Popless Week 31: Mess Addiction

After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel
Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record
collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and
consider what he still needs.

Here's how it goes sometimes:
A guy likes movies, initially because he's attracted to story and spectacle,
but after a while, he sees so many movies that he starts to get tired of the
same kinds of structure and style repeated over and over. So novelty starts to
take precedence over quality, and the cineaste starts grooving on such esoteric
virtues as slowness and murkiness. Or consider the music buff, who often gets
jaded quickly and starts tossing around words like "overproduced" and
"middle-of-the-road" to describe songs they can't abide, while championing acts
that traffic in drone and distortion. Whatever the medium, that fan-driven
attitude of "tougher equals better" can sometimes infect the artists
themselves, as they tie their self-image to being difficult, and dissonance and
obscurity become preferable to the solidly built and entertaining.

Back in 1989, Stephen Malkmus
and his boyhood pal Scott Kannberg—both died-in-the-wool rock
geeks—conceived Pavement as one of those mysterious European-style
outfits that buries their personality behind their music. They adopted the
"noms de rock" SM and Spiral Stairs, and started recording lo-fi DIY singles
and EPs with their middle-aged wastrel neighbor, drummer Gary Young. Early in
the band's career, Malkmus would claim that he improvised most of his lyrics
and a good chunk of the music, but that was likely as much of a pose as the
impenetrable graphics on Pavement's record jackets. Even at their sloppiest,
Pavement's songs had a definite structure, and whatever lyrics listeners could
make out clearly featured some well-turned phrases:

It didn't take long for
Pavement to become a cause célèbre among indie-rock devotees, who eagerly
sought out and dissected their early records. By the time 1992's debut album Slanted
& Enchanted was released (over a
year after it was recorded), the band had added members in order to become a
more reliable touring attraction, and were on the verge of kicking out the
sloppy Young. Even Slanted & Enchanted's more abrasive songs—like the stinging "Perfume-V"—work
with more clarity and overall sonic oomph than anything the band had recorded
before.

After the dismissal of Young,
Pavement banged out Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, an album at once more random and experimental than Slanted
& Enchanted and—when it
counted—more clean and poppy. The record sold in the six figures, and
scored a radio hit with the kicky "Cut Your Hair." Suddenly the band was being
hailed as possibly the next Nirvana, and Malkmus was being talked about as a
scathing social critic thanks to songs like the generational wrap-up "Elevate
Me Later."

And that's when things
started getting interesting—or annoying, depending on your perspective.
Much as Nirvana's arrival as magazine-cover-worthy led the band to find unique
ways to rebel—by wearing Ts for their favorite cult bands, or sporting a
hand-made "Corporate Magazines Suck" shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone—the members of Pavement came up with their own
petty protests. Kannberg flatly refused to appear on a Rolling Stone cover, and even after the departure of Young, the
band's live performances were still often rambling and disheveled. When
Branford Marsalis quit The Tonight Show, he cited the awfulness of the modern rock bands he had to watch every
night as one of the reasons he couldn't be the musical director anymore, and
anyone who saw Pavement shamble their way through "Cut Your Hair" in front of
Leno and Marsalis had to imagine that they were one those bands Marsalis was
talking about.

In a perverse way, the loss
of Gary Young seemed to cue the rest of the band to pick up his slack (so to
speak). Before, Malkmus had to construct songs that utilized Young's
unpredictability, and he had to play and sing extra hard to compensate for any
potential problems from the rhythm section. After Crooked Rain, Malkmus started singing with more indifference, and
his mates seemed to follow his lead, trying to create an atmosphere where the
rare moments of cohesion sounded like minor victories. Pavement followed up Crooked
Rain with the sprawling, often
off-putting Wowee Zowee, a record
featuring some of Malkmus' best songs alongside some of his weakest—all
of them performed through a sonic muck that at times seemed more like an
affectation than a genuine expression of what the band wanted to be. Pavement's
shot at enduring rock stardom misfired, and the band went on to record two more
albums and a slew of singles that continued to slap together witty lyrics,
endearingly off-kilter melodies and frustratingly bratty performances.

There are plenty of Pavement
die-hards who consider Wowee Zowee
to be the band's best album, and respond to that record's abundant imagination
and brave embrace of chaos theory. It's undeniably a fun record, in its own
wise-ass way. But seen from the perspective of what came afterward—two
more hit-and-miss albums in which Pavement became hooked on delayed
gratification—Wowee Zowee
comes off more like a cowardly abdication of responsibility. During the
remaining years of Pavement's run, Malkmus continued to whip up great songs,
with lyrics that scanned like fiendishly clever little puzzles. And he
continued to sing them as though he were walking barefoot across a hot beach,
while his mates loped along behind

The destructive impulse in
some musicians can be exciting in and of itself, and it's easy to understand
why a lot of critics and music buffs gravitate towards acts that like to knock
their own block towers down. But after a while, the knocking-down stops looking
like creative courage and starts to look more like sadism, spiked with an
unhealthy dose of adolescent petulance. There needs to be some element of
contrast to make willful sloppiness work. In a movie, a long static take has
more impact if it's not surrounded by a dozen more long static takes; in music,
noise and aggression are often more effective if it's clear that a band is
capable—and willing—to do something else.

