After
17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking the year off
from all new music, and instead revisiting his record collection in
alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he
still needs.
There's a
school of thought that says art ought to hurt a little. Art should make your
pulse race, your head turn away, your stomach drop and your perceptions change.
If all art does is reassure you that everything about you is A-OK, then it's
hardly art at all. Literature, film, music, painting… they shouldn't just move
you, they should push you.
Me, I'm not so sure. I tend to think art
should help you learn something about yourself by allowing you to empathize
with the experiences of others. And while abrasion can be a valuable part of
that process, relying solely on shock and awe is, ultimately, lazy.
Or maybe I'm just a wimp.
Until I was
about 16 years old, I shied away from music that I feared would be too loud,
too fast and too aggressive, and I'll be honest: a lot of that hesitation was
straight-up snobbery. I grew up in a lower-middle-class family—bean soup
and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner three times a week—but my parents
stressed education and manners, and didn't like it when my brother and I
associated with kids they felt were too crude. Our household watched "quality"
TV, and listened to "tasteful" pop music. My dad may have been a country music
buff, but he was more into Chet Atkins and Kris Kristofferson than Hank Williams
and George Jones. He liked thoughtful, proficient performers, not hicks. (When
he watched Hee Haw,
it was to admire Roy Clark's picking style.) And because my mom knew I was
shaken up by horror-movie commercials on TV—I still have nightmares about It's Alive—she
refused to let me watch even the bowdlerized network versions of movies like Halloween.
So until I
hit adolescence, I tended to think of metal and punk as music for
dimwits—trash for the trashy. (Although the distinctions were fine. The
Who and Rush were okay, but not Kiss or Black Sabbath—probably because
the first two bands seemed a little smarter.) Still, anyone who takes a serious
interest in rock history is eventually going to have to grapple with music a
little rougher than The Beatles' "Come Together." As it happened, I met an
older student at my high school who loaned me his copy of The Sex Pistols' Never
Mind The Bollocks,
and for the next several months he fed me a steady diet of music by punk and
goth acts that I'd previously known only by name (if at all). Bauhaus, Joy
Divison, 45 Grave, Meat Puppets, The Dead Kennedys…I didn't know how any of
them were going to sound before I dropped the needle on their records. Would
they upset me? Repulse me? Would I be condemned to Hell for listening to them?
Well,
anyone who's familiar with the acts above should know that I didn't have much
to be scared of. I already liked The Doors and David Bowie, so Bauhaus wasn't
that big of a jump, and the Meat Puppets album my friend loaned me was Up On
The Sun, which is
decidedly mellow. So I eased into punk. I gave myself a choppy haircut, tore up
my pants, and started hanging around people at school who did the same. I
wasn't in it for the lifestyle—if anything, I was annoyed by the local
punks' anti-authoritarian/anti-school chatter, which offended my honors student
sensibility—but for the chance to be exposed to some new music. I wanted
to learn more about the bands that were left out of Rolling Stone and its history books: Suicidal
Tendencies, Sisters Of Mercy, Minor Threat, Skinny Puppy, et cetera.
But I hit a
wall when I got to Crass. Another friend of mine—a smart kid who'd taken
his interest in anarchy beyond drawing a big "A" on his notebook—foisted
copies of Christ: The Album and Yes Sir, I Will and Best Before 1984 on me, and for the first time, I
dropped the needle on some records that really did leave me shaken and unsure. The
political songs of The Clash and Bruce Springsteen are nothing compared to the
bombs thrown by Crass, who excoriated Western culture and called for new ways
of understanding gender relations, class struggle and "revolution." Some of
their songs had melodies, and some of them had ideas I could use. (I still
ponder the chorus of "Bloody Revolutions": "You talk of overthrowing power /
With violence as your tool / You speak of 'liberation' / And 'when the people
rule' / Well ain't it people rule right now? / What difference would there be?
/ Just another set of bigots / With their rifle sights on me.") Others were
shrill, disgusting, and—the greatest sin of all—tuneless.
Part of
developing personal taste is figuring out your limits. I taped some of the
catchier songs from my friend's Crass albums, then returned them. But years
later, I bought a copy of Best Before 1984 on CD, because…well, because with so much poison in
our culture, it's never a bad idea to keep an emetic around.
