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hello there, loyal superstarcastic readers, isn’t it a beautiful day? why the random ebullience on the part of joie, you ask? well, a few weeks ago touch and go records announced a caption contest for this seriously ridiculous photo of ted leo and the pharmacists. the results were just announced - may i point you toward the 4th winner down?
yes, folks, that’s me*, and there are few things in this world that i am prouder of right this minute. anyone who knows me at all knows how much i loveloveLOVE this band for their literate brand of revolutionary ass-shaking and has heard me singing their praises to the heavens. and you also know that ted leo is my future ex-husband, so you can imagine the dorky grin i have plastered across my face right now. please expect fun photos of my unphotogenic self kissing my autographed copy of living with the living whilst garbed in the various other ted leo/rx paraphernalia that i won.
*in the interest of being completely fair, zak helped come up with the caption. howevs, he didn’t get off his lazy ass and submit it and i did. so now i’m famous and he isn’t. hey, those are the breaks.
I doubt that anyone reading this needed to hear this from me, but here it is anyway: Avril Lavigne’s new album is no good. If you’re the sort of person who likes to be told things that you already assumed were true, you and this review are already great friends.
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But why, exactly, does Avril Lavigne suck? After all, I’m no stranger to this defense when reviewing an album like this: “You can’t possibly review this band because they’re not meant for you.” Superficially, this tack of argument is appealing. After all, I’m not a teenage girl, which is obviously the demographic this album is aimed at, with songs like “Girlfriend” (about a girl who wants to be a guy’s boyfriend), “Contagious” (about a girl who likes a guy), and “Hot” (about a girl who likes a — tune in next week!).
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The problem with that point of view is that it, much like Avril’s writing partners and the producers of this album undoubtedly do, assumes that teenage girls are idiots. I was a teenager once. I know that they are often ruled by hormones and angst, and that’s okay. But it is perfectly possible to make a great album for a teenage audience that does not pander so quickly and severely to the lowest common denominator.
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We’ll even make it especially fair to Avril by using her chosen genre as an example. The pop punk scene doesn’t immediately make one think of brilliant music, but there are bands out there who have used it very effectively. Consider The Descendents, particularly the breakout “Milo Goes To College”. The song “Clean Sheets” is a pop punk masterpiece, a fun-sounding lament about a familiar teenage topic — in this case, tough love and heartbreak — that isn’t idiotic or formulaic. Ditto for other tracks like “Parents” and “I’m Not A Loser”.
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Over 20 years later, we can be sure that young Avril has taken no heed of her forefathers. Every single goddamned song on the CD is simplistic, predictable, and repetitive — completely interchangeable with the one preceding it, both lyrically and musically. Random additions of some misplaced piano or a call-and-response section try and break up the monotony, but they’re painfully obvious for what they are. Underneath, the chord progressions and lyrical sentiments remain the same, over and over and over again. The nicest thing you could say is that most of the songs are catchy on some level, but when you’re using the same tried-and-tested hook over and over again — one that we’ve heard a million times before — the catchiness only lasts for the duration of the song; it is instantly forgettable. Which is great for me.
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I realize at this point that I’ve devoted little of this review to what the disc actually sounds like, but really, what’s the point, other than to satisfy my more masochistic tendencies? Take one of Lavigne’s songs — really, any one will do — and play it 10 times. Throw in a slower, more ballad-like song and play it once or twice. Mix well (not well, actually — you’ll need the sound of overproduction), and throw in an occasional inexplicable faux-British accent. Congratulations. You’ve recreated “The Best Damn Thing”, and you didn’t have to do your damndest to avoid the disapproving gaze of the checkout guy at the record store to do it.
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Sadly, Lavigne’s core audience does not care that her new album is trash; in fact, they’re happy. Shrewdly, effortlessly, she and her producers give them exactly what they want. “Iiiiiii don’t haaaave to tryyyyyyyy!” Lavigne screeches on a track bearing the same name. Truer words have never been spoken.
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Release date: April 17, 2007
Label: RCA
Rating: 2/10
Don’t get me wrong; i’m not so hardline as to say that any use of a band’s music in advertising is evil (although it should always be scrutinized). While it’s admirable that Trans Am turned down $100,000 to have their music featured in a Hummer ad, what Trans Am fan is going to suddenly decide that Hummers are A-OK just because Trans Am’s music is in an ad? Still, this really makes me queasy, and not just because it involves Fall Out Boy:
Partnership Offsets Costs of Video by Fall Out Boy
Fans of Fall Out Boy who downloaded “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs,†the rock band’s new video last weekend most likely enjoyed the spectacle of chimpanzees playing filmmakers and mocking the members of the band. But they may have noticed something else: Tag All Nighter, a deodorant body spray aimed at young men, is featured prominently in the video.