Of course, musical
preoccupations can go the other way, too. Some critics—myself, for
one—get exhausted by extremity and start to overpraise music that is
florid and pretty, seeing crystalline beauty as the supreme value. But that's a
neurosis for another day.

*****************

Pieces Of The Puzzle

OutKast/P.M. Dawn

Years Of Operation 1991-present/1988-present

Fits Between Funkadelic and Jungle Brothers/De La Soul and Stevie
Wonder

Personal Correspondence Remember that scene in The Jerk when Steve Martin's character hears Lawrence Welk on
the radio for the first time and runs around waking up the black family he
lives with, yelling that he's finally found music that really speaks to him? I
had a similarly embarrassing (and perhaps painfully revealing) experience with
P.M. Dawn. I was browsing at a chain record store when the clerk started
playing P.M. Dawn's debut album Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross:
The Utopian Experience. About three
songs into it, I was convinced I was hearing the next evolution of hip-hop: a
kind of rap more melodic and flat-out beautiful than any I'd heard before. I
bought the album right away and started evangelizing about the band, even
dragging my roommates to see them in concert. Of course, in the years to come,
P.M. Dawn would be mocked by their peers as wimpy hippies, and they'd go on to
release three albums of varying quality, distinguished primarily by their
poetic spirit and inescapable softness. As I hope I've made clear by now,
softness is by no means a deal-breaker for me, but over time, P.M. Dawn's celestial
riff on rap and R&B; started to seem vaguer and vaguer, to the extent that I
now find even that debut album too twinkly by half. I think back on the version
of myself who fell hard for P.M. Dawn, and I cringe a little. (Not that I
haven't already touted music in this series that others might fight even more
embarrassing…and not that I won't continue to do so.)

So why combine an entry on
the disreputable P.M. Dawn with the highly acclaimed, decidedly more
substantive OutKast? It's not meant as a swipe at the latter, whose work I
still find exciting. (I've never even tired of the overexposed "Hey Ya,"
perhaps because I have fond memories of dancing to it at my pal Scott's
wedding.) But the shifting stance on OutKast among the critical elite is partly
responsible for expediting my current estrangement from hip-hop. For a time,
OutKast was one of the most respected acts in the genre, pumping out
imaginative, forward-thinking records that sold well and topped year-end lists.
Then they reached superstar levels with Speakerboxx/The Love Below, and immediately became a bludgeon with which some
persnickety cultural guardians began to beat on the less rap-savvy. Because
they'd become the only hip-hop act that a majority of critics agreed on, that
made them automatically suspect among a vocal sub-group of those critics. These
days, saying you like OutKast doesn't buy you any credibility than declaring
your allegiance to P.M. Dawn would.

Enduring presence? Luckily, this kind of hand-wringing over what's
cutting edge and what's wimpy and mainstream tends to fade over time, and 10
years from now, hardly anyone will remember that the award-winning,
multi-platinum-selling Outkast were briefly on the outs—though it would
help if Andre 3000 and Big Boi would reunite and work together an album to wash
away the taste of the undercooked Idlewild. As for P.M. Dawn, I think losing a key member, waiting 10 years to
release a new album, and appearing on the kitschy NBC series Hit Me Baby One
More Time has pretty much doomed any
chance that they'll rehabilitate their rep. Sorry, 20-year-old Noel.

[pagebreak]

Palace/Palace Brothers/Palace Music/Palace Songs

Years Of Operation 1992-96

Fits Between Cat Power and Lambchop

Personal Correspondence I was slow to warm to Will Oldham's Palace project,
because in the early going it struck me that Oldham's raspy whine and
indifferent guitar picking—while giving his songs a casual, honest
feel—also made them sound kind of ungainly and samey. And given Oldham's background—scion
of a wealthy Kentucky family, acclaimed child actor—he sometimes seemed
willfully slack, playing at primitivism with his "mountain mystic" persona.
Gradually though, I began to sense how Oldham's raw rusticity had a purpose:
exploiting the folk-music tradition to increase the tension and excitement as
his songs teetered toward the edge of abstraction. That said, I've generally
been more appreciative of the relative polish of Oldham's Bonnie "Prince" Billy
guise. I even liked BPB's revisiting of the Palace catalog with Nashville pros
on the album Greatest Palace Music,
a record that some dismissed as a stilted joke. Greatest Palace Music delights me for a number of reasons, including the
presence of Hargus "Pig" Robbins, an industry veteran who's played on hit
records by everyone from George Jones to Travis Tritt. Oldham's revamped "Gulf
Shores" reveals the influence of Robbins, who plunks gently between the lines
of the Palace classic, distantly answering Oldham's lyrics about defiantly and
somewhat forlornly wasting away on the beach. To me, the best of Oldham's songs
have always felt like country-rock standards in the making, lacking only a

nimble steel-guitar line or a soulful backup vocal to push them up. So I
appreciate Oldham making the effort himself, rather than leaving it to someone
else to cover his music properly.

