not a care in the world about the product they put out.

Rebecca Black is famous. People all over the world are laughing at her. Any chance she had of making it in the jungle of the music business is now dead, lying in repose next to William Hung’s début album. But it is the people pulling the strings that deserve to be laughingstocks. They wrote the song, they produced it, they ran her voice through Auto-Tune, they created the atrocious video. And they’re adults. To quote another singer who spent a lot of time playing for food and passing the hat in Greenwich Village, Rebecca Black is only a pawn in their game.

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The Listening Post: February 2011

More snow, more cold. Time to light a fire.

  • Burning Down Your House—The Jim Jones Revue. They don’t make rock ‘n’ roll like this anymore. Really, they don’t. The Jim Jones Revue are a throwback to the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll music, a furious hybrid of Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the proto-punk of 60s garage bands like The Sonics. This is raw, uncompromising stuff, 11 revved up rockers in barely 30 minutes. No ballads need apply. There is a certain sameness to the album as a whole; one or two change of pace songs might have served the album well as a listening experience, but the album is over so quickly there’s no time to get bored. The main purpose of the album, however, is not to be a soothing listening experience; it’s to get you off your keister and out on the dance floor until you collapse in a pool of sweat. On this level, it succeeds admirably. Like the best of the early rock ‘n’ roll it’s almost impossible to listen to this without wanting to move. George Clinton told us “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” and the Jim Jones Revue provide a mind-freeing experience. This music makes you want to shake like jelly on a plate even if, like me, you’re allergic to looking like a fool on the dance floor. I dare you to listen to this album without at least tapping your foot or playing imaginary instruments. I double dog dare you. Pianos and guitars dominate along with a frenzied, borderline inarticulate howl of vocals from Jim Jones. This is rock ‘n’ roll that should come with a warning label: playing this album loud might, in fact, burn your house down.
    Grade: B+
  • In The City—The Jam. I’ve never been sure why The Jam were considered a punk band. I get that they played short, sharp, aggressive songs and came out of London at the height of England’s punk scene, but The Jam were always acolytes of The Who and The Small Faces, lovers of all things Mod right down to their haircuts and skinny ties. The Jam were a power pop band, in the very best sense of that term. The power pop they played was not from the “hard rock Beatles” school of Badfinger or the Raspberries, but rather the crashing, catchy two-minute anthems of the early Who. “The Kids Are Alright,” “Substitute,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” and “Pictures Of Lily” are the musical progenitors of “Art School,” “In The City,” and “Sounds From The Street.” Seen as punks, the label that was dropped on them by clueless music executives and critics, the Jam are lightweight. Seen correctly, as power pop heirs to the pre-Tommy Who, the Jam are titans. In The City is a nearly flawless début album, loaded with brilliant gems: “Art School,” “I’ve Changed My Address,” “I Got By In Time,” “In The City,” “Sounds From The Street,” “Time For Truth,” and “Takin’ My Love” are some of the greatest power pop songs ever put down on tape. The rest is nearly as good, from a rave up version of “Slow Down” that shreds the Beatles version to a thrashy version of the theme song to the TV show Batman (also covered, back in the day, by both the Who and the Kinks). Some of the typical punk rock subject matter raises its ugly head (“Bricks and Mortar” rails against urban planning, and features a very Who-like fadeout; “Time For Truth” asks “Whatever happened to the great empire/You bastards have turned it into manure”), and the aggressive nature of the music makes you think there’s an underpinning of inchoate punk rock anger throughout (even when there isn’t), but musically this is classicist rock music. This is smart songwriting, well-played. If you like the early Who, you will like In The City. I love the early Who, ergo….
    Grade: A