*****************
Pieces
Of The Puzzle
Constantines
Years Of Operation 2000-present
Fits Between Fugazi and The Hold Steady
Personal
Correspondence It's
hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this Toronto band's assaultive,
nerve-jangling rock that's so effective, but from the moment I heard 2003's Shine
A Light, I was in
Constantines' thrall. At the time I wrote: "Shine A Light, is arguably engaged in the
new-rock discourse, given the band's simultaneous embrace of classic-rock
bravado and splatterpunk nightmarishness. Singer-guitarist Bry Webb sounds like
he's been shouting across a room for an hour and can now only hoarsely grunt
and squeak while the rest of his quintet zooms hard, sweating up front so as to
give an excuse for the lengthy, bass-led instrumental interludes to come. The
group frequently wanders into still valleys before chugging back up, properly
balancing bounce and punch—Constantines may be the best band since
Archers Of Loaf to marry intelligence and brute force. Shine A Light can be practically celebratory; and
it can also knock listeners down, as on the harsh-edged bounder 'On To You,'
which starts with kicks and coos and ends in rasp and accusation. As Webb
breathlessly intones lines like 'I'm learning to survive / on earthworms and
houseflies,' and drops obsessive references to pigeons, dogs, fire, and poison,
Constantines generates a jarring-but-tuneful vision of desolation. It's music
for an overheated, off-the-books hideaway, with its doors barricaded to stave
off impending doom." Tournament Of Hearts carried that mood even further, while also letting
in a little more light. It's an album without as many readymade anthems, and
yet is every bit as transporting a record as Shine A Light. I'm not one for tossing around
phrases like "post-9/11," but Constantines are one of the few bands who seem to
have woven the anxieties of the terror age into their art, without being overt
about it. They make music that stands defiant, then trembles, then reaches out.
Enduring presence? I don't always think of
Constantines when someone asks me to list my favorite current bands, but they'd
easily be in my Top 10, and maybe Top 5. Each of their last two albums finished
towards the top of my best-of lists in their respective years, and their debut
album would've too, if I'd heard it in time. New album due next month. Man, I
can't wait to hear it. But I've gotta.
The Coral
Years Of Operation 1996-present
Fits Between Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Love
Personal
Correspondence The
Coral too—like Constantines—seem to be making music that's haunted
by the fears of our age, even as the band apes the styles and sounds of 1966.
The band's best album, The Invisible Invasion, is dotted with lines like
"Conspiracy in the corridor," "There'll never be another century," and "The
madman's in the desert," sung by James Skelly in an even-toned voice that makes
the prophesies of doom all the more unnerving. The music is bouncy and buzzy
too—like an dose of levity in the face of annihilation. My problem with
The Coral is really just that I always want to like them more than I do. I'm in
favor of them in the abstract, but the majority of their songs fall just short
of unassailability. Either the chorus is too blandly hooky, or the band's arty
touches too jarring, or something. A few years ago, I might've counted The Coral among the
best bands of the '00s, just judging on potential. Now I'm not so sure.
Enduring presence? In the battle of the sax-aided
Liverpudlian retro-pop bands, I'll still take The Coral over The Zutons,
because The Zutons seem to be working their sound with an ear towards chart
success, while The Coral seem to be following their influences wherever they
lead, regardless of commercial appeal. (I don't usually care about those kind
of distinctions, but it doesn't help that The Zutons' songs, "Valerie" aside,
come off kind of flat and soulless.) That said, I still don't think The Coral
have made a top-to-bottom great album, though The Invisible Invasion comes closest. (I didn't hear
last year's Roots & Echoes). I've trimmed my Coral collection down to one hourlong
playlist, which suits them well.
Cornelius
Years Of Operation 1993-present (solo)
Fits Between Cocteau Twins and Pizzicato Five
Personal
Correspondence I
went through a J-Pop phase in the late '90s, spurred by my interest in
Pizzicato Five and Cornelius' US debut Fantasma. The former sounded like all the
kitschiest pop music of the '60s, '70s and '80s, mashed up and recombined and
sent shooting forth at a hundred miles an hour. The latter's much the same,
though Fantasma
draws on more respectable influences—hip-hop, prog-rock, grinding
guitar-punk—alongside junk like cartoons and sci-fi movie soundtracks. Fantasma fulfilled a lot of the promise of
sampling culture, by taking Cornelius' cultural influences, reproducing the
most pertinent pieces of them, and then fitting them together to complete a
portrait of the artist. Post-Fantasma, Cornelius has gone more minimal, creating album-length
explorations of arrhythmia and pastoral bliss that draw heavily from Steve
Reich, Kraftwerk, and Tortoise. About the terrific 2002 album Point, I wrote, "The intricacy and
elegance of Point's structure becomes clearer as the pieces come together,
working much the way that the CD cover art does: pulling back from a single,
blurred blue spot to reveal a different picture when the booklet is unfurled.