Enduring presence? All of that said, I don't want to give the impression
that I don't dig the Palace songs in their original incarnations. In fact, it's
hard for me to choose which version of "Gulf Shores" I like best. Both are
lovely ballads about the pleasures and stresses of idleness, but one emphasizes
the washed-out feeling while the other stresses the appeal of doing nothing.
Same song, same singer—different interpretations. Which only proves how
flexible Oldham's songwriting can be.

Patti Smith

Years Of Operation 1974-present

Fits Between Lou Reed and The Pretenders

Personal Correspondence I bought Horses on cassette the summer before I left for college, and at one point
during my freshman year, I discovered that if I started playing Smith's
head-clearingly blasphemous rendition of "Gloria" the moment I stepped out of
my dorm room, then I'd be hearing Smith's bookending moan of "Jesus died for
somebody's sins, but not mine" right about the time I reached the front door of
the dining hall for breakfast. I can't count the number of times I started my
day that way in the fall of '88. It's maybe a little too High Fidelity to make a list of the greatest album-openers of all
time, but if I were to make such a
list, "Gloria" would be in my top five. There's something thrillingly wrong about the way Smith replaces Christianity with the
doctrine of Them, explaining her faith in rock by adopting the persona of a
man-on-the-make who gets the girl of his dreams and wants to tell the world all
about it. If "Gloria" had been the only song on Horses, the album would still be one of the greatest rock
albums ever recorded. After all the pompous attempts to elevate rock to the
status of high art through elaborate stage shows and orchestral overtures,
Smith took it to the academy by shrieking along to an old garage-rock single
and showing that pop spirituality is all about a belief in feeling good.

Enduring presence? The rest of Horses—and the rest of the Smith discography,
really—is frequently as brilliant, albeit a little anti-climactic. I can
trace my ongoing (mild) disappointment with Smith to Horses' three-part epic "Land," a homely sister to "Gloria"
that would be more attractive if it just fixed itself up a little. On the
latter-day live version included on the 2005 Horses reissue, Smith seems to give up on "Land," choosing to
reprise "Gloria" to create the climax that the weaker track only hints at. But
there's a more obvious solution. After breathlessly chanting about a boy's
dream of horses and tying it to the R&B; classic "Land Of A Thousand
Dances," all Smith has ever had to do to complete the thought—power equals
sex equals pop—is build to the "na na-na na-na"s of Pickett's version.
Instead, she humps away but skips the orgasm. What a punk.

Paul McCartney

Years Of Operation 1970-present (solo)

Fits Between Buddy Holly and The Hollies

Personal Correspondence Somehow, when writing about John Lennon a few weeks
back, I mistakenly gave the impression (to one disgruntled commenter at least)
that I prefer Paul McCartney to Lennon. This is absolutely not the case…at
least not anymore. As a kid, around 10—around the time Lennon
died—I would've counted myself a McCartney-ite. Wings songs were all over
the radio then, and came in so many different flavors, all designed to appeal
to youngsters in thrall to an easy hook. And though I'm still in thrall to an easy hook to some extent, over time I
began to notice how little substance there was to the majority of McCartney's
post-Beatles efforts. Robert Christgau once described McCartney's solo career
as "music for potheads," and that pretty aptly sums it up. There's a whole lot
of "eh, good enough" to McCartney's music, as he comes up with a melody that
sounds nice and then never bothers to develop it, or deepen it with lyrics that
have any real personal meaning. Of course, sometimes that unfinished quality
can be charming in and of itself. Consider "Every Night," one of the
knocked-out ditties that comprise McCartney's debut solo album. There's really
nothing to the song, and yet when McCartney brings the song to its
non-chorus—a series of "woo-woo-woo"s—the casual feeling suits the
songs's "Hey, let's stay in tonight!" message. It's just so homey.

Enduring presence? At a certain point though, McCartney needs to get out
of the house. He's produced some absolute garbage during his solo career, along
with about 15 songs that I keep in my iPod and return to fairly frequently. His
music used to mean so much to me, but if he were to die tomorrow, I don't think
I'd feel even the slightest twinge of grief. (Unless he died in some horrible,
gruesome way. I mean, c'mon, I'm not a monster.)