Procter & Gamble, which owns Tag, made a deal with the band’s label, Island Records, to make the video available for free downloading from the band’s Web site before it could be seen anywhere else.
Since CD sales are declining but the cost of making a video is not, many musicians have made product placement deals for videos in the last few years. In this deal, Tag essentially underwrote the cost of those downloads for a limited time and put a message to that effect on the band’s Web site. Tag also promoted the band in advertising and helped offset the cost of making the video.
“It used to be that you’d make a video and you’d get a certain number of plays on MTV, but things changed,†said Steve Bartels, president of Island Records. The deal with Tag offered another way to reach viewers, and the label said that video was downloaded more than 100,000 times.
At a time when music labels are trying to reduce their promotional costs, deals like this could become more common. “If it offset the cost of the video it sounds like a great idea,†said Scott Booker, who manages the alternative rock band the Flaming Lips. He said that younger fans were less likely to perceive such deals as “selling out.â€
In this case, Fall Out Boy was comfortable with Tag because the brand’s ads have a “sarcastic spin,†said Pete Wentz, the band’s bassist and lyricist. “Given how the industry is right now, you have to come up with new kinds of partnerships, and when you’re able to offset the cost of the video, that’s cool. Hiring chimps is not cheap.â€
I suppose that i could be snide and suggest that there is no compromising of artistic integrity here because first you have to have art…but really, i’m just weirded out.
I guess they’re great businessmen, anyway.
Back in February, we posted about a VBS.tv documentary about the search for Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only heavy metal band. The 5 part series was far more fascinating than I’d expected. Well, now comes a part two of sorts. VBS.tv has a 7 part series called “Black Scorpion of Baghdad” about Acrassicauda (Latin for Black Scorpion). Luck you… all 7 parts are up and posted. Write off the next few minutes of your life because you won’t be able to do anything until you get through all 7 parts:
Like many ostensibly indispensable pillars of rock and roll, the concept album has gone from revolutionary to quaint. The idea behind album-spanning narrative helped shift the focus away from hits to a working whole, but the concept album as rock’s highest datum is as antiquated as a backwards guitar solo.
The answer, according to Trent Reznor, is not to retreat to disjointed singles, but to make a concept production that spans all available media, and in some disturbing ways has no previous equal. Nine Inch Nails’ new album, Year Zero, is only the capstone of an ominous world that Reznor has invented and released in upsetting vignettes, images and sound bytes that hint at a future to make ‘Brave New World’ read like ‘Charlotte’s Web’.
These ‘clues’ so far have been dispersed throughout the internet, stemming from the band’s website, YouTube, and also from jump drives ‘accidentally’ left behind in restrooms throughout Europe, for starters. With no accompanying explanation or context, these could just as easily be moments of horror happening right now, though they are, according to various sources, stolen scenes from the year 2022. None of them - grainy videos, wiretaps, scrambled codes - make any sense by themselves, or even taken as a whole except to paint a woeful image of what’s in store for us at the hands of terrorists, a government run by religious fundamentalists, and slowly-eroding rights and protections that disappear unnoticed. It is all so disturbing because, without explanation, they may not be marketing ploys, but your sister’s last words from the trunk of a car.
Just like the collection of glimpses so far released, the album draws strength from its sense of inevitability. Lately, we’ve been momentarily incensed by unwarranted phone taps, and occasionally bothered enough to bitch about surveillance of public spaces, all of which continue to haunt us unimpeded, which Reznor reminds us in ‘My Violent Heart’, adding that there are no plans to stop these intrusions. Year Zero effectively states its case and sticks to it - it is not a possible future that can be altered by doubling your clerk’s salary and taking a vested interest in his crippled son, but one that will come to pass by unstoppable wheels have been put in motion. Ugly.
Cementing all of these fragments is some of Trent Reznor’s best music since The Downward Spiral. Following the trajectory of his past two albums, Reznor has moved from the blistering machine-gun fury and despair of his first three efforts (and particularly Broken) into a more rhythmic and strangely hook-laden direction that is no less marauding. Most unusual is the use of noise and anti-melody to fill in spots where convention places guitar solos or bridges. The sonic confusion mirrors the narrative and puts white noise where musical interludes usually belong, not unlike headlines about a single culprit claiming responsibility for every act of terror since 9-11 to strategically distract us from the more plausible scandal surrounding the U.S. Attorney General.
