One can’t help but wonder what the late Ian Curtis would have thought of the music the other members of Joy Division would go on to make after his death. With each passing decade, the musical sensibilities of his former band mates seem to drift further away from Joy Division’s.
Take Bad Lieutenant. With New Order officially broken up, Bernard Sumner has moved on to this project, an unremarkable but pleasant enough New Order-esque outfit. Also featuring Phil Cunningham, who briefly replaced Gillian Gilbert as NO’s keyboardist, and Jake Evans, their debut includes contributions from such notable musicians as fellow New Order ex-pat Stephen Morris and Blur’s Alex James.
My fellow Pure Popper Tanner recently summed up Sumner’s song-writing motus operandi as succinctly as I’ve ever heard, suggesting the majority of his songs are “populist love songs.” I couldn’t put it better myself. Whereas the Joy Divisions of this world deal in the morbid and bleak, Sumner’s more inclined to fill an album with a dozen or so declarations of affection.
Should you bother with this album? Well, if you liked Get Ready and Waiting for the Siren’s call, absolutely. If you didn’t, or you never bothered to check them out, steer clear. It’s only the absence of Peter Hook’s bass sound that makes this record distinguishable from latter-day New Order.
Would Ian Curtis have liked it? One shudders to think what an Ian Curtis pushing 60 would have thought about anything. I, for one, adore it.
Tegan & Sara – Sainthood
The Quin sisters are always up for some good referential digs, be it to the Material Girl in the broken-strummed “Paperback” or to themselves when crooning “Go steady with me/I know it turns you off when I get talkin’ like a teen” on “On Directing.” In either case, the irreverent, snide wit and easy self-deprecation prove to be an effective, if surprising, fit for Tegan and Sara’s brand of genial indie-pop, elevating Sainthood beyond mere snappy diversion. (Read the Full Review)
Devendra Banhart – What Will Be
Banhart’s immanence has always been limited by the weirdness of his music and the size of his promotional arsenal. No more, though. Banhart jumped to a major label this year, and What Will We Be, his first recording on Warner/Reprise, marks the beginning of the end of his transition from Oh Me Oh My’s primitivism to mass culture’s sonic boom. The title What Will We Be suggests resignation, reluctance even, to this development. But its contents show a commitment to the cause, a final leap from the fringe to the fore.
The eccentric still lives to some extent. What Will We Be includes songs written from a child’s point of view about love and intimacy (“Chin Chin and Muck Muck”), silly lyrics set to seriously constructed tunes (“Willamdzi”), plastic pronunciation and wordplay (the insertion of additional syllables in the couplet “wild when/smiling” on “Can’t Help”), Spanish cooing (the moody “Brindo”), and, of course, warbling in that all-shook-up vibrato. (Read the Full Review)
Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
Tarot Sport represents a subtler, more mature approach to songwriting and a sharpening of their craft. But moreso, it marks a comprehensive stylistic shift for the duo’s sound, from experimental noise with a buried pop sensibility to a sort of modernized electronic take on classic post-rock structures. And impressively, they’ve made these changes without sacrificing any of the genre-straddling adventurousness that made them intriguing in the first place. (Read the Full Review)
Jack Johnson – En Concert
Tanner, who since he was twelve spends most of his time planning an ever-more-elaborate, ever-less-likely-to-happen wedding for himself, came upon this dull website for what appears to be a collective of wedding dj’s. Amusingly, there’s a page of indie-rock themed wedding mixes, all of which look like rough drafts for the Garden State soundtrack. Being the bitter, dry husks of human beings that we are, the first thing we thought was, “What would the opposite of these mixes look like?”
In that spirit, we proudly offer you seven tracks to spoil the mood at a wedding.
1. The Big Pink – Dominos
“As soon as I love her it’s been too long.
And I really love breaking your heart”
2. The Mountain Goats – No Children
“And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my way
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die”
3. XTC – Your Dictionary
“Now your laughter has a hollow ring
But the hollow ring has no finger in
So lets close the book and let the day begin
And our marriage be undone”
4. Rolling Stones – Out of Time
“You’re out of touch, my baby
My poor discarded baby
I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time”
5. Husker Du – Never Talking to You Again
“I’d put you down where you belong
But I’m never talking to you again
I’d show you everywhere you’re wrong
But I’m never talking to you again”
6. The Misfits – Last Caress
“Well, I got something to say
I killed your baby today
And it doesn’t matter much to me
As long as its dead”
7. Jarvis Cocker – Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time
” ’cause the years fly by in an instant
and you wonder what he’s waiting for
and then some skinny bitch walks by in some hotpants
and he’s running out the door”
This might be a little out of place in the Pure Pop newsletter, but as I’ve already written two articles this week, so I’m putting this up. We’re starved for content, dang it.