This is music to take in from all sides, as a magnificent piece of pop
architecture." I didn't get a chance to review the follow-up Sensuous when it was released in the States
last year, but while it's not quite as good as Point, it's an interesting record, taking
the pleasant breaks and bridges of soft-rock and extending and repeating them,
creating a kind of avant-garde version of easy listening.
Enduring
presence? The
problem with Cornelius in the '00s—and it's not much of a problem,
really—is that he's making albums, not collections of songs, and they can be hard to
pull apart in the iPod era. That may be why he so readily turns him music over
to other artists for remixing. Cornelius needs little Corneliuses of his own,
to express their love for his music by chopping it up.
Cornershop
Years Of
Operation
1992-present
Fits Between Beck and Yatsura
Personal Correspondence This seems to be the week for
genre-bending, culture-bending bands here at Popless. I was fascinated by
Cornershop from the moment I heard the Merge edition of Hold On It Hurts, which appends the band's
doggedly indie-rock Lock, Stock And Double Barrel EP. The song "Summer Fun In A
Beat-Up Datsun" in particular starts out as sloppy DIY, adds sitar, and then
breaks into semi-raga before coming back to punk—all in 90 seconds.
Everything I like about Cornershop is in that song: the breeziness, the
percussive drive, and the casual addition of Indian instrumentation to
slop-rock. The song also represents what keeps driving me away from Cornershop:
it really only contains one lyrical idea, repeated unto exhaustion. Sometimes
the repetition works—as on the band's best-known song, "Brimful Of Asha,"
which is one of the best singles of the '90s—but over the course of a
whole record, and on repeated listens, the Cornershop method wears thin.
Enduring
presence? I had my
suspicions that Cornershop wouldn't hold up so well this week, and I'm sad to
report that those suspicions were correct. I've decided to hold onto their
albums while keeping a very pared-down iPod playlist—like 45 minutes
long—because I still like the concept of Cornershop, and I have hopes
that I'll come back around on them again.
Cowboy Junkies
Years Of Operation 1986-present
Fits Between Patsy Cline and Low
Personal Correspondence A whole lot of narrow-minded rock
fans decided that country music wasn't so bad thanks to Cowboy Junkies' The
Trinity Session,
and specifically the band's beguilingly sleepy cover of "Sweet Jane." There
were bands before Cowboy Junkies that carried the country cause to
rockers—including my hometown favorites Jason & The
Scorchers—but The Trinity Session had an elegance and dreaminess that appealed a
generation immersed in Cocteau Twins and Sinead O'Connor. The band's post Trinity
Session records
weren't as widely popular, though by then there was a nascent alt-country
movement to keep the Cowboy Junkies cult alive. I check in on them every now
and then, and find that they're still capable of whipping up originals as
winning as "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning" (from 1990's The Caution
Horses), a
breathless ramble that in form is almost like hip-hop, but without the rhyming.
Enduring
presence? The last
Cowboy Junkies album I bought was One Soul Now, from four years ago, and it was
quite good, but I confess I spend the most time with Studio, the well-chosen hits collection
the band put out a few years back.
The Cramps
Years Of Operation 1976-present
Fits Between The Misfits and Eddie Cochrane
Personal
Correspondence I
had a hard time making sense of The Cramps when I first encountered them,
because their name and their fashion sense marked them as punks—or
possibly Goths—while their music was essentially just slightly more
echo-y rockabilly. Contextually, you could put The Cramps on the same shelf as
the Ramones, as NY-based bands dedicated to restoring a feeling of danger and
menace to the original rock 'n' roll sound. (The B-52's would be there too,
although they were more about restoring the fun.) There are maybe only a dozen
or so Cramps songs that I think are truly essential, and half of those are
covers, but they did help me connect the dots between a few disparate musical
trends. And I always smile when I hear the how-to portion of The Cramps' anthem
"Drug Train:" "I'm going to tell you how / To get on board / You put one foot
up / You put another foot up / Put another foot up / And you're on board / The
Drug Train."
Enduring
presence? The
Cramps graduated out of the punk scene and became godfathers of the neo-garage
movement, which thrived on a small scale before blowing up big for about a year
in the early '00s. They're another band that needs a comprehensive reissue
series and a two-disc anthology.
Crass
Years Of Operation 1977-84
Fits Between Blood Brothers and The Exploited
Personal
Correspondence The
mini-essay up top deals with my first encounters with Crass, but one aspect of
my Crass experience that I don't want to discount is how much they spoke to my
budding Anglophila. Crass songs drop references to British politicians and
media figures and institutions, and express a tolerance for the idea of a
welfare state in ways that struck me as very foreign. "Do They Owe Us A
Living?" was the name of one of the band's earliest and most incendiary
singles. And the answer? "Of course they fucking do."