Paul Simon

Years Of Operation 1971-present (solo)

Fits Between James Taylor and David Byrne

Personal Correspondence Paul Simon's Greatest Hits Etc. was in heavy rotation in our house when I was a kid,
but I honestly didn't give the solo Simon much thought until the '80s, when the
kicky single "Late In The Evening" was all over the radio. A few years after
that, I saw Simon perform the wispy "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog
After The War" on the short-lived NBC sketch comedy series The New Show, and I subsequently bought Hearts And Bones, a deeply underrated pop record that found Simon
taking some tentative steps away from the middling easy-listening music he'd
been making in the mid-to-late '70s, and trying to get back to the more
exploratory place he was in when his solo career began. There are elements of
gospel, island music, New Wave and classical minimalism on Hearts And Bones, as well as some of Simon's most lovely ballads.
(Including the title track, a song I put on one of the first tapes I made for
my future wife, and which she claims caused her to pull over while driving
because she was weeping uncontrollably.) For my 16th birthday, my
dad bought me the just-released Graceland, because he'd heard a story about it on NPR, and thought it would be
something I'd enjoy. It was maybe the best, most thoughtful gift he ever got
me. I took to Graceland instantly,
and enjoyed its subsequent success. Even later reports that Simon stole a lot
of Graceland's best songs from his
collaborators—most notably Los Lobos—hasn't soured me on the
record, though it has knocked Simon down a peg or two in my estimation. But
that's okay; I've always cared more about the music than the man.

Enduring presence? At a certain angle,
Paul Simon's career can look somewhat safe, as it progresses through folk,
folk-rock, pop-psychedelia, singer-songwriter confessionals and worldbeat, all
while staying in step with MOR audiences. But look more closely and Simon
becomes a musical explorer, seeking to fill out literate story-songs and
character sketches with snatches of everything from reggae to Phillip Glass.
His songs rarely change, but Simon continually challenges his unerring sense of
melody by introducing elements that comment on and sometimes work against the
composition. I've always appreciated Simon's willingness to weave together his
current obsessions, both musical and social. That's what made The Capeman a noble, in my opinion underrated experiment, and
that's what made his most recent album—the Brian Eno collaboration Surprise—so lively. Throughout Surprise, Simon's lilting melodies step around Eno's factory
clank, like some lithe woodland creature scurrying from a bulldozer. (Which is
probably the way Simon likes to imagines himself.)

Paul Weller

Years Of Operation 1991-present (solo)

Fits Between Van Morrison and Joe Cocker

Personal Correspondence Because Weller's solo career has been so undervalued
here in the states, I've sometimes felt like a reactionary when I've reviewed
one of his '90s or '00s albums and advocated for their simple virtues. At its
best, Weller's solo work has displayed the heft of classic British blues
shouters, with a warm sheen that Joe Cocker hasn't known since Woodstock.
Weller's also gravitated towards a gentle, up-tempo melodicism that sounds
great in an easy chair. Is it on a par with All Mod Cons? Heck, no. Weller's best work will probably always be
behind him, mainly because his sober style is best suited to the aggression of
loud rock, not the looser feel of R&B.; Still, Weller has acquitted himself
better than most other aging punkers. He still knows how to write a catchy
tune, he's still got a flair for local color, and he's overcome his
occasionally stunted song construction by expanding his arrangements and
instrumentation. Solo artists can do that; it's one of the reasons that their
careers endure, while bands tend to burn out.

Enduring presence? The blend of gruffness and grooviness that's been
Weller's trademark since he began snarling out youth anthems in the late '70s
has mellowed into a refined smoke, curling through songs that unify melody and
atmosphere. "Out Of The Sinking" is maybe my favorite Weller song for the way
it swings easily from hook to hook, setting a mood in which the lyrical pining
for escape is made manifest. Meanwhile, Weller seems blissfully willing to let
his voice, his guitar-playing, and his whole sonic persona dissipate into the
air.

[pagebreak]

Pavement

Years Of Operation 1989-1999

Fits Between The Fall and Sonic Youth

Personal Correspondence Last week, I mentioned that Nirvana was partly responsible for my career, because in the
"everything's changing" atmosphere of the grunge/Clinton era, it was a lot
easier for an awkward, unprofessional runt like I was back then to get a
callback from an editor. I also have to give some credit for my career to
Pavement, and specifically the college newspaper review of Slanted &
Enchanted that convinced an editor in
Nashville to hire me to work on his short-lived 'zine, and then to write for
the alt-weekly Nashville Scene. I
was inspired by Slanted & Enchanted to crank out some of the most evocative prose I could muster at age
21, and though it took me over a decade to get back to that Slanted place in my writing on a regular basis, the
subsequent reviews I wrote of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Wowee Zowee, Brighten The Corners and Terror Twilight are among my
favorite pieces from my frequently awful early years. Nevetheless, if I had to
live the rest of my life with only one Pavement record, I'd eschew all the
albums and stick with the four-song EP Watery, Domestic, which starts with shrill noise and ends with maybe
the quintessential Pavement song, "Shoot The Singer," a string of
clever-sounding nonsense that Stephen Malkmus somehow imbues with meaning. In
fact, Malkmus' nuanced vocal performance here puts the lie to the idea that his
singing on later Pavement albums sucked because he couldn't do any better. When
he cared to, Malkmus could sing just fine.

Enduring presence? I pretty well covered Pavement in the opening essay,
and will probably throw Stephen Malkmus a Stray Track when his turn comes
around, but I wanted to go ahead an link to my Malkmus
interview from a few years back, during which we talk about his
vocals some. This was one of the first substantive interviews I conducted for
this site, and while it was pretty choppy at times, I was excited that Malkmus
and I had something close to an actual conversation. In a segment that got cut
from the final edit, we even had a sizable digression in which we talked
baseball. When I got off the phone, I felt like the coolest person alive.
(Well, second-coolest.)