There are some weaknesses. Reznor’s frustration is a little overbearing in ‘Capital G’ when he sings about politicians who, “used to believe in something, now I forgot what that could be.” We’ve heard that 100 times before (which, at least, he admits as such), but that’s because they’re the words of a politician - not remarkable lyrics, but thematically appropriate. Where he succeeds - which he does for most of the album - is in a mastery of dynamics, and haunting sensitivity, like on the album’s closeing twofer ‘In This Twilight’ and ‘Zero-sum’, which sound like the survivors of a ruined society trying to recall an old symphony that’s been banned or forgotten.
If eschatology and conspiracy theoretics aren’t your thing, then the music on Year Zero - some of NIN’s best in years - may still draw you in. I was surprised to have a great deal of it stuck in my head, which is surprising given that it is the soundtrack to the disintegration of civilization. But just as Reznor adroitly employs the latest technology to sonically replicate the most human senses of fear and despa
ir, so does his apocalypse have a toe-tapping beat.
Like a good novelist or playwright, Reznor doesn’t necessarily need to know what he’s writing about – he just needs to make you think he does; taking him and his fatalistic view seriously is not required to be affected by it. It is not as concerned with preparing us for scheduled misery and oppression, but with holding a gory meditation on what it would be like were it to occur. But just in case he’s right, I hope I die of old age before the terrorists, or the Thought Police come to git me.
Release date: 4-17-07
Label: Interscope
Rating: 8.5/10
Recommended prep material: ‘Jesus Camp‘, 1984, The Book of Revelation, Zoloft
Remixes and covers are tricky business. Not only is the potential for blasphemy extremely high, but the likelihood of totally sucking is, too. It’s hard to make a good remix, and it’s even harder to cover someone else’s original track with any kind of dignity. Yes, it’s been known to go well; done with a deft hand, remixes can be especially creative. In extremely rare cases a remix or cover can even rival the original, but generally, no. Suck. So when I heard that an album of Xiu Xiu (one of my top bands of all time) remixes and covers was being released, I became kind of stressed out. Because like, ugh. Suck.
As a whole, the album is a mixed bag. Trying to take one of Xiu Xiu’s anxiety-filled train wrecks and make it your own seems like a delusion of grandeur; the tracks that work best are the ones that leave the meat of the original intact and simply tinker with glitch. “Over Over” gets impressively remixed into a smoother, less-panicked song with the addition of some shiny electronics. Kid 606 takes the helm on two tracks, “Fabulous Muscles” and “Bishop, CA”, turning them both into robot seizures that probably shouldn’t work but in fact totally do. Gold Chains transforms Caralee’s “Hello from Eau Claire” into some seriously ballsy techno, and This Song is a Mess but So Am I, who has one of the stupidest bands names of all time, remixes “Buzz Saw” into an impressive display of irregular and intricate beats. Fittingly, the best remix on the album is Xiu Xiu’s own remix of their cover of “Ceremony” which, hands down, is the best remix - nay, the best song - I’ve heard all year. The original is one of the greatest songs ever written, Xiu Xiu’s cover completely did it justice and updated it, and now this remix of that cover just adds even more depth. That is three layers of fucking awesomeness. Can’t ask for more than that.
For each of these high points, however, there is a low. Her Space Holiday’s cover of “I Luv the Valley (OH)” is a limp and colorless piece of, well, total shit. Marissa Nadler’s version of “Clowne Town” is pretty much a spacy country and western song, so I don’t really need to elaborate on that mistake. “Apistat Commander” is done well by Sunset Rubdown, but it’s so much like the original, except lacking the visceral vocal delivery that makes the original so superior, that it’s existence seems kind of pointless. And is the lead singer from Oxbow, who attempts to cover “Saturn”, secretly Dave Mathews on speed? No? Hmm, could have fooled me.
If you are already a Xiu Xiu fan and/or collector, you pretty much need to own this. It has some surprising moments of greatness, and of course the remix of “Ceremony” alone is worth every penny spent. The better remixes don’t venture into a blasphemous place, and the Kid 606 tracks are extemely innovative and definitely worth checking out if you follow his work at all. The rest of you, proceed with caution. Better yet, just listen to the originals. You should already be doing that.
Release Date: April 10, 2007
Label: 5rc
Rating: 6/10