Enduring
presence? These
days, Crass are still mainly mentioned by the punk rock cognoscenti, though my
perception is that they remain a part of a lot of young punks' formative
experiences. As I wrote above, I pretty much never listen to Crass. But they
helped shape me nonetheless.
Credence Clearwater Revival
Years Of
Operation 1967-72
Fits Between Hank Williams and Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Personal
Correspondence At
this point, maybe the best way to really hear Credence Clearwater Revival is to
go back to the original albums and skip all the cherished hits, in favor of the
ones that rarely get played on the radio. I found my way back in via Richard
Hell & The Voidoids' cover of "Walk On The Water," a song from CCR's 1968
debut album, and one that's more rooted in the jammy, arty side of the Bay Area
scene. John Fogerty belonged to the '60s tradition of urbane folks playing
earthy music—a la Bob Dylan and The Band—but Credence was so
unpretentious about it and so good at getting to that spontaneous-sounding country-pop place
by they're rarely lumped in with the high-minded rock artists of their day. (In
fact, they had kind of a spotty critical reputation until Dave Marsh took up
their cause in several reviews and essays, including the one that gave him the
name of his terrific book Fortunate Son.) They were remarkably fleet too, putting a new
album about every six months—three in 1969—although the records lacked the
stylistic growth that acts like The Beatles, Elvis Costello and The Clash
showed in similarly small windows of time. Fogerty just knocked out the kind of
catchy singles that sounded like they'd been part of Americana for decades
before they were actually written, then surrounded them with some
not-always-as-successful exercises and experiments (Just imagine if they'd
saved all their best 1969 songs for one album…it would be the GOAT.) The
timeless CCR songs are timeless for a reason, but they're so perfect in their
way that it's hard to get closer to Fogerty as an artist by listening to them
alone. It's his mistakes and his follies that make him more relatable.
Enduring
presence? Given how
ubiquitous CCR is on oldies radio, I don't think many would argue that they
don't get their due as a great American rock band. But that ubiquity may mean
that people don't give Credence much thought at all. They're just there, like gas stations and "hey the
'60s were a wild time" montages in period movies. We only notice them when
they're not around.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Years Of Operation 1969-present
Fits Between The Jefferson Airplane and America
Personal
Correspondence I
got my first iPod right around the time that I started digging deeper into the
late '60s Laurel Canyon/Cosmic Americana/Sunset Strip scenes, and one of the
first things I did was make separate iPod playlists for David Crosby, Stephen
Stills and Graham Nash, combining their best CSNY contributions with some
choice tracks from solo albums and songs by The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and
The Hollies. When I mentioned this project to some of my friends, they cracked
some jokes about what a stupid idea it was, and how I should just stick to Neil
Young. But I'll tell you: I've listened to those three playlists as much as
I've listened to any single other playlist or mix CD I've made in the past
decade. I've even burned them onto CDs, and I play them in my car a few times a
year. (Yes, even Nash.) I've been thinking about those three men as distinct
entities for so long now that I almost can't put them back together and talk
about them as a group, even though I have many happy memories of listening to
the first CSN album late at night when I was a teenager, failing to study as I
drifted off to the bewitching strains of Crosby's "Guinevere." I've picked
"Wooden Ships" as my sample CSN track—no Y here, sorry to say—because
even though I've assigned it to Crosby on my playlists, it's one of the few
really collaborative songs the band recorded together, drawing equally on
Crosby's ripping acid mysticism and Stills' weary, somewhat huffy guitar-rock.
(Plus some contributions from The Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner.) There's a
darkness to "Wooden Ships"—it is about a post-apocalyptic future, after
all—that belies its beauty.
Enduring
presence? I worry
that people want to cherry-pick Neil Young's songs out of CSNY and pretend that
the other three are just embarrassing relics of the mellow era. But you know,
there's a reason
why a musician as hip as Young has kept reuniting with these guys over the
years, and it ain't just for the money. (Or the companionship, since they all
reportedly resent each other.) It's because of what they represent: a sort of
"Best Of The '60s," subdivided into the distinct qualities of pop music,
political commitment, spiritual awakening and cross-cultural acceptance.