Here is a cover of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” that my band, The Jazz Guys, did. I’m the ugly one.
Incidentally, fans of the original song (like myself) are no doubt familiar with its video. It’s a charming piece with some wonderful choreography by Jonte. This guy is so out-there he makes Kool Keith look like Robert Frost. Check out the video for “Bitch You Betta!”. If I could kick my legs up like that, well, I can’t imagine there’d be a lot of practical applications, but it’d sure be neat. WARNING: This is pretty crass stuff.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand ($4.88) - Before the Back To The Future Trilogy or Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis made his film debut with this charming tale of three young women who want to encounter The Beatles during their legendary 1964 New York visit for three very different reasons.
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny ($8.88) – Skeptical audiences skipped this one at the box office, all but ensuring we’ll never see a sequel. It’s too bad, because this Tenacious D origin story/fantasy epic is a sturdy piece of comedy loaded with inspired gags, hilarious cameos and classic D tracks.
Cry-Baby ($9.88) - John Waters‘ 1990 nostalgia fest stars a very young Johnny Depp as a 50′s gang member who falls in love with a straight-laced girl. Spoofing the conventions of teen musicals and mainstream portrayals of sub-culture, Cry-Baby is endlessly entertaining.
Nashville ($6.88) - Robert Altman directed a handful of truly great films in his vast career, and Nashville is one of the best. It features most of Altman’s hallmarks, including massive group action, overlapping dialogue and a dizzying number of intertwining plot threads. Even people entirely disinterested in the music culture of Nashville, Tennessee will find a lot in this film to fascinate them.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ($6.88) – Allright, this is not a music-themed film by any stretch of the imagination. It is a great movie by the incomporable Jim Jarmusch about a modern man living by the samurai code who owes a life-debt to a local mobster. It gets a little complicated from there. Why is it on this list? Well, RZA did the music. Duh.
When Anthology 1 came out in 1995 in a limited vinyl edition, I made a vow to myself that I’d keep buying new Beatles releases only on vinyl. Since then i’d broken that vow twice; first when i had a chance to get a collection of the Beatles Christmas messages on CD (who can afford $200 bucks for the record?), and second, the LOVE project, which isn’t really the Beatles at all but an amazing mashup project.). So why did I buy the remastered Sgt. Pepper compact disc? Maybe I succumbed to that zombie dance at Abbey Road crosswalk that Microsoft created for the Rock band commercial. Or maybe I just plain gave in to the siren song of that word remastered like I’ve always done. Whatever the reason, on Sept 11, I bought the remastered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In researching this little rant I found out that the record was released Thursday, June 1, 1967, which means i can say with relative certainty that I bought my first copy of Sgt. Pepper on Saturday June 3, 1967, and probably at Gaynes Shopper’s World in South Burlington for $2.37. Know where Staples Plaza is? Anyway, it was probably a mono copy and I listened to it the way you’re supposed to listen to mono records – on a portable RCA hi-fi with a single 3 inch speaker. Sometime that afternoon I became addicted to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and started sketching backgrounds for a cartoon that i wanted to try and make with my father’s 8mm movie camera. He’d stumbled on the single frame possibilities of the camera and had started animating titles for some of his home movies and shown me the trick. A pretty high concept for a 14 year old who’d just brushed up against psychedelia for the first time. Anyway, back to 2009 and that remastered CD. Entertainment Magazine had warned me about the compression utilized in the remastering processing and there WAS a flatness to the music I heard when I put in the disc the next morning.
