Category Archives: albums

We Buy White Albums by Rutherford Chang

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Dust_and_Grooves_3332Last March the NY Times ran a story about a guy named Rutherford Chang, whose art installation called “We Buy White Albums” was open in Soho of New York City. Chang had collected more than 600 first edition copies of the Beatles album The Beatles, with the embossed lettering, more commonly known as The White Album.

The White Album, Chang found, was something of a tabula rosa, a canvas for stains, drawings, accidents and art, and from the Times story is appears that was part of the plan of the cover’s designer, Richard Hamilton.

Chang created a record store stocked with his White Albums, and spent his time at the store playing each one. They are ordered by the serial numbers that came on the albums pressed before 1975.

Another plan was to play all of them at the same time. Now the record store has opened up in a museum in Hamburg Germany, and Chang has released his overlaid performance of 100 copies of Side 1. It seems record pressings are not all the same, and while this starts out sounding like a somewhat boomy version of side one, by the end of Back in the USSR there is a real loopy dreamscape at work. I learned about this from a story in Slate.

Have a listen here.

NY Magazine Names 60 Albums You’ve Never Heard Of

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You can read the list here: http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/60-great-albums-you-probably-havent-heard.html#comments

It’s a good list because many are new to me and I look forward to delving. I may or may not agree, but I find this fun.

Just so you know, I know a bunch of these records. Here’s some notes on those:

2. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel Train (1956): I own this one and it was in heavy rotation for a long while. Thanks for the reminder.

6. Elizabeth Cotten, Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes (1958) Not rocking, but a fantastic record of one of our most fecund folk music heritages. And I love that detail about the guitar playing.

14. Tex Williams and His String Band, Smoke Smoke Smoke (1960) I learned about Tex because Commander Cody covered the title song here. And while I delved deeper into Bob Wills, Tex was great.

19. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Volunteered Slavery (1969) It was later that we loved Mr. Kirk. Because he could out Jimi Jimi, and because his sound was wild. I remember eating up this jazz back then as if it was the news. Seems crazy now.

25. Jane Birkin, Di Doo Dah (1973) It seemed subversive at the time.

27. Melanie, Stoneground Words (1972) She’d had corny hits, though they were more a tribute to her personality than anything else. And she was an artist, if maybe more a weird one than a great one.

28. The Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band (1972) This is one of my favorite records of all time, amped only a little because of its origins. That is, it was recorded in Nashville by our heroes——Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock–but shelved by heartless record execs until Rounder released it nearly 20 years later.

30. Jobriath, Jobriath (1973) I remember him as an absolute fraud. His inclusion on this list means I have to listen again.

32. Marshall Crenshaw, Downtown (1985) A classic album. Probably shouldn’t be in this list. He is a masterful pop-rock songwriter who never really found any pop success, but is widely respected.

35. Fishbone, Truth and Soul (1988) I saw these guys a few times and they were always great. Hard to believe they didn’t leave a long tail, but their fusion of styles–funk, ska, hardcore, no wave, younameit–was awesome. Especially live.

38. King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Juju Music (1982) My first real date (not mini golf) with my wife was to see King Sunny. This album, a compilation but his intro to North America, is one of the greatest of all time. That we don’t know that has to remind us that culture is king. But so is King Sunny.

41. Ivy, Apartment Life (1997) This is one of my favorite albums of all time, partly because it flies so far under the radar, partly because it sounds like Belle and Sebastian but predates that band.

45. Youssou N’Dour, Set (1990) I’m a big fan of this elpee. Beautiful voice and semi pop tunes. Still, exotic.

46. Latin Playboys, Latin Playboys (1994) A lovely album that came with no strings attached by members of Los Lobos. Dreamy and Mexican, experimental with poetry. This is a lovely album.

47. Freedy Johnston, Can You Fly (1992) A fine pop songwriter singing his songs, like Marshall Crenshaw. The key is “fine.” We should listen to him. I linked to him singing Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman a few weeks ago

48. Iris DeMent, My Life (1993) One of my favorite writers and singers, full of country warmth and hard truths, spiritual and wonderfully straight forward. If you haven’t listened to all her songs, you’re missing out.

Ilan Mochari Loves Counting Crows’ August and Everything After

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duritz-harlequin head

Not Ilan, Adam

I know Ilan in the most direct peripheral way: He used to write for the Fantasy Football Guide. But he didn’t write directly for me, so I’ve never met him or even had a conversation with him, except on Facebook a little. I have written him checks. For some reason, I guess having to do with the 20th anniversary of its release, and its pedigree as a T-Bone Burnett production, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After has been discussed quite a bit here recently.

