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- teecomb in Pitchfork Leaks Some of the 2008 Lineup Animal Collective rocks so hard. It’s has great melodies and most people who hate on it have only heard one era of them that didn’t...
well, what did i tell you…robes are so passe. for their highly anticipated new album the fragile army, being mixed now for an early 2007 release, the polyphonic spree will be sporting an edgier and hardly fragile militant look. très awesome, no? i hear the music is going to be darker too and i personally cannot wait to hear it.
in other spree news, the band has been hand-picked to cover a yoko ono song for an upcoming tribute to the dubious musician who is john lennon’s widow. let’s hope she doesn’t try to break up the band. yeah, i know that’s a pathetic old joke but i had to use it before any of you smartasses commented with it.  good times.Â
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For your edification, dear readers. Take notes.
Gary Numan - Me (1981)
I’m somewhat suspicious of the use of superlatives and imperatives in music appreciation, mostly because their presence often signals a discussion of some buzz band or other. That said, go see The Twilight Singers next time you get a chance, because when they came through Boston last week, they put on the best show I’ve seen all year.
Anything but a buzz band, the Twilight Singers began in 1997 as Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli’s side project and went on to release four albums–Twilight (2000), Blackberry Belle (2003), the covers album She Loves You (2005), and this year’s Powder Burns. An EP, A Sitch in Time, came out on iTunes last month. Over the years, the loosely formed Twilight Singers have seen many different collaborators–Harold Chichester, Matthias Schneeberger, Jesse Tobias, and Chris Phillips, to name a few. Though bassist Scott Ford has been around since Blackberry Belle, Dulli’s been the group’s only constant. Vanity act? Possibly–but (especially with their current lineup) The Twilight Singers totally earn it.
We’ve all seen plenty of bands whose onstage demeanor detracts from rather than enhances their performance. How many times have you gone to see some act with a cute name, passable riffs and great butts, only to find that there’s something about their exaggerated gestures that ultimately smacks of hollowness? This was how I felt watching the second opening band of the night, Stars of Track and Field. Though I can forgive the band for their name (they’re from Oregon, so I’m going to pretend the moniker is a shout-out to U of O running great Steve Prefontaine and not a reference to the first track on my favorite Belle & Sebastian album), and though they show some promise (they’ve kinda got that nu-gaze thing going on), they still have a ways to go musically before they grow into their stage act. Singing love songs while jamming back-to-back a la Spinal Tap is extremely cute, but it’s not that convincing.
It’s strange how the use of gesture can fall flat for one band and work like crazy for another. Real rock ‘n’ roll is about craft and performance, not good looks and carefully-timed posturing–but if you already love a band’s work, it’s hard not to interpret its non-musical idiosyncracies as signs of its added greatness. Once Stars of Track and Field’s gear was off the stage and the roadies were hauling in a mic stand with a beverage holder affixed to one side and an ashtray to the other, we had a funny feeling that The Twilight Singers were going to rock.
Ten minutes later, the room went dark, some intro notes from Powder Burns’ opening track “Toward the Waves” came over the speakers, and five orange orbs appeared at the side door of the Paradise, bobbing slowly toward the stage. A slight change in the air and a little more light revealed that the glowing orbs were attached to the cigarettes of Scott Ford, Dave Rosser, Bobby MacIntyre, Jeff Klein (who was doing double duty, having opened the evening with a solo set before SoTaF), and Greg Dulli. The band waved hello to the audience and then proceeded, balls-out, to rip “Teenage Wristband”–a breath-caught-in-the-throat, intricate piece from Blackberry Belle–into a gorgeous musical wreck that matched its rebellious lyrics. Read more »
So we are all supposed to care, right? It’s Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the ubiquitous Radiohead. Holy crap, omg, blah blah blah. Yes, he recorded a solo album. Everyone change their underwear, it’s going to be ok.
I’ve never been a huge Radiohead fan. They are talented and have a lot of great songs, it’s true. Superior songs, even. Admittedly, I own all their albums. Everything from Kid A to present has been pretty solid (although I don’t understand what was so damn revolutionary about Kid A. Someone explain? Brian Eno was doing those sorts of things in the 70’s). So I was definitely interested in this solo venture of Thom’s, but in a mild, detached sort of way. Any excuse to ogle that weird eye of his, anyway.
It’s always kind of a tense moment when someone from a respected band breaks off from the group and makes a solo album. What if it’s lame and ruins the band? What if it’s really good and ruins the band? Radiohead hasn’t broken up or quit; Thom just felt like he had some solo material and wanted to record it. Well, fair enough, Thommy boy. Let’s hear it.
My thought on the first listen was, “Wow, this sounds like awkward Radiohead.” It’s quite difficult to separate Yorke’s vocals from Radiohead - he’s been screeching in our ears for 15 years or so at this point, and Yorke-as-Radiohead is sort of ingrained on the collective unconscious of the world. So initially, the album is just a crappy Radiohead record, sorely lacking Jonny Greenwood’s presence.
Sure, Morrissey did just fine without Johnny Marr, but he never paralleled the greatness of the Smiths on his own. Likewise, Yorke is competent without Greenwood, once one gets over the feeling that the solo album is just a slightly-retarded Radiohead record, but it simply just isn’t as good.
