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Fleetwood Mac: Rumours

Jessica Hopper — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours would never be just an album. Upon its release in 1977, it became the fastest-selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height, and its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon. The million-dollar record that took a year and untold grams to complete became a totem of 1970s excess, rock'n'roll at its most gloriously indulgent. It was also a bellwether of glimmering Californian possibility, the permissiveness and entitlement of the 70s done up in heavy harmonies. By the time it was made, the personal freedoms endowed by the social upheaval of the 60s had unspooled into unfettered hedonism. As such, it plays like a reaping: a finely polished post-hippie fallout, unaware that the twilight hour of the free love era was fixing and there would be no going back. In 1976, there was no knowledge of AIDS, Reagan had just left the governor's manse, and people still thought of cocaine as non-addictive and strictly recreational. Rumours is a product of that moment and it serves as a yardstick by which we measure just how 70s the 70s were.

And then there's the album's influence. Though it was seen as punk's very inverse, Rumours has enjoyed a long trickle-down of influence starting from the alt-rock-era embrace via Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to the harmonies and choogling of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the earthier end of Beach House. Rumours set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath.

Setting aside the weight of history, listening to Rumours is an easy pleasure. Records with singles that never go away tend to evoke nostalgia for the time when the music soundtracked your life; in this case, you could've never owned a copy of it and still know almost every song. When you make an album this big, your craft is, by default, accessibility. But this wasn't generic pabulum. It was personal. Anyone could find a piece of themselves within these songs of love and loss.

Two years prior to recording Rumours, though, Fleetwood Mac was approximately nowhere. In order to re-establish the group's flagging stateside reputation, in early 1974 Fleetwood Mac's drummer and band patriarch, Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, and her husband, bassist John McVie, moved from England to Los Angeles. The quartet was then helmed by their fifth and least-dazzling guitarist, the American Bob Welch. Not long after the band's British faction had relocated, Welch quit the band. Around the same time Mick Fleetwood was introduced to the work of local duo, Buckingham Nicks, who'd just been dropped by Polydor. The drummer was enchanted by Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work and Nicks' complete package, and when Welch quit, he offered them a spot in the band outright.

The group, essentially a new band under an old name, quickly cut 1975's self-titled Fleetwood Mac, an assemblage of Christine McVie's songs and tracks Buckingham and Nicks had intended for their second album, including the eventual smash "Rhiannon". It was a huge seller in its own right and they were now a priority act given considerable resources. But by the time they booked two months at Record Plant in Sausalito to record the follow-up, the band's personal bonds were frayed, there was serious resentment and constant drama. Nicks had just broken up with Buckingham after six years of domestic and creative partnership. Fleetwood's wife was divorcing him, and the McVies were separated and no longer speaking.

While Fleetwood Mac was a bit of a mash-up of existing work, Lindsey Buckingham effectively commandeered the band for Rumours, giving their sound a radio-ready facelift. He redirected John McVie and Fleetwood's playing from blues past towards the pop now. Fleetwood Mac wanted hits and gave the wheel to Buckingham, a deft craftsman with a vision for what the album had to become.

He opens the record with the libidinous "Second Hand News", inspired by the redemption Buckingham was finding in new women, post-Stevie. It was the album's first single and also perhaps the most euphoric ode to rebound chicks ever written. Buckingham's "bow-bow-bow-doot-doo-diddley-doot" is corny, but it works along with the percussion track (Buckingham played the seat of an office chair after Fleetwood was unable to properly replicate a beat a la the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'"). Like "Second Hand News", Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" is upbeat but totally fuck-you. He croons "shackin' up is all you wanna do,"-- accusing an ex-lover of being a wanton slut on a song where his ex-lover harmonizes on the hook. Save for "Never Going Back Again," (a vintage Buckingham Nicks composition brought in to replace Stevie's too-long "Silver Springs") Buckingham's songs are turnabout as fairplay with lithe guitar glissando on top.

"Second Hand News" is followed by a twist-of-the-knife Stevie-showpiece, "Dreams", a gauzy ballad about what she'd had and what she'd lost with Buckingham. It was written during one of the days where Nicks wasn't needed for tracking. She wrote the song in a few minutes, recorded it onto a cassette, and returned to the studio and demanded the band listen to it. It was a simple ballad that would be finessed into the album's jewel; the quiet vamp laced with laconic Leslie-speaker vibrato and spooky warmth allow Nicks to draw an exquisite sketch of loneliness. "Dreams" would become Fleetwood Mac's only #1 hit.

Though Fleetwood Mac was always the sum of its parts, Nicks was something special both in terms of the band and in rock history. She helped establish a feminine vernacular that was (still) in league with the cock rock of the 70s but didn't present as a diametric vulnerability; it was not innocent. While Janis Joplin and Grace Slick had been rock's most iconic heroines at the tail-end of the 60s, they were very much trying to keep up with boys in their world; Nicks was creating a new space. And Fleetwood Mac was still very much an anomaly, unique in being a rock band fronted by two women who were writing their own material, with Nicks presenting as the girliest bad girl rock'n'roll had seen since Ronnie Spector. She took the stage baring a tambourine festooned with lengths of lavender ribbon; people said she was a witch.

Like her male rock'n'roll peers, Nicks sang songs about the intractable power of a woman (her first hit, "Rhiannon") and used women as a metaphor ("Gold Dust Woman"), but her approach was different. At the time of Rumours' release, she maintained that the latter song was about groupies who would scowl at her and Christine but light up when the guys appeared. She later confessed that it was about cocaine getting the best of her. In 1976, coke was the mise of the scene-- to admit you were growing weary would have been gauche. Nicks' husky voice made it sound like she'd lived and her lyrics-- of pathos, independence, and getting played-- certainly backed it up. She seemed like a real woman-- easy to identify with, but with mystery and a natural glamour worth aspiring to.

It's almost easy to miss Christine McVie for all of Nicks' mystique. McVie had been in the band for years, but never at the helm. Her songs "You Make Lovin' Fun" and "Don't Stop" are pure pep. "Songbird" starts as a plaintive ode of fealty and how total her devotion-- until the sad tell of "And I wish you all the love in the world/ But most of all I wish it from myself," (an especially heart-wrenching line given that McVie's not quite ex-husband was dragging a rebound model chick to the sessions and Christine was sneaking around with a member of the crew). She didn't hate her husband, she adored him, she wished it could work but after years of being in the Mac together, she knew better. Throughout, McVie's songwriting is pure and direct, irrepressibly sweet. "Oh Daddy", a song she wrote about Mick Fleetwood's pending divorce is melancholy but ultimately maintains its dignity. McVie, with typical British reserve, confessed she preferred to leave the bleakness and poesy to her dear friend Stevie.

As much feminine energy as Rumours wields, the album's magic is in its balance: male and female, British blues versus American rock'n'roll, lightness and dark, love and disgust, sorrow and elation, ballads and anthems, McVie's sweetness against Nicks' grit. They were a democratic band where each player raised the stakes of the whole. The addition of Buckingham and Nicks and McVie's new prominence kicked John McVie's bass playing loose from its blues mooring and forced him towards simpler, more buoyant pop. Fleetwood's playing itself is just godhead, with effortless little fills, light but thunderous, and his placement impeccable throughout. The ominous, insistent kick on the first half on "The Chain", for example, colors the song as much as the quiver of disgust in Buckingham's voice when he spits "never."

In the liner notes to the deluxe Rumours 4xCD/DVD/LP box set, Buckingham describes the album-making process as "organic." Rumours is anything but, and that is part of its genius-- it's so flawless it feels far from nature. It is more like a peak human feat of Olympic-level studio craft. It was made better by its myopia and brutal circumstances: the wounded pride of a recently dumped Buckingham, the new hit of "Rhiannon", goading Nicks to fight for inclusion of her own songs, Christine McVie attempting to salve her heart with "Songbird." That Fleetwood Mac had become the biggest record Warner Bros. had ever released while the band was making Rumours allowed for an impossibly long tether for them to dick around and correct the next album until it was immaculate.

Given the standalone nature of Rumours, it's difficult to argue that any other part of the box set is necessary. The live recordings of the Rumours tour are fine, lively even (perhaps owing to Fleetwood rationing a Heineken cap of coke to each band member to power performances). Only a handful of tracks on the two discs of the sessions outtakes lend any greater understanding of the process behind it. One is "Dreams (Take 2)", which is just Nicks voice, some burbling organ, and rough rhythm guitar gives an appreciation of her fundamental talent as well as Buckingham's ability to transform it; it makes the case for how much they needed each other. Another is "Second Hand News (Early Take)", which features Buckingham mumbling lyrics so as not to incense Nicks. The alternate mixes and takes (more phaser! Less Dobro! Take 22!), by the time you make it to disc four, just underscore the fact that Rumours did not hatch as a pristine whole. One does not need three variously funky articulations of Christine's burning "Keep Me There" to comprehend this.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to buy into the mythology of Rumours both as an album and pop culture artifact: a flawless record pulled from the wreckage of real lives. As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk (Hotel California, certainly). We can now use it as a kind of nostalgic benchmark-- that they don't make groups like that anymore, that there is no rock band so palatable that it could be the best-selling album in the U.S. for 31 weeks. Things work differently now. Examined from that angle, Rumours was not exactly a game changer, it was merely perfect.

Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969

Hank Shteamer — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

"It was really a bad motherfucker," Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography of the live band he led in 1969. With somewhat less panache, Davis completists have pegged the group the Lost Quintet, since, unlike the two longstanding Davis five-pieces that preceded it, this one never made a proper studio recording. All of the members-- saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette-- appear on 1970's landmark Bitches Brew and other scattered sessions from the time, but only as part of larger ensembles; until now, if you wanted to hear them as a stripped-down unit, you had to consult imports, bootlegs and YouTube. This second installment in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, which follows an excellent 2011 set focusing on the trumpeter's prior working band, gives us three complete Lost Quintet gigs, plus the majority of a fourth, on three CDs and one DVD.

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure. In a very clear way, the Lost Quintet is the pivot point between the two main phases of Miles' 40-plus-year career: the acoustic jazz idiom he inhabited, and eventually revolutionized, from the mid-'40s through the late '60s, and the plugged-in ensembles he would lead until his death in 1991. In other words, if you've ever wondered exactly how the dapper jazzman of Kind of Blue morphed into a loudly attired icon in wraparound shades, this set offers some crucial clues. When we last left Miles, on The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, he was leading the world's most advanced and telepathic acoustic jazz group (the so-called Second Great Quintet); by the time of the gigs on Live in Europe 1969, Miles was straddling the fault line. He had already traded acoustic piano for overdriven electric keys and had begun taking rhythmic and textural cues from contemporary funk, but he hadn't yet entered his psychedelic-groove-machine phase in earnest. (For an early taste of the latter, try the 2001 Miles archival release Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About that Time, which features Shorter, Corea, Holland-- who had switched to electric bass in the interim-- and DeJohnette, as well as percussionist Airto Moreira.) Unlike the groups that succeeded it, the Lost Quintet shared a significant portion of its DNA with the acoustic, jazz-centric Miles ensembles that came before.

This is especially apparent on the first two sets here: good-sounding, often-bootlegged performances recorded over successive July nights at the 1969 Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in Antibes, France. The scope of these concerts is remarkable. You hear pieces from the yet-unrecorded Bitches Brew ("Spanish Key," "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"); a track from the ethereal masterpiece In a Silent Way ("It's About That Time"), recorded that past February but not yet released; staples of the Second Great Quintet repertoire (including "Masqualero" and "Footprints," both by Shorter, the sole holdover from that band); and themes Miles had favored since the late 50s ("Milestones," "Round Midnight")-- all flowing together in the expertly paced suites that were Miles' onstage trademark. But the repertoire is only half of the story; as always with Miles groups, the personnel is the thing. Like the members of the Second Great Quintet, these musicians, aside from the relatively unknown Holland, were already rising or established stars when Miles recruited them. They make for a deadly team, equally at home with low-down groove, in-the-pocket swing and feverish abstraction.

The group displays its raucous intensity right from the start of the first Antibes set. During opener "Directions," Corea, Holland and DeJohnette send some serious whitewater their boss's way, in the form of a near-chaotic proto-breakbeat. Miles responds with a brief but explosive solo, full of blaring peaks and bravura runs. If drummer Tony Williams was the chief upsetter in the Second Great Quintet-- furnishing near-constant turbulence to the delight of his employer-- the entire rhythm section takes on that role in the Lost Quintet. When Davis isn't playing, they get straight-up Dionysian. The night-two version of "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" starts off as crackling uptempo funk. But following Shorter's solo, Corea and Holland engage in a free-form duel between bleepy keyboard and scratchy bowed bass that rivals Sun Ra's freakiest excursions. Here you can hear Corea-- who has gone on record saying he distrusted the electric piano when Miles first suggested he play it-- forgetting about technique and reveling in an alien sound palette.

The band isn't just about disruption. The versions of familiar pieces like "Footprints" and "Round Midnight," both from from the first Antibes set, feature bashing DeJohnette crescendos and bracingly gritty Shorter solos, but they also demonstrate the band's knack for extraordinarily supple, dynamically controlled swing. A brief Miles/Corea duet on "I Fall in Love Too Easily," from night two, is another shrewd pace-changer. On The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, Miles and Herbie Hancock introduce this same piece as an unaccompanied duo, but here, Corea's electric piano lends it a newly dreamlike aura. In retrospect, this interlude plays like a stealthy sneak preview of In a Silent Way's proto-ambient brain massage; like the versions of Shorter's "Sanctuary" that close each Antibes set, it's part jazz balladry, part immersive soundscape.

The material on disc three, portions of two sets from November 5 in Stockholm, contrasts nicely with the fierce, sprawling Antibes shows. Because of an electric-piano malfunction, Corea plays acoustic piano for most of the first set, a swap that has a major effect on the group dynamic. This performance has its dark, unruly moments, including an early take on the ominous title track of Bitches Brew, recorded that past August but not yet released, but overall, it's a surprisingly tame outing. The version of Shorter's "Nefertiti" sounds both elegant and almost quaint, about as close as the Lost Quintet ever came to jazz orthodoxy. The one sample we get of the second Stockholm set offers a tantalizing contrast: a rare take on "This", a Corea composition which the pianist had first recorded in May of '69 with a band that included both Holland and DeJohnette. After a brief group theme statement-- with Corea back on electric piano-- the ensemble embarks on a series of atomized improvisations, including a dense Davis/DeJohnette face-off and a pointillist Shorter/Holland/DeJohnette excursion. This single track, possibly the most concentrated example on record of a Miles Davis group playing free jazz, demonstrates how the members of the Lost Quintet spurred the leader toward the avant-garde even as they helped him achieve a deeper engagement with funk and psychedelia.

The DVD, containing a complete Berlin concert from November 7, is essential; the clarity and intimacy of this pristine multicamera document should assure that no one ever again pegs this band as obscure. The in-progress shift in Miles' aesthetic, already apparent in the music, is right there to behold in the men's dress: Whereas the Second Great Quintet always turned up in black tie, the Lost Quintet looks like it's fresh from a Williamsburg vintage shop. (Holland's ensemble—a cow-skin-pattern vest over a purple sweatsuit—is either a facepalmer or a triumph, depending on your tastes.) The band takes a while to warm up here, turning in an unusually subdued "Directions." But by a mid-set "It's About That Time," the feral magic is back; Shorter's brilliantly jittery, speaking-in-tongues soprano solo and a low-volume, high-intensity free-improv duet between Corea and a mallets-wielding DeJohnette make this piece one of the highlights of the entire box set.

Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette eventually left Miles' band in turn, and Davis began constructing the psych-funk juggernaut heard on records like 1974's aptly titled Dark Magus. As Miles outfitted his trumpet with a wah-wah effect, enlisted a phalanx of guitars and began doubling on organ, the atmosphere thickened and the grooves grew more colossal, but the trumpeter would never again lead a group as thrillingly virtuosic and diabolically mutable as the Lost Quintet. (It's a testament to Miles' eye for talent that Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette still rank among the most popular and esteemed jazz musicians on earth; Shorter's current working quartet, heard on the new Blue Note release Without a Net, exemplifies a volatility that's directly traceable to the Lost Quintet.) That fact is now duly noted in the official record, thanks to this set-- a bad motherfucker in its own right.

Marianne Faithfull: Broken English: Deluxe Edition

Lindsay Zoladz — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Like a lot of stories of scandal, ruin, and the opportunity for redemption, it started with a pretty face. In the spring of 1964, 17-year old Marianne Faithfull walked into a swinging, star-studded London party and landed a record deal without singing a note; Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager and world-class sleazeball, famously summed up the matter with his usual showbiz aplomb: "I saw an angel with big tits and signed her." Within the year, the bookish baroness' daughter was climbing the charts and making the rounds at concert halls and the BBC, thrust into a pop career she didn't much want in the first place. ("For one brief, blissful moment I thought I saw a way out of my pop nightmare," she wrote three decades later in her autobiography, Faithfull, which is every bit as insightful, vivid, and deliciously bonkers as Keith Richards' Life.) Faithfull was a passable vocalist with a folksy, melancholy, relatively generic lilt, but there was a certain vacancy and listlessness about her that suggested she'd not yet become comfortable in her skin. If you watch some of her earliest performances on YouTube, she has a way of making Lana Del Rey look present.

Faithfull started dating Mick Jagger in 1966, and her 60s output is generally only discussed in terms of how it relates to that of the Stones: "As Tears Go By" is more famous for being the first song Mick and Keith wrote together than for being Faithfull's debut single. On the personal front, though, the opposite was true: Notoriety had a way of sliding off the boys and sticking to Faithfull. After the infamous Redlands drug bust, the press dubbed her "Miss X" and, a bit more personably, "The Girl in the Fur Rug." ("SCANTILY CLAD WOMAN AT DRUG PARTY" screamed one representative headline.) To those closer to the Stones' circle, she was The Muse-- though by her account, her relationship with Jagger was a pretty mutual exchange of ideas, old records, and hallucinogens. Ever the avid reader, a little while prior to the Beggar's Banquet sessions, Faithfull handed him The Master and Margarita and suggested that this Lucifer guy might make for a good character in a song. She wrote the lyrics to "Sister Morphine", and cut a shudderingly melancholy version that makes the Stones' take almost seem like a romp. This was maybe the first big, public hint that Miss X knew more about pain and suffering than a lot of people wanted to assume. When she slipped into the coma that almost killed her-- the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia-- she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, "Marianne, we thought we'd lost you." In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, "Wild horses couldn't drag me away."