Ilan weighs in with a piece for the WBUR (a Boston NPR station) website about his love for the album. He’s read the Steven Hyden piece about which I wrote a few weeks ago and quotes it, so this isn’t all out of the blue, but I liked Ilan’s personal account and thought it was worth reading. He says:

“For months, the album felt like my own little secret. I evangelized it to friends, family or anyone who’d listen. They had a hard time grasping my zealotry for the fledgling band. It seems strange, today, to think of Counting Crows as fledgling. But, for a period of five months in late 1993 and early 1994, they were. The smash hit “Mr. Jones” — which became a No. 1 song in April 1994 — had not yet been released. In casual conversations, if you mentioned Counting Crows, the likely reply was, “Are you sure you’re not thinking of The Black Crowes?”

Read the whole thing here.

In discussion on Facebook Ilan also cops to what can best be described as Counting Crows’ weaknesses, with a rationale I like a lot: “i was a little abashed about the essay, because there are millions of people who don’t respect CC’s album-mastery and judge them as lame/whiny (not without some justification), because of their dreadful joni mitchell covers and the overplaying of certain songs and what the singer LOOKS LIKE, which is so utterly phony i want to barf, but that’s humanity.”

 

Counting Blows: Nirvana and Everything After

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Some time back Lawr wrote about the producer T-Bone Burnett, who produced Counting Crows’ first album, August and Everything After. That led me to tell a story about hearing a song on the radio, ordering the cassette, and then to my surprise discovering that I didn’t like the record at all. I don’t think I told that I took my copy and sent it to my brother in law, which he appreciated. He became a fan, as did much of a broad swath of America. A story that ran in Grantland recently says 7 million bought August and Everything After.

Steven Hyden, of Grantland, starts telling the story of Nirvana’s In Utero, which was originally released 20 years ago and has been rereleased in various deluxe sets. I also wrote about that recently. But his real story is Counting Crows’ August and Everything After, which was released one week earlier.

He really likes Counting Crows, finds Adam Duritz to be a compelling lyricist and performer and song craftsman, and he lays out a really interesting case about why Nirvana and Counting Crows are looked at now, 20 years on, so differently (and it isn’t just that one depressive songwriter shot himself and the other depressive songwriter numbed himself with medicines). The piece is a little long, and has those cute/dangerous/irksome footnotes that Grantland is known for, but I’ll let you read Hyden’s story for his explanation of the nature of sad songs, which I think is very smart and on first thought at least, right.

But I’m pretty sure he’s not right about the equivalence he makes between In Utero and August sonically. I mean, maybe some Alternative Radio stations played both, it’s possible, but these two records couldn’t be less alike in terms of their approach to music.

In Utero is a rock record with some quiet songs, while August is a poet’s record, with a jazz/folk rock accompaniment. The difference shows up most clearly in the relationship between the words and the music. Cobain and Nirvana seem to build the sound, the arrangement first, then figure out how to fit the words inside. I’m not saying this is exactly how they do it always, and it isn’t that Cobain doesn’t care about the words, but listening to Nirvana the words are always set inside the sound. Have a listen to one of the band’s quiet songs:

Adam Duritz, on the other hand, surely concocts his story songs on long pieces of paper, maybe typing madly a la Jack Kerouac and his rolls of On the Road. He’s not logorrheic, he’s a poet getting the story down, but his talent is weaving together long shaggy dog stories full of emotionally hurt people doing their best, subject to digressions and qualifications and an occasional hook. That’s the start, and it is hard to listen to a Counting Crows song’ and hear a song, per se, except for the one that is in Duritz’s vocals. Apart from that, the band does a nice job filling in around the edges, but the center of the songs are the words, not the sounds of music.

I’m not sure that this is always a weakness, but it doesn’t help if you find Duritz to be a tiresome voice. As I do. Without chops and musical drive, you keep landing on his quavery whine. But that’s a personal taste. Steven Hyden hears in Counting Crows’ songs emotions and connections that are rarely explored by rock bands, as he discusses in the article, and he finds that valuable. That’s his choice and he’s welcome to it.