Crooked Fingers
Years Of Operation 2000-present
Fits
Between Tom Waits
and Human League
Personal
Correspondence It
took me a while to warm to Eric Bachmann's first major post-Archers Of Loaf
endeavor, probably because it took a while for Crooked Fingers to actually get
good.† On the band's first couple
of records, Bachmann relied on monotone balladry, dressed up by his beer-gargle
vocals and swoony romanticism. But starting with 2003's Red Devil Dawn and then continuing with 2005's Dignity
& Shame,
Crooked Fingers started to lighten up and expand, adding Latin and pop touches
to the thick, stricken love songs. Back in '05, I wrote, "Dignity &
Shame's signature
track is 'Twilight Creeps, which may be the catchiest pop song ever to combine
the principles of classical minimalism with the motor-mouthed street patter of
Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and John Mellencamp." I still wish Bachmann would
add punk back to his palette, and revive some of the Archers' raw kick. But
given what Crooked Fingers has become, I'm now willing to accept that he knows
what he's doing.
Enduring
presence? In the
spirit of perversity that seems to define rock fandom, it seems there are many
Crooked Fingers fans who preferred the band on their first two albums, when
they were basically recording the same song over and over, and those fans don't
much care for the more eclectic albums. You know, the good ones. I'll never understand my
tribe.
The Cure
Years Of Operation 1977-present
Fits Between Echo & The Bunnymen and New Order
Personal
Correspondence Like
Cocteau Twins last week, The Cure were one of those cross-clique bands at my
school, liked by goths, brains, and even some jocks and punks. (The same friend
who loaned me Crass turned me on to Pornography, the ferociously bleak Cure album
that doesn't get brought up much when The Cure is discussed.) For me, what's
always attracted me to The Cure is the cleanness of songs like "Jumping
Somebody Else's Train" and "In Between Days," which—like New Order and
early R.E.M.—make guitar-based music as viably danceable as techno-pop.
Similarly, The Cure have managed to make mopey music relatively
accessible—and even upbeat in its way. Early on, Robert Smith figured out
how to extract that element of post-punk that was radio-ready, and to keep it
stable while surrounding it with the meandering songs of loss that continue to
assure his credibility among the young and sad.
Enduring presence? Unlike a lot of the bands I grew
up with, The Cure are still being listened to by the rising generations—either
because they've been name-checked by bands like blink-182, or because their
songs show up in commercials and movie soundtracks, or because they've just
become one of those bands, like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that gets passed down
without anyone saying much about it.
Cursive
Years Of Operation 1995-present
Fits Between The Cure and Bright Eyes
Personal
Correspondence As
I've written before, I missed out on the whole "emo" revolution as it was
happening, so I mainly caught up with the flagship bands and fellow travelers after they'd released their much-beloved
early singles and fumbling first LPs. I have no special attachment to path Tim
Kasher and his Cursive-mates took to get where they are now, though when I
listen to the early songs collected on The Differences Between Houses And
Homes, I can
imagine how they might've been a revelation to the young punk fans who heard
them at the time. Me, I started with The Ugly Organ, Kasher's best-realized album to
date—and one of the top 100 rock albums of the '00s, in my
opinion—so the music that proceeds that record seems more like steps on a
journey, with The Ugly Organ being the destination. While balancing dreamy, textured confessionals and edgy, abrasive
spazz-rockers, Kashner rips himself open, beginning by chastising himself for
turning his romantic pain into music, and then noting how his sensitivity has
proven to be an effective tool for getting women into bed (even if those women
worry that they're going to be turned back into songs).† What's most impressive about Kasher's
songwriting is how thorough his lyrics
are. He comes up with an idea—like imagining himself as a single father,
or becoming the sex slave of one of his one-night stands—and he carries
it through from start to finish. People mock "emo"—and even Kasher
has qualms about the term I'm sure—but Cursive a their best give the
genre a good name.
Enduring
presence? Cursive's
last album, Happy Hollow, was a real letdown, and though Help Wanted Nights—the most recent album by
Kasher's other band, The Good Life—was a little better, it lacked
memorable songs. Sometimes Kasher's thoroughness gets the better of him, and he
tries to carry a single idea over the course of a whole album, and has to
stretch to come up with songs that fit the theme. But he's a talented guy, and
young. I suspect he'll turn it around before too long, probably by finding
another musical direction to go in besides moony laments and raging art-punk.