That's the thing about pretty faces. We'd much prefer to watch them wilt. We don't expect them to belong to the fighters-- the junkies and monks and cockroaches who'll survive every atomic bomb and suicide attempt and outlive us all. And we definitely don't expect them to make songs as gnarled and candid as the ones on Faithfull's finest record, Broken English, but there you go: the best records are all, in some way or another, the ones that blow a mouthful of smoke in the face of expectation. The world that thought it had tsk-tsked Miss X into submission was probably not ready for Broken English in 1979, and even today as it's released in a deluxe edition, it's still raw enough to make you squirm-- the cracked, undead voice of a woman back from exile to make a record about the simple audacity of staying alive.

If you know one thing about Broken English, you probably know that Faithfull was living on the streets right before she made it. And unlike the Mars Bar myth (now thoroughly debunked by Faithfull, Keith Richards, and an honest-to-goodness policeman), this checks out. Broke, heroin-dependent, and (it seemed) professionally washed up, Faithfull spent the better part of two years living in a roofless pile of rubble in Soho, a bombed-out ruin of the Blitz. She was squatting with her then-husband Ben Brierley (of British punks the Vibrators) and riding the unexpected success of her forlorn ballad, "Dreamin' My Dreams" (a dud at home but a surprise hit in politically tumultuous Ireland, where, in 1976, "forlorn" was the mood of the hour) when somebody at her label rather improbably gave her the money to cut another record.

The resulting album feels so intimate and personal that it's easy to overstate its singularity. But Broken English is more than just a portrait of the addict as a middle-aged woman; it captures an entire generation's disillusioned comedown. "The days of mind-opening drugs were over," Faithfull writes in her autobiography, reflecting on the spiritual climate of the mid-70s. "The world had tilted. A major change in key had taken place. It was a Mahler symphony whirling madly out of control." And that's the key in which these songs were written and recorded. Much in the way the Stones did in the late 60s, Broken English taps into a collective consciousness. The new-wave-tinged title track evokes the anxious, prickling paranoia of the Cold War, a chillingly grim cover of "Working Class Hero" longs for the counterculture's idealistic faith in individuality, and the excellent "Brain Drain" ("Got so much to offer/ But I can't pay the rent/ I can't buy you roses 'cause the money's all spent") captures the hopelessness of the junkie's lifestyle. A rapidly deteriorating Tim Hardin co-wrote the lyrics on that last one with Faithfull and Brierley on a debauched trip to Antigua. Both implicitly and explicitly, it's a ballad of wasted genius. It's one of the last songs to bear Hardin's name-- he was dead of an overdose a little over a year after the record came out.

After dabbling in baroque pop and country, Faithfull drew fresh inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Brierley's clan in the late 70s, but Broken English is a punk record more in spirit than in sound. (It doesn't sound much like any of her subsequent records either; afterwards, she moved towards the Weill-meets-Tom-Waits-in-a-dank-cabaret sound of the excellent Strange Weather.) Stylistically, Broken English is a fusion of new wave, blues, reggae, and pop, created by a backing band talented enough to genre-hop deftly. Guitarist Barry Reynolds adds a particularly distinct flair to the record; on the incendiary "Why D'ya Do It", his barbed, sneering riff is the perfect match for Faithfull's legendary performance. Easily one of the best songs in her repertoire, "Why D'ya Do It" is also probably the most controversial-- a Heathcote Williams-penned, unfiltered torrent of lovers' rage scattered liberally but purposefully with a few words that still have the power to shock.

Broken English's most affecting moment is Faithfull's spellbinding rendition of Shel Silverstein's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan", a song about a bored housewife dreaming of the exhilarating life and "thousand lovers" she never had, slowly going mad. Obviously, it's far from autobiography, but when you know Faithfull's history (a veritable primer on the pitfalls of an exhilarating life), the subtext becomes almost unbearably poignant. "Lucy Jordan is me if my life had take a different turn," she has said. "It's a song of identification with women who are trapped in that life and the true private horror of the 'good life.'" But the pain in her fractured voice tells a more complicated story, pointing towards the classic catch-22 that still plagues famous and unfamous women alike: The world will size you up and make you choose one of two roles, Miss X or Lucy Jordan. And the worst of it, Faithfull is saying in this evocative performance, is that the dreamy conjectures about what your life would have been had you chosen differently will not only prove incessant, they might actually drive you crazy.

The bonus material on this deluxe edition of Broken English doesn't add too much to the experience. With only one exception ("Sister Morphine"), the extra disc is all alternate mixes and extended cuts of the songs that made the record. If anything, the remixes' noodly accoutrements will make you appreciate the record's purposeful minimalism anew. In almost every case, wisely, producer Mark Miller Mundy and engineer Bob Potter let the unvarnished power of Faithfull's voice carry these songs. The deluxe edition also includes the great experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman's early music videos for "Broken English", "Witches Song", and "Lucy Jordan", but if you can make peace with the low quality you could have watched these on YouTube years ago. This particular re-release of Broken English isn't notable because of any new insight it brings to the listening experience, but for the simple fact that it might bring some new fans to an enduringly great record.

Faithfull has been clean for a while now, but she still speaks freely and unapologetically about the experiences that lead her to making this record. Last week I was listening to an interview with her that I assumed was current, done in promotion of the deluxe edition. I didn't realize it was a few years old until she started talking about Amy Winehouse hopefully and in the present tense. "She's young, she's rich, she feels absolutely immortal," Faithfull said, with obvious empathy. "They judge her [harshly]... but she's going to get through it all, I know it." Feeling a little haunted after hearing this, I put on Broken English immediately, and its sheer power and purpose had never felt more obvious. This record documents a particular shade of darkness not everybody lives to describe. Like Faithfull identifying with her opposite in Lucy Jordan, Broken English is an almost otherworldly communion with the other side; it's a record for the Joneses and the Hardins and the Winehouses and all the other voices that the wild horses dragged away before they could say anything this honest about their pain. Aching and defiantly alive, it still bleeds like it was cut yesterday.

Nas: Illmatic

Jeff Weiss — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

You hear the arthritic rumble of the train. The 100-ton iron horse clacking at 55 miles per hour through the tunnel to nowhere. Stainless steel cars bombed with balloon letters in bubble gum paint. The F Line, pre-Giuliani, packed with rats and villains, foreigners and flummoxed out-of-towners, beggars, bandits, and sweating working stiffs. Third rails everywhere. It stops at 21st street. Queensbridge exit.

The doors crumple open and the passengers vanish up half-lit stairwells into the Bridge. There is no Illmatic without the Bridge. Illmatic is the bridge. Queensbridge Houses, the largest projects in America, brick buildings dun as dead leaves, a six-block maze clotted with 7,000-plus trying to survive. The pissy elevators only stop on every other floor. The neighbors are the rotting East River and the "Big Alice" power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds.

The Bridge is where Nas was raised. He explained the mentality to The Source in April 1994, the same month Illmatic was instantly canonized with a perfect 5-Mic score: "When I was a kid I just stayed in the projects… that shit is like a city. Everybody's mentality revolves around the projects. Everybody's gotta eat. It's just the attitude out there, it's just life. You can't be no sucker."

Illmatic starts with that rumbling of the train. A VHS snippet from Wild Style immediately snarls, "Stop fucking around and be a man!" You hear a cassette tape hissing the verse from teenaged Nasty Nas on Main Source's "Live at the BBQ," 1991: "When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus." He anointed himself the "street's disciple." Everyone blessed him as the Golden Child.

The track shifts to "The Subway Theme" from Wild Style, hip-hop's first creation myth, the 1983 film that exposed the routines of the South Bronx to the rest of the world. Nas calls his version "The Genesis", fusing his own story of origin with the culture.

His brother Jungle snaps, "yo, Nas, what the fuck is this bullshit?" Nas tells him to chill. He's carrying on tradition, defined as: "When it's real, you do it even without a recording contract." It's an oath of purity amidst poisons-- something that seems sanctimonious in a post-Puffy world, but it assured the older gods that they would have a stake in the next generation. He was the spawn of the Wild Style, the first great to grow up with Park Jams as his earliest memories.

I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times.

Hip-hop was a teenager when Illmatic dropped. Old enough for biblical foundation, but young enough to be embroiled in an early identity crisis. The Columbia press sheet that accompanies it opens: "While it's sad that there's so much frontin' in the rap world today, this should only make us sit up and pay attention when a rapper comes along who's not about milking the latest trend and running off with the loot."

New York street culture was losing its birthright to hip-hop's evolution. Death Row and West Coast gangsta rap dominated the charts and mass media oxygen. Rap-A-Lot was carving up its empire in the South. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. Big Daddy Kane was firmly in the silken post-Madonna Sex book era. LL Cool J was mugging with a red beret in Toys. Even a young RZA and GZA got bamboozled into goofy New Jack Swing jams by clueless executives. And Nas couldn't get a record deal.

This sounds insane in hindsight. When people start making greatest rapper lists you can't count to five before Nas' name is mentioned. The kid who went to hell for snuffing Jesus has become a sacred cow. Twenty years deep, he's nominated for a Grammy and is in Gap ads with his dad. There was the album with Damian Marley, the feud with Jay-Z, there was Belly. Nas is firmly entrenched in VH1 Special territory. He has crossed over enough without ever making radio hits, save for "Oochie Wally", in which he is out-rapped by his bodyguard-- all for oochie.

But Def Jam's Russell Simmons passed on the demo, famously claiming that Nas sounded too much like Queensbridge machine gun, Kool G Rap. Translation: great but unsalable. He signed Warren G instead, who went triple platinum in the summer and fall of 1994. Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in its first year. It has no "Regulate" that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made. Illmatic is the gold standard that boom-bap connoisseurs refer to in the same way that Baby Boomers talk about Highway 61 Revisited. The evidence they point to when they want to say: this is how good it can be.

I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death.

The enduring vision of Nas: a baby-faced Buddha monk in public housing, scribbling lotto dreams and grim reaper nightmares in dollar notebooks, words enjambed in the margins. The only light is the orange glow of a blunt, bodega liquor, and the adolescent rush of first creation. Sometimes his pen taps the paper and his brain blanks. In the next sentence, he remembers dark streets and the noose.

The phrases and images are so deeply rooted in rap consciousness to have become cliché. Over the last 19 years, a million secret handshakes and scratched hooks have been executed to lines from Illmatic: I woke up early on my born day; I sip the Dom P, watching Gandhi 'til I'm charged; you couldn't catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer, that's like Malcolm X catching jungle fever; I'm an addict for sneakers, twenties of Buddha, and bitches with beepers; vocabulary spills, I'm ill; life's a bitch and then you die.

Removed from context, they seem unremarkable. When spit with criminal smoothness over beat breaks, they became iconic. If Rakim was rap's Woody Guthrie, Nas was the Dylan figure expanding the possibilities and complexity of the form, twisting old fables to match contemporary failings, faithful to tradition but unwilling to submit to orthodoxy.

Illmatic was the bridge. Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow, to Run-DMC, to Rakim, the Juice Crew, and Big Daddy Kane. Now Nas. Everyone said he had next since Large Professor brought the chipped tooth kid sporting Gazelles into the studio. His arrival was a communal effort. After MC Serch discovered he was unsigned, he landed him a deal at Columbia Records. When Nas summoned beats, he was laced with jewels from the city's best producers: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, the Large Professor, and Q-Tip.

Regional demand was so high that Serch claimed he discovered a garage with 60,000 bootlegged copies. The brief length (10 tracks, 39:51) was due to this rush to get to market. It also left less room for error. There are many albums with higher highs than Illmatic, but none with fewer flaws. The sequencing is perfect down to "Halftime" ending as the cassette tape clicked. It's as dense and claustrophobic as Queensbridge, but blood simple. The verses sprint around blind corners and the hooks are hypnotic chants: New York State of Mind, One Love, It's Half Time, The World is Yours, Coming Out of Queensbridge, Represent.

A classic album is supposed to change or define its time. Illmatic did both. The Notorious B.I.G. borrowed everything from art ideas to album structure. It was so blatant that Ghostface and Raekwon dedicated an entire skit to mocking it. Jay-Z took a hot Nas line and made a hot song on Reasonable Doubt. If you listen to Sean Carter before Illmatic, the rat-a-tat is straight from Big Daddy Kane. After Nas dropped, Jay-Z suddenly got smooth. Those are just the two most famous appropriations.

No album better reflected the sound and style of New York, 94. The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom-bap. The loops rummage through their parent's collection: Donald Byrd, Joe Chambers, Ahmad Jamal, Parliament, Michael Jackson. Nas invites his rolling stone father, Olu Dara to blow the trumpet coda on "Life's A Bitch". Jazz-rap fusion had been done well prior, but rarely with such subtlety. Nas didn't need to make the connection explicit-- he allowed you to understand what jazz was like the first time your parents and grandparents heard it.

I pour my Heineken brew to my deceased crew on memory lane.

None of this context has to matter. Illmatic is imprisoned within itself. The power is targeted in the narrow scope of its worldview. There are six desperate and savage blocks and there is nowhere else. Nas captures the feeling of being young and trapped. You see his struggle and you see his ghosts.

The more I listen to Illmatic, the more haunted it feels. When you're younger, it clubs you with its hail of words and the skeletal beauty of its beats. But the older I get, the more it strikes me as a teenaged requiem for those still living. "Old Soul" is the sort of stock phrase used by yoga teachers and amateur psychics, but it always fit Nas. He's 20 and prematurely nostalgic, struck by memories of park jams and watching "CHiPS.", when Shante dissed the real Roxanne, and how much he misses Mr. Magic.

There is no narrative about Ill Will, but you hear the name over and over. Will was his best friend and first music partner who lived on the 6th floor with turntables and a mic. He was shot to death in Queensbridge over a drunken argument. You don't hear how Nas and his wounded brother Jungle rushed Will to the hospital, got static from emergency room officials, and watched him die. But the sense of grievous loss shadows almost every bar, especially "Memory Lane" and "One Love".

If you listen to it enough names start to pop out: Fatcat, Alpo, Grand Wizard, Mayo, the foul cop who shot Garcia, Jerome's niece, Little Rob, Herb, Ice, and Bullet. The entirety of "Represent". You start to wonder where they are now, or if they are. The album's lone guest AZ, lays it down flat: he's destined to live the dream for all the peeps who never made it.

But Nas uses Illmatic as more than a vehicle to escape. The styles and stories that formed him fuse into something that withstands outdated slang and popular taste: it is a story of a gifted writer born into squalor, trying to claw his way out of the trap. It's somewhere between The Basketball Diaries and Native Son, but Jim Carroll and Richard Wright couldn't rap like Nas.

That's why 19 years later, Get On Down is re-issuing a box set with a vinyl, gold CD, and an ersatz cherry wood case featuring a 48-page book with The Source article that originally crowned him-- even if Illmatic was the archetypal cassette album (along with the purple tape). It's best heard by ignoring the dogma, culture wars, Nas clones, and would-be saviors that have accreted since April of 1994. Who cares whether it's the greatest rap album of all-time or not? It's an example of how great rap can be, but not necessarily the way it should be.

There was no real follow-up to Illmatic because Nas understood that he'd tapped into a moment that could only come once and in one place. This is what things had been building towards. A little over a decade later, Nas claimed that hip-hop was dead, but this world that was his was already starting to vanish on Illmatic. But you can still summon it from the first rumble of the train. This is what happened when the doors opened.

J Dilla: Donuts (45 Box Set)

Nate Patrin — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

If the six years since Donuts was released has taught us anything, it's that a great album can be a sort of open-ended puzzle that can be solved from multiple angles. It's become James Yancey's signature production opus, even though the path that led him to it was laid down by a lifetime of collaboration, workshopping, and constant production in the service of other people's voices. It's the last work he created in his lifetime, released the week of his death, and yet it still feels like his music hasn't run out of time yet, whether that's down to periodic dives back into his vaults, or via the artists that've picked up inspiration and run with it to new places. It's a widely praised favorite for so many people, and yet there's something about Donuts that feels like such an intensely personal statement. Even attempting to engage with it objectively, setting aside the direct experience of the man who made it, doesn't entirely break through its mystique.

But as music, the role Donuts occupies is something more than the weight of its rep or impact-- or even the circumstances in which it was created, as hard as it is to separate the idea of the album's sound from the motivation of a prolific creator knowingly constructing his final work. As an album, it just gets deeper the longer you live with it, front-to-back listens revealing emotions and moods that get pulled in every direction: mournful nostalgia, absurd comedy, raucous joy, sinister intensity. There's all kinds of neat little tics and idiosyncrasies, pushing Dilla's early 00s beat-tape experiments and exchanges into compositions that tinker with Thelonious Monk's off-kilter timing and Lee Perry's warped fidelity. The songs on Donuts are like miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites out of all those nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. There's little else in Dilla's catalog quite like it; at points, it sounds like he was busy quickly unlearning everything he'd taught himself just so he could have the experience of relearning it all again one last time.

While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, a format that initially comes across like a boutique novelty at the expense of practicality. If anybody owns a scuffed-up old jukebox and wants to stock it with records that recreate the feeling of recalling jumbled-up memories and mulling over them for a while, then sure, this would work great. And it's hard not to appreciate the symbolism of issuing this album on 7" records, considering that the hospital bedside setup Yancey used to create a significant portion of Donuts consisted of a SP-303 hooked up to a portable 45 turntable. But is there a reason to chop one of the last 10 years' purest can't-listen-to-just-one-track experiences into pieces, especially when the target audience for this reissue likely already has a version they don't have to keep flipping over?

Well, think of it this way: What's your favorite song on Donuts? Breaking an album like this into its component tracks puts a new viewpoint on a record that's always been easy to see as a whole, and the limitations of three minutes or so per side gives individual moments more weight on their own. The rhythms of the isolated tracks can feel truncated and abrupt in this new context-- without anything to segue into, side-enders like "Workinonit" and "One Eleven" flip off like a light switch-- but it still fits the suddenness and in medias res editing of the album's handmade, conversational feel. And it only serves to elucidate how much Dilla could do in such a limited amount of space. He could fit a lot of off-beat meter-shifting, loop-upending false starts and jump cuts, subtle slow-build dynamics, and double-back surprises into the little 50-to-80-second vignettes. That's plenty of time to set up expectations, only to twist them around a thousand degrees.

There's also some clever sequencing to the sides that lets new thematic possibilities appear. Of course "Airworks" and "Lightworks" share a side to themselves, and as consecutive tracks they felt like weird companion pieces in the middle of the original album. On record, that odd pairing-- a hiccupy series of tics drawn from L.V. Johnson's classic Chicago soul, transitioning into a cheerfully odd rework of Raymond Scott's late 50s musique concrete corporate jingles-- forces those two cuts into closer quarters and highlights their shared tendency to loop vocal phrases and backbeats into knots you can't untie. Same goes for "Two Can Win" and "Don't Cry", which consecutively showcase Yancey's knack for building classic hip-hop beats out of solitary 70s R&B nuggets. The choppy yet lush elegance of "Dilla Says Go"/"Walkinonit" and the heartbroken please-stay pleas of "Hi."/"Bye." stand out in isolation, too.