First Take: Insta Pop, Kings of Leon, Nirvana

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I’m a fan of Icona Pop‘s “We Love It,” which is a deft melding of Jesus and Mary Chain guitars with cheesy Europop rhythms and bleats and other goofy sounds, topped with a cheerleaderish infectious chorus. To their credit, too, the current single, “All Night,” is plenty catchy if not nearly so fresh. But listening to the album is a little like eating pop rocks while hopping on a pogo stick. The thing that makes the mostly-twinned vocals on “We Love It” sound so happy, enthusiastic, and attractive, in a small measure, quickly causes overdose as the same vocal timbre reappears, hardly wavering, on song after song after song. Recommended in small doses at lunchtime or afterschool discos.

I’ve never been a fan of Kings of Leon, who always seemed to have way too much reputation for the unrelenting dullness of their sound. I would read about their southern-rock style, I’d think of Skynrd or Tucker and give them another listen, only to be bewildered by why anyone would play this boring stuff a second time. I mean, if you’re going to make dull rock you better have killer lyrics, and they didn’t. They didn’t come close. Yet, spurred by a growing audience (and no doubt ambitious management weasels), they puffed up and went kind of U2 or Coldplay, full of arena grandeur—without a thought in their atmospheric heads, and that didn’t go so well. Now, after a couple years off they’re back, supposedly leaner and meaner. Nah, and not smarter either.

I remember the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” while driving through Rhode Island one sunny day, which was the first time I became aware of Nirvana. I remember the second time, too, at the Palladium with a bunch of friends, waiting for Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Mekons to play. We commented then that it was a helluva song. A really good video came out and lots of other people thought so, too, and one of the music’s historic bands was created out of sudden pop flames. In Utero, which has been rereleased in a 20th Anniversary deluxe set, was the followup to Nevermind, the album that couldn’t contain “Smells,” if you know what I mean. It was, it turned out, the last collection of Kurt Cobain songs released while he was alive. It has been remixed by Steve Albini, who says he really just added back in some tracks that were left off by accident originally. It also contains the 1993 original Albini mixes of Heart Shaped Box and All Apologies, which had been cleaned up by the record company because they were to be the elpee’s singles. That and lots of other extra stuff is of interest, of course, but hardly essential or revelatory. To my taste, each Nirvana record got more self conscious, and I prefer my heavy navel-gazing hard rock less self conscious than more, but all three albums (and Incesticide, too) are brilliant, essential rock albums by a band that somehow managed to make hard challenging sometimes radical sounds embraceable.

First Take: Yoko, Elvis and MGMT

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In a week in which Yoko Ono and Elvis Costello both have new releases, let’s start with Elvis covering Yoko. I like the Costello version for its warm vocals, he goes for warmth, and its relative brevity. Yoko’s version is much more muscular in a disco sense, where the music comes from, but also much more brittle and fragile vocally.

As for “Take Me to the Land of Hell,” Yoko’s new elpee, what can you say? Yoko is a significant visual and performance artist who was married to one of the Beatles, and made records with one of the Beatles. They slept together, too. She has artistic vision, vast resources, and an admirable fearlessness. I sampled tracks on this record, put off at times by sometimes weird vocals, sometimes bad poetry, and most often awful and inappropriate disco/dance tracks. Those vast resources, it seems to me, would be well spent finding awesome collaborators who could make really interesting music that could serve as a potent setting for Yoko’s lyrical thoughts. The Plastic Ono Band on the record seems to be  Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto), Yuko Araki (mi-gu) and Jared Samuel (Invisible Familiars). All I can say is that the first eight tracks irked me because of the mismatch of dance tracks and Yoko’s voice, but once I got to the title track I grooved. Suddenly, with simpler and statelier settings, Yoko and her words, singing and music seemed to be in synch.

EDIT: Now, looking through YouTube, it seems that the producers and maybe the backing bands on different tracks are different. On Bad Dancer, for instance, Mike D and Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys get a credit. There’s another on which tUnE-yArDs is credited. I’m not sure that makes either song better, but it does make their failures harder to explain.