But there was also a new clarity and subtlety to those songs I knew so well. Here are some of the notes I scribbled during that first headphone listen: … Listen to the fades and the silences…the echoes…the doubled vocals, those hand claps…the first REAL kick in the head is the clarity of “She’s Leaving Home”…the break on “Within You Without You” (that whispered “da ta da two” lead (George?) at the end of the instrumental break) …even in its crystalline remastered glory “When I’m 64″ is still right there with “Besame Mucho” for ultimate Beatle cheese…The fadeout on “Lovely Rita” might have been Charlie Manson’s head’s up for “Helter Skelter” …”Good Morning” has that patented sax chorus that George Martin found for his Boys …Lennon’s “Bye” at the start and that little organ bit in the fade into “Day In The Life”…and of course the inner groove at the end of the now strangely anti climactic “Day in the Life”…
The next morning brought 2 more listens at home on speakers. The CD went on first and it sounded great. Then I got down my copy of EMI BC 13, the Beatles Collection box that first came out in 1978, pulled out Sgt. Pepper, put it on the turntable and set the needle to the vinyl. And there’s that analog/digital divide which I can’t really tell you about. The vinyl is, as they say, warmer, and to this geezer’s ears, the way the Beatles are supposed to sound. But what about those subtleties? Some of them are there in the room as I listen, but on Listen #4, with the vinyl on headphones, all of those little things I thought I was hearing for the first time Friday morning on the CD come right back out at me from the LP. So what is there to write about now?
A few days later I did another listen with my friend Erik. A couple of cuts in both formats and there’s that omnipresent word warmth again. A few days after that I rediscover my copy of Sgt. Peppeb’s Loney Hearps Club Band, a Chinese knockoff on Liming Records from back in the day that I picked up at a porch sale in Richmond, Virginia, and when I listen to it on headphones, some of those subtleties I heard on the remastered compact disc last week come bubbling out through 30 years worth of surface noise. So I guess I’ll end this with, not the Rockband Beatles which a lot of you love, and not the remastered Beatles catalog on compact disc that will launch akagillion memories, rants and lies, but rather, a Utopian to do list.
First, find a good record player and speakers. Second, track down the cleanest LPs that you can find (at least until they come at us with the limited edition remastered vinyl). Third, plop ‘em on, turn ‘em up, and enjoy some great records by a great band. And that’s not to say you shouldn’t be buying these CD’s, cuz I’m pretty sure that at some point, I’ll be getting the CDs of Abbey Road, The White Album and Past Masters, it’s just that, as they say, nothing is real.
-Michael Breiner
When all that Beatles stuff came out a coupla weeks ago, mountains of hyperbole, most of it warranted, were tossed around. For example, many people remarked that the band’s creative evolution was the broadest in all of rock. From their conventional beginnings, through their psychedelic studio alchemy to the majesty of Abbey Road’s side 2 suite, it’s hard to dispute that The Beatles covered more ground in their seven or so years then any had before them or has since.
On the other hand, maybe that’s something of a rigged accolade. There was a lot of room for rock n’ roll to open up in the early sixties. Throughout the decade, many artists pushed boundaries and pioneered innovations. The Beatles, with their vast financial resources and army of “best-in-the-biz” studio mechanics, could easily streamline cutting edge-trends into their sound.
The Beatles were a great band, and if anyone deserves the “best-of-all-time” title, it’s those lads, but isn’t their embodiment of the 60′s sound more a result of their ability to follow trends than build them?
Consider a band like Big Star. In three short years, Big Star went from upbeat power-pop to music that was despaired, esoteric and nigh unclassifiable. This did not go-with-the-proverbial flow of their contemporaries. Big Star cultivated their own sound and subsequently evolved via their own aspirations and frustrations. Sure, they proudly wore their influences on their sleeve (Velvet Underground, The Kinks and yes, The Beatles.) What separates their evolution from a band like The Beatles is that Big Star didn’t streamline. In fact, they seemed incapable of making their music palpable for mass audiences. Their third (and dare I say best) album didn’t see release for a half a decade after its creation because labels deemed it “un-listenable”.
So, speaking of Big Star, Rhino’s Keep An Eye on the Sky release of just about everything you could ever want or need by the band is an absolute must-own. I didn’t realize how in-need of a clean-up job their material was before listening to the glorious job the ever-reliable Rhino has done with Big Star’s material. You know how a sip of water can make you realize how thirsty you’ve been? That’s the sort of sensation one has listening to this set for the first time.
In honor of this fantastic release, we’ve compiled a list of what we consider to be highlights from the set.
1. “Oh My Soul” – The opening track of Radio City, Big Star’s second album, is one of their finest. Lively and jaunting, it features some of Alex Chilton’s most creative songwriting and guitar work. The remastered version’s added fidelity highlights the nuance of the song’s arrangement.
2. “Downs (demo)” - In it’s official incarnation on Third/Sisters Lovers, “Downs” is a particularly eccentric piece. It sounds both over and under-produced. The demo version, a simple and straight-forward solo-acoustic rendition, reveals a tight structure and fantastic melody. Both are on the box set. Compare and contrast!