But even without that benefit of new juxtapositions, it's still eye-opening to take each little set of songs as it comes and not sweat getting to the next one, pinpointing the inimitable technique and sample-sourcing scope of Donuts through certain distinct moments. Just pull out "Geek Down" and note how Dilla took one of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, ESG's "UFO", and found something surprising and obscure to lay it over: a 2002 7" retro-funk b-side called "Charlie's Theme" released in limited numbers by an incognito Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley from Portishead. That's in keeping with the other moments where he's clearly working with some well-used building block that every sample-based producer should know their way around-- Mountain's "Long Red" ("Stepson of the Clapper"); Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" ("Workinonit" and "The Twister"); the Beastie Boys' "The New Style" ("The New")-- and still finds a way to fit that piece into something uniquely his by drawing from an encyclopedic catalog of under-utilized funk and soul deep cuts. Even the ubiquitous siren he lifted from Mantronix feels like Dilla's sole property now-- maybe because Kurtis never thought to lay it over a mobius-strip revamp of Kool and the Gang album track "Fruitman" ("The Diff'rence") or a tense, staggered piano loop cut from Martha Reeves' mid 70s post-Motown solo debut ("Thunder").

If you need any extra incentive, the box set packs in some bonus material. There's a medley of tracks that share sources with Donuts instrumentals "Anti-American Graffiti" and "Geek Down", which were originally slated for MF DOOM and Ghostface showcase "Sniper Elite & Murder Goons". The track shows both MCs still in post-Madvillainy/Pretty Toney form, DOOM twisting internal rhymes at a ridiculous clip, Ghost still verbally sprinting like he's coming off "Run". And "Signs", originally a Fan Club release, tacks on a stand-alone postscript that hints at some of Donuts' brilliance, but mostly just provides a pretty straightforward (if appealing) instrumental break based off a needly organ riff and that old Syl Johnson "Different Strokes" grunt. The rarities are enticing, the packaging is immaculate, and the format is intriguing. But above all else, this reissue provides a good excuse to revisit an old favorite in a new light, and in the end it's still a classic no matter how you hear it-- on 45, CD, MP3, or just running through your head.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts

Marc Masters — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

"Timbral fascism sucks," said Daniel Lopatin in a 2009 interview with The Wire. His point was it's wrong to reject specific sounds-- in this case, the synth tones used in 1980s new age-- simply out of disdain for the genre they're associated with. In one sense, Lopatin's solo project Oneohtrix Point Never is an ongoing battle against timbral fascism. He's tried to liberate synth sounds from their conventional trappings, placing them in less familiar contexts and coaxing you to hear them in new ways.

This laid-back battle began with Lopatin's first album, 2007's Betrayed in the Octagon, which he called "a stoned space epic about one really bad day in the life of an astronaut." His astronaut landed on a strange planet in 2009's Russian Mind and wrote the score to his own death in 2009's Zones Without People. But more interesting than that inscrutable tale was the way that, throughout this trilogy, Lopatin re-imagined synth music for the current era, injecting tension into something normally soft and cheesy. New age got a bad rep because it became too light to resonate, simplifying emotion instead of creating it. But even Lopatin's most beatific arpeggios and most soothing drones avoid sentimentality and easy-listening ambience.

That became clearer when New York noise label No Fun packaged those first three albums together-- along with tracks from smaller-run releases-- into the 2009 double CD Rifts. Listen to one track here or there and it can be tough to hear how lighter moments differ from the saccharine cloud of incidental mood music. But immerse yourself for long stretches, and Rifts sounds more like the hypnotic marathons of Terry Riley than something playing in a store that sells candles and crystals. In that sense, the set was greater than the sum of its original albums. Absorbing all two and a half hours revealed commonalities between Lopatin's disparate constructions-- the kind that aren't apparent when you take OPN in small doses.

The immersion opportunities are even greater on Lopatin's new version of Rifts, issued on his own label Software. This lavish 5xLP/ 3xCD set includes six more tracks from previous releases, stretching it past the three-hour mark. Revisiting Rifts in this expanded (and reordered) form, I've found its stoic sadness even more impressive. Lopatin finds poignancy in wavering tones and rippling notes, conveying a sense of loss mixed with stiff-lipped acceptance. Even the set's one curveball-- an acoustic guitar song called "I Know It's Taking Pictures From Another Plane (Inside Your Sun)"-- carries this tone, and sounds logical squeezed in between synth-scapes.

The rich moods of Rifts persist in the tracks Lopatin adds to this version. Take the hymn-like despondency in the trebly voices of "Memory Vague." Or the slow lurch of "The Trouble With Being Born", which sounds like a defeated army returning home, dejected enough to hang their heads but prideful enough to march in step. Such complex sentiments have marked Lopatin's work even as he's moved to the noisier drones of 2010's Returnal and the glitchier loops of 2011's Replica.

So in retrospect, the path OPN has traveled makes sense. But when I first got Betrayed in the Octagon from No Fun in 2007, it was a bit of a shock. At that point the noise underground was still in an upswing, and the harsher sounds of Carlos Giffoni's label (and festival) led the charge. There was diversity inside the No Fun umbrella, but nothing there sounded like Betrayed in the Octagon. It turns out that Giffoni and Lopatin were prescient, or at least observant, because soon many other underground artists began mining new age styles.

That trend may be less in vogue a couple of years later, but it survives. Just in the past two months, excellent forays into new age-tinted synth have come from noise-leaning types such as Joseph Raglani, Robert Beatty, and M. Geddes Gengras. All of which makes Rifts look like an important touchstone, and it should. The way Lopatin discovered fresh ideas inside of a worn-out genre is an inspiring story for the present age.

Stars of the Lid: The Ballasted Orchestra

Mark Richardson — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

In the 1990s there were a few artists tucked into out-of-the-way corners of the United States making music defined by its vastness. In Richmond, Va., were Labradford, whose slow-moving and cinematic pieces showed how much could be wrung from simplicity and repetition. Up in Dearborn, Mich., Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren were making sensual drone music inspired both by the endless held tones of Lamonte Young and the textural romanticism of 4AD. And down in East Austin, Tex., there were Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, who made druggy and internally-focused drone music as Stars of the Lid.

Stars of the Lid's 1995 debut was called Music for Nitrous Oxide and it had a track called "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy"; those two phrases offer a serviceable definition of what SOTL's early music was all about. Working at home and recording on their Yamaha MT-120 and Tascam Portastudio 424, Wiltzie and McBride were patiently mapping a new terrain for experimental music. Along with groups like the previously mentioned Windy & Carl in the United States and UK groups like Flying Saucer Attack and Amp, they were taking the tools of D.I.Y. culture (recording at home, getting the word out through print zines, releasing music on smaller, specialized labels, demonstrating a fondness for cheap and easy cassettes) and using them to make abstract music for deeply immersive listening. Music For Nitrous Oxide mixed metallic drones and feedback with the sounds of strange voices; the effect was something like tuning into two radio stations at once, hearing strange disembodied phrases mixed with weird music that floated across the plains. For their third album, 1997's The Ballasted Orchestra, which has been out of print for some time and has now been reissued on vinyl by Kranky, they did away with the voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning.

The Ballasted Orchestra is four sides of shifting guitar-based drone, with textures that range from thick and menacing to thin and ethereal. For those more familiar with SOTL's work from the last decade (ambient music classics And Their Refinement of the Decline and The Tired Sounds of...) what's most striking about Ballasted is how raw and ragged it sounds, in the best possible way. As the the SOTL project matured, the music grew more pristine, incorporating strings and horns and drawing inspiration from carefully composed music by artists like Arvo Part. In 1997, when these tracks were recorded, Wiltzie and McBride were firmly committed to seeing how much feeling they could wring from guitars and effects pedals.

Turns out it was quite a lot. Some psychedelic drone music seems like it's designed to soundtrack a trip through the cosmos; Stars of the Lid invites you to close your eyes and explore your own mind. And the range of sensations and moods is surprisingly wide. The disorienting "Sun Drugs" mixes thin tendrils of wavering drone with trebly guitar notes that feel random like wind chimes. "Taphead" is closer to the airy drift of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois' Apollo while "Fucked Up (3:57 AM)" is tensely cinematic, with overlapping chords that are finally interrupted with a cavernous bass that sounds like a tuba blast echoing through an empty gym.

But the highlight and centerpiece is the side-long "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30", which is split into two parts. David Lynch's television series ended its two-season run with episode #29, so the clever title (and Stars of the Lid have always had good ones) affirms that they're using their imaginations to soundtrack a fictional world. And while the work of frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti's work has been an inspiration to Wiltzie and McBride (see "Mullholland" on The Tired Sounds of), at this point the connection was more thematic than sonic. If anything, the piece is more likely to bring to mind the industrial soundscaping of Lynch's sound design partner Alan Splet. But SOTL's speculative soundtrack is absolutely masterful, a drawn-out throb of drone that feels vividly alive. At high volume it taps into the oceanic quality of shoegaze, dissolving boundaries between the listener and the listened-to.

The "Twin Peaks" nod helps explain why Stars of the Lid still feel so relevant and why this music, while deeply connected to the wide-open world of 90s tape-based psychedelia, still feels so current. We'll never stop soundtracking our space and creating virtual worlds. It might happen with a YouTube or an installation but in 1997 there were 4-track tapes recorded by friends in dark rooms that somehow found their way to other people who understood the transmission.

Jawbreaker: Bivouac

Brandon Stosuy — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

They never became a household name and people still think Face to Face or some shitty "pop punk" band wrote "Chesterfield King", but Jawbreaker were a huge deal for a lot of people. I remember driving from New Brunswick, N.J., to Philadelphia to bring my girlfriend a promo cassette copy of Dear You, the group's 1995 post-Green Day major label debut. It had arrived a day earlier at the record store where I worked, and I thought she'd want to hear it. I got out of the van, showed it to her; she tossed it on the ground, smashed it under her foot. Around that same time, a guy I knew from local basement shows, came into the record store, pointed to the tattoo of the Jawbreaker logo on his arm, and shook his head. He had tears in his eyes.

This was a band the underground didn't want to lose, at a time when commerce wasn't so closely intertwined with everyday listening experiences. Formed while they were students at NYU, the trio of vocalist/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach, bassist Chris Bauermeister, and drummer Adam Pfahler relocated to Los Angeles and released their debut, Unfun, in 1990 (it was reissued by Blackball in 2010). Unfun was a good (very fun) record, a solid dose of early 90s emotional, literate punk that established the raw-voiced Schwarzenbach as an underground hero. The band went on the so-called "Fuck 90" tour with Econochrist that summer and broke up, but managed to get back together, relocate to San Francisco, and record 1992's Bivouac.

The record found them experimenting, and pushing into deeper, angrier, heavier (and headier) waters. People cite 1994's Steve Albini-helmed 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, which showed up after they played some shows in 1993 with Nirvana, as the group's pre-major label masterpiece. But Bivouac has always held a special place for me. It's their darkest collection, a sprawling, shaggy-dog set that found them transitioning from the cleaner, calmer Unfun to something grittier, wilder, and smarter. Bivouac was a ragged call to arms, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy an ambitious offering within that newer space they'd created.

Bivouac also includes one of their most beloved songs, "Chesterfield King", a poppy anthem a lot of people saw themselves in. It was a perfect punk vignette. In just about four minutes Schwarzenbach sets a scene ("We stood in your room and laughed out loud/ Suddenly the laughter died and we were caught in an eye to eye/ We sat on the floor and did we sit close") as vivid as good fiction. One of his gifts was finding a way to present specific, personal details ("Held your hand and watched TV and traced the little lines along your palms") and make them feel universal. So, here, when the protagonist cuts out to catch his breath and ends up sharing smokes and thoughts with a toothless woman in a 7-11 parking lot, you sort of remember this happening to you, too.

But it's not all love and lovesickness. From opener "Shield Your Eyes" ("There was a sun once/ It lit the whole damn sky/ It kept everything alive") onward this is an apocalyptic record filled with bigger kinds of searches, depression, and dirt. You get that soul sickness in "P.S. New York Is Burning", "Parabola"'s "I saw myself in someone else and hated them," and "Like a Secret"'s request: "Don't talk me down from here/ Let me fly this kite without a string." It shows up clearest, and more impressively, in the 10-minute closing title track's search for meaning: "I'm lonely/ I'm an only/ I learned to put on airs/ I needed them to breathe/ Today I wake up." Here, Schwarzenbach sets an earth clawing scene ("I dug my fingers in the earth/ I drew picture of my pain/ They were so pretty") punctuated by feedback, noise, and the singer's howling of the album title, a shout that hurts and brings down the shelter he's place around himself. It's a call for help, though one that doesn't need to be answered. You get the sense that it's the act itself that mattered most.

Biouvac's 20th Anniversary CD reissue, remastered by John Golden from the original tapes, includes songs from the original studio sessions: "Ache", which showd up on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, and "Peel It the Fuck Down", which appeared on the 2002 compilation Etc. Like the original 1992 CD, this version includes the four-songs that appeared on the 1992 Chesterfield King 12": "Tour Song", "Face Down", "You Don't Know", and "Pack It Up". For those who followed the band at the time, those tracks have always felt as much a part of the tracklisting as the 9-song vinyl version. (Fittingly, Blackball has also reissued the 9-song Bivouac and Chesterfield King 12" on vinyl for the first time in years.)

One of those Chesterfield King tracks, "Tour Song", ends with the line: "Every little thing must go wrong." But, the truth is, despite things not working out exactly as planned, everything did not go wrong. People were angry when Schwarzenbach had painful polyps removed from his vocal chords and were ready to riot when, later, he cleaned up his vocal sound for Dear You. That record didn't sell well enough according to DGC standards, Jawbreaker never became the next Nirvana or Green Day, and in 1996 the group called it quits. But, in retrospect, Dear You was the right record for the band to make. (It's a great album, just not the one you wanted to hear when you were 21 and navigating a close-knit underground that hadn't dealt with this sort of thing firsthand.) So, yeah, Jawbreaker may have grown up before we were ready for them to grow up, but their music has managed to age especially well. It feels as vital now as it did two decades ago.

Herbert: Bodily Functions

Andrew Ryce — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:01 -0600

Matthew Herbert likes processes, rules, and parameters. He has a manifesto for how he records music-- no sampling other artists, no drum machines, no synths. It sounds mighty ascetic, but the prolific Brit has been responsible for some of the past decade-and-change's most natural-sounding dance music. 1998's Around the House saw him incorporating household sounds; 2001's Bodily Functions moved inward, building songs from samples of the human body. It was easily Herbert's most audacious idea at that point.

Bodily Functions is even more stretch-your-legs-out luxurious than House. The beats don't sound like flatulence, belches, or growling stomachs, but there is something very organic about the record. The drums feel squishy, the rhythms are padded, and everything moves with an elegance that most house could only dream of (no drum machines, remember). "Leave Me Now" and "You Saw It All" are relatively raucous stompers fashioned from gasping snares and wet rattling, while the very strange "Foreign Bodies" is like early Ricardo Villalobos mapped out in human flesh.

It's as much of a jazz album as a house album. Around the House already had plenty of jazz leanings, but this record makes them explicit-- horns that sigh like deep exhales, scrumptious, meaty bass. The album is punctuated by brief meanderings away from house, like the cocktail lounge opener "You're Unknown to Me" or the straight-up "I Know", which is four and a half minutes of pure jazz vamp with Herbert's own delectable piano work. These pieces serve to open the album up into its inviting, expansive whole.

Bodily Functions also continued Herbert's fruitful collaboration with Dani Siciliano, a smooth singer whose jazzy inflections go well with this album's tasteful house. She's as much the star of Bodily Functions as Herbert is, her pleasantly husky voice inhabiting the album's warm atmosphere. Her calm, gently emotive personality makes tunes like the masterful "It's Only" agonizingly ambiguous. She wrings layer upon layer of feeling from the wry kiss-off "Leave Me Now," commanding "never call again" but later asking "be the friend I never knew." The lyrics are equally clever, mixing the lexicon of life science ("Foreign Bodies") with subtle commentary on relationships and interpersonal interactions.

Bodily Functions' supple texturing, smooth demeanor, and pop songcraft have made it timeless, a gem so well-polished you couldn't ever imagine it accumulating scuff marks. So the reissue acts as more of a reminder than a rediscovery, packaged with a second disc that includes compilation track "Back to the Start" (which could have easily landed on the album), as well as a number of period remixes. Highlights include a stunning cover by Jamie Lidell and strong remixes from Matmos and Plaid.

For well-versed Herbert fans, the reissue offers few revelations, though it is nice to have the whole period collected into one package. There are a few new bits, however, including a Dave Aju remix of "Foreign Bodies" and two remixes from Pampa boss and consummate weirdo DJ Koze. His take on "You Saw It All" capitalizes on the album's odd movements and springy textures, but it's his version of "It's Only" that really hits home. Koze's work here is pretty transparent: he hollows out the beat and mixes up the vocal, and then puts a monster bassline underneath, sloping down at a sharp right angle just when you expect the chord progression to ascend.

With Bodily Functions, Herbert made a gorgeous jazz-pop album from recordings of human bodies and a few instruments-- but he also made one of last decade's most important dance albums. An enduring album that still sounds singular, Bodily Functions floats far above the trend-obsessed nature of dance music.

D'Angelo: Voodoo

Ryan Dombal — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

It's impossible to talk about Voodoo without talking about what's happened since Voodoo. Or, more accurately, what hasn't happened since Voodoo. It's been 12 years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, and we have yet to see a follow-up. During those dozen calendar runs, the Virginia-bred singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer has learned to play guitar and spent countless hours in various studios, trying to find his way to the next sound. This time last year, unofficial D'Angelo status updater and kindred spirit/collaborator ?uestlove told me the new album is "pretty much 97% done." And this year, D played a number of live shows, his first in a decade. That's the upside.

He's also been arrested-- for disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, carrying a concealed weapon, and driving under the influence in 2005, and then for offering an undercover NYPD officer $40 for a blowjob in 2010. There were several attempts at rehab. And he's almost died at least once, when he drunkenly crashed through a fence and flipped his Hummer alongside Virginia's Route 711 seven years ago. In 2010, when I asked ?uestlove how his friend stacks up against the other luminaries he's worked with-- people like Jay-Z and Al Green-- he summed up the D'Angelo dilemma well: "I consider him a genius beyond words. At the same time, I say to myself, 'How can I scream someone's genius if they hardly have any work to show for it?' Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it's lasted 10 years."