The record has some great moments, but just as many - if not more - earth-shakingly dull ones. In it’s entirety, it’s best described as static - from start to finish there is not a lot of variation, just your run-of-the-mill digital bleeps, whirrs, steel footsteps, paranoid metallic sounds, and dreamy ambient laptop weirdness set to Yorke’s all too familiar whine. Tracks one through five fell deadly flat on my ears. Track one, “The Eraser”, was enough to vaguely pique my interest, but I quickly grew bored. Then, upon hearing track five, ”Skip Divided”, my boredom, which sucks but is generally managable and something I’m accustomed to, turned to horror, which I dislike managing and try to avoid. Truly the most awful song on the album, it comes complete with faux heart monitor sounds (think: emergency room atari), deep, tuneless vocals and lyrics like “I’m a dog, I’m a dog, I’m a lapdog, I’m your lapdog, yeah” (is the ”yeah” really necessary?) left me feeling nauseous and sort of pissed off, simply because it existed and I made the mistake of hearing it. Only starting with track six, “Atoms for Peace”, do things start to get interesting, but even then, it’s a momentary flash of hope, and then the end of the record comes all too quickly. It’s like mediocre sex - it’s not bad, really, and you’d probably do it again if you had some free time or were seriously intoxicated, but it’s nothing to put any effort into or tell your friends about.
Release date: July 11, 2006
Label: XL
Rating: 5/10
I’m not well versed in my Graham Coxon solo but this is what I know: Blur was great and the last Graham Coxon solo album, “Happiness In Magazines” bored the shit out of me. It was seemingly a record without a purpose… put out for the sake of doing what he does. Now, I know at least a few people who used words like “brilliant” when it came out, but the emperor has no clothes… Morrissey hasn’t made a good album since “Your Arsenal” and Graham Coxon’s “Happiness In Magazines” is entirely forgettable. No matter how much you want those statements to be false just because of whose name is on the record sleeve sometimes those we want to like will disappoint us.
Earlier this week, what should arrive on my desk but “Love Travels At Illegal Speeds”. Whereas “Happiness In Magazines” was like eating a rice cake with mayonnaise on it, “Love..” opens with the single “Standing On My Own Again” which isn’t that bad… like a rice cake with peanut butter. The melodies are aggressive and hook filled and it’s not hard to realize that this is the same man who wrote all of those great blur songs from way back when.
After listening to this album 3 times, I couldn’t repeat one line of lyrics back to you. Maybe it’s due to the production work or maybe it’s due to the songwriting itself, but the vocals are almost inconsequential. Obviously, these songs were written to have someone sing over them, but why not have a guest vocalist… say, Damon Albarn? Maybe have Alex James and David Rowntree fleshing out the rhythm section?
Ah fuck it - let’s just say it. This album is good, if not great, mostly because it sounds like a Blur album. It’s got teeth and sharp corners on one tracks, then soft skipping-in-the-meadow dripping with sugar on the next track and so many hooks it’s like a pirate convention. An immediate listen doesn’t yield much of a reaction beyond “That was nice.” - but I know myself and I can hear when an album will grow on me like a fungus. This time next year, it’ll be among my favorites.
7/10 (9 of 10 if he’d just made this album with blur)
Reinterpreting a classic artist’s repertoire has a failure rate worse than that of the restaurant industry, but someone is always trying. It wouldn’t be the first time the Beatles got ‘the treatment’, but this one, Love, is generating a great deal of noise. Even though George Martin oversaw production, thereby giving it credence, I am going to hate it until further notice. Follow me, ye purists, and let’s wander back to a time when mash-up meant something brawlers did at the pub…
No cover art, and no real name, the Beatles’ self-titled double-album (which will henceforth be called by its common name) rounds out more Top-10-favorite-album lists than any other release from the Four Lads. Where Sgt. Pepper is dated, and Abbey Road drops ‘Octopus’s Garden’ in an irony-free setting, The White Album need make no excuses for any shortcomings. It has a critical immunity to it, and even the most jaded hipster can find something to enjoy in the White Album that eludes him or her throughout the rest of the Beatles’ catalogue.
But not for all… I grew up in a household that was soundtracked by The Beatles, save The White Album material. Whenever I make a Beatles mix for Dad, he tells me to go heavy on the old stuff, “and maybe a few off of Abbey Road and Let it Beâ€. He had not heard most of the cuts off the White Album until I bought it for him on his 53rd birthday; there is still no evidence that he’s played it through, and less that he liked the experience if he did. No, it is ‘too weird’, which is strange since ‘I Am the Walrus’ is one of his favorites. But then again, there are songs like ‘Wild Honey Pie’ and ‘Revolution No. 9’ that fall not only under the ‘weird’ category, but they also categorically suck, and are there to piss off all but the most hardcore fans.
But whenever someone complains that, “track-such-and-such is crap,” the immediate response is, “oh, come on… it’s THE WHITE ALBUM,†where all flaws are forgivable, given the payoff of the songs that work (which is most of them).
This record is where Lennon really shows up McCartney. Granted, Paul gave us the boisterous ‘Helter Skelter’, but that song has always left me dry because it was written simply to out-pummel the Who. McCartney wasn’t tearing the roof off as a matter of course, but had to be shamed into it. He scores big on the civil-rights-celebration ‘Blackbird’, which also stands as ‘#1 Most Likely Song to be Played by a Guy With a Guitar at a Party’, but his other contributions pave the way for the horror that would be Wings. But this is Paul McCartney - he’s always been the kind of guy to think about turning 64 while his friends are off getting better all the time. Even if it doesn’t hold a candle to ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, ‘Martha My Dear’ is wholly appropriate for this album. Out-of-place both in song-order, and in the year it was written, therein lies the beauty of The White Album. Read more »