Curt Boettcher
Years Of Operation 1964-83
Fits Between Brian Wilson and Bobby Sherman
Personal
Correspondence
Remember what I wrote above about how Credence Clearwater Revival is so
overexposed that the best way to understand them is to listen to the songs that don't get played
on the radio? That's a theory of music appreciation I call "shadowing," where
you learn to re-appreciate a musical act or trend by spending time in the long
shadow of its influence. The trick is to understand that the shadows are the
shadows, not the object. That's what a lot of music geeks miss, as they
rediscover forgotten R&B; artists or regional power-pop bands, and try to
argue that these acts are better than the ones that had all the hits. Most often, it's not
that they're better, but that they're refreshingly unfamiliar. I'd never argue
that '60s producer/songwriter/non-star Curt Boettcher was better than Brian Wilson, or that the albums
he masterminded with makeshift bands like The Ballroom, Millennium, Sagittarius
and The Goldebriars was better than The Mamas & The Papas. But Boettcher was working
some of the same veins, creating an audio fantasy world of pristine beauty and
forced innocence. As a solo artist, sunshine-pop icon Boettcher doesn't hold
much fascination, except for dogged fanboys like me. He completed and released
one album, There's An Innocent Face, in 1973, working in a light country-rock style that
doesn't really reflect the trippy proto-bubblegum he recorded in the '60s; and
he recorded a slew of demos and barely released singles, trying to convince the
major label mavens of the '70s that he still had the hitmaking touch he'd shown
back when he produced artists like The Association and Tommy Roe. Boettcher
considered himself a commercial artist first and foremost, which is why his
lyrics are essentially fluff. His art is bound up in the way he tried to stay
one step ahead of the styles of his times, and create a sound in the studio
that would take the pop world by storm. The fun of following
Boettcher—which, by the way, is an endeavor that requires hunting far and
wide for the records he worked on or masterminded, many of which remain
unreleased—is in hearing how he tried to cash in, while retaining his
preoccupation with gentility and wide-eyed wonder.
Enduring presence? With each passing year it seems
like I see Curt Boettcher's name dropped more often in music reviews, so maybe
he's securing his place alongside Wilson, Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche as one
of the '60s studio wizards who helped define the sound of the era. If some book
publisher would like to give me some money so that I can take a year off and
write a book about Boettcher, I'd do my best to make him better-known. Are you
listening, book publishers?
Daft Punk
Years Of
Operation 1993-present
Fits Between Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder
Personal
Correspondence If I
have a bias against contemporary dance music, it may be because I want every
album to sound like Daft Punk's Discovery, one of those rare records that sounded timeless
from the moment it was released. I know some DP fans prefer the more hardcore
house music of the French duo's debut album Homework, but that record always seemed to
me to be too tied to the clubs, with its repetition tooled for dancing and
intoxication. Discovery is more varied and fun. It's unapologetically disco, yet
modernized—even futurized. It takes sounds we're all familiar with
recombines them into some kind of pop ideal.
Enduring presence? Daft Punk's third album Human
After All was a
minor misfire, but thanks to last year's highly conceptual live act—and
the support of fans like Kanye West and LCD Soundsystem—the band seems to
be more popular than ever. Even if they never top Discovery, they could still pull a
Kraftwerk and just put on exciting shows based on their old stuff for as long
as they care to. Heck, I'll go see them anytime.
The Dambuilders
Years Of Operation 1989-97
Fits Between Camper Van Beethoven and Pixies
Personal
Correspondence
There are probably a dozen or more bands I've loved who had a fair shot to make
the big time then botched the play, but few of them were as surprising to me as
The Dambuilders. They seemed to be handling everything so well, starting with a
few buzzed-over, impossible-to-find indie LPs and EPs, then making their major
label debut with Encendedor, a compilation of their best early work, highlighted by the
single "Shrine" (a Cure-informed anthem about how rock can unite people from
different cultures). They had a fairly distinctive sound, with thick bass
carrying the hook and shrill violin serving the function of a new wave
synthesizer; and they even had a good marketing gimmick, having promised to
write a song for every state in the union. But The Dambuilders' two post-Encendedor albums dropped the state motif, and
the latter of those albums, Against The Stars, went for a polished sound that
only proved that some bands sound better a little ramshackle. I've no doubt The
Dambuilders' ex-members have their share of label horror stories, to help
explain why they didn't succeed. But as I recall, Ruby Red and Against The Stars didn't get the same kind of glowing
reviews that Encendedor did either. Mistakes were made.
Enduring
presence? The
Dambuilders probably weren't big enough to merit an anthology, but boy they'd
be well-served by one, because they had some really good songs. We'll probably
have to wait 10 years or so before some kid who grew up loving "Shrine" gets to
sit behind the desk of some fly-by-night indie and put together the Dambuilders
best-of he or she has always dreamed of. But by then will probably all be
living underwater. Or in caves. Or in underwater caves.
Stray Tracks
From the fringes of the collection, a
few songs to share….
The
Compulsive Gamblers, "I Don't Want To Laugh At You"
As rock
auteurs go, Greg Cartwright is more a Chet Atkins than a Jack White. He works
as much behind the scenes as in front, and in the half-dozen bands he's been a
part of, his contributions have frequently been collaborative. So Cartwright's
going to be popping up a lot in this series, and as with Curt Boettcher, I'll
try to piece together Cartwright's appeal through a song here and an act there.