At this point, it's easy to forget that Voodoo itself was, for quite awhile, one of those forever-delayed studio myths, too. "I've been gone so long, just wanna sing my song," D'Angelo sings on "The Line", a self-directed pep talk and explanation of his slug-like pace, "I know you been hearing a lot of things about me." Voodoo arrived five years behind D's home-recorded bap&B debut, Brown Sugar, and blew through its fair share of release dates before touching down on January 25, 2000. Its arrival came during the twilight of the mega-CD era-- six months after Napster's birth, two years before the iPod-- but its four-year gestation occurred during the halcyon 90s, a time when artists were afforded the chance to tinker for years on end while blazing through bottomless studio budgets. The record topped the Billboard albums chart during its first two weeks out, and looking at 2000's other #1s-- including N'Sync's record-breaking No Strings Attached, Eminem's angsty Marshall Mathers LP, and, uh, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water-- Voodoo stands tall with October's Kid A as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging artistic statement that somehow managed to scale the industry.

Riding high off of 1998's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Maxwell's first two LPs, and Erykah Badu's 1997 album Baduizm, the so-called neo-soul movement, which favored earthy 70s production rather than 90s slickness, was reaching an apex in 2000. And Voodoo was positioned as a more down-to-earth alternative to the infinite excess of late-90s hip-hop and R&B. "[Contemporary R&B]'s a joke," scoffed D'Angelo at the time. "It's sad-- the people making this shit have turned black music into a club thing." (For his sake, here's hoping D hasn't flipped on the radio in the last five years.)

While this viewpoint may seem somewhat myopic in our poptimist era, to understand D'Angelo is to understand who he looked to for musical and spiritual guidance: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Otis Redding, Prince-- supremely gifted artists known for expertly plying their craft. His devotion isn't merely cosmetic or fashionable, though-- by all accounts he's a hardcore music nerd who "knows every Prince concert's playlist," according to recent GQ profiler Amy Wallace. His love of musical lore is partly why he chose to make Voodoo in Electric Lady Studios, the downtown Manhattan recording space Hendrix built in 1969. Listening to the album, his influences are apparent, but also ingrained in a way that's equal parts reverent and uncanny. Rather than just listening to old Funkadelic or Stevie albums for inspiration, Voodoo was literally born from them; a typical night at Electric Lady would have D, ?uestlove, bassist Pino Palladino, and maybe one or two of their prodigious buddies playing an entire classic soul album through, and then seeing where those jams led them. This went on for years. The result is ineffably natural, the type of live-in-studio sound that requires copious god-given talent-- D'Angelo started playing piano at age 4-- and constant woodshedding to really pull off. There are no shortcuts.

D'Angelo's old-school obsessions extended even further than songwriting inspiration. Voodoo was recorded on 2" tape-- 120 reels of the stuff were used in total according to engineer Russell Elevado-- and many of the songs' instrumental takes were recorded live without overdubs. Vintage gear was employed. The analog fetishism is ironic considering how, at the time of its release, vinyl had yet to make a resurgence; indeed, this 2xLP reissue is a godsend in that respect, especially for anyone who's considered dropping $100 on eBay for one of the few LPs originally made in 2000. I've been listening to this album since it came out-- my original 74-minute CD-R, burned from a friend, left out the 79-minute album's last song-- and it never gets old, or grating, or tired. While this is obviously largely due to the quality of the songs, it's hard not to think that the warm glow given off by the equipment and recording techniques used to create it factors in as well. Not all music needs to be built to last, but Voodoo was designed and willed and technically optimized to be a testament for the ages; it captures empty space and heartbreak as well as it does rim shots and joy. The grooves deepen. When the news of a bare-bones, no-bonus-tracks vinyl reissue causes palpable excitement 12 years later, it's a rare accomplishment.

But Voodoo is more than a fetish object for analog geeks and old-soul collectors. It's peppered with hip-hop inflections largely informed by the singular work of J Dilla, the record's biggest modern influence. D'Angelo probably had Dilla's beats in mind when he wanted ?uestlove to dirty his impeccable timing to drum like he had just "drank some moonshine behind a chuckwagon," as ?uest once put it. In GQ, D cited the Detroit producer's 2006 death as the moment he decided to wake up from his booze-and-cocaine fueled lost years. "I felt like I was going to be next," he said. And when he played this year's Made in America festival in Philadelphia, he stepped out to the strains of obscure Canadian band Motherlode's "When I Die", which Dilla flipped on the finale of his last true album, Donuts. The song's hook: "When I die, I hope to be a better man than you thought I'd be." Voodoo's element of sampling is crucial and varied as well, whether through flawless interpolations (as on "Send It On", which borrows its horn-laden lilt from Kool and the Gang's "Sea of Tranquility"), or sly cut-ups (like when DJ Premier drops in a line of Fat Joe's materialistic "Success" into the anti-materialism screed "Devil's Pie"), or well-chosen covers (the slowed-down brilliance of "Feel Like Makin' Love", a #1 for Roberta Flack in 1974).

Given his extensive repertoire of male R&B legends, the fact that D chose Voodoo's only cover to be a song made famous by a woman also seems key. Because another aspect of the album's overall concept involves an embrace of femininity. "The Aquarian Age is a matriarchal age, and if we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all of our hearts," wrote singer/poet Saul Williams in the record's liner notes. "But is there any room for artistry in hip hop's decadent man-sion?" The album's most uncharacteristic moment involves this schism between hip-hop and misogyny and feminism, when guest stars Method Man and Redman drop tone-deaf dick-fluffing broadsides on "Left and Right". (Intriguingly, Q-Tip recorded a more thematically appropriate verse for the track, though that version has yet to surface.) But everywhere else, Voodoo exhibits a mature attitude toward women and relationships-- one that doesn't pander, but empathizes, and shows that the then-26-year-old father of two was becoming acquainted with all sides of love.

Voodoo's second half, from "One Mo' Gin" through "Africa", goes from the depths of despondency, to regret, to carnal ecstasy, to something more spiritual and everlasting. These songs get to the bottom of nothing less than the core of human interaction; what happens when people collide and come together and break apart. And it's all done with the omnipotent knowing of a saint. Nothing is overstated. "The Root" is the record's most downtrodden track lyrically, where D'Angelo confesses, "I feel my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can't feel my legs/ I need someone to hold me, bring me back to life before I'm dead." But instead of dour instrumentation, the song's accompanying rhythm is comforting, warm. The whole song leads to a kind of exorcism-- in its final minutes, the singer masterfully layers his own voice on top of itself, vocal lines coming in at every imaginable direction, offering a peek inside his brain. Then it all smooths out, finding comfort in infinity: "From the Alpha of creation, to the end of all time." D'Angelo knows these stakes are high but, as he concludes on "The Line", "If I can hold on, I'm sure everything will be alright." Voodoo is the sound of him holding on; its ensuing silence marks his lost grip.

Details also give Voodoo its timelessness. The album's gentle avoidance of common song structures adds spontaneity; even after hundreds of listens, it's still possible to be surprised. The barely-heard words spoken in intros and outros give things continuity and a voyeuristic quality, like you're hearing it all through a city wall; listen again for the the sweetly awkward conversation with an ex that starts "One Mo' Gin" or the way "Greatdayndamornin'" is introduced with D'Angelo praising ?uestlove to journalist dream hampton: "I was like, 'You gonna be my drummer one of these days,'" gushes D.

The concept of voodoo itself-- as portrayed via the record's voodoo-ceremony photos-- is multi-layered. While probably using voodoo's exaggerated and misrepresented image within modern popular culture to add some mystique and danger, D'Angelo's also likely referencing the religion's African origins, and how it was coveted by uprooted slaves, feared by slave owners, and ignited the Haitian Revolution of 1791. D'Angelo was born the son of a Pentecostal minister, and he was exposed to that religion's closely intertwining relationship between the spiritual and earthly realms: speaking in tongues, divine healing. And music. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher," he told GQ. "The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful." Coming out of D's mouth, this is more than hokum-- he believes it and he makes you believe it. There are many ghosts hidden within this record. They're still being drawn out.

Still, many simply know Voodoo for a certain naked music video. The clip for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the reason why the album went platinum, and it plays a large part in D's ensuing disappearance. It instantly transformed the singer from a very talented artist to a pin-up. The song was the last track recorded for Voodoo, and it's the most direct thing here, a churning Prince-inspired ballad that bests nearly every actual ballad Prince ever recorded. It's about lust, sure, but it's a two-way street. The way he sings it, "how does it feel?" isn't necessarily rhetorical, no matter how much it should be considering the power of the music. And if you look closely, the video isn't just a handsome and muscular guy flexing his pecs. There's a vulnerability in D'Angelo's eyes, an awkwardness that's both endearing and slightly uncomfortable.

"You've got to realize, he'd never looked like that before in his life," D's trainer Mark Jenkins told Spin in 2008. "To be somebody who was so introverted, and then, in a matter of three or four months, to be so ripped-- everything was happening so quickly." The video became a phenomenon and, soon enough, women were standing at the lip of D'Angelo's stage, telling him to take off his clothes. The attention was infuriating to him, and it sent the singer to a dark place-- all that work, all that time blown away by a few sweaty shots of his abdomen. Then again, while he was hesitant, he still shot the video. The unfortunate ordeal causes writer Jason King to conclude, in this reissue's new liner notes: "For all of Voodoo's claims to realness and authenticity, D'Angelo's imaging, while rooted in promise, had been in some ways a charade, an unsustainable performance of black masculinity gone awry."

"I got something I'm seeing; I got a vision," D'Angelo told Time upon Voodoo's release. "This album is the second step to that vision." It seems safe to say the prophecy he was speaking about did not entail more than a decade of nothingness, or drug addiction, or shame. Now, it's difficult to say where this vision is leading. Playing an upbeat new funk track called "Sugar Daddy" at this year's BET Awards, he looked solid, and his voice sounded fantastic, but it was almost as interesting to watch the cutaway shots-- to see Nicki Minaj staring on, seemingly confused, or Kanye talking to someone during the performance, or Beyonce standing up, loving every second. (BET headlined the clip: "D'Angelo's Sexiest Performance Ever!")

There's a big difference between a prodigious, smooth-skinned 26-year-old playing retro-styled music and a 38-year-old doing the same thing. The backwards-looking pose can calcify; by the time Prince was 38, he was well into his symbol phase. That said, D'Angelo is the quintessential old soul. And there's hope in the comebacks of fellow 90s refugees Maxwell and Badu, who both released some of their best work after long layoffs over the last few years. But D'Angelo's inactivity has only helped to inflate Voodoo's myth, though it doesn't need much help. It's frustrating to think about how someone so enamored with the past, who knew his heroes' failures so well, could be doomed to repeat them. It's almost as if he studied them too much, and the same spiritual power that fueled his greatest moment couldn't help but bring him down. Like that's how he thought it was supposed to go. In an interview between ?uestlove and D around the release of Voodoo, the drummer confronted the singer about his idols: "They all have one thing in common, they were all vanguards, but 98% of them crashed and burned." To which D'Angelo responded: "I think about that all the time."

The Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Ian Cohen — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Billy Corgan hasn't done a very good job speaking on his own behalf over the past decade, so let me feed him a line from the Greek philosopher Pittacus that would make a much better case for his legacy: "The measure of a man is what he does with power." In 1995, nearly every other band at Smashing Pumpkins' level was in some way turning its back on its audience: Pearl Jam had started their principled retreat from the spotlight; U2 and R.E.M. were deep within their stagiest, most ironic phases and making their least satisfying music to date; Rivers Cuomo was well on his way towards making Pinkerton; Metallica discovered nail polish; and, of course, Kurt Cobain gave up on life itself. On a much smaller level, even Corgan's eternal rival Steve Malkmus had just released Wowee Zowee, a record whose sloppy sprawl was taken by Rolling Stone as proof that "Pavement are simply afraid to succeed."

Given this mid-decade valley, it's understandable that the 2xCD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be sneered at as self-indulgent. The Smashing Pumpkins hadn't made their appearance at Hullabalooza yet, so many were unaware the band had a sense of humor. Still, their reputation was played for laughs. But Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turned out to be one of the most generous records of the decade. During a time when rock heroes were hard to come by, Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed.

I suppose it's worth mentioning I was 15 when Mellon Collie came out and I would've told you at the time it was my favorite album ever made. Finally, I thought, here was our White Album, Physical Graffiti, or The Wall, but we could watch its legend being constructed in real time without all the received wisdom. It's true, a double album reeks of 70s-style excess that tries to edify its creators. It was meant as Smashing Pumpkins' monument to itself. But in the case of Mellon Collie, it was the only format that could contain the songwriting streak Corgan was going through at the time. Anything shorter would've done his fans a disservice.

This is not an exaggeration. Cull the 14 best tracks from the concurrently recorded The Aeroplane Flies High singles collection and you either have the fourth best Smashing Pumpkins album (behind the perpetually underrated Adore, ahead of Pisces Iscariot) or a strong third disc that would've made Mellon Collie the greatest triple-LP ever made. What becomes more obvious with time is that Mellon Collie, unlike its most common comparison The Wall, has no conceptual framework. There is no plot, almost no filler, and the organization of its two discs is iffy at best: The second song on the seemingly chronological first disc Dawn to Dusk is "Tonight, Tonight", while disc two, Twilight to Starlight, contains all of the ugliest metal songs. So Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.

This is perhaps the only Smashing Pumpkins record where they acted like an actual band rather than Corgan and his resentful charges. It's hard to pinpoint where the influence of James Iha or D'Arcy came into play (not so with the phenomenal drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin), but with the oversight of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, Mellon Collie was developed through protracted jam sessions and personal interplay. Siamese Dream, for all of its symphonic grandeur, was a fairly standard rock album and a solitary one-- nearly all of the guitar and bass parts were rumored to have been performed by Corgan himself. Meanwhile, Mellon Collie indulges in styles more associated with hermetic artists-- ornate chamber-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), mumbly acoustic confessionals ("Stumbleine"), and synthesized nocturnes (mostly everything after "X.Y.U."). And it does so while feeling like the work of four people in a room.

Mellon Collie's remarkable breadth is the best indication of Corgan's ability to let loose. You could pick five songs at random and still end up with a diverse batch of singles that would make a case for Smashing Pumpkins being the most stylistically malleable multi-platinum act of the 90s. Maybe it wouldn't sell as many copies, but picture an alternate universe where heavy rotation met the joyous, mechanized grind of "Love", "In the Arms of Sleep"'s unabashed antiquated romanticism, the Prince-like electro-ballad "Beautiful", "Muzzle"'s stadium-status affirmations, or the throttling metal of "Bodies".

The ubiquity of the five songs that did become singles overshadows just how idiosyncratic and distinct they were in the scope of 1995. Has there been anything like "Tonight, Tonight" since? Orchestral strings typically signify weepy balladry or compositional pretension in rock music, not wonderful, lovestruck propulsion. While "Tonight, Tonight" is now inseparable from its Le Voyage dans la lune-inspired video, that the music existed without its guidance only stresses the Pumpkins' sonic creativity. "Thirty-Three" was the final and least heralded of the singles-- where on alt-rock radio was there room for a slowpoke, time-signature shifting country song with phased slide guitars and shuffling drum machines?

"Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" are the ones that riled up the older folks and, yes, the lyrics are pissy and juvenile and fairly embarrassing. That said, they're far more interesting from a sonic perspective than they're often given credit for. They're the songs where Flood's digitized production fits better than the saturated, analog warmth Butch Vig lent to Siamese Dream. They're basically new wave performed as pop-metal.

And of course, there's "1979", the one everybody can agree on. On a record that reveled in 70s prog and pomp without being restricted to it, it sounds futuristic. And while just as youth-obsessed as everything else here, it's one of the few times where high school sounds like something that can be remembered fondly. Corgan loves to stress how it was the last song to make the record, and while its chorus does have an effortless charge embodying the "urgency of now," it's the only Mellon Collie song that functions best as nostalgia. That reading is no doubt abetted by another fantastic video, but while "1979" is an unimpeachable song, the rush to praise it as an outlier does its surroundings a tremendous disservice. While Mellon Collie is the realization of all Billy Corgan's ambitions, most of the criticisms surround the lyrics for not being as personal as those on the tortured Siamese Dream. It's this way by design.

The terms "sad machines" and "teen machines" are interchangeably used during "Here Is No Why", a pep talk to the outwardly sullen mopes who Corgan urges to break free of either and ascend like its heroic guitar solo. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is notorious for its chorus, but teen angst doesn't fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it. The mudslide of distortion that ushers in its bridge leads towards two minutes of the most viscerally exciting music that Smashing Pumpkins produced. Then immediately after, the mournful "To Forgive" devastates with a personal detail that gives Corgan credibility in all of this: "And I remember my birthdays/ Empty party afternoons." This is the kind of youthful, inexplicable emotional whiplash that can result in an immolating hatebomb called "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" being followed by a giddy proclamation that "love solves everything." It's clearly not a mature way of dealing with life, but that's only a problem if you somehow believe Mellon Collie isn't meant as rock 'n' roll fantasy. When Corgan declares "I know that I was meant for this world" during "Muzzle", it's your happy ending.

So, yes, most people who have developed a meaningful relationship with Mellon Collie did so in their youth. The question is whether you can get anything new from this in 2012. As with all of the Smashing Pumpkins reissues, Mellon Collie is giving: the Deluxe boxed set justifies its sticker shock by containing "re-imagined cover art, velvet-lined disc holder and decoupage kit for creating your own scenes from the Mellon Collie Universe," which is everything you'd imagine and thensome. There are an extra 64 tracks and only a few of them appeared on The Aeroplane Flies High, though most of these inclusions are demos or alternate takes, the sort of thing that should only be listened to multiple times by people who are being paid to do so, i.e., music critics and Flood.

But there is a way of hearing the same album differently as you refract it through your own experiences. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" is rumored to have contained 70 guitar tracks; it's a wedding vow punctuated by Corgan snarling "youth is wasted on the young." This isn't meant to negate the intent of the 90 minutes that preceded it, it's a reminder of how Mellon Collie can communicate different things to someone who's 30 as opposed to 15. Revisiting it can feel like leafing through a high school yearbook-- not necessarily your own, just somebody's. And there's solace in how, for all of the navel-gazing that went on, the ridiculousness of it all somehow escapes you. What you wore, how you spoke, what you felt not so much seeming normal as just the way it is. You look at each person, thinking that they might hope to achieve the self-actualization promised by "Muzzle", to lose themselves in another person in the manner described by "Beautiful" or "In the Arms of Sleep", or to embrace their own awkwardness as a rallying cry like "We Only Come Out at Night". Those events were all right around the corner, as they are for just about anybody growing up, but when you're locked up in your room listening to Mellon Collie for hours on end, they seem as distant and fantastical as the album cover. When Corgan sings "believe in me" during "Tonight, Tonight", you don't have much of a choice if you want to escape.