Pearl Jam

Years Of Operation 1990-present

Fits Between The Who and Crazy Horse

Personal Correspondence Here's another band that I missed seeing in concert
during my college days, only to catch them on TV a couple of weeks later and
realize I'd made a mistake. I was never all that gung-ho for Pearl Jam's Ten, but when I saw the band on Saturday Night Live barely a month after they'd played the University Of
Georgia's Legion Field, I could tell that they were, at the least, a live band
to be reckoned with. My disgruntlement with all things Seattle led me to write
a pan of Vs. as one of my first
post-collegiate professional reviewing assignments, though I now think I was
way too harsh on that record (which honestly and earnestly tries to build on
the success of Ten by expanding
Pearl Jam's musical vocabulary). I started to soften on Pearl Jam around the
release of Vitalogy, another
eclectic and somewhat reckless album that kicks off with one of the band's most
ferocious rock songs, "Last Exit." In essence, Pearl Jam has always been a
better-than-average club band with a great vocalist, but great rock vocalists
aren't that easy to find, and however annoying Vedder can be off the stage, he
consistently delivers the kind of powerful vocal performances—at once
tender and fierce, with astounding tremolo—that has made his band's rep.
The problem is that for every stirring rocker or ballad they crank out, Pearl
Jam remains every bit as capable of lumbering head-bangers and aimless,
pseudo-smart thrashers. Great rock vocalists may be hard to find, but great
rhythm sections can be even harder—and more often than not, Pearl Jam's
rhythm section simply doesn't swing.

Enduring presence? Pearl Jam has been carrying too heavy a load almost
from its inception: first cursed as the ambitious, arena-ready lamprey riding
Nirvana's back, then lauded as the savior of modern rock after warring against
Ticketmaster and MTV. After a stretch in the early '90s as arguably the most
popular rock band on the planet, Pearl Jam has settled into an unexpected place
as the grunge-era Grateful Dead, with a low-key mass-media presence, a rabid
cult following, and a chorus of wary-but-respectful critics ready to proclaim
each new album "the best since Vitalogy." But like its fellow
Seattle scene breakouts (Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, etc.), Pearl Jam has
never exactly burst with timeless melodies. A good Pearl Jam album is more a
string of immediate, visceral experiences, where pounding drums and grinding
guitars give way suddenly to moments where Eddie Vedder moans dreamily. The
band gladly sacrifices fluidity for drama.

Pere Ubu

Years Of Operation 1975-82, 1987-present

Fits Between Devo and Talking Heads

Personal Correspondence I have absolutely no memory of why I bought the Pere
Ubu rarities anthology Terminal Tower
when I was in high school, except that I'd probably seen the band in the New
Wave concert film Urgh! A Music War,
and I'm sure I'd read glowing reviews of their early albums in some of the rock
history books I pored over back then. Whatever the reason, Terminal Tower was a tough one for me to grasp immediately, even
though I now realize that it's maybe Pere Ubu's most accessible record
top-to-bottom. Coming off the streets of Cleveland as a garage-rock band with
high ideals and an artsy bent, Pere Ubu has frequently favored abstraction even
on "pop" albums like The Tenement Year and Cloudland. But the
early recordings on Terminal Tower
have a certain nimbleness in their apocalyptic rumble. They're scary as much
for how smart they are as for how dark. And speaking of scary: When I was in
college, I interviewed Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas while sitting outside the
venue where Pere Ubu was about to open for the Pixies. He was gruff but
patient, and I remember him offering some dazzling analogy about music was like
the Diet Coke can he was holding. I wish I could remember what his point was.
I'm sure it was persuasive.

Enduring presence? Pere Ubu is another one of those great, essential
bands with a discography too unwieldy and erratic to suggest a clean
introduction. Aside from Terminal Tower, maybe the easiest Pere Ubu record to find and enjoy would be their
debut, The Modern Dance, an
American post-punk landmark littered with more straightforward songs. The track
"Untitled" off Terminal Tower
offers an early version of The Modern Dance's title track. Not just post-punk, but
post-everything, Pere Ubu's messy dissection of the modern condition chugs
along like a subway train, breaking at the chorus for random street noises and
guitar skronk. It's the kind of modernist art-rock that Talking Heads was going
for early on, only less clever and more sloppily human.

Pernice Brothers

Years Of Operation 1996-present

Fits Between The Smiths and E.L.O.

