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- Voltaire in Pitchfork Leaks Some of the 2008 Lineup I was hating on Animal Collective before it was “hip” to hate on Animal Collective. Hell, before it was hip to LIKE Animal...
(note: title jacked from here)
IÂ admit: it’s been a good nine years since I took any interest in Tori Amos’ career. Her current release at the time was From the Choirgirl Hotel, an album fraught with the emotional turmoil of new love and repeated miscarriages. I admit: I listened to it probably twice, and went back to my copy of Boys for Pele, which I continued listening to in the ensuing years. Tori moved on, trying electronica, a covers album, a label switch, concept albums, and all the usual shit that seems to happen to successful musicians midway through their career when they’re not exactly sure what to do next. Then, on top of that, came the greatest hits collection, the official bootlegs, and the retrospective box set. It seemed like Tori was closing the door on an artistic part of her life, and moving into a new phase (in fact, she started mentioning doing something different from her earlier albums in interviews). When the opportunity arose for me to review American Doll Posse, I took it, interested to see what she might be up to. I told my roommate, and she replied “Tori’s gone apeshit!”
And yes, folks, it’s true: Tori’s gone apeshit. If you’ve been following any of the pre-release hype, you may know that Tori has created five “alter egos,” (the “posse,” natch) and they all split vocal duties and writing chores. Um, sure. Except they’re all Tori Amos, right? Well, they sure all sound like her. I can’t say if she’s writing the blogs each of the characters maintains. Oh, and they’re all based on Greek mythology, apparently, although I don’t recall a Greek god named “Santa.” Or “Pip,” for that matter. I realised that I’d have to stop rolling my eyes at some point, ignore all this character creation (which is hardly something she’s never done before, if the Wikipedia entry for Scarlet’s Walk is to be believed) and actually listen to the record if I was going to learn anything I could impart unto you, the reader.
The album kicks off nicely, following the brief ode to everyone’s favorite American citizen “Yo George” with the lead single “Big Wheel.” It’s a somewhat courageous choice, given the burnished, radio-ready sound of “Secret Spell” and “Bouncing Off Clouds,” but it’s a good one, coquettishly kicking its way onto the dance floor while Tori proclaims “I’m an M-I-L-F, don’t you forget.” The mis-steps start early, though, as “Teenage Hustling” tries a mean swagger that comes off self-concious (it should be noted that “Body and Soul” handles the swagger much better.) “Programmable Soda” wastes a fun music-hall arrangement on a song that’s, well, called “Programmable Soda.” What more do you need to know? On the other hand, a string quartet pops up on the lovely, understated “Girl Disappearing.” Another ballad, “Digital Ghost,” mixes quietly ticking electronics with quiet, crunchy guitars. Unfortunately, around the hour mark of this 79-minute album, the songs just run together. It’s a shame some of the wasteful fluff like “Mr. Bad Man” couldn’t have been trimmed.
But I suppose that’s not the point. If I were reviewing this album in one sentence, it would say “Tori Amos makes a Tori Amos record.” All I can really say about many of the songs are that they sound like Tori Amos songs. I’m okay with that, but then, I like her okay. American Doll Posse won’t sway anybody’s opinion; if you’re a fan, I’m sure you’re already making art based on an offhand remark in Clyde’s blog, and if you’re not, you’ve probably given up on this review by now. Which leaves just you and me: the vaguely curious. And what we are left with is the fact that Tori will make the album she wants, and more power to her. But for all her talk of forward motion, why is the music so familiar? Has her search for a new voice led her back to an earlier sound? Is it artistic laziness? I suppose we’ll have to wait for the next album, or maybe longer. Maybe I’ll spend another nine years reaching for Boys For Pele when I want to hear a Tori Amos record. But I’ll keep an ear open.
Here we go, my first review that nobody’s done on the site before. Hold your breath and cross your fingers.
It’s been a helluva year for our man, Mr. Mark E. Smith. Last summer, everybody in the Fall apart from his wife ditched the band mid-US tour (something about a banana? Who knows.) This isn’t the first time Fall membership has turned over almost completely (as opposed to one-at-a-time like usual) and last time it lead to The Real New Fall LP, the best thing they’d done in at least a decade. The relationship soured quickly, though; Fall Heads Roll, despite containing a song so good that advertisers sat up and noticed, was largely substandard and complacent. Two albums in and they’re bored? Oh dear.
Mr. Smith and the missus went ahead and recruited a bunch of California dudes, finished up the tour, and set about making a new record (but of course). I was pretty excited to hear how the sensibilities would match up, and the results are…well…shall we say mixed? No, let’s say a brilliant side A and a total shit side B.