I'd like to say "they don't make 'em like this anymore," which is true if you want to talk about rock bands who make double-LPs that sell 10 million copies thanks in part to lavish videos that air constantly on MTV. They do make 'em like this, in spirit, albeit very rarely-- 2012 appears to be just as hostile as 1995 was towards embracing the life-altering possibilities of classic rock or pursuing actual populism. It's no wonder Corgan is so agitated about the state of rock music these days, since his critics won. But every now again, there will be something like M83's Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and Japandroids' Celebration Rock-- that get there in their own way and express what the Pumpkins did on "Tonight, Tonight", that "the impossible is possible tonight," as in right now. They have little to do with Mellon Collie except that they sacrifice being cool to show a deep respect for the way teenagers interact with music. When the world is a vampire, you don't want history lessons or a list of influences, you want fucking magic. You don't want lifestyle music, you don't want Our Band Could Be Your Life. You want music that you can live inside. Damn right Smashing Pumpkins shot for the moon on Mellon Collie, but only because they wanted to give you the sun and the stars.

Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Matt LeMay — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

On the surface, the story of Interpol's 2002 full-length debut Turn on the Bright Lights is almost annoyingly of its place and time: four guys meet in New York, start a band, make tightly-wound indie rock jams that sound great at your favorite mid-gentrification Williamsburg bar, sign to a renowned independent label, and the rest is history. But the early-aughts New York of Turn on the Bright Lights is not the young, vibrant, and impossibly cool place of cultural myth. It is a darker and more complicated place, fraught with disappointment and disconnection. It is a crushingly real place, rendered in such vivid emotional detail that it rings true even to those who have never set foot in the city. This stellar 10th Anniversary reissue documents the process by which a handful of pretty-good songs became a truly great album, making it painfully and unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences.

In retrospect, 2002 may have been the very year that we stopped talking about how music sounds, and started talking about what other music it sounds like. "Interpol sounds like Joy Division" was one of the first critical observations to turn into a full-fledged meme. In the intervening years, other bands have sounded a whole lot more like Joy Division, and the comparison now feels like just that: a comparison. While Joy Division could channel enormous amounts of energy through Ian Curtis's intense delivery, Interpol pulled off a real magic trick by constructing a framework complex and dynamic enough to bring singer Paul Banks' inscrutable deadpan to life. Banks's words can be downright laughable on paper, and are often sung as if WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPS WITH NO PUNCTUATION. But from this insistent, exaggerated blankness, the band coaxed a genuinely unnerving sense of alienation and melancholy. These songs are packed with a staggering amount of rhythmic and melodic tension, sometimes amplifying minuscule expressive nuances in Banks's voice, and sometimes drawing attention to their disconcerting absence.

Each individual member of the band has his own role in piecing this puzzle together. Drummer Sam Fogarino is the perfect anchor for Carlos Dengler's busy, melodic bass lines, keeping the rhythm section forceful and grounded. Guitarist Daniel Kessler is the album's unsung hero, expanding the band's dynamic range by oscillating between wide, monolithic chords and narrow, winding leads. The album's second single "NYC" achieves two unlikely successes pioneered by Matador labelmates Chavez: structuring a ballad around loud, steady drums and withholding all bass guitar until the chorus. "The New" slips a disco bass line under a morass of swirling, detuned guitars. There are a lot of things about Turn on the Bright Lights that should not work, and would not work were they not so carefully thought through and artfully implemented.

Three batches of demo recordings are far and away the most interesting bonus materials on this extensive reissue, as they show just how close the album came to not working. The first three-song demo, recorded in 1998 and featuring album cuts "PDA" and "Roland", comes off as an unremarkable practice tape by a band with lots of good ideas but insufficient energy and chemistry to pull them all together. The second three-song demo, recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room in 1999, is more worked over with decidedly mixed results; there are some jarringly tacky too-loud keyboards here, and a sing-spoken interlude that can't help but bring to mind Crazy Town's "Butterfly". Somewhat ironically, it is only the third and final four-song demo, recorded at the band's practice space, where Interpol stops sounding like four guys in a practice space tentatively running through busy rock songs. Much of this can be credited to Fogarino, who joined the band between their second and third tapes and brought with him a rhythmic confidence and swagger that provided the crucial missing piece of Interpol's singular sound.

This progression of demo recordings documents not only the evolution of the band's playing, but also their increasing attention to texture and ambiance. As the group grew more confident, the gritty sonics of their demos became less incidental to the songs they were making, and more a part of the songs themselves. Producer Peter Katis did an amazing job of preserving and amplifying this rawness, and the band themselves crucially revisited many elements of their demos to better suit their evolving capabilities. The slight changes that Fogarino made to the kick pattern at the beginning of "PDA" completely make the song's signature introduction, taking it from "oh, there's a drumbeat" to "OH, there's THAT drumbeat." Banks gave his lyrics a thorough tune-up before the recording the album, excising his most rhythmically formless lines and shoring up the critical interplay between his voice and the rest of the band.

The extensive liner notes here are as much about the city in which Interpol operated as the band itself. It's certainly interesting, especially for those who are up on their New York City indie rock landmarks. And while the photographs included here do a good job of documenting the physical locations where this album was born, the album itself conveys the setting in a deeper way. Suggesting that this album is simply a product of its time and place is no less naive than suggesting that anyone who has ever been in love could easily write, arrange and record an amazing love song. There were a lot of good bands in New York in 2002, but only one band made this record.

Massive Attack: Blue Lines

Miles Raymer — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Listening to Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. Nearly every song offers a sound currently in use in music's taste-making leading edge. Robert "3D" Del Naja's chopped-up vocals on the album-opening "Safe From Harm" sound freakishly like the chorus to Kanye et al's "Mercy" (even if Ye actually lifted it from DJ Screw, who was developing his idiosyncratic style 5,000 miles away from Bristol, England at almost the exact same time Massive were recording Blue Lines). The chunky, palm-muted guitar riff on "One Love" is almost identical to the one on "Ahh Shit" from Jeremih's brilliant Late Nights with Jeremih. The subzero space-reggae beat to "Five Man Army" could easily be a highlight of any number of fashionable rappers' mixtapes.

When Del Najas, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles were recording Blue Lines, the sub-genre called trip-hop hadn't been invented. But at its heart, Blue Lines is a hip-hop record, although one marbled with streaks of soul, dub, dance music, and psychedelic rock. The fact that its primary audience in America was made up largely of ravers and alternative rockers doesn't change that. And their accomplishments stand out even further next to what was happening elsewhere in the hip-hop world at the time. Straight Outta Compton, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul's Boutique, and 3 Feet High and Rising were all still just a few of years old in 1991, and so was the idea of beatmaking as an art unto itself. The blocky rhythms and minimal arrangements that defined rap's identity in the 1980s were just starting to be replaced by the deep, organic textures that would define its 90s, and Blue Lines was at the forefront.

When Massive Attack first arrived, hip-hop in the UK was still figuring itself out. For years the scene there, such as it was, focused mainly on reproducing trends that had already fallen out of fashion by the time they made it across the Atlantic. That lack of identity was probably an asset for Massive Attack. They didn't have to compete against their contemporaries to see who could sample which Jimmy Castor Bunch break first, or worry about conforming to any outsider whose preconceptions about hip-hop authenticity might not include prog-rock samples or a lush chill-out anthem like "Unfinished Sympathy". Another asset was Neneh Cherry, whose Raw Like Sushi, which Del Naja and Vowles worked on, provided a genre-bending inspiration for Blue Lines, as well as a bankroll to record it. (Cherry even paid the group a salary and let them turn her kid's bedroom into an impromptu studio.)

In fact, those Raw Like Sushi credits (Vowles' for programming, Del Naja's for co-writing "Manchild") were the only real music-industry bona fides any of the principal contributors to Blue Lines had going into it, aside from vocalists Shara Nelson and roots reggae veteran Horace Andy. But somehow the group realized a remarkable and seamless sonic identity. That's clear from the arresting opener "Safe From Harm", which spins an aggressive drumbeat, Del Naja's rap, Nelson's soulful vocals, and a mist of sustained minor-key synths around an intimidatingly muscular bass loop. From that moment, every major part of the Massive Attack profile is already present, from the collaging of genres to the spacious, nocturnal sonic environment to the heavy dose of paranoia that permeates it all.

They spend the rest of the album exploring variations on these themes. "One Love," with Andy on vocals, has a digital dancehall feel, a creepy-funky electric piano riff, and a scratched sample of a blaring horn section that predates Pharoahe Monch's "Simon Says" by almost a decade. "Daydreaming", with its scratchy breakbeat drums, is more directly hip-hop than most of the rest of the album, but the layers of atmospheric synthesizers and Tricky's felonious near-whisper make it clear that Massive Attack was up to something entirely different from what every other rap producer at the time was doing.

Blue Lines brought producers around to its unique vision. By the time Massive released Protection three years later, the group's renegade approach had been copied enough times to become a full-on movement. They'd go on to produce their masterpiece, Mezzanine, a couple of years after, but by then the project had already started to splinter. Tricky split from the collective after Protection to follow his own solo vision, while the core trio behind it would eventually burn out acrimoniously, with Vowles and then Marshall leaving Del Naja to produce increasingly less rewarding music under the group's name. Meanwhile, trip-hop in general had its edges polished off by genteel musicians who transformed it into soundtracks for fashionable hotel lobbies.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that Blue Lines was a startling record when it came out, and it remains one now. For this reissue it received a new mix and a new mastering job straight from the original tapes. It's available as a CD, in digital form in standard and high fidelity formats, and as a set of two LPs and a DVD of high resolution audio files. There aren't any bonus tracks, and aside from a reproduction promo poster in the vinyl edition there aren't any add-ons either. Frankly they'd just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

Bikini Kill: Bikini Kill EP

Lindsay Zoladz — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

When you put the needle to Bikini Kill's newly reissued self-titled EP, the first thing you hear is static, followed by frontwoman Kathleen Hanna asking, "Is that supposed to be doing that?" It was the summer of 1991 in Washington, D.C., and the four members of the Olympia-based punk band were in a professional recording studio for the first time. The EP's de facto producer, straight edge monastic and Minor Threat/Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye, recalls in its liner notes when one member glanced at the mixing board and marveled, "It's like Star Trek!" In the middle of a tour riddled with heckling and violent threats, Bikini Kill were nervous, road-wearied and vulnerable, all of which comes through on the EP. "It [was] a way to demystify the myth of perfection that a more polished product perpetuates," drummer Tobi Vail wrote earlier this year, reflecting on the EP's aesthetic, "It's also a way to say, 'Hey! You at home! You can make a record too!'" Bikini Kill is purposefully, defiantly, invitingly imperfect. This is why some people thought it was the scourge of the underground ("It was sad to see a woman so desperately confused," one music critic wrote of Hanna at the time); it's also why some other people have its lyrics tattooed on their skin. And it's precisely why, two decades later, it still sounds like a revolution.

In 2012, Bikini Kill's legend is more widely known than their music. The spirit of riot grrrl is manifesting not so much in bands but in extra-musical phenomena influenced by the movement's ideas: from the rebel girls running the feminist teen webzine Rookie to the collective of Russian revolutionaries who plucked two pieces of the Bikini Kill lexicon and dubbed themselves Pussy Riot. So the release of the first EP on Bikini Kill Records (an imprint formed to reissue the band's discography) feels like an auspiciously timed opportunity to remember something that's come to feel, oddly, almost secondary to their story: Bikini Kill wrote great punk songs. Tobi Vail's drumming managed to sound both wildly anarchic and assertively tight; Kathi Wilcox's bass gave even their hardest songs an elastic, low-end pogo-ability. Billy Karren pivoted between sludge-coated surf riffs and piercing dissonance. And then there was Hanna, sassing, seething, and spitting the band's cumulative passion like hot bile.

Commemorative reissues of classic punk records present certain ideological challenges. Should a band that sticks a $200+ price tag on a box set of previously released material be banned from speaking about the evils of capitalism? Can liner notes explain why a certain album is great without discouraging the listener from coming to his or her own conclusions? Is it possible to glorify the past without shortchanging the future? Well, aging punks, take note: the reissue of Bikini Kill elegantly avoids these pitfalls. It provides context (a zine-style insert featuring photos, collages, and recent interviews with MacKaye and Bratmobile's Molly Neuman) but doesn't stifle you with nostalgia. It pokes fun at the scenester's eternal refrain of "I was there" (one interview's gently mocking subtitle: "Bikini Kill, You Really Had To Be There…"), and it's ticketed at the reasonable price of just 2 and 2/5 Fugazi shows (not adjusted for inflation). It's an uncommonly inviting reissue, letting the songs sound not like museum pieces but living documents. Somehow, this music still sounds throbbingly present tense, which levels the exclusiveness of nostalgia.

Bikini Kill touches on themes they'd continue to explore over the next half-decade. "Liar" draws a direct line between capitalism and forms of social oppression ("You profit from the lie"), "Carnival" extols the virtues and radical possibilities of seemingly trashy pleasures ("It's by the Lacey Mall! That's where you'll find me, yeah!"), and the opening manifesto "Double Dare Ya" manages to cram everything Bikini Kill stood for into two minutes and 41 gloriously abrasive seconds. "Hey girlfriennnnnnd," Hanna begins, "I gotta proposition, goes something like this! Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will! Dare you to cry right out loud!" It's one of their definitive songs: an explosive collision between didacticism and dynamism, a Bill of Rights you can mosh to.

And as Hanna treats each song like a cross between a political speech and a vaudeville act, her performance on this EP is nothing short of legendary. She can roar as powerfully as she can belt and over the course of the EP she adopts a wide range of personas: She's Barbie, she's Biafra, she's a drill sergeant and a (not-so) conscientious objector, she's artist and (on the incendiary and dryly funny "Thurston Hearts the Who") critic, victim and abuser; she's your dad, your mom, your little brother, and your big sister all trapped (or liberated) inside one body.

The elasticity of voice in a Bikini Kill song is visceral, cathartic, and occasionally even comic. But it's also inherently political. Shortly before forming Bikini Kill, Hanna was working at a domestic violence shelter where she'd founded a discussion group for teen girls. This experience had a huge impact on her songwriting. In Sara Marcus's riot grrrl history Girls to the Front, she says that these were the girls she was initially writing for, screaming out other women's pent-up silence. So the vocal theatrics Hanna delivers on the earliest Bikini Kill songs are sometimes declarations of resistance (during the chorus of the blistering "Suck My Left One", she voices a girl hurling the title phrase at her sexually abusive father like she's re-enacting a scene from The Exorcist), but they also find her exercising her freedom, acting on the challenge she issues in the first song: Dare you to be who you will!

"Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, having to claw their way out," Kim Gordon said in a recent interview. She was reflecting on the trial of Pussy Riot, who cite Bikini Kill as a major influence, but she might as well have been summing up the spirit of Bikini Kill's earliest recordings. They'd go on to make better records (The Singles remains Bikini Kill's defining document), but none invite the listener to re-think how records are measured quite like their insurrectionary first EP. So if Pussy Riot prove the continued relevance of Bikini Kill's ideology, this EP does the same for something that deserves just as much credit: their music. In its grooves, still, you hear the revolution.

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico

Miles Raymer — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Forty-five years after its release, everything that was supposed to have made The Velvet Underground & Nico special has been nearly eradicated by its own legend. The most dangerous record of 1967 has been absorbed into the establishment rock canon; the paradoxical fame it earned from its hilariously terrible sales figures in its early years has been negated by reissue after deluxe-edition reissue; and its transgressive kinky-druggy menace has been smothered by the embrace of millions of overly precious Wes Anderson acolytes. Is a limited-edition "super deluxe" six-disc box set really going to help restore any of the ineffable outsider cool that it's lost over the years? Actually, yeah, it is.

The new super deluxe edition of TVU&N consists of a new stereo remaster of the album, a new mono remaster (both taken from the original tapes), a disc of alternate versions and mixes of the songs, a disc of practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording from around the time the album was recorded (spread across two discs), and a remaster of Nico's solo debut, Chelsea Girl, which the Velvets performed on. So aside from the 45 minutes of Chelsea Girl, you've got five hours of essentially the same 11 songs presented over and over in various levels of audio fidelity. On paper it may seem indulgent, but listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in.

First there's the album proper. The remastering process was handled by Bill Levenson, who's been working on Velvets material since the mid-80s rarities collections VU and Another VU, and who oversaw the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set that collected all of the group's studio recordings. Levenson knows the material well enough to keep from making it sound too clean. The amp hiss, tape saturation, and overall grit that made TVU&N leap out from the scores of mannered psychedelic rock albums released around the same time is still firmly in place; it's just that the grit sounds better.

The stereo mix breathes in a way that the album never has before. As incredible as it sounds, though, the mono version on the second disc provides the set's first moment of serious revelation: It doesn't breathe at all. In fact, with every throbbing bassline and squalling viola set dead center, the mix is suffocating. The transformative effect it has on the songs is unreal. Lou-fronted rockers like "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" leap out from the speakers with an aggression that other versions lack. "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Venus in Furs", and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are oppressively noisy, but pleasurably so. It's a sensual sensory overload that underlines just how successful the group was at the music-as-S&M game it was playing with listeners.

Disc four is even rawer, and removes the last bit of remaining studio refinement to expose the Velvets' primal proto-punk heart. The first half is a reproduction of the one-of-a-kind acetate discovered by a record collector in a New York City street sale in 2002-- and sold on eBay a few years later for over $25,000-- that contained the first version of the album that the band delivered to Columbia Records (and which the label rejected). Some of the tracks would end up on the version of album that Verve issued after taming them down during another round of mixing; others were re-recorded entirely. Compared to the familiar finished version the material sounds unhinged. Moe Tucker's rudimentary drumming on an alternate version of "Heroin" is primitive to the extreme, while the original mix of "Femme Fatale" place a bizarre falsetto backing vocal from one of the male members high enough in the mix to put a listener on edge. And since the audio's taken straight from a beat-up acetate the whole fantastic mess is covered in crackles and hiss.

The rest of disc four is pulled from a taped rehearsal at the Factory a few months before the Scepter sessions, previously available in bootleg form. Parts of it are more interesting than listenable, like the band dicking around while Lou Reed patiently attempts to explain the lyrics to "Venus in Furs" to Nico. Other parts are jaw-dropping, like a version of "Run, Run, Run" that quickly turns itself inside out and transforms into a frenetic, semi-improvised Bo Diddley impression that's denser and heavier than almost anything else in the Velvets' catalog and can demand repeat plays back to back.

What makes moments like this, and the set in general, so compelling is that you get a picture of the group as a living, breathing band, separate from the performances that would be frozen in time and started on a long march to iconhood a little over a year later. For a minute-- or sometimes for 12-- you get a sense of what they really were, which is just another garage outfit hopped up on pills and playing rock'n'roll music so hard that it starts flinging off parts. The difference is that their garage was the Factory, and that they were willing to ride it far closer to fully falling apart than anyone else.