For example: this loose semi-ballad from Cartwright's defunct roots-rock band
The Compulsive Gamblers. To some extent, "I Don't Want To Laugh At You" is a
little bit of nothing: a tossed-off take that borrows a melodic line from The
Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" and doesn't sweat such niceties as structure and
a chorus. But really, it doesn't much matter what Cartwright plays. This song
isn't about musical expression, it's about human expression. It has the quality
of a hand-written note, quickly jotted down to refer to later. The sentiment
behind the song is completely of the moment.
The
Cookies, "Wounded"
The
reliable Rhino Handmade compilation Come To The Sunshine yields another treasure with this
disjointed piece of sunshine-pop theatrics, relating one young woman's absolute
terror at the prospect of losing her virginity to the wrong man. Settle back
for three minutes. This is a song that goes places.
Cory
Branan, "The Prettiest Waitress In Memphis"
Early in my
freelance career, I wrote a sprawling, unfortunately gonzo-inspired story for a
Nashville 'zine about the city's continuing allure to aspiring songwriters, and
as research for the piece I spent a few nights haunting the back of the cafés
and nightclubs that host showcases and open mic nights. A song like this funny,
rollicking love story would've killed at one of those nights, which shouldn't be surprising,
since young singer-songwriter Cory Branan is a product of that culture of "How
can you hold a jaded audience's attention for three full minutes?" There's a
limit to how much of this kind of thing I can stand, but this song is a lot of
fun.
Count
Basie & His Orchestra, "That Rhythm Man"
Though this
performance was recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1939, it's thoroughly rock 'n'
roll, in that it's about pure abandon. It's exciting to imagine how a song like
this—so jumpy, so free—made the young people of the late '30s feel.
The
Coup, "Everythang"
I was
already a fan of The Coup before I saw Freestyle: The Art Of Rhyme—a short-ish documentary about
rap battles—but I was especially impressed with Boots Riley's comment in
the film that while he admires freestylers, he feels he owes it to his fans to
write his rhymes down, and work on them until he gets them right. The Coup take
the same approach to their albums, which are so thought-out and full of
surprises that they make the majority of hip-hop seem not just mundane, but
pointless. Frankly, The Coup should be a "piece of the puzzle," except that I
still haven't caught up with the band's full discography. Listening to Party
Music and Steal
This Album again
this week, I realized that I haven't given them enough of my time. So I'll just
give it up for Party Music's lead-off track, a perfect example of how Bootsy and his
boys make subversive social protest sound like a real good time.
Cream,
"Badge"
When it
comes to Cream, I'm more into the fuzzy pop songs than the heavier-than-rock
blues-based jams. (Give me more "I Feel Free," less "Sunshine Of Your Love.")
I've always been a fan of "Badge" for the way it peels apart in the middle, and
gives Eric Clapton a chance to solo in a more open space, away from the tight
blues derivations that start the song. When the bluesy sound returns in the
final 30 seconds, it's lost a lot of its rigidity. Clapton has cleared the air.
The
Creation, "I Am The Walker"
These '60s
mod favorites were kind of The Who II, following the same formula of one part
R&B;, one part primitive proto-punk, and one part English music hall. The
cycles of pound and relent on "I Am The Walker" are all about drawing attention
to the recording itself, where all kinds of rumbling mini-explosions are
creating the illusion of conflict and drama. This is not the kind of song other
bands cover. They want its sound, not its hook.
Creeper
Lagoon, "Dreaming Again"
San
Francisco indie-rock act Creeper Lagoon recorded half of a great debut album
and followed it up with a decent EP, and then—like The Dambuilders before
them and Wheat later on—they got their crack at the majors, and recorded
a big league album, Take Back The Universe And Give Me Yesterday, that tried waaaaay too hard. It's
not a bad record, but if you listen close to "Dreaming Again"—one of the
better songs off their debut album I Become Small And Go—you should be able to hear
both how a label might imagine it would sound better pumped up, and also hear how too much
studio fuss would ruin it. The truth is that this song—and Creeper Lagoon
in general—too accomplished to stay indie and too anonymous to break
wide. I'm pretty sure this is the kind of middling song/band that people hate
when they hate on indie-rock as a movement and a sound. But my heart goes out
to these kinds of acts, who are good at what they do, but never great.