Why I like Side A: We get a maniacal laugh from Mark and we’re into the first song, “Over! Over!” The prototypical Fall rockabilly-chuck starts up and the lyrics go “I think it’s over now/I think it’s ending/I think it’s over now/I think it’s beginning.” A tribute to themselves, as always. “Reformation!” is nearly as intoxicating, with back-and-forth guitar bits and a nice little squiggly keyboard riff. And “Fall Sound” is just as advertised, musically reminiscent of The Frenz Experiment and The Unutterable all at once while Mark E. shouts “brrrrrrrrr! brrrrrrrr! You just woke up to Fall Sound!” After a pretty decent cover of Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever” comes “Insult Song.” Mr. Smith does an American accent, calls his band “retards” and his wife “the mad Greek woman, the Hydra.” Cute enough, but maybe not six minutes worth. “My Door Is Never” brings things back in line, and the extremely poppy “Coach and Horses” leads us down the chute…
Why I hate Side B: Bypassing “The Usher” (which contains groovy bass lixx and thus is no good), we hit the first big roadblock on “The Wright Stuff.” The classic Mark E. Smith line goes “If it’s me and your grandmother on bongos, it’s The Fall.” This song has the same problem as “Trust In Me” off the last album: no Mark E. Smith. Therefore, it’s not a Fall song and I really don’t want to hear it on a Fall album. Then, a FUCKING APPLAUSE SAMPLE (as if to underline how damn shitty the song is) leads us to “Scenario,” which is just kinda boring. And then: OHHHHH and then: “Das Boat.” “Das Boat” starts off with two full minutes of guitar-and-keyboard riff buildup, leading to keyboard sound effects, somebody whacking something with a stick, and Mark and Eleni Smith randomly saying “Das boat,” “blue boat,” and going “Ee-ee, ee-ee!” FOR TEN MINUTES. By the end I was mentally screaming at the top of my lungs “Goddammit, can I just get a fucking song in here?” No, I get “The Bad Stuff,” a band argument over who should start a formless jam with an answering machine recording laid over it. Finally (apart from an “outro”) “Systematic Abuse” closes things out, but it’s too late to care.
Typically two or three odds-and-ends records come out between real Fall albums, and I wonder if this is actually supposed to be one of them. Four good tunes coupled with bad, bad filler. Is this really what the Fall are now? Is it America’s fault? Are we all just being fooled yet again? I don’t mind being fooled if it’s fun, but this shit is no fun. I must admit, though, that I’ll still check the next album out. One bad Fall album doesn’t mean another won’t be great.
Goddammit, I wish it were summer.
It’s been a tough, long winter in Wisconsin this year. Now, in early March, the plowed snow still stands ten feet high. I honestly thought that blasted oversize chipmunk might be right when he predicted an early thaw this year, though. The temperatures started edging into the 40s, Mcdonald’s rolled out the Shamrock Shakes, all signs indicated spring. Then, guess what? Blizzard! I hit a drift driving to work, fucked up my exhaust to the tune of $400, and that’s enough, dammit. No more winter.
I want summer back. I miss it. For those of you not acquainted with them, I gotta tell ya, Milwaukee summers are something to live for. I can’t wait for the backyard cookouts, the tossing of extraneous furniture off the front porch, makeout time on the very same porch, as oblivious to the passer-by below as they are to us (unless we’re full of Everclear and yelling at them — it happens more often than you’d think). And I have a desperate need to roll down my windows in a prototypically american fashion, driving down the highway with the stereo up loud. And when I do this, I’ll be listening to Phantom Punch.
Sondre Lerche has a name I’m not sure how to pronounce and a pop touch that’s hard to beat. His second album, Two Way Monologue, was chock-full of Bacharach arrangements and managed the intriguing feat of each track sounding like an album closer. It’s a quality record. The pendulum swung farther afield on 2006’s Duper Sessions, which was pretty much undistinguished lounge-jazz, so reminiscent of Elvis Costello’s experiments in the style that it included a cover of “Human Hands.” A subsequent “rock” album was promised, but were we really to believe that? Isn’t that what Radiohead has said ever since OK Computer came out? “Next one’s gonna be the big rocker,” then bleepbleepbloopblop, theraindropstheraindropstheraindropstheraindrops, who fucking cares. The last time a band claimed their next album was going to be heavier and actually came through was 1991, when Slave To the Grind came out.
Phantom Punch kicks off with “Airport Taxi Reception,” a song that could easily have been on …but you can tell it’s leading somewhere else. And sure enough, when “The Tape” kicks in with noisy, splattery production, fuzzed guitars, and a healthy amount of attitude, there it is: rock and roll. Now, we’re not talkin’ AC/DC here, this is still Sondre Lerche, so the melodies are sticky sweet. So, what, you don’t like a little pop in your rock? Fuck you. It’s there in the obvious spots, like the Descendents-speed “Face the Blood,” it’s there in the chaotic end of “Well Well Well,” and it’s there in the salty love song “She’s Fantastic.” And the whole thing winds down with a seven-minute tension-ratcheting called “Happy Birthday Girl.” Rock and fucking roll.