3. “Hot Burrito #2 (live)” & “Slut (live)” – Big Star weren’t shy about covering their favorite songs. On these versions of songs by The Flying Burrito Brothers and Todd Rundgren respectively, Big Star meet the originals halfway by not corrupting their essences while making them their own.
4. “I Got Kinda Lost (demo)” – Contrary to the stripped-down “Downs” demo mentioned earlier, this version of “I Got Kinda Lost” features the whole band performing the song together. The raw and immaculate performance is invigorating, leading up to a highlight of the entire box-set. “How was that?” asks a member of the band at the song’s conclusion.
“It’ll do” replies what I can only assume is an engineer or producer, making the understatement of the 70′s.
5. “For You” - I hate to use the word sublime, but it really describes this song. Composed and sung by drummer Jody Stephens, it’s a simple tribute to the object of Stephens’ affection. “For You” features a haunting string arrangement that benefits greatly from Keep an Eye on the Sky’s remastering job. This track is reason enough alone to buy the set.
The Beatles – Abbey Road
The music is tempered with uncertainly and longing, suggestive of adventure, reflecting a sort of vague wisdom; it’s wistful, earnest music that also feels deep, even though it really isn’t. But above all it just feels happy and joyous, an explosion of warm feeling rendered in sound. And then, the perfect capper, finishing with a song called “The End”, which features alternating guitar solos from John, George, and Paul and a drum solo from Ringo. It was an ideal curtain call from a band that just a few years earlier had been a bunch of punk kids from a nowheresville called Liverpool with more confidence than skill. This is how you finish a career. (Read the Full Review)
The Beatles – The Beatles
If The Beatles feels more like a collection of songs by solo artists, they’ve also each got more going on than we’d realized. John is even more hilarious than we’d imagined, wanting nothing more than to puncture the Beatles’ myth (“Glass Onion”), but he’s also displaying a disconcerting willingness to deal with painful autobiography in a direct way (“Julia”). Paul’s getting disarmingly soft and fluffy (“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, “I Will”), while simultaneously writing the roughest, rawest tunes in his Beatles oeuvre (“Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Helter Skelter”). George is finding a better way to channel his new Eastern-influenced spiritual concerns into a rock context, while his songwriting toolkit continues to expand (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Long Long Long”). And even Ringo Starr writes a decent song, a country & western number with weirdly thick and heavy production (“Don’t Pass Me By”). Listening as the tracks scroll by, there’s a constant feeling of discovery. (Read the Full Review)
The Beatles – Past Masters
Past Masters is the ugly but brilliant sibling of the Beatles discography. Originally released as two separate discs in 1988, it’s a catchall for all the stuff the Beatles officially released during their existence that wasn’t intended for their albums (and didn’t end up on the after-the-fact album Magical Mystery Tour). It’s slapped together chronologically, so it begins with an unprepossessing alternate take of “Love Me Do” and ends with the ludicrous doodle “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”. And, between them, it includes some of the best pop songs ever recorded– scratch that: some of the best pop singles ever recorded. (Read the Full Review)
The Beatles – Let It Be
As the 1960s wound down, so did the Beatles. The symmetry was perfect: youthful energy, optimism, and camaraderie had given over to cynicism, discord, and looking out for number one. As the decade’s final year began, the White Album was still riding high on the charts and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack was days away from release. But the Beatles were in serious trouble. Nothing about being in the band was enjoyable or easy. The power vacuum left by the death of manager Brian Epstein a year and a half earlier had never been satisfactorily filled; Apple Corps, the multi-media company started by the band a year earlier, was bleeding money; and toughest of all, the once-Fab Four didn’t generally enjoy being in the same room together. All were either married or close to it, closing in on 30, and tremendously weary of all they’d been through. (Read the Full Review)
Liam Finn – Champagne In Seashells
While Liam Finn’s debut album of last year, I’ll Be Lightning, attracted its fair share of acclaim, the Australian was weighed down by the duality of being a dizzyingly frenetic live performer but something of a straightforward singer-songwriter on record.