That's the image that sustains the final two discs, which together comprise a bootlegged live set from Columbus, Ohio's Valleydale Ballroom in November, 1966, four months or so before TVU&N was released. While someone-- maybe a devoted fan of the Factory scene-- yells out Nico's name when she introduces "All Tomorrow's Parties", you get the very clear idea that very few people in the crowd know who the Velvet Underground are, or like what they're playing. You can hear maybe two or three members of the audience clap after the opener "Melody Laughter", a 28-minute jam that's mostly noisy drone with a brief pop coda at the end. After a feedback-filled scorched-earth rendition of "Black Angel's Death Song", Lou Reed snarls at the audience, "If it's too loud for you, you move back."

A few months later, right after the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group would convene to record parts of Nico's Chelsea Girl, which is a fine baroque folk-pop album, but nothing approaching that first record. The three other LPs the group recorded before Reed left the band almost four years after that show were great in their own rights, but paled in comparison to TVU&N. Listening to the live recording and hearing the silences between the songs, though, it's easy to imagine a roomful of people being pummeled by this strange, intimidating noise, and seeking safety in the back of the room, completely unaware that the band they're being assaulted by was at that moment (and for not much longer), the best in the world.

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops

Mark Richardson — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

In the early part of the last decade, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops was the sort of music you passed around. Once you heard it, you wanted to tell somebody about it. There was obviously the sound itself, so hypnotic that it was immediately understood as a classic of ambient music. But there was more to it.

The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.

Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD. The video is included with the four volumes of the music and two new live pieces in this lavish and impressive box set.

The beauty of the music is not easy to explain. There are plenty of pieces that work in a similar way-- the beat-less drone pieces of Gas, a few of Gavin Bryars' most heartrending works, the experiments in memory by the Caretaker-- but it's hard to quantify this music's special pull. Each of the nine pieces on the original four volumes has its own character, yet all are related and function like variations on a theme. "Dlp 1.1", marked by a plaintive horn sound, has the air of a dejected fanfare, a meditation on death and loss (it was this loop that was paired with the 9/11 video). "Dlp 2.1" is more of a metallic drone, filled with anxiety and encroaching dread. The source material on "Dlp 4" sounds like a soundtrack to an educational film, not terribly far from the warble of an early Boards of Canada interlude, but the chaotic ripples of distortion make it seem even more uneasy. "Dlp 3" feels like a snippet from an impossibly lush and shimmering Debussy piece stretched to infinity and then lowered into an acid bath. The moods and textures of these pieces are all different but they become more powerful in relation to one another.

There's an irony to the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops appearing here on vinyl for the first time, since the defiantly analog origin of the music is central to its appeal. Even 10 years later, the internet is generally a poor space for contemplating the end; there are few digital metaphors for the process of dying. With Basinski's pieces, the metaphor couldn't be more simple. This music reminds us of how everything eventually falls apart and returns to dust. We're listening to music as it disappears in front of us. Hearing the music on vinyl, with its inherent imperfections, and imagining the records changing over time, lends another layer of poignancy.

Given the central idea behind the project, the length of the individual tracks is important. The first, "Dlp 1.1", is just over an hour long, and its source only lasts a few seconds. To listen to the entire piece is to hear that segment many hundreds of times, and the progression from "music" to silence happens incrementally with each play. But the loops don't fade linearly. It often takes a few minutes for the obvious cracks to appear, and then the tumble toward the void speeds up at the end, presumably because the cumulative runs against the tape head had loosened even the bits of tape that were still hanging on. The process is so gradual it focuses attention in unique way; I find myself examining each new cycle to discover what is left and what has vanished.

It's possible to use this music in the quintessential ambient sense, allowing it to play in the background while doing something else. The sound is uniform and drone-like, so you can adjust the volume and not worry about it intruding. But there is something uncanny about the emotion embedded in this music. It never feels neutral, so it's hard for me to just have it playing in the background. Part of that is what I know of how it was made, and part of that is the nature of the loops themselves. Basinski has a rare feel for mood and texture. The sounds on their own are haunting, and Basinski has a wonderful ear for how a loop can work, how to capture these bits of incidental music in a place where there's just a hint of tension that is never released.

One unexpected twist in The Disintegration Loops story is that some of the work was later performed. New music ensembles have charted the progression and decay of the pieces and scored them for a live setting, and recordings from two shows are included in this box set. (One of the performances is by the ensemble Alter Ego, who partnered with Gavin Bryars and Philip Jeck in 2007 to record a new version of Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic". The presence of Alter Ego reinforces the thematic and emotional connection between the two pieces.)

I was skeptical of these live versions at first, but over time they made more sense. They bring a different quality to the experience and offer a subtle twist. The key to live recordings lies in the rests. Little by little, the players have to insert a bit more silence into the piece and hold that silence as they cycle through the same phrase. And there's something especially tense and uneasy about hearing this happen in a moment with live performers. It also makes it difficult for the audience to know exactly when the piece has ended, and when it finally does, they explode with applause and, presumably, relief.

I've owned many box sets and this is possibly the most gorgeous and substantial one I've ever seen. There are CD and vinyl versions of all the music; the vinyl is heavy, and the pressings are very well done. There's a book that has liner notes from Antony Hegarty, David Tibet, Basinski himself, and others. But most of the book consists of blown-up frames from the video piece. It's almost like a flip book, as each new shot brings us a little closer to darkness. For me, it functions like a more tolerable version of the video piece, which, even after all this time, I still have trouble watching. I respect it and understand that it might work very differently for someone who was there, but it's still difficult for me to watch footage of burning Manhattan in an "art" context.

It's been said that box sets are tombstones, but this one feels like a living and breathing thing. And there's an irony in that too. The obvious observation about The Disintegration Loops is that it's about death, but of course, life gives death meaning. A couple of days ago I was listening to "Dlp 4" while riding the subway to work. For the track's early half, I was gripped by the sublime beauty of the repeating music and I was lost in my own world completely. But then as it started to break apart and silence took over I started to become aware of what was around me. I could hear the engines, the rattle of the tracks, and the voices of people in the subway car. The music had me thinking about the biggest questions-- why we are here and how we exist and what it all means. And then as the last crackle faded and the music was no more, I took in my surroundings and looked around at the faces and I was right there with everybody and we were alive.

The Weeknd: Trilogy

Ian Cohen — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

If you checked out completely in 2011, Trilogy has all the makings of a blockbuster: 22-year old Toronto native Abel Tefsaye along with producers Illangelo and Doc McKinney developed a state-of-the-art R&B template and scored several radio hits; they're associates of megastar Drake, and have played sold-out club shows and rapturously received festival appearances. But there's one catch: If you weren't checked out completely during 2011, you've already heard the vast majority of Trilogy, for free. So it's understandable if you're wondering why this set, which collects the Weeknd's three 2011 mixtapes in one package and adds three additional songs, exists in the first place. But presentation matters to the Weeknd. This is evident in the project's early anonymity, the unified typography, the striking photographs, the ambitious videos and, most important, the fact that Tesfaye called his three releases of 2011 a trilogy. It's not unprecedented for someone to put out three albums in a year, but Trilogy suggests an ambitious and rigorously planned Work of Art.

While the previously available versions of House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence already felt definitive, a three-hour immersion provides a new way in, assuming you are willing to take it as a single piece. Which isn't easy: in spite of Tesfaye's diaphanous voice and the lush production, these are heavy records, with tempos that slow to a codeine drip for five minutes or more. But Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied.

House of Balloons is the "fun" part of the story, though that's a relative term. It has the only Weeknd songs you might play at a celebration, and the only point where the illicit behavior feels alluring. On House, the Weeknd introduce an aesthetic that, over the course of the rest of the three tapes, gradually evolves into something deeper and less based in traditional songcraft. It's a continuation of the purple-tinted R&B and hip-hop hybrid forged by The-Dream and Drake, with eye-of-the-quiet storm assurance of Sade and Aaliyah and industrial and trip-hop touches that range from Nine Inch Nails to Tricky. But the Weeknd show a flair for melody that allows every richly atmospheric song on House to stand on its own, boasting strong (and sometimes borrowed) hooks that embrace repetition without feeling manipulative. The cyclical choruses of "What You Need", "The Morning", and "High For This" in particular are both immediately striking and subtly ingratiating, overtures to pop radio that operate outside of it.

Those borrowed hooks mean that House of Balloons is the part of Trilogy most affected by the remaster. If you can't catch how the guitars hit a little harder and the drums have a bit more pop on "High For This", you'll definitely notice how the sample from Aaliyah's "Rock the Boat" has been wiped from "What You Need". If I had to choose, I prefer the original House of Balloons for its spontaneity, but it's kind of like familiarizing yourself with your partner after they get a new haircut; it's just different for a while, and if you want, you can always go back.

Thursday is exactly the kind of "difficult" second record you'd expect from the Weeknd had they disappeared for two years and holed up in the studio as a reaction to House's success. But it came just a few months after. It's more ambitious in its way, incorporating influences far from the R&B mainstream and generally just sounding like it has something to prove.

The title is a loaded metaphor; Thursday is a day for the most dedicated partiers, the one that separates a lost weekend from a week full of blackouts. Accordingly, the album is an hour-long exploration of people acknowledging a point of no return. What had been seductive has become menacing. Outside of Drake's guest verse on "The Zone", there's not much indication that the songs take place in a club of any sort. The pleasure on House of Balloons felt consensual; here, it feels codependent.

Echoes of Silence benefits considerably from the Trilogy context and now seems on equal footing with House of Balloons and Thursday. As Juicy J helpfully reminds us out of nowhere at the end of "Same Old Song", Echoes was released near Christmas, a refractory period between the publication of year-end lists and the turn of the calendar. It's easy to overlook new music that drops at that point, especially in this case, where the lack of immediate hooks suggests that it could have been a rush job.

But get familiar with Echoes' aims and you can hear its value. For one, the lyrical and thematic callbacks make clear that Echoes was meant to interact with what preceded it, to serve as an epilogue and appendix in addition to a denouement. More importantly, it's easier to tune into the final third's resounding depression after having been tenderized by the preceding two hours. It's a morning-after record for a night that never ended, where people have to go into their day shift with no sleep, where club stars still live with parents and the parents find drugs in the laundry. And it's where people who only hours before were perfectly fine to snort their life away simply cannot fucking stand to be around each other for another minute.

But the arresting music redeems that potentially alienating emotional view. "Montreal" boasts a frigid and concise hurt as well as a pop sensibility that went missing from the previous half hour, "Outside" incorporates intriguing Eastern overtones, and "The Fall" integrates Clams Casino's brand of beautifully wasted hip-hop, which ascended in parallel to the Weeknd throughout 2011.

On House's "The Party and the After Party," Tefsaye sings, "They don't want my love/ They just want my potential." In the context of Trilogy's progression, it's the first crack in his callous exterior, revealing a lifelong studio nerd with possibly years worth of grudges ("I don't play/ Unless it's keys and I play all day," he claims on "Loft Music"). He makes repeated mentions of "potential," and being "next," fixating on those particular words like he's holding onto something a girl told him in 7th grade. If you turn your ear right, Trilogy is the most in-depth exploration of male sexual neuroses this side of Pinkerton.

"You never thought I'd go this far," Tesfaye sings on "Same Old Song". That line could be a reference to marathon drug use or the progressive demoralization of his narrator, which bottoms out amidst the pall of gang rape coursing through the very uncomfortable "Initiation". The inclusion of Michael Jackson's venomous "Dirty Diana" on Echoes (renamed "D.D.") is perfect in this context, retaining the original's deplorable depiction of predatory groupies as the feminine norm. Tesfaye's narrator celebrates his own irresistibility and embraces the poisonous justifications of victimhood.

Just as perfect is the closing title track, which finds Tesfaye alone in a quiet room, letting the past reverberate, hitting bottom because he simply stops digging. It's the point where the Weeknd's 2011 stops and it's a perfect way to end things. At least it was; on Trilogy, it's followed by "Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)". Like all of the new songs, it's strong enough on its own but arbitrary in terms of sequencing and has only minimal relation to the LP it was included on.

This is some of the best music of the young decade; judging by its already pervasive influence, it's safe to say Trilogy (or at least House of Balloons) will be one of those records that will be viewed as a turning point when we look at the 2010s as a whole. Some of it's up to demographics. Artists of Tesfaye's age had formative years where Timbaland, the Neptunes, Missy Elliott, D'Angelo, and Aaliyah were at the peak of their powers. And given the "new rock revolution" early in the 2000's, which created nothing new at all, it stands to reason that many who came of age in that era don't hear rock as a progressive form. You can sense the shift when talking to new bands. And of course, for those who have some indie rock inclinations, Beach House and Siouxsie samples don't hurt.

Ultimately, the Weeknd's music creates a world. In it, people acknowledge their humanity as expressed by their desires to fuck, to get high, to resent one another, to hurt, to not care about tomorrow. That's a lot for a single artist to take on. "You'll wanna be high for this," Tesfaye memorably sings within the first minute. Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe

Andy Beta — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:01 -0500

In 1977, American astronomer Carl Sagan selected the composer Laurie Spiegel's computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise "Harmony of the Worlds" for inclusion aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft's "Golden Record". Kepler's "Harmony of the Worlds" was the lead cut on a collection that held recordings of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, selections from Beethoven, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry, for the sake of demonstrating to other life forms in the galaxy that there is intelligent life on our planet. And now, Laurie Spiegel's music has traveled to the edge of our solar system.

Back on Earth, the New York label Unseen Worlds has obliged us with more Laurie Spiegel, reissuing her 1980 album, The Expanding Universe, and adding over 100 minutes of additional music. At a time when crucial female electronic composers like Pauline Oliveros and Suzanne Ciani are receiving new recognition for their work, Spiegel's music continues to resonate and often sounds strangely contemporary. That her work can be simultaneously dystopian and luminous speaks to Spiegel's talents. She can evoke the chilling cosmos while also crafting something small-scale and warm. When Voyager launched, President Jimmy Carter said: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings." His statement applies just as readily to The Expanding Universe.

Spiegel attended Julliard before researching at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and at Connecticut's Electronic Music Laboratories on the nascent music systems being developed there. (Ultimately, she chose to pursue programming, forgoing musical composition altogether.) The notes within this reissue show the room-sized computers with which Spiegel concocted her music, and her anecdotes recall disk drives the size of washing machines preserving mere seconds of code. She offers details like: "This 32k DDP understood FORTRAN IV and DAP II 24-bit assembly language. It could do an integer add in as little as 3.8 milliseconds but a floating point multiply could take up to 115.9 microseconds. You can bet we all wrote the tightest, smallest, fastest code we could."

Whatever its heady origins, Spiegel's music is inviting, playful, and visceral. As she explained to The Wall Street Journal recently: "There were all of these negative images of computers as giant machines that would take over the world and had no sense of anything warm and fuzzy or affectionate." Yet "Patchwork" has the buoyancy of the ARP figure from the Who's "Baba O'Riley", "Old Wave" is woozy and syrup-slow, and a number of melodies anticipate the analog splendors of Jürgen Müller or Boards of Canada. Her intellectual curiosity led her to investigate African and Indian polyrhythms-- which inform the throbbing and lively "Drums"-- as well as the modal Celtic tunes she heard while studying American folk music in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which permeate three iterations of "Appalachian Grove".

Thrilling as these shorter studies might be, it's in her longer, more contemplative works that Spiegel's sensibilities become clearest. "The Expanding Universe" is nearly a half-hour of swelling, evolving tones, and she stresses that the composition is neither "minimalist" nor "ambient," and that it exists wholly in its own space. Even if Spiegel's music weren't already launched into the firmament, it would finds its natural home there; it's when she contemplates orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through sound that her imagination is unparalleled. While Kepler mused that the "Harmony of the Worlds" would be audible only to the ear of God, what reaches human ears via Spiegel's realization is bracing, menacing, and disorienting, the piercing tones not unlike a choir of air raid sirens. An alien life form encountering it on Voyager's "Golden Record" would conclude that our world was a maddening, maniacal place.

Royal Trux: Accelerator

Stuart Berman — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:01 -0500

In the early 90s, indie rock was essentially synonymous with lo-fi, as upstart artists embraced four-track recording for its cost-effectiveness, DIY egalitarianism, and aesthetic remove from the increasingly commercialized nature of alternative rock. But by decade's end, many of the movement's most visible proponents-- Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh-- had traded up to bigger labels, bigger recording budgets, and proper producers, effectively defining the idea of lo-fi as a formative phase that bands inevitably outgrow.

Royal Trux seemed destined to follow the same trajectory. While the duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema first earned underground renown with 1990's still-inscrutable sci-fi skronk masterwork Twin Infinitives, by 1995, the band was signing a three-album deal with Virgin Records and hiring Neil Young's long-time right-hand man, David Briggs, to oversee their southern-rockin' major-label debut, Thank You. And despite its infamously retch-worthy cover art, the 1997 follow-up, Sweet Sixteen, was even more sophisticated in execution, swaddling the band's grimy boogie in layers of cinematic strings and gleaming guitar solos. But Royal Trux's increasingly high-concept take on dirtbag-rock didn't exactly light up SoundScan registers: Rather than release the band's third Virgin submission, Accelerator, the label opted to pay Royal Trux to just go away. (Hagerty all but anticipates Royal Trux's exile from Virgin when, on the Dylan-esque "Yellow Kid", he moans, "I don't like this arrangement/ Wild schemes and nothing but bad dreams.")

You can't blame the Virgin execs for running scared-- in sharp contrast to its two refined predecessors, Accelerator pulls an abrupt 180 back to the lo-fi obfuscation of Royal Trux's earliest releases. Accelerator found more sympathetic benefactors at the band's original homebase of Drag City Records, but while sonically of a piece with the hazy, strung-out blooze of 1992's untitled release and 1993's Cats and Dogs, the album continues with the more accessible songcraft the band introduced on the two Virgin releases, making this both the most openly celebratory yet eternally warped entry in the Royal Trux canon. In the hands of, say, Guided by Voices, lo-fi recording could approximate the tinny din of the golden oldies broadcast on your local AM station; Accelerator, however, doesn't so much evoke the sound of a classic-rock band blaring out of a cheap transistor radio as one trapped inside of it, strangled by circuitry and choking on static.

Royal Trux had conceived their three-album Virgin run as a triptych exploring a different decade in recent American pop-cultural history: Thank You was their comment on the 1960s, Sweet Sixteen their take on the 1970s, and Accelerator their interpretation of the 1980s. Not that you could necessarily tell without the advance notice: Accelerator bears none of the MTV-ready sleekness we tend to associate with popular music from the era and, if anything, its acid-damaged riffage, wiggy Wurlitzer vamps, and copious cowbell more closely relate to turn-of-the-70s post-hippie jam-rock. (The latest release from Herrema's post-Trux outfit, Black Bananas, Rad Times Express IV, actually boasts a more explicitly 80s ethos.) But then, for all of the glamor and futurism attached to the 80s, the decade was equally defined by its retro-gazing-- the first wave of aging-rocker reunion tours, "The Wonder Years", and every second film at your local cinema being about the Vietnam War. Accelerator thus captures the experience of 80s kids who grew up thinking the most transformative moments in history had already passed them by, its distorted, disorienting production underscoring the impossibility of recapturing something that's long gone. Closer in spirit to Ariel Pink's phantasmagoric pop than its 90s lo-fi contemporaries, Accelerator is like an Instagram-filtered take on rock's golden age-- an attempt to recapture something authentic through knowingly artificial, premeditated means.