The Roots always sound great. Elvis Costello is a great songwriter with a rather sweeping delta of tunes, the many best of which hit the channel. His songwriting never flags energetically, but given how many records he’s released it should not be surprising that he’s got a fairly extensive catalog of tunes that may pleasure but are far from essential. When I heard the title song from his new one with the Roots, “Walk Us Uptown,” I feared this disk would end up on the play once and file pile. Here was lots of groove, but what the heck was he going on about? Tragically and hiply, Costello has a homely voice that is never going to be the first choice for all vocals, and certainly doesn’t elevate Walk Us Uptown. But his is an able and essential sound for his best songs, one of which is “Sugar Won’t Work,” the elpees second track, which is swampy and evocative of, um, swamp and has a psychedelic groove. It pleases. This isn’t the place for a track by track description, but attention should be paid to “Stick Out Your Tongue,” which is a reworking of the darkly minimalist “Pills and Soap,” from his Punch the Clock album released in the 80s. Nice line, “you can turn these obsessions into careers.” And “She Might Be A Grenade” is one of quite a few examples of collaboration that kick ass. Costello is working hard here, to earn the band and the groove, and if not all the tunes are perfect, all earn our attention. Stick out your tongue.

Oh, also, I’m a total sucker for the City Lights Books design of the elpee cover. This is getting many plays from me going forward. Buy this stuff here:

So, the biggest release of the week is MGMT, which is a band that aspires to XTC lushness (from what I read). MGMT burst on the scene in 2007 with three atypical hit singles, but since (and here) have layered a profusion of sounds over pretty standard beats and mostly buried vocals (with no such interesting words when you can hear them) to make something you might call neo-psychedelic not-pop pop music. It sounds like music that wants to be liked and wants to taken seriously, but is too ornate and static to really engage. “Your Life Is a Lie,” is perhaps the most poppy tune here, and many of the sounds are pretty nice. While none of the album is bad or misbegotten, all of it makes me impatient and wanting to move on.

One Of These Days I’ll Write Something

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Until then, another video. Well, not a video, but a song at least. I’ve been doing pretty well lately targeting unanimous five-star raging rock ‘n’ roll albums on Amazon (I’m still listening to that Uncle Acid album at least once a week), and this New Bomb Turks album will probably be my next buy. Viva la Wire!

First Take: New music from September 10th

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I think John Legend‘s “Get Lifted” is one of the great records of the current millennium. It could be classified as neo-soul, a genre that is meant to appeal to grown ups drinking wine (or even better champagne) and talking just a little dirty while waiting for the hot tub (or lube) to warm up, but the thing is that the songs are sexy, the sound starts with old soul and gospel and, surprisingly, surprise. The words flow full of new ideas (or old ideas cleverly reframed) and often a hint of edge or menace that make the mix of rhythm and melody sound fresh, redolent of musical and lyrical pleasure. Perhaps no subsequent record could stand up to that monumental achievement, but on first listen the new Legend, “Future of Love,” is a mess of cliche and sappy melodies, with treacly arrangements and tired melodic and lyrical ideas. Legend was a singer songwriter who seemed early on to have the chops and sensibility of Sam Cooke, smooth melodicism, sexy charm, and a bit of righteous indignation, but in hindsight perhaps the excellent taste might be better attributed to his producer and partner, Kanye West. “Wake Up,” Legend’s elpee of protest song covers with the Roots released last year is mostly charming, if too often a little staid, but after the excessively polite third album, “Evolver,” offered welcome affirmation that this was a man with a political, socially-engaged heart. But this new disk made me question my love (is the future of love disdain?) for his first two albums. A quick relisten to “Get Lifted” again confirms its greatness. The new record has none of that going on at all.


I was never a Nine Inch Nails fan, so I’m not qualified to compare the new record, “Hesitation Marks,” to the rest of their/his oeuvre. What is striking here is that these songs are very much songs, full of electronic textures and details in the background, but with plaintive simple vocals on top. It isn’t that the vocals or the arrangements don’t relate, but they have very distinct and different aural profiles. The music is hard edged and polished, machine music, even when it careers toward the emotional, while the vocals are plaintive, all too human, the opposite of hard. Not out of tune, but a bit warbly and textured by throat and tongue. The contrast has the effect of foregrounding the lyrics, which unfortunately all seem to be rhyming couplet cliches. I remember the driven sense of NiN’s MTV hits back in the day that some powerful interpersonal dynamic was at stake. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though I wouldn’t mind hearing vocal free versions of some of these tracks. They might work well in a soundtrack.