Personal Correspondence Joe Pernice's Scud
Mountain Boys were always a difficult group for me to get behind, because no
matter how gorgeous their spare, literate folk-country sounded, Pernice's
earnest vocals always seemed to be bordering on the parodic—as if he were
making fun of his own music by investing it with exaggerated sincerity. The
same problem cropped up on Overcome By Happiness, the debut album by Pernice's most enduring outfit,
the Pernice Brothers. Even so, the switch in medium from stark country to
orchestral pop allowed Pernice's level of sincerity to seem a little less faux.
Maybe it's because fey white boys sound more at home singing pretty pop songs,
or maybe it's because the extra instrumentation gives Pernice's pale skin some
much-needed blood. Either way, it was nice to hear his witty, self-deprecating
lyrics presented in arrangements that sound so fresh and bright, that you'd
swear you'd heard them before, slotted between Poco and America on some Classic
Cafe radio show. In his Pernice Brothers guise, Pernice has continued to slap
the sweetness of '70s AM pop over airy folk songs, and has produced two
full-length albums—The World Won't End and Yours Mine & Ours—that are ridiculously rich in beauty and
meaning, as catchy as they are caustic.

Enduring presence? The persistent problem
with Pernice Brothers is that they can be too much of a good thing. It's
entirely possible that Joe Pernice has had all the creative breakthroughs he's
going to have in his career. No matter what name he slaps on his literate,
soft-pop singer-songwriter projects—Scud Mountain Boys, Chappaquiddick
Skyline, Pernice Brothers, or something new—they all fall back on pretty
melodies, sweet orchestrations, and smart lyrics steeped in regret. Still, like
The Smiths and The Psychedelic Furs—two bands that had as big an
influence on Pernice as '70s AM pop—Pernice Brothers continue to make
impossibly catchy and pretty music, cloaked in ache.

*****************

Stray Tracks

From the fringes of the collection, a few songs to share….

Operation Ivy, "Knowledge"

What I most appreciated about
the recent documentary Punk's Not Dead is that it doesn't entirely buy the notion that the true spirit of
punk was co-opted and debased by the wave of pop-punk acts that emerged in the
early '90s. Instead, the movie sees punk as having a continuity that stretches
forward and backward, perpetually speaking to some new group of teenagers in
search of something they believe to be "authentic" (for whatever reason…however
spurious it might seem to grown-ups). I was in the target demographic when
Operation Ivy stormed out of the Bay Area, but for some reason, they never
penetrated my circle of punk-minded friends, so I caught up to them late,
post-Rancid. I'll offer some comparisons of the two—and a spirited
defense of Rancid—in about a month, but for now I'll just say that while
I like Operation Ivy, I have the disadvantage of hearing them first from a
distance. To me they just sound like a very good punk band with a gift for
writing sing-along hooks. If I'd heard them at the right time in my life, I'm
sure I'd feel that they were something more.

[pagebreak]

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, "Messages"

Prior to seeing OMD open for
Depeche Mode on the Music For The Masses tour, my only exposure to the band had been hearing "If You Leave" on
the Pretty In Pink soundtrack and
"So In Love" on some tape my brother made. The Depeche Mode show was at an
outdoor amphitheater, and OMD started playing while it was still daylight, as
the crowd milled about, trying to find a good spot on the grass (or trying to
find a friend who could sneak them down front in time for DM). I was one of
that milling crowd (and I did manage to sneak down front, as it happened), but
I remember stopping my milling cold when OMD started to play this song, a
technopop ballad I'd never heard before. Especially in the gloaming, "Messages"
sounded like it was beaming out into the encroaching dark—a last call of
a kind, entrusted to the electronic impulses we all rely on to convey what we
most urgently need to say.

Ornette Coleman, "Congeniality"

I won't insult the jazzbos by
pretending I have some deep connection to or appreciation of Ornette Coleman. I
only own one Coleman album, The Shape Of Jazz To Come, which I pull out about once a year and revisit. I
originally bought it because it was on sale, and because Coleman was one of the
artists mentioned in the Mo' Better Blues rap song "Jazz Thing" (he "was another soul man," if I have the rhyme
right). Also, The Jody Grind used to cover Coleman's "Lonely Woman," which is Shape's opening track. I wasn't that keen on Coleman's
version right away—too ragged and freeform for me, and more demanding of
my attention than the kind of jazz I was looking for at the time—but I
gradually came to appreciate the way Coleman explodes jazz improvisation by
actively working against the idea of a clean, steady groove. This Shape song is a prime example of what I'm talking about.
The tempo, the riff, the jam—it all keeps changing.

Os Mutantes, "A Minha Menina"

I should probably talk about
Os Mutantes' major contributions to the Tropicalia movement in Brazil, and how
they integrated acid-rock into traditional South American music, helping to
pave the way for some delicious hybrids that North American pop fans are still
discovering and chewing over, decades later. But mainly I'm including this song
this week for all my fellow attendees of last year's Toronto International Film
Festival. Hey buds, remember that recurring pre-show cel-phone movie with the
guy combining separate shots of his facial features? This is the song from that
thing.