Like the previous entries in Drag City's Royal Trux reissue campaign, this no-frills re-release of Accelerator exists simply to put this essential album back into print rather than try to deconstruct its mystique through outtakes and demos. And besides, bonus materials are ultimately unnecessary, because this album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. The passage of time has brought us no more closer to figuring out the logic of the uproarious roadhouse riot "The Banana Question" or the absolutely demented, street-jive nursery rhyme "Juicy, Juicy, Juice", but their insidious earworm hooks perpetually lure you back into the clamor for further investigation.

Most of these tracks are simply structured, and even repeat the same lyrics throughout, but Royal Trux deviously tweak the sonics so that you barely recognize your surroundings by song's end-- over the course of five identical verse/chorus cycles, "New Bones" approximates the sound of walking through the eye of a hurricane, with Herrema's dead-cool drawl and the song's steady strut perilously on the brink of being washed out Hagerty's alien guitar frequencies and shortwave vocals. But Accelerator's bizarro sound-world is not so overwhelming as to completely obscure Royal Trux's bad-ass essence (see the wah-wah-drenched knockout "Follow the Winner"), nor their penchant for surprisingly lucid, affecting lyricism: in the chorus of "Liar"-- "I've got a taste in my mouth/ just like a burning tire"-- you've got a slogan for your worst Sunday-morning hangover. And in a late-game surprise, Accelerator drops its fuzz-covered facade to deliver Royal Trux's most unabashedly tender moment ever in "Stevie", a suave, string-swept soul ballad that could practically pass for early Steely Dan. Where the song's poignancy was once undermined somewhat by the fact that it was reputedly written in honour of Steven Seagal, today, the tribute feels that much more appropriate: after all, if a B-level 80s action star can go on to play a real cop on TV, then surely Accelerator can now stand alongside the hallowed classic rock it so brilliantly subverts.

Andrew W.K.: I Get Wet

Ian Cohen — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Let me get it out of the way and welcome everyone who clicked here with the sole hope of witnessing Pitchfork's biggest statistical mea culpa ever. Ten years is a long time for sour grapes to ferment, and I hope they're delicious. Perhaps you've heard that we were not particularly kind to Andrew W.K. the first time around. I obviously disagree with Ryan Schreiber's initial assessment, but even if it weren't poor form to publicly air out your boss for opinions he held a decade prior, I'm in no position to judge. I, too, am trying to live down an equally regrettable (if far more obscure) review of I Get Wet for a student newspaper that went in the completely opposite direction, praising it not so much for its musical value as its ability to combine with Adderall and Keystone Ice to form an outgoing college senior's Holy Trinity of nihilistic intoxication. It was and is a record that inspires extreme reactions. And a lot of us seemingly did I Get Wet a great disservice trying to intellectualize it from both sides. Now here we are 10 years later and nothing has changed about the record except our relationship to it. Even though critics of Andrew W.K. were often branded as the fun police and his fans considered fools or incurable ironists, I Get Wet is a singular record, and your opinion of it can't possibly make a larger point about anything else. It just is.

It was one of the last great bizarre major label experiments. Coming at a time when the New Rock Revolution was meant to depose nu-metal, it was staunchly anti-intellectual, undeniably a commercial flop, and yet, you've heard it nearly everywhere. A full decade later, Andrew W.K. maintains enough pop culture juice to end up on TV with striking frequency. Musically, I Get Wet started no trends and influenced no one. It's often scoffed at as one of the dumbest records ever made, but I've heard equally compelling and cogent arguments comparing it to Daft Punk's Discovery in how its treats euphoria as an actual musical genre.

It is not a work of fascinating contradictions, deceptive layers, or idiot savant genius. But do you want to turn a record whose first song is called "It's Time to Party" into an academic work? Many, including Andrew W.K. himself, have tried to frame "party" as a metaphorical device or a Zen philosophy, but come the fuck on: It does nothing new in any technical sense if you've been in a basketball arena at any point in your life. And still, the only response to hearing the initial detonation of guitars, kick drums, and fake orchestra hits from "It's Time to Party" is, "What the fuck is this?" Or to backflip into a kegstand, after which the next 90 seconds should not be spent around any breakable or flammable home furnishings. "Party Hard" is the next song and upon first exposure, the two may seem like the five greatest minutes of music you've ever heard.

Whether you consider these songs to be brilliant, brilliantly dumb, or just dumb, I Get Wet is necessarily simple. Though placed in the lineage of hair metal, there's almost no technical flash, no power ballads, not even a single minor chord. The trickiest modulation happens on the chorus to "Girls Own Love", which may or not just be a Hysteria deep cut played at twice the speed. The vocal harmonies of "Party Hard" are stacked so thick that the melody barely moves, making it the easiest and best karaoke song ever. Even if "Party Hard" had lyrics about anything else, it would still be a keg-rock legend based on its riffs alone-- they're the four best on I Get Wet, which makes them the four best of that year. But unlike those from, say, White Blood Cells, they just sound wrong banged out on one guitar. The impossible number of vocal and guitar overdubs on "Take It Off" pushes it beyond even shoegaze incomprehensibility. You simply can't divorce the sensational effect of I Get Wet from its emotional one, and the music truly is the message: "It's Time to Party" immediately triggers I Get Wet's enduring effect, the same pit-in-the-stomach feeling of boarding a roller coaster, asking someone out, or looking at your bank account after a particularly brutal weekend. It's thrilling, it's nauseating, there's no going back.

But while I Get Wet is the perfect Andrew W.K. album, it's in no way a perfect album. For one thing, there are the songs that actually try to make some sort of coherent statement and could potentially take on some sort of post-9/11 relevance ("I Love NYC", "Ready to Die"). But they thrash about as blissfully unaware as "Party Hard" because they make absolutely no sense. Many hear I Get Wet as a record of unintentional comedy, but "I Love NYC" falls into the realm of intentional comedy because I don't even think it's about New York City. Or any city. "She Is Beautiful" and "Girls Own Love" are both hilariously bereft of any kind of eroticism, women viewed as mere vessels for expressions of male lust and yet beyond all comprehension. They're songs Barbie and Ken might fuck to. Point being that, for an album that supposedly steamrolls any talk of nuance, it has some pretty mundane issues. And the second half is much weaker than the first. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who's shown up to the I Get Wet 10-year anniversary shows 20 minutes late. (Dude loves to party but he's remarkably punctual.)

Part of that is inevitable since any record that starts with "It's Time to Party" and "Party Hard" doesn't leave much room to build on an upward trajectory. But while "Party Til You Puke" is the culmination of I Get Wet's "Party" trilogy, it's also the tipping point where the thought of past, present, or future partying becomes unbearably oppressive. The sheer velocity of its call and response vocals renders it a monolithic yell of "CHUG," and immediately afterwards, "Fun Night" is that guy handing you a rally beer at the toilet when all you can say is "not now, bro." "Got to Do It" is "Girls Own Love" seen through the eye of a tiger, and though I've owned this record for nearly a decade, to this day I still can't remember what the title track sounds like. To its credit, "Don't Stop Livin' in the Red" is pretty much the only way this record could end, and it's nice to see it get him some Target ad money even though it's almost impossible to imagine its, um, suggestive cover appearing in the superstore's sales racks. So I suppose there's irony somewhere in all this.

As far as the reissue goes, it's worth exploring whether or not you're amongst Andrew's white-denimed minions. There's a batch of live tracks that are curiously and intentionally recorded in a way that Andrew W.K. once described to me as what he hears when he's on stage. I'd say the demos and alternate takes are far more intriguing since the idea of I Get Wet ever existing as demos is hilarious-- just imagine Andrew W.K. hunched over an acoustic guitar trying to finish "We do what we like…" with the right lyric.

If you're 20 years old and haven't heard I Get Wet yet, go ahead and enjoy it while you can. But I won't convince you that it matters in a larger sense even though the ostensible goal of any reissue, particularly in the case where the original isn't out of print, is to edify or reassess. That's unnecessary with I Get Wet. Not much Andrew W.K. did or could do after the record would redeem, justify, or vindicate your original opinion of it. About a year and a half after it failed to set the charts ablaze, The Wolf happened, and while it's a perfectly fine record, its value is entirely manifested in its utility for expert-level trolling; surely on a message board somewhere, someone is taking great satisfaction in his opinion that it's better than I Get Wet.

Andrew W.K. did go on to make other records on a much smaller and cultishly followed scale, which was likely meant to happen from day one. In spite of the utter lack of separation between Andrew Wilkes-Krier and his living, breathing party persona, neither appears to have aged a day in the past decade, which perhaps confirms the record's totemic, unyielding nature. Because really, while my life has changed significantly since my first exposure to I Get Wet and I maybe spin this record once a year, I still don't think there's ever been an album that does a better job, while it's actually playing, of convincing me it's the only music I'll ever need for the rest of my life.

Ride: Going Blank Again

Ian Cohen — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:01 -0500

If the intent of reissuing Ride's first two LPs was to change the group's reputation of being the perennial runner-ups of the shoegaze era-- the human foil to the divine My Bloody Valentine, a great band rather than a legendary one-- then this campaign has been a miserable failure. Mostly because the truth wins out: "The Story of Going Blank Again" contains the following quotes from the members of Ride: "It's a steady work process, which is a great way to do an album," "It was fun, it was a team effort," "I think it was the closest together as a band we ever were. There was no tension, no conflict. Everything just seemed to work."

Ride didn't bankrupt Creation Records; in fact, they partied with Alan McGee. They never advanced the image of being hermetic visionaries; they had to force themselves to stop socializing with other bands. They never disappeared for years on end and would later release some universally reviled trad-rock albums that doubled as applications to open for Oasis, or in the case of Andy Bell, to be in Oasis. But on Going Blank Again, Ride managed one thing MBV never accomplished after Loveless and probably never will: facing the crippling expectations and making a tremendous follow-up record.

It might not change the narrative surrounding Ride, but hopefully it does raise the question of why Going Blank Again is assumed to be the contrarian's choice for the band's true masterpiece. Some of it is pretty understandable: Going Blank Again is a noticeably lighter affair and lacks the monolithic heft of its predecessor, which is readily apparent from their respective album art. I mean, compare the two covers, which one looks like the classic to you? Perhaps more crucially, Going Blank Again was without a movement, the UK looking to move past shoegaze towards something more personality-driven, though it wasn't clear quite what yet.

Strange thing is, Ride could be included in that. Many lesser bands followed in Ride's wake, and "Leave Them All Behind" is as close as a mission statement that you're gonna get from a band whose lyrics are mostly nonsense. Bell and Mark Gardener's guitars somehow got even louder and it can initially register as Nowhere Plus, but it also sets the tone in how Going Blank Again would distinguish itself. "Seagull" started Nowhere with a peal of feedback and six minutes of trebly squall that only revealed its layers when played at tinnitus-inducing levels. Blessed with Alan Moulder's crystalline production, the salutation of "Leave Them All Behind" is a reverberating Hammond organ and an extremely punchy drum break from Loz Colbert, which acknowledge the two encroaching threads of influence of the band: the first of the Who, reflecting Ride's increasing stadium-readiness, the latter acknowledging the influx of hip-hop and funk breakbeats into UK rock.

It might be meant as the valedictory speech of shoegaze, but it isn't actually shoegaze at all, not in the sense where the genre's main goal was to obliterate or obscure. Every single element of "Leave Them All Behind" is voluminous, but not just in sheer loudness: It's overwhelming, not oppressive, and the sonic expanse is even more mindblowing with this remastering job. Bell and Gardener's barnstorming guitars, Steve Queralt's girder-thick bassline, and Colbert's Moon-sized drum fills all could fill canyons individually, yet never once does it sound like something other than four guys in a room, which explains why Ride was pretty much the only band of their ilk that was as good live as they were on record. That said, the inclusion of the Live at Brixton DVD is mostly notable for its stupendously dated visuals.

The band adamantly demanded "Leave It All Behind" be the lead single, and it reached No. 9 in Britain, their first Top 10 hit. This would seemingly bode well for Going Blank Again's fortunes considering the next single was the giddy, nonsensical "Twisterella". Drawing from the same sugar-spun power-pop of labelmates Teenage Fanclub as well as the cuts from The Stone Roses equally influenced by acid and ecstasy, it was rightfully described by the band as their "ace card." Yet it was a baffling flop on the charts and Ride released no more singles from there on out.

Shame, too, as Going Blank Again should have been able to take advantage of its depth and diversity, its main trump over Nowhere. You get Television-styled guitar interplay and Bell and Gardener's most tossed-off lyrics on "Not Fazed". "Chrome Waves" shot for "Unfinished Sympathy", but landed somewhere closer to Seal's "Crazy" and was all the better for it. "Leave Them All Behind" has an equally colossal bookend in "OX4", though the addition of four bonus tracks from the Leave Them All Behind and Twisterella EPs are hardly an unwelcome appendage (particularly "Grasshopper"). And there are the goofy pop songs like "Twisterella" which arguably worked against Going Blank Again's legacy, and even the band will admit the flower-child spoof of "Making Judy Smile" isn't its best work.

Because the typical selling point of shoegaze-- there's classic pop under all that noise!-- doesn't quite explain what Ride excelled at. Speaking on the origin of "Mouse Trap", Bell observed, "occasionally you discover a chord sequence that you'd be quite happy to play for two hours non-stop." There's about eight or so of those on Going Blank Again. Even with Ride's aim to integrate more true pop songwriting, much of Going Blank Again wisely follows the wake of the immortal "Vapour Trail", which rode out a single gorgeous progression for nearly its entirety, its only flaw stopping at four minutes instead of eight. More and more, I think the true impact of hip-hop on Ride wasn't evident in Colbert's drum fills so much as their seeing chord progressions as rhythmic beds as much as melodic ones, the way a rapper might treat a breakbeat. As such, Ride proved to be a band that operated in largesse more than finesse: simply building on these perfect chord changes for five minutes at a time with stretched out vocal harmonies, a brief shift of a couple of bars into a minor key, erratic tempo changes toward the thrilling end of "Cool Your Boots", bent soloing on "Leave Them All Behind", a 12-string riff breaking up the middle of "Mouse Trap". The pleasures of Going Blank Again are cumulative, and if you simply love the sound of guitars-- clean ones, distorted ones, overdriven Leslie amps, Les Pauls, Rickenbackers, whatever-- this is about as indulgent as it gets.

Perhaps the timing is just convenient, but Going Blank Again feels more similar to the recently reissued version of Sugar's Copper Blue than anything that's strictly identifiable as shoegaze. It's certainly reckoning with the aftermath of Loveless and an awareness of Nevermind, if not necessarily its influence. But they're both records that feel welcome 20 years later, because while their more famed peers have influenced hundreds of pale imitators, these more approachable records feel strangely undervalued. Because really, what was the last new band to bear the influence of Sugar or Ride? Not even in strict sonic similarity, since it's hard to imagine the brassy acoustic guitars you hear on "Chrome Waves" ever coming back into vogue. But more in how there's an unfortunate void of very loud, very catchy, and very polished guitar bands that aren't ashamed of commercial ambitions. You can learn a lot from Going Blank Again: Come up with four chords worth repeating for four minutes, hum a pretty melody, overdub the guitars, overdub them again, and make the drums even louder. It's not the stuff of legends, but we need great records, too.

Roxy Music: Roxy Music: The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982

Tom Ewing — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In their 1970s heyday, Roxy Music enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success, but even so, they and their art-school rock were admired more than trusted. American critics snipped at leader Bryan Ferry's arch romanticism, while the Brit press considered the models Ferry squired and the suits he doffed and dubbed him "Byron Ferrari". Almost everyone affirmed that the band were great, while disagreeing as to when, exactly. For some, the great achievement was 1982's farewell, Avalon-- impeccably designed pop for weary grown-ups. Others went a decade further back, to the early, playfully experimental albums Roxy released when Brian Eno was in the band, playing androgyne peacock to Ferry's tailored lothario. Whether you see their development between those points as progress or cautionary tale, it's easy to let this contrast define the band.

This box set of remasters to celebrate the band's 40th anniversary-- not lavish, but thorough and reasonably priced-- is an opportunity to break free of narrative and see what sets every phase of Roxy Music apart. The answer is Bryan Ferry, one of rock's great, sustained acts of self-definition. In classic 70s style, like Bowie or Bolan, Ferry invented a pop star. A sybarite with a plummy, awkward croon, gliding through his own songs like they were parties he'd forgotten arriving at. A flying Dutchman of the jet set, doomed to find love but never satisfaction. Having worked his way into character over an album or two, he simply never left it, becoming more Bryan Ferry with every record and every year, whether performing or not.

Which might have been insufferable, except Ferry's performances could hit an emotional core nobody else in rock was getting near. He made enervation his own-- a real, neglected feeling, if a hard one to sympathise with. On Avalon's title track he puts it plainly: "Now the party's over/ I'm so tired". Roxy were never drained by hangovers or comedowns, more by moments of rueful self-knowledge. But you hardly needed lyrics to spot it: from first to last, Roxy Music scattered moments of exquisite exhaustion through their songs. The hanging chords on the intro to early single "Pyjamarama", as if the song can't decide whether to get out of bed. The smothering synthesised pall of "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", from their masterpiece, 1973's For Your Pleasure. The hilariously overwrought dolour of "A Song For Europe". Or the band rousing themselves on "Just Another High" for a quixotic chase after one last thrill, futility nipping at their heels.

That song, closing out 1975's Siren, was one of the great career-ending statements. Except Roxy reformed and returned-- a three year break counted as a split in the frenzied 70s-- for a trio of albums that explored ennui in ever smoother, prettier, and more laconic ways. They restarted well. The glowering, compelling title track from 1979's Manifesto promises a meaner and darker band than we ever quite got. But the later material isn't always worthwhile. There are moments on 1980's Flesh and Blood, in particular, where the band stop sounding tired and start sounding bored, a fatal difference. There are also moments, like Avalon's "More Than This" and "To Turn You On", where the entropic gloss is a feint to let heartbreaking loneliness get in close and floor you. The ultimate late Roxy Music song, oddly, might be their cover of "Jealous Guy", released after John Lennon's murder. Here genuine loss is paid tribute by studied melancholy, soul-baring replaced by poised regret, and in the greatest tribute a narcissist could pay the song stands revealed as a Roxy tune all along.

