NEW RELEASES
Alexander / Awol One + Factor / Baseball Project / Anna Calvi / Devotchka / Dum Dum Girls / PJ Harvey / Scott Kempner / Middle Brother / Morning After Girls / Paper Cuts / Portugal The Man / Rural Alberta Advantage / Say Hi / Stateless / Lucinda Williams / Beady Eye / The Builders + The Butchers / Cut Copy / Gang Gang Dance / Mt. Eerie / REM / Rival Schools / Gil Scott-Heron + Jamie xx / Kurt Vile / Wye Oak
REISSUES
Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna
Sparklehorse – Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot
Blue Magoos – Electric Comic Book + Psycedelic Lollipop
Kinks – Kinda Kinks
Ariel Pink – Doldrums + House Arrest
This Mortal Coil – It’ll End In Tears
Neil Young – Neil Young
Howdy.
I’m Sue and I popped it purely for about 2 years, from may 2004 until august 2006. I had just graduated from UVM and, go figure, wanted nothing to do with a profession that directly related to my degree in art education. Instead of trying to deter young children from eating paste or sticking crayons up their noses, I decided to earn my money by selling indy kids the latest pitchfork recommendation, hocking coldplay albums to soccermoms and getting overly excited upon the discovery of a nicely-saturated sharpie in the artists’ card’s art box.
A normal day consisted of working at PP, band practice, walking a quasi-retarded beagle around town and consuming grilled meat products flipped to perfection by one Michael Crandall.
My days of working at pure pop have been the highlight of my occupational history thus far, and if it weren’t for my undiagnosed case of extreme wanderlust I would most surely be a lifer behind that stickered counter. Like most everyone that works or has worked there, my musical knowledge and tastes became enhanced and refined thanks to the Pop. It was an exciting time for me. A normal day consisted of working at PP, band practice, walking a quasi-retarded beagle around town and consuming grilled meat products flipped to perfection by one Michael Crandall.
During those 2 years I may have lost half of my hearing and spend 2/5ths of my net income on vinyl special orders, but I also met some of the most interesting and musically knowledgeable people I know.
I left Burlington 3 years ago for Berlin, Germany with the hopes of becoming a go-for at Morr Music or the coffee girl at Monika Enterprises. Unfortunately all I got was a waitressing gig at an American Restaurant and a job teaching art to spoiled German children. Oh, sweet irony. My time in Berlin has been ‘wunderbar’, but this summer I left the Haupstadt and its neon clad minimal techno kids behind for greener pastures, literally. I have been travelling throughout Europe by bike for the past three months and am currently working on an organic farm outside Warsaw, Poland. Perhaps my 6 years of secondhand patchouli smoke inhalation is to blame.
So here are the ways being a music geek has helped me have fun so far on the trip:
Denmark: I pedaled into Kalvehaven, Denmark and found myself stopped outside a rawkus sailor bar. It wasn’t even dinner time and the place was packed with people singing and bells a-ringing. My kind of place. I found a hostel and quickly went back in hopes of joining the party. They had a jukebox and the dude next to me put on the Kinks.
I told him I liked his picks. He thought I said I liked his pigs. Hilarity ensued.
Norway: I once asked Chris Miller to explain to me the difference between black and death metal. He used the term ‘Cookie Monster’ somewhere in the explanation, but I can’t for the life of me remember in what context. Anyway, while in Oslo i got hit on by a drummer who was going on tour with Dimmu Borgir. When I said I knew of the band I think he peed himself a little. Aren’t they filed right next to Cattle Decapitation?
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.
Believing, as we do, that you can’t judge a book by its cover, what follows is a list of albums we consider great despite some garish cover art. Feel free to weigh in with your contributions to the list or any disagreements you may have. Ciao.
Neil Young – Zuma
When Zuma came out, Neil Young was coming out of his infamous ditch period, a dark and creatively fertile stretch of albums. Zuma, a more upbeat country tinged album is considered one of his greatest, but unlike the striking and more artistically considered album art of the previous albums, Neil seriously miscalculated with this one. What are we looking at here? A mediocre black and white sketch of what appears to be a pelican-eagle hybrid riding the back of flying naked women over desert terrain. And there’s a pyramid. Maybe there’s some brilliant connection between the music and the image, but it’s an eyesore. Only the idiosyncratic Young would compromise such an upbeat album’s broad appeal with a cover that says, “Put me in a bargain bin.”
Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour
In 1967, it seemed The Beatles could do no wrong. Sgt Pepper had solidified their status as popular music’s most ambitious and capable innovators. What would they do next? Of course, their subsequent music was immaculate. The Magical Mystery Tour EP, which would would later be expanded to a complete album with the addition of contemporaneous A and B sides, is as good as anything they did. However, the EP was released in support of the disastrous Magical Mystery Tour television movie, a masturbatory hour of improvised scenes and half-baked ideas. The EP’s cover, in its original and revised form, has more in common with the film than the music. As difficult as it is for me to write such blasphemy, for a moment, The Beatles seemed completely out-of-touch
Black Sabbath – Sabotage
The last great Sabbath album to feature Ozzy (sorry Technical Ecstasy fans), Sabotage saw Sabbath indulging a number of disparate whims effectively. The album featured two of Sabbath’s greatest rockers, (Symptom of the Universe and Hole in the Sky), ambitious studio trickery, and atypical, keyboard-driven songs. Unfortunately, for all the thought and planning that went into the music itself, the cover is garbage. The band strikes a lazy pose, echoed on the portrait behind them in a black, foggy room. It looks worse than it sounds on paper. What was the photographer saying to them? “You! On the left! Try to look more stilted. Red pants, can I get a little belly peeking out of that leather jacket? Beautiful. Something’s still not right. Can we get Ozzy in a dress?”
Kinks – Lola vs Powerman and the Moneygoround
Driven by the success of “Lola”, one of the Kinks biggest hits, Lola vs Powerman and the Moneygoround was something of a comeback for The Kinks after a handful of brilliant but under-appreciated albums. Eclectic and eccentric, the album was unapologetically honest and cutting, targeting the music industry as well as people of deplorable character in general. The cover is abysmal, featuring the bizarre and unappealing image of two faces spliced together. By all accounts, Ray Davies was really hoping for a hit with this album. Why he’d jeopardize his chances with such a poorly conceived cover, we’ll never know.
Pearl Jam – Ten
Here it is, folks. The worst cover on this list. Ten was one of the biggest albums of the grunge movement, and Pearl Jam has proven to be the most enduring of those bands, continuing to enjoy popularity and success well into their second decade. While most of the grunge elite were breaking up and falling apart, Pearl Jam was just getting started. So what the hell were they thinking with this cover? It features the band high-fiving under pink light in front of a massive sculpture of their name. It screams early nineties, but believe me folks, it was even shitty back then. The worst part has to be the group high-five. A high-five? Preposterous.