I’m one of the few people in North America who just doesn’t get the appeal of Arcade Fire, who have a new single out called “Reflektor.” I’ve tried to get into them a number of times and just can’t get past the superficial similarities with Talking Heads, whose “Stop Making Sense” live album seems to be a huge influence. In any case, I listen to Arcade Fire and I often hear the Heads, only not nearly as good or interesting. Maybe that’s because the vocals are sludgy and dull, regardless of the lyrics. I’m not someone who needs lyrical meaning to make a song, but I do need the vocals to somehow sound like they deserve to be there. I can’t judge the lyrics of Arcade Fire, I haven’t been able to get into them, but I can judge that the singer doesn’t make we want to hear more. If you like Arcade Fire you’ll probably love Reflektor, it has the big textured sound of the band, but be aware that it also has the prosaic vocals that smudge into a blur running through the middle. I get the impression they’re supposed to signify passion, but I hear anything but.


According to Mick Jones this is the last package of product the Clash will be releasing. It’s primary raison d’etre is complete remixes/remastering of all the old records. This particular linked package of “Sound System” has a bunch of video which may be worthwhile to you or not, and you may or not have most of these tracks. There is a bunch of live and studio stuff that is “new,” though the band never held much back, so it’s unlikely (I haven’t listened to it all) that it’s essential. The bottom line here is that this is one of the greatest of bands of all time, and if you don’t know about all that they did, you should.

Peter

The Agony of the XTC

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skylarkingWhile concocting my top 50 albums for our collective list, there were a lot of discs that I wish could have made it but didn’t.

I wanted to put my 16 hits by Buddy Holly on, but I don’t believe Greatest Hits albums belong in a “what’s best” competition with the albums from which the best songs came.

Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Animal also deserved some attention as it is a fabulous piece of work, although its strength lies largely within two cuts: Rock and Roll and Sweet Jane.

There were others but one album that completely slipped my mind and list was the British band XTC’s wonderful record Skylarking.

The fact is I still might not have remembered this lovely piece of Brit pop, save Diane and I were streaming the last season of Weeds, and the closing song on one of the episodes was Dear God  from Skylarking.

Released in 1986, and produced by the one and only Todd Rundgren (who also managed to bring other bands, like Grand Funk Railroad to the mainstream), Skylarking is as lovely a piece of Beatlesque Brit Pop as has been produced.

The title, lifted from Percy Shelley’s poem, To a Skylark is enough to make me love the disc and concept (my MA focus was on 19th Century British Literature, and that included a lot of Shelley and my favorite, Samuel Coleridge) which is sort of A Day in the Life expanded into  the pastoral.

Apparently there was a lot of friction between principal songwriter/guitarist Andy Partridge and Rundgren during the recording, but in retrospect Partridge yielded to his producer’s wizardry, noting in the book Song Stories, by Neville Farmer, “Musician and producer Todd Rundgren squeezed the XTC clay into its most complete/connected/cyclical record ever. Not an easy album to make for various ego reasons but time has humbled me into admitting that Todd conjured up some of the most magical production and arranging conceivable. A summer’s day cooked into one cake.”

The album kicks off with the lazy flowing effect laced Summer Cauldron which portends–and segues–into Grass, as sweet and dreamy a cut as you will find anywhere.

The Meeting Place, in fact all the subsequent cuts, smack of a fabulous amalgamation of that Beatleseque pop along with a new wave attitude that affirms the influence and direction the Fab Four started as a natural evolution, realized by a really good band, under the direction of a really really great producer.

However, these songs and this sound are hardly derivative as XTC is clearly their own band, with their own sound. They just also understand their roots and as with most successful artists, understand how to reinterpret their heritage with their vision of the contemporary and even and eye on the future.

In fact with Ballet for a Rainy Day, the band even points to their next studio album as XTC (they released Psonic Psunspot in 1987, a year after Skylarking,as the Dukes of Stratsphear) opening the vocals with the lyrics “oranges and lemons.”

Probably the most controversial tune on the disc is Dear God, which Partridge both hated, and which did not make the first cut of the disc. The song also wound up being the definitive song on the album, not to mention the most covered.

There are a couple of tracks after Dear God on my CD–Dying and Sacrificial Bonfire–that I remember being on my cassette, the format on which I originally purchased Skylarking in the late 80’s when I first purchased; however, I seem to remember Dear God being the last cut, which added to the punch and the message of the song.

Of all the tunes on Skylarking, my favorite was always Earn Enough for Us, a paean to love, life, society, and British life, that bops along so breezily and with such solid and catchy parts it almost seems like the participants don’t even have to try.

My father once told me, “A genius is someone who can do easily what the rest of us cannot do at all.”

I think there is not only some truth to that, but also that both the band XTC and producer Rundgren were totally in control of their art with Skylarking. They were also at the top of their game. Meaning the anguish noted in Song Stories just sounds easy.