Weather.com says it’s going to get up to about 55 today. So I’m going to drive to work with the windows open, blasting the best record I’ve heard this year. It’s time for Phantom Punch, and it’s time for the world to open up again.
I had written a nice three-paragraph, journalistic review of the new Jesu record. I couldn’t decide if I actually liked the review at all. While I spent the weekend waffling over it, Amber put up her review, and I liked it a helluva lot more than anything I’d written. I realized the problem with mine: I forgot to put in anything about how I felt about the music.
Duh.
When I was younger, I lived in a small town in Iowa, isolated from anything but the massest of media. Music was, even then, what I was doing with my life, even if it was just from a listening standpoint. I heard everything I could get my hands on, and I had figured out a lot about what I thought was “standard,” the stuff they always did in songs. When I was very young, I was pretty sure that every song had an intro, a verse, a chorus, another verse, the same chorus, a middle part, and then the chorus again. Maybe, if the songwriter was particularly adventurous, there was another verse before the final chorus, or even a key change. I knew this didn’t happen in classical music, so I figured it had something to do with the words. Luckily, I learned about other types of music and structure before I became Diane Warren, or worse, a poet.
Even still, there were biases I’d built up that were hard to overcome. Pretty music was quiet. Ugly music was loud. And never would they overlap. When pretty music got loud, it became triumphant, or rousing, or something like that. And I never heard ugly music that was quiet.
When I was fifteen, I’d moved to a somewhat larger city, with a decent record store. I was starting to get a whiff of what else was out there. Sonic Youth had opened the door somewhat, but when I was introduced to My Bloody Valentine and especially Medicine, everything changed. Here was the most pop, Beach Boys, sing-along-able melody, buried in this shrieking, howling noise. It was the most wonderful music I’d ever heard. By the time Mogwai came along, I was in college, soaking up Cage and Varese, and remembering how dynamics played such an important part in the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven I’d listened to when I was small. And when a friend at work passed me the self-titled Jesu album, I cheered as another genre from my teenage years entered the mix: metal.
Say what you want about Chuck Klosterman and his writing (and boy howdy, I have a couple of things to say about Killing Yourself To Live, you better believe it,) but in his somewhat pedantic way, he managed to write the most true-to-life book I’ve ever read. That’s me in Fargo Rock City, a teenage male in the late 80’s and early 90’s, unable to even ironically appreciate New Kids on the Block. So I grew my hair out as soon as my mom would let me, bought a lot of Metallica bootlegs, and waited to see where it was all going. Believe it or not, MTV provided the first signpost. One late night I saw a blurry, black and white video by some band called Napalm Death. But then! There was this band called Naked City full of jazz guys that was EVEN BETTER! From there, you could follow all sorts of paths, from the New York downtown ‘81 scene to the Melvins, even towards the ever-lovin’ Fair brothers and another band I’d become obsessed with in the future, God Is My Co-Pilot. But once I got something on my plate, it never really left, and I still liked metal as a genre as much as I liked anything else.
Jesu made sense right away. It was the loud part of early Mogwai songs, downtuned and with less midrange, and sad, sad vocals, delayed and reverbed to hell. You couldn’t make out many of the lyrics, but you could tell they weren’t about sunshine and pussycats. I fell asleep to it most nights on tour that year. When Silver came out last year, I liked it even more. It sounded like a My Bloody Valentine record at 16rpm. It was heavy, sure, but it was gorgeous, a sound you could really crawl inside. I tracked down every Jesu song I could find (for the record: Heart Ache is 40 minutes of dull, but the Japanese bonus tracks on Jesu and Silver are all worthwhile).
Conqueror strips even more metal out of the equation, but it’s certainly no loss. Songs like “Mother Earth” and “Conqueror” sound more akin to Codeine than anything remotely industrial or metal, and are pretty far removed from anything Justin Broadrick’s previous band, Godflesh, ever did. Broadrick is still one sad bastard; “Try not to lose yourself/I’m way past trying/I’m way past caring/I’m way past hoping” go the lyrics to “Weightless & Horizontal,” and they’re typical. But the overall feeling is somehow not hopelessness, but hope, earnest hope. Almost too much, in places; “Transfigure” features such heartfelt post-grunge riffage that the whole thing starts to feel a bit like a joke. The album succeeds beyond that little quibble (which might just be the jaded hipster in me talking, anyway) and is well worth your time, loudly or softly. Preferably with a good set of headphones.