Ozark Mountain Daredevils, "If I Only Knew"

Paul Williams, "I Won't Last A Day Without You"

A publicist sent me a copy of
the other OMD's The Car Over
The Lake Album when it was reissued
about six years ago, and while I had far more awareness of the band's name than
their music, I was still surprised to hear that they sounded…well, like this
song. I guess I expected something more Ozark-y, more mountain-y, or more
daring. (I later realized that I was familiar with Ozark Mountain Daredevils' biggest
hit, "Jackie Blue," which is in the same cooing soft rock vein as this song.) I
know this is mostly due to fuzzy-headed nostalgia, but sometimes I think I
could spend the rest of my life listening to music like this, so cozy and
sleek. It's that abiding affection for the easy that also led me to spring for
a pricey anthology of Paul Williams a few years back. My memories of Williams
from my childhood are of a doughy, pale man practically indistinguishable from
the Muppets he often appeared with on TV, but in some ways Williams had a
career similar to Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Neil Diamond, in that he was
another hit songwriter who became a distinctive performer in his own right. I
can't say that Williams' own recordings stand up to the trio above, but songs
like the minor hit "I Won't Last A Day Without You" represent a clear vision.
This is music that conjures up dimly lit lounges, variety show lens flares, and
bolts of satin.

Paddy McAloon, "Sleeping Rough"

Following up on what I wrote
about Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Paul Williams above, here's a lushly
orchestrated ballad from the frontman for cult UK soft-rockers Prefab Sprout,
one of my favorite bands of all time. The Sprout's Popless entry is right around
the corner, but since McAloon's oddball solo album I Trawl The Megahertz—with its symphonic instrumentals and 20-minute
poetry reading—got almost zero attention when it came out five years ago,
I thought I'd share the song on the album that comes closest to conventional.
Like a lot of the record, it sounds like an extended bridge to a pop
fantasyland that McAloon never quite reaches. The journey though, is a dream.

Pale Saints, "Time Thief"

There was a time when Pale
Saints were mentioned alongside Lush and Ride as the standard-bearers for the
short-lived shoegazer movement, but Pale Saints' contributions to the genre
don't get cited as often as they probably should. The band's debut album The
Comforts Of Madness is hardly a
masterpiece on the order of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, but its arguably the most cohesive and consistently
moving LP other than Loveless to come out of that first shoegaze wave. (I might put
in a good word for Swervedriver's Raise too, except that I'm not sure Swervedriver should be strictly
classified alongside the other Creation/4AD bands.) "Time Thief" is the last
song on The Comforts Of Madness,
and brings the album's separate threads of noise, moodiness and arty drone
together into a climactic finale.

Paolo Nutini, "Jenny Don't Be Hasty"

Here's a useless piece of
Popless trivia: Paolo Nutini's These Streets is one of two albums I received as gifts last
Christmas, a few days before I shut off all new music. So for the last week of
2007 and the first week of January, These Streets was pretty much all I listened to in my car, until I
figured out how to integrate other CDs into the mix. I like Nutini—I saw
him live on TV and was impressed enough by his off-the-cuff blue-eyed soul to
put his album on my Amazon wishlist—but I sure wouldn't want to make These
Streets the only record I played for
an entire year. I'll be curious to hear what he does next, though. There's a
lot of promise on that first album, but to my ears, he hasn't yet figured out
how to work that amazing voice into songs dynamic enough to support it.

Paper Lace, "The Night Chicago Died"

Every era has some weird
songs that become hits—have you listened to Taco's "Puttin' On The Ritz"
or Murray Head's "One Night In Bangkok" lately?—but the early '70s seemed
more wide open than most for one-hit wonders and quirky novelties. I mean, what
the hell is this song? What was in
the air in 1974 that made people want to hear an eccentric evocation of the Al
Capone era, as performed by a band of Brits?

Patty Griffin, "No Bad News"

Griffin is an alt-country
artist—more by necessity than design—who's shown the confidence to
incorporate elements from disparate genres to support simple songs that follow
the up-sloping contours of her phenomenal voice. Last year's Children
Running Through is arguably her best
album, highlighted by "No Bad News," an aggressive acoustic anthem that has
Griffin stammering words of hope obsessively over hard strumming, as though
performing an exorcism at a fiesta.

Paul Burch, "Lovesick Blues Boy"

Paul Burch plays drums and
vibraphone for Lambchop and leads his own richly traditionalist country band
The WPA Ballclub, and for both outfits, he strives to recreate the pitch and
tone of old radio broadcasts. At their best, Burch's solo albums survey the
range of romantic emotion from desperation to giddiness to quiet contentment,
and though Burch's smooth twang and heavy reverb give his songs the surface
texture of recordings from late 40s, the records as a whole aren't as hidebound
as they seem. The galloping guitar and moaning steel of "Lovesick Blues Boy"
comes off as dulled and muted in a way uncommon to the period the song evokes,
which effectively distances the feeling of heartbreak. The song is softer and
dreamier than its old-timey origins, and throughout his career, Burch has
similarly smeared together honky tonk and big band pop, taking classic melodic
structures and a general sense of reserve from both. All his echo and blur is
like the memory of a touch, if not the touch itself.