Crippled
Pilgrims, "Down Here"
Maybe it
would better for bands like Creeper Lagoon if they never even got a glimpse at
rock stardom, but instead stayed on the level of regional semi-legends, like
the largely forgotten mid-'80s DC-area college-rock act Crippled Pilgrims—who
recorded one EP and one LP, got some airplay on university campuses with their
Feelies/Meat Puppets-style roots-drone, and then faded into the memories of the
few thousand people who cared. I'm not even sure how I first encountered Crippled
Pilgrims. I think a friend of mind loaned me their album and EP without me even
asking, and I taped the best songs from each onto one side of a 90-minute
cassette that I played quite a bit in high school. A few years ago, some indie
label put the complete Crippled Pilgrims output on a single CD, and when I
bought it out of nostalgia, I learned that they were most definitely not the great-lost band of the '80s.
But they had a nice jangly sound, and some appealingly fluid songs. Like this
one.
The
Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
If you want
to understand Phil Spector's "wall of sound," spin this single, which uses an
orchestra's-worth of instruments to elevate routine teen romance to the level
of earth-shattering drama—which, of course, is exactly how it feels to
the teens in question. Note also lines like "He kissed me in a way I've never
been kissed before," which would seem to indicate that Spector and his
co-writers are sliding something smutty past the censors.
(Side note:
For some, it may be hard to hear "Then He Kissed Me" without thinking of the
way Martin Scorsese used it in the Goodfellas scene below. Here, the song
represents a kind of innocence, and contrasts ironically to the scene of a
killer and crook showing off for his best girl. Of course the real irony is
that the song may not have been that innocent to begin with.)
Culture
Club, "I'll Tumble 4 Ya"
In
retrospect, it might've been better if Boy George had just been openly gay from
the start. Playing the androgyny game made him look like a garden-variety
weirdo, which made him a safe target for the jokes of late night comedians,
which in turn reinforced the notion that young gay men are better off keeping
their mouths shut, lest they be mocked. Of course it didn't help either that so
much of Culture Club's music was insipid—and not in an intentional, campy
way. They did have their moments, like this bouncy single, which runs with the
glossy early '80s UK sound of bands like Aztec Camera and Haircut 100. Yet even
here, there's evidence of the "Cornershop effect" that marred so many Culture
Club songs. Put plainly, the chorus gets annoying after a while. And the song's
not even three minutes long!
Curtis
Mayfield, "Pusherman"
I usually
try to shy away from the obvious choice when it comes to musicians who've had
careers as long and varied as Curtis Mayfield's, but here I can't help it. I
just love "Pusherman" so much: from the way Mayfield's friendly voice makes
drug-dealing sound downright neighborly to the way the bongos gradually assert
themselves as the song's lead instrument. If I could have a running soundtrack
to my life, it would sound a lot like this song. (Only maybe with different lyrics.)
The D4,
"Get Loose"
Here's a
relic from the recent past, when record labels were scouring the globe looking
for the next White Stripes/Strokes hitmaker to lead the largely media-created
"Rock Is Back" movement. Ultimately, The D4 were no more exciting than The
Datsuns or The Vines, but they did record one ripping single. It would make a
great Jock Jam, if some arena manager wanted to revive it.
Dale
Watson, "Justice For All"
This would
be the opposite of the "fun" open-mic-night singer-songwriter crowd-grabber as
described in the Cory Branan entry above. This is one of those songs that
leaves the crowd stunned and a little confused. When I interviewed Dale Watson
for Performing Songwriter magazine last year, he was more comfortable talking about
"Justice For All"'s Johnny Cash-inspired sound than he was about its meaning,
but I did get the sense that if he and Steve Earle ever met at a party, they'd
probably avoid talking about capital punishment.
Listened
to, unremarked upon:
Communiqué, The Complete Strategist, The Concretes, Condor,
MomentsConnie Price & The Keystones, Console, The Contingencies, Controlling The Famous,
Copeland, The Cops, The Coral Sea, Cordero, Cory Branan,
Corey Hart, Corinna Repp, Cornelius Brothers, The,
CoronadosCouch, The Cougars,
Cougars, The Count Five, Counting Crows, The Court & Spark, Cowboy Jack
Clement, Cracker, The Craig, Craig G, Crash Vegas, Crazy
Elephant, Creed, Crescent & Frost, The, The Cribs, Criteria, Crooked Hook, Crowded House,
CrestsThe Crunchies, Crystal Skulls, The Cuff Links, Cul,
De SacCurrituck County, Curumin, Cut Copy, Cynthia G. Mason,
Cyril Stapleton, D12, Daedelus, Dag, The Daily Flash, Dale Vaughn and Dälek
Next week: From Damien Jurado to Dexy's
Midnight Runners, plus a few words on Music Nerds and Delicate Geniuses