Exhaustion was Roxy Music's speciality, but if it was all they could do they'd be a footnote. The band earn their ennui by convincing us how hard they can party. The superb mid-70s albums in particular-- For Your Pleasure, Stranded, Country Life and Siren-- are giddy, muscular displays, and vicious when they need to be. They're also Ferry's peak as a vocalist: by Stranded (also from '73) he'd found his voice but hadn't settled into the lounge lizard comfort zone, and was confident playing things staccato, mocking or sentimental. More importantly, his band had the same freedom to roam. If they lack the impertinent invention of the Eno years, these records are generous with opportunities for Roxy Music's lynchpins-- Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Eddie Jobson-- to shine and stretch. When they reach full steam behind an inspired Ferry, on "The Thrill of It All", "Street Life" or "Mother of Pearl", it's the best, most exciting music the band created.

Eno's departure, as he himself admitted, helped Roxy become that more focused, energized band. But his contributions had been colossal. Eno helped Ferry mutate his songs into referential collages and eerie synthscapes, and that experimentation gave the early Roxy their identity. He's easier to spot on their flashy, daring self-titled 1972 debut, the inventiveness of songs like "Ladytron" and "The Bob (Medley)" helping cover up rattly production. But For Your Pleasure is a greater testament to Eno's importance: it's hard to imagine an album that better exploits the tension between two fast-diverging creativities. Its best tracks play games with sincerity and emotional tone: the preposterous schmaltz of "Beauty Queen" resolving into real anguish, while "In Every Dream Home an Heartache" lurches from creepiness to hilarity. Speculating on what would have happened if Eno had stayed with Roxy Music past two albums is wistful fun. But once you've squeezed nine-minute krautrock jam "The Bogus Man" and light-footed pop manifesto "Do the Strand" into the same space, and made it work so magnificently, where do you go? Besides, Ferry needed room to obsessively refine himself.

What they lost, over time, wasn't so much inventiveness as playfulness. Country Life (1974), in particular, is an album of delightful variety-- the genre pastiche of "Prairie Rose", the gothic folly of "Tryptych", the gentle reflection of "Three and Nine". None of these survived the three-year gap. The box set has two discs of non-album material-- singles, mixes and edits-- including all the instrumentals they put on B-Sides. Relaxed studio goof-offs ("Hula Kula", "Your Application's Failed") give way to portentousness ("South Downs") as Ferry, or the group, evolve, and it's a shame. There were trade-offs, of course. The final records may not be so much fun but Ferry had found an occasional knack of crafting brilliant, swooning radio choruses-- "Dance Away", "Oh Yeah", and "More Than This" fully deserve their thrones in AOR Valhalla.

Direct Roxy Music copyists are few, but their themes-- romantic gloom, and the weariness of hedonism-- will be pop-relevant as long as self-conscious twentysomethings get famous, or want to. The music on this box set is often startling, usually wonderful and more affecting that you might have expected. But it's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx.

David Lynch / Alan Splet: Eraserhead

Mark Richardson — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The first and most important thing about the soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film masterpiece is that it's not like any other soundtrack in your collection. This is no "music from and inspired by" set and it doesn't gather orchestral cues from the film's score. Eraserhead is a sound track (two words) in the literal sense. It contains 38 minutes of the sound that accompanies the 89-minute film's picture. When you are listening to this LP, you are hearing a movie. And it works, because Lynch and his late collaborator, Alan Splet, had a rare ear for the immersive and emotional possibilities of sound. The sound design in Lynch's films is consistently brilliant, brimming with details that enhance the mood and further the narrative. And here on Eraserhead-- Lynch's first feature, most personal film, and in many ways the strangest and most evocative movie he ever made-- his and Splet's aural genius was already fully formed. Working with the analog technology available in the 1970s, they created a richly textured and evocative world.

The narrative details of Lynch's movie aren't essential to this set, but they do help to put the album into context. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer, a strange and quiet man with bushy hair who goes about his business in a parallel universe with a skewed relationship to our own reality. The streets in Henry's neighborhood are empty and dark, but you can hear dogs barking in the distance and you feel like something unpleasant might be lurking around every corner. Somewhere out of sight, enormous boilers and blast furnaces are constantly churning, belching soot into the sky and pushing tendrils of steam into cramped one-room apartments. It's a lonely, menacing place, modeled in part from Lynch's memories of his time living in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia. Eventually, Henry finds that his girlfriend Mary has given birth to...what, exactly, is never clear. "They're still not sure it is a baby!" she cries at one point on the soundtrack. Lynch and Splet render this setting with a varied mix of creaks, rumbles, hisses, and roars. Theirs is a place of polluting industry, clacking trains, dangerous electrical whirrs, and a screaming infant from the unknown.

Purely as a listening experience, you could file Eraserhead next to the ice cold drift of Thomas Köner's Permafrost, the tape-heavy pieces found on the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, the subliminal voice and sound-effect rumble of Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, and the fuzzed-out radio transmissions of Music for Nitrous Oxide-era Stars of the Lid. Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" channels a comparable nightmare, the swampiest and most decayed bits of Brian Eno's On Land might be found somewhere inside this world, and you could imagine the metallic drones of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith leaking out of Henry's floorboards. Eraserhead is dark ambient, in other words, a few years before that term had come into wide use. And despite its origins as the sound component of a film, it works terrifically well as music, provided your definition extends to the artists mentioned above. You'll hear some funny dialog about things like "man-made chickens" here and there, delivered in that distinctively Lynchian sing-songy deadpan. But the album as a whole is something you sink into, a shadowy vision of a frightening place.

Beyond the machines and industry, two more traditionally musical elements are found on the album. One recurring motif is the use of solo organ pieces from the 1930s played by Harlem jazz legend Fats Waller. The creaking organ tones, played by a man from years ago on a wheezing mechanical device, form a natural complement to the sound effects; they cycle in and out, bringing to mind a cracked memory of another time or place that never quite comes into the focus. And then there is the song "In Heaven", sung in the movie by a tiny woman with disfiguring acne who lives in Henry's radiator and serves for him as a source of warmth and comfort. "In Heaven" developed a life of its own outside of Eraserhead, most famously in the indie rock world when it was covered first by the Pixies and then, later, when incorporated into Modest Mouse's single "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'".

 "In Heaven" still fascinates because of its ambiguity. It's both deeply creepy and somehow a little bit uplifting, never quite sure if it's celebrating life or death. On this vinyl reissue from Sacred Bones, it's also included as a 7", the flip side of which is an instrumental piece in a similar style laid out by "In Heaven"'s composer, Peter Ivers. Taken all together, this beautifully packaged reissue is a thorough and complete presentation of Lynch and Splet's soundworld, complete with photos and stills from the film set on heavy card stock. It takes something moving and important that is in danger of being lost and bring it to a new audience, which is exactly what a reissue should do. And there's something reassuring about knowing that Lynch's "haunting dream of dark and disturbing things" lives on, finding people willing to put it on the turntable and make their own pictures.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Reissues

Stuart Berman — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

At the turn of millennium, old-school Nick Cave fans had good reason to believe the singer's fiery heart had been extinguished by middle age. In 1997, at age 40, he released his most delicate, introspective album, The Boatman's Call, to universal acclaim, making it the go-to Nick Cave album for people who never really liked Nick Cave. And then, thanks to a sober-up sabbatical, the usually prolific songwriter took four years to follow it up with the ornate No More Shall We Part; by 2002, this one-time contemporary of Lydia Lunch and Swans was covering the Beatles' "Let It Be" alongside the likes of Sheryl Crow and Sarah McLachlan on the soundtrack to the Sean Penn TV-movie-of-the-week-style weepie I Am Sam. Cave had never made a secret of his admiration for the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen; now, it seemed he was content to settle into a similar late-career routine of steadily releasing respectable albums that would allow him to grow old with his aging fans, rather than court new ones.

But if Cave's course seemed predetermined at the start of the decade, the final installments in Mute's 25th anniversary (28th anniversary by now) Bad Seeds reissue campaign cover a period of great upheaval and rejuvenation. Of course, the sense of rediscovery here is undermined by the fact that these records are still in print and fresh in memory, and the trajectory they chart feels incomplete without the inclusion of Grinderman, the more feral Bad Seeds offshoot that formed over this span. But, collectively, these records provide rare evidence of a band that continues to produce to career-besting work well into their third decade. And as per the series standard, each album here has been repackaged with B-sides, 5.1-channel stereo DVD audio mixes, videos, and the final chapters of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's always-illuminating talking-head documentaries Do You Love Me Like I Love You-- albeit, sadly, with 90% less Blixa.

At the very least, these reissues should reassert the importance of Nocturama in the Bad Seeds canon, given that the album's jarring stylistic shifts were initially greeted with an equally divisive reception. Where No More Shall We Part reasserted the Bad Seeds' rock-noir majesty in gradual, controlled gestures, Nocturama is more like a loosely screwed light bulb that flickers on and off in spurts. Eight of its 10 songs capture Cave in piano-man crooner mode, at times to overly sentimental effect-- see: "Rock of Gibraltar", a song destined to go down as Cave's "Mull of Kintyre". But Nocturama marked the start of a fruitful reunion between Cave and his Birthday Party producer Nick Launay, and is ultimately remembered for its two outliers: the Grinderman dry-run "Dead Man in My Bed" and the incomparable "Babe, I'm on Fire", a breathless 15-minute, 38-verse tour de farce that provides a peak-power showcase of both the Bad Seeds' sleazeball swagger and Cave's peerless wordsmithery. It is, in essence, a love song to kill all other love songs, personifying the manic ecstasy of romance through kinship with an "unlucky amputee," "menstruating Jewess," "rapist on a roll," and 100-plus other wayward souls seemingly on-call from some bizarro-world reality-TV show.

Beyond reawakening the Bad Seeds' inner beast, Nocturama signaled a shift in Cave's songwriting perspective. His lyric sheet up to that point had been mostly a pastiche of old-school signifiers, drawing on the blues, the Bible, and the Beats. But Nocturama revealed a growing interest in the modern world, America specifically. And while Cave's work has never been lacking for black humor, Nocturama evinced a greater willingness to embrace the absurd (as epitomized by the outrageous videos that accompany "Babe" and lead single "Bring It On"). It follows, then, that Cave's next release would embody his own funhouse-mirror view of life during wartime: Arriving just in time for Dubya's second term, 2004's double-album opus Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus deviously blurred the line between religious-fundamentalist fervor and bloodthirsty savagery.

Recorded live off the floor in Paris' historic Studio Ferber, the 17-song set is, to my ears, the Bad Seeds' most visceral, vibrant recording to date, thanks in great part to an omnipresent church choir that serves less as a vessel for spiritual uplift than a sneering critique of organized religion. (From the gate-crashing opener "Get Ready for Love": "Praise Him till you forgot what you're praising Him for/ Then praise Him a little bit more.") The Bad Seeds' first recording without the corrupting influence of long-time guitar-scraper Blixa Bargeld, Abattoir Blues compensates for his dissonant edge with pure gospel punk muscle, while Lyre of Orpheus elevates Cave's balladeer guise to a grand, widescreen scale. But, in their own unique ways, both present a response to the looming threat of holy war: where Abattoir's "Hiding All Away" sadistically champions it as cause for celebration ("There is a war coming!"), Orpheus' mournful closer "Carry Me" and "O Children" constitute last-ditch pleas for salvation.

Abattoir/Orpheus was going to be a hard act to follow and, judging by the lack of outtakes on offer here, one that drew the creative well dry at the time. But instead of trying to top it, Cave wisely stripped down, hijacking fellow Bad Seeds Sclavunous, Warren Ellis, and Martyn Casey for a barrage-rock regression-therapy session as Grinderman. The satellite band further mined Cave's growing obsession with American pop culture and was enthusiastically received by old and new Cave fans alike. But its ultimate purpose may have well been to serve as a sort-of Bad Seeds boot camp. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! scraped away Grinderman's surface squall, but retained its streetwise, dick-swinging attitude (and porn-star 'taches). And true to its conflation of the sacred and the profane-- resurrecting the New Testament's Lazarus as a hustler in modern-day New York City-- Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is at once the Bad Seeds' most classic rockin' album to date (with "Today's Lesson" built upon the "Jenny says" template of the Velvets' "Rock & Roll"), and its most sonically adventurous, as heard in the eerily disembodied krautrock of "Night of the Lotus Eaters" (though, sadly, the bonus disc neglects to include the more menacing version the Bad Seeds used to open shows on their 2008 tour).

Cave turned 50 during Lazarus' recording, but the only hints of aging arise when he turns the pen on himself and his process: Just as the Abattoir Blues standout "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" rendered writer's block as an apocalyptic affliction, Lazarus' centerpiece, "We Call Upon the Author", keys in on the existential crisis of the 21st century scribe, who's duty-bound to educate the oblivious "idiot constituency" and "myxomatoid kids" while struggling to measure up to the greats. ("Berryman was the best! He wrote like wet papier-mâché!") It's a hilarious song-- and all the funnier because this admission of inadequacy came in the midst of an exceedingly productive and audacious streak in Cave's already storied long career.

But for all the manic glee he takes in fashioning a hook out of a line like "Prolix! Prolix!/ Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix," the song reveals the seriousness and discipline that Cave-- the rare songwriter who keeps regular office hours-- continues to apply to his craft. In the years that have passed since Lazarus, Cave has both rebooted and retired Grinderman and tenured resignation papers from his longest serving Bad Seed, Mick Harvey. But given his recent track record of perseverence in the face of change, there's good reason to believe this author still has lots of explaining to do.

The Books: A Dot in Time

Mark Richardson — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Books met over Shooby Taylor. "It was pretty random," co-founder Nick Zammuto told Pitchfork in an interview in 2003. "I met this girl Julie up in Williamstown, and we were both working the field of art conservation. She ended up getting a job with the Guggenheim and I followed her down to New York where she got this apartment with her sister. Her sister was friends with Paul [de Jong, cellist and co-founder], and so we ended up living in the same building together. I remember the first time I went over to his apartment. He pulled out this Shooby Taylor record."

Taylor was a musical oddity known for his energetic, one-of-a-kind scat singing. He was profiled in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. And the fact that his music was in the room when Zammuto first met cellist and fellow sound collector Paul de Jong makes perfect sense. Taylor's music was something that was lost, found, re-discovered, and shared. It was weird and it had an uncertain context and the people who passed those records around created new ones. Such odd gems are rescued from obscurity and passed around by people like de Jong and Zammuto. And that drive provided the initial inspiration for the Books.

That was the beginning of the last decade, and now the Books are no more. After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. Nick Zammuto was somewhat evasive as to why, but it doesn't really matter. It feels right for the Books to wind things up. They had a brilliant idea, they created a sound around it, they bent and shaped and explored that sound as best they could. And then eventually it came time to put that sound away. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than A Dot in Time, a lovingly compiled and gorgeous box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.

The Books had a distinctive sound that was like nothing else when it arrived on the scene in 2002. It sounded so bizarre and alluring in part because it was the perfect music for a very specific time and place. If it'd have arrived five years later, it wouldn't have made nearly as much sense. In 2002, Google was firmly in control of the web search game, but information in general still seemed overwhelming, random, unknowable. There were fewer ways to focus attention on a single nugget of culture. And the Books were founded in part as a way to take a stream of artifacts and re-assemble them into something new. Which is another way of saying that the Books made less sense in the post-YouTube world; once everyone became an archivist and the fragments of culture were available to all, someone coming to the Books for the first time did so without the same sense of wonder.

But all that was a few years away. First, we had Thought for Food, one of the most startling and original debut albums of the 00s. With this project, you didn't know where one element started and another began. What was sampled? What was played? Where did these sounds come from? Was the young child being told, "You have no mother and father," and being asked not to touch his father in the song "Motherless Bastard" "real" or was this from a movie or was it staged? It was hard to know, and this lingering sense of strangeness and unknowability suited the music perfectly. Without access to the details of authorship, you could only let the sound wash over you, and it was a beauty. Subtle guitar and banjo, bits of cello, some voices. We were just coming out of the peak era of Chicago post-rock, and the Books' approach to sound bore some relationship to the thoughtful, understated, cerebral, but still deeply felt expression of Jim O'Rourke, one of the lynchpins of that scene. A decade on, Thought for Food still works its peculiar magic.

The Lemon of Pink is that odd follow-up album that finds a band refining and honing its sound but losing the element of surprise. The technique is almost identical, but Zammuto and de Jong had a better understanding of how to wield their instruments and samples for maximum impact. As is sometimes the case, for the Books, each of their first three albums has an almost equal number of fans who think it's the best. And in these cases, a lot depends on which you heard first. The Lemon of Pink showed them growing slowly into the more song-oriented direction they would develop later, but the samples are as fresh as ever, words and syllables plucked from who-knows-where and allowed to settle in your brain and grow into a new kind of meaning.

Lost and Safe was the breakthrough, the album that moved the Books out of the realm of small cult act. They'd become an enjoyable live band, and they found a sort of community in the world of bookish coffee shops and NPR. Many fans like Lost and Safe best, and in retrospect I feel I underrated it upon its initial release. It was one of those cases in which what I wanted from the band was different from what they were interested in doing. The Books were heading further in the direction of proper songs. Since Zammuto's voice is limited, his muted sing-speak-whisper integrated very well into the clips from instructional records and ancient news broadcasts. Coming as it did after the 2004 presidential elections, a difficult time for progressives in the United States, Lost and Safe had a political undercurrent that further bound the Books to this community. "I can feel a collective rumbling in America," went a line in "Be Good to Them Always", the album highlight and arguably the greatest single track the Books ever made. It's a song that contained so much: surface beauty, intricate construction, subtle commentary. And if the album as a whole didn't quite deliver on that promise, it was the third winner in a row from a group that didn't necessarily seem like they could sustain things that long.

Between Lost and Safe and their final album, 2010's The Way Out, the books released a collection of scraps called Music for a French Elevator. That EP has been greatly expanded with 32 additional tracks, and the set as a whole is unexpectedly satisfying and offers a different angle on the Books' world. Without the careful editing and thematic unity of their albums, French Elevator mostly shows how musical they were, and how adept they were at making simple guitar and cello patterns pack an emotional punch. Some of these extra tracks are just instrumentals played by Zammuto and de Jong and some are just samples, but they do illustrate the consistency of their aesthetic, how they were able to shape different textures so that they fit with with their overriding sound.

And then came The Way Out, a more playful and free-wheeling album. In retrospect, The Way Out is easily the least satisfying of the four, though it still has its charms. Experimenting with steadier beats and grooves while going heavier on the jokes, The Way Out ultimately feels like a dry run for Zammuto's solo work than a wrap-up to the Books proper. But heard here, in the context of their career as a whole, it's as good an epitaph as any. Something feels right about this box set, from the beautiful design to the fact that it feels a bit like a tombstone. As markers of the dead go, it's a beautiful one. May it live and decay and be covered with weeds and, eventually, be unearthed and dusted off by some young creative person still finding their way. And may that person pass it on to someone else and find a way to share something new with the world.