Paul Pena, "Jet Airliner"

Pena's unreleased 1973 opus New
Train briefly became a big deal when
it was re-released in 2000 to capitalize on Pena's revival as a Tuvan
throat-singer (as documented in the 1999 film Genghis Blues). New Train
is a likable record, and though it probably wouldn't have made Pena a superstar
had it come out when originally intended, Pena's groovier original version of
"Jet Airliner"—later popularized by Steve Miller—should've had a
chance to become a hit.

The Paybacks, "Love Letter"

Proving once again that
timing is everything, Detroit's muscle-rock outfit The Paybacks dithered too
long and failed to cash in on the garage-rock revival of the early '00s, even
though nearly every article about the Detroit scene cited the band as the best
of the bunch, and lead singer Wendy Case in particular as a star in the making.
This lead-off track to the The Paybacks' third album Love, Not Reason is a beautiful beast, full of crushing guitars and
tribal drums—like glitter-rock with a rusty edge. And Case remains a
primal force: Pat Benatar with a fat lip and a black eye.

Peggy Lee, "Winter Wonderland"

Peggy Seeger, "Gonna Be An Engineer"

Here are two contemporaneous
versions of mid-20th-century womanhood: one a mainstream pop singer,
the other a dissident folkie, both with an amazing vocal presence. I haven't
previously posted any of the preponderance of Christmas music I have on my hard
drive, but Lee's version of "Winter Wonderland" transcends the holidays. It's
sassy and seductive. Seeger, meanwhile, uses her sass in a different way, to
define herself as someone who won't be chained to a bedpost, stove or crib.

The Peppermints, "Yes It Is"

I frequently find that when I
strike through—or just don't write about—bands like The
Peppermints, who are geared more toward abrasion and experimentation than
striving openly to move or entertain, I get comments along the lines of, "You
don't know what you're missing." But you know? I think I do know. I usually
keep a little something by the noisy bands that seem to have a little something
on the ball, but I mostly keep them around for contrast and research. When I'm
driving or walking or working or cooking or just hanging out, this isn't the
kind of thing I want to hear. I can appreciate it, but it's not something that
I enjoy easily.

Percy Faith & His Orchestra, "Theme From A Summer Place"

Theme. From A Summer Place. A Summer Place. The Theme. From A Suuuuummer Place.

*****************

Regrettably unremarked
upon Otis Redding, Ozzy Osbourne,
Panda Bear, Papercuts, Paul Anka, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Paul Duncan,
Paul Oakenfold, Paul Westerberg, Paul Weston and Pedro The Lion

Also listened to: Ollie & The Nightingales, Olu
Dara, On! Air! Library!, One Night Band,
Onelinedrawing, The Only Children, The Only Ones, The
Oohlas, OOIOO, The Open, The Optic Nerve, Orange
Juice, The Orange Peels, Oranger, The Oranges Band, The Orb, Orbital, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou
Dahomey, Orchestre Régional De Kayes, Organized
Konfusion, Orgone, The Original Blind Boys Of Alabama, The Original Cyndi, The
Original Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, The Originals, Orlandivo, Orval Hale, Os Paralamas Do Sucesso, The Osbourne Brothers, Oscar Brown
Jr., Oslo, Osunlade, The Other Half, Otis Clay, Otis
Gibbs, Otis Rush, Otto Luening, Ours, The Outfield, Outhud, The
Outsiders, Over It, Over The Atlantic,
Overpass, The Ovulators, Owen, Owusu
& Hannibal, Ozomatli, P.O.D., P.P. Arnold,
Pacific Gas & Electric, Pacific Ocean, Page France, Paik, Pajo. Palaxy Tracks, The Paley Brothers, Palomar, Pam Tillis, Panama, Panda &
Angel, The Panda Band, Panic! At The
Disco, Pantera, Panther, Papa Byrd, The
Paper Chase, Paper Lace, Paper Lions, Papo Felix, The Parish Festival, Park, The Partridge
Family, Pascal, Pash, The
Pastels, The Pasties, Pat
Brennan, Pat Carrolls, Pat
Hunt, Pat Kilroy, Pat MacDonald, Pat Peterman, Pat Shannon, Pat Upton, Patterson Hood,
Patrice Fontanarosa, Patrice Holloway, Patrice Rushen, Patricia
Vonne, Patrick Cleandenim, Patrick
Park, Patrick Watson, Patrick Wolf, Patrizia &
Jimmy, Pattie Brooks, Patty Larkin, Patty
Loveless, Paul Brill, Paul Cebar, Paul Curreri, Paul Kelly,
Paul Murphy, Paul Revere & The Raiders, Paul Schwartz,
Paul Siebel, Paula Frazer, Paulinho Da Viola, Paulson, Pavel
Vernikov, Pearlene, Pee Wee Crayton, Peech Boys, Peel, Peeping Tom, Peerless Quartet, Peglegasus, Pell Mell, The
Pendletons, Penetration, Pennsy's Electric Workhorses Songs, People, People Like Us, People Noise, People Press
Play, People Under The Bridge, Perfections, Performers and The
Perishers

*****************

Next week: From Pete Townshend to Polvo, plus a few words
on outmoded media