Utilising an array of loops, and showcasing his awesome drumming skills, on stage Finn never disappointed; but by witnessing the man in the flesh before hearing his recorded wares, this writer for one was left a little less impressed than was expected. Yet for this new six-track offering, the eldest son of Crowded House’s Neil Finn has chosen to explore sounds that, largely, gently caress the synapses rather than bludgeon their way into one’s affections, as was the case with previous performances. (Read the Full Review)
A. A. Bondy – When the Devil’s Loose
The reason that people are enamored with the singer-songwriter concept is that we all love the idea of conveying our innermost thoughts, hopes, dreams, ruminations, and beliefs through music. Yet, despite such desires, most of us don’t possess the talents necessary to shape words and melodies into the proper form, or at least not a form that will have people singing along at a show, fashioning a mixtape, or spend hours upon hours teaching themselves how to play guitar—all because of one single, memorable, unforgettable song. While the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and others sing about feelings and situations shared by many members of the music-loving public most of us can’t craft the thoughts and chords into a coherent whole that others will appreciate.
What makes A.A. Bondy stand out from his fellow guitar-strumming contemporaries is his ability to pair his beleaguered voice with a brand of road-weary folk rock that’s intimately accessible, without sounding stale or hackneyed. Opposed to indulging in the sort of overtly passionate melodrama that passes for emotional transparency these days, When The Devil’s Loose finds Bondy singing song after gut-wrenching song, yet doing so with a strength that gives his pathos that much more depth. He doesn’t have to belt out his lyrics at full volume, wailing on his guitar with tears in his eyes and a bleeding heart on his sleeve, for listeners to connect with his songs, to believe that what he’s singing is oh-so-true. (Read the Full Review)
John Fogerty – The Blue Ridge Rangers Ride Again
Here is John Fogerty doing what comes naturally. If he seemed immodest in the Creedence Clearwater Revival, he has justified himself and proven that he can make a fine, fine record without anyone’s help at all. The Blue Ridge Rangers may be the most successful one-man rock album yet, and if the general concept still doesn’t make sense at least Fogerty has made it work.The entire album is devoted to reinterpretations of personal favorites; mainly country, some spirituals and early rock. It has practically nothing to do with current rock trends, be they singer/songwriter, heavy metal, theatrical, glitter or flash. Instead, the record is a crystal-clear distillation of one man’s view of the rock & roll past, the source of his strength and his faith. On it, each cut seems to flow into a river of feeling in which country and city, western and blues, gospel and secular blend together in a complete body of indigenous American music. (Read the Full Review)
Muse – The Resistance
1- UPRISING (502)
If the album was announced as being particularly symphonic, Muse is playing with us as this stunning opening, the exact opposite of the direction expected. It starts with an electronic buzz, quickly followed by a low saturated fat and a hammered rhythm on the toms. The feeling tends to be closer to Depeche Mode, just how “Map Of The Problematique” on “Black Holes & Revelations”, but with a dynamic almost at the level of heavy guitar riffs. The title is not dancing, but he keeps it your own sad and melancholy timbre of Matthew Bellamy. Note the presence of a few choruses of “hey” chanted like a Marilyn Manson of the great days. This is the first single extract from the official record.
2- RESISTANCE (546)
Here is the eponymous song, angular piece of the album begins in an atmosphere of calm generated by a few layers of soft synth. Then tumbling piano melody accompanied by a powerful rotating drum that slowly turns into a deafening march rhythmic way. The Muse 2009 vintage seems to have the desire to surprise and that there seemed to be quickly identified is fast, éructant pre-chorus baroque-style way Queen “Bohemian Rhapsody”. And while we thought we hear a predictable final climb, the trio prefers to play calm and keep a few cartridges in reserve … (Read the Full Track by Track Review)
The best of kind of vinyl reissues are of albums that are tricky to come by. I’m always a little perplexed when things like Supertramp’s Breakfast in America or Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits get the deluxe reissue treatment, not because they’re poor albums (I quite like the former) but because their presence in the used market is all but ubiquitous. If you haven’t seen a second-hand copy of either, you’ve never been in a used record store.
On the other hand, this week’s release of all four Smiths studio albums is a godsend. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to find copies of The Queen is Dead in their dad’s record collection, because in this hypothetical perfect world everyone bought The Queen is Dead. Alas, that wasn’t the case, and it’s been a bit of a drag tracking their stuff down.
Rhino, the king of the reissue, has drawn the line at studio albums, so fans looking for Hatfull of Hollow or Louder than Bombs are going to have to continue cruising the used market. What we do have are the eponymous debut, Meat is Murder, The Queen is Dead and Strangeways Here We Come. If you only have the cash for one and you don’t know which one to get, the answer is all of them.
People tend to get hyperbolic in either their acclaim for or derision of the Smiths. As much as I like to sing their praises, I’ll attempt not to give into that and merely say The Smiths were an excellent rock n roll band. The availability of their material on vinyl is fantastic news.
