O Song!

Okkervil River - Pop Lie

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:38:18 GMT

I had stopped writing in O_Song for three main reasons.

1) I got busy. There was a thesis to write, classes to teach, bands to play in, and writing about music fell by the wayside. But I guess I'm less busy now.

2) I became unable to use the hosting where I put my mp3s. But these days, I can probably get away with linking to an mp3 hosted on a record company website for most of the things I want to talk about.

3) I feel like I had become too detached. When I first started the blog I would post about what the songs made me feel, but as the arc of the story progressed, and I felt pressure to just post, I became more likely to discuss the song with more detachment - the chorus does this, the verse does that. And I didn't really like that. It felt like a lie. A pop lie?

So this Okkervil River song, from last year's album The Stand-Ins, is true. A lot of the songs we listen to are basically lies. Music is all about emotion, more or less. And, sometimes, it's pretty easy to pick a liar's song - obvious careerism, too much focus on style, and not enough on content, and sentiments that are too bland or too easy to be real. These are the songs "Pop Lie" presumably targets.

There's a certain kind of person who wants these easy, bland sentiments (a Celine Dion fan, for example, if you've read Carl Wilson's excellent book). I have a kind of intuition that people who fall for the easy sentiments aren't particularly self-reflective, and probably don't have very little idea why they do the things they do. But maybe that's just my prejudices.

The thing is, musicians are like everyone else. We often do not understand why we feel the emotions we feel, and indeed often do not realise we are feeling emotions. We lie to ourselves just as much as anybody else. The conscious act of editing a song into the dynamic catchy kind of thing that a bunch of people would want to listen to further distorts the emotions that got transmitted into the song when the initial inspiration struck. The upshot of this is that most of the songs out there are emotionally untrue, or at least emotionally misdirected, at some level.

This means that "Pop Lie", apart from being true, is a lie. The fact that the final verse in "Pop Lie" explicitly says the song is a lie ("the liar who lied in this song") is also itself an emotional lie, especially when set against the style of Will Sheff's singing, where his lack of vocal control comes across as emotion being portrayed, and the visceral immediacy of the song (which, of course, uses all the tricks of the catchy pop songs that Sheff knows). He sings that it's a lie, but he sings it and plays it like it's not.

The thing is, we need the lies. We need lies to live by. Otherwise, for most people, everyday life would be unbearable. This is why those songs with the bland, easy sentiments are so popular sometimes; the more unbearable life is, in fact, the more you want to believe the easy lies. So even if "you're lying when you're singing along", perhaps that's not a bad thing. Sometimes the truth isn't what we need to hear.

tim.

I Won't Be Found

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:20:47 GMT

I think I lost interest in this blog because it used to be about songs that made me feel things, and what it was about the songs that made me feel things. But as the history of the blog progressed, the writing became less about what made me feel things and became more about things which interested me on an intellectual and rational level. Which is understandable in a way; I was doing a PhD where the intellectual and rational level of writing is paramount. And I had also considered this blog a sort of practice writing area - if I got lots of writing practice here, it might make it easier there. And, maybe it helped with the PhD because I've finished it (apart from some apparently minor changes).

(The Tallest Man On Earth's "I Won't Be Found", from the album "Shallow Graves" (2008))

Anyway, The Tallest Man On Earth's "I Won't Be Found" is fairly intensely traditional folk; the song is a reconstitution of sorts of the old folk tune "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground", but I don't think it matters that it is. It's just a guitar and a voice and a song. Kristian Mattson (i.e., he who is The Tallest Man On Earth) furiously fingerpicks throughout the song, letting cascades of fingerpicked notes ring out, providing a countermelody to the (strong) sung melody line. His voice frequently sounds on the edge of falling apart, as if he's belting it out as hard as he can; there are rough edges in the voice every so often, as if certain tones make his voicebox rattle and his throat crack. With singing like that, you (well, I) believe every word he says.

The lyrics are elliptical, with mentions of freeways, the Serengeti, and lizards in the spring, but they seem to me to speak of a desire for hibernation away from prying eyes (like a mole deep in the ground); as if he's come to the end of something and has to lay low to regenerate himself. Hmm, now why would that appeal to me?

tim.

If you'll take Jack, my dog.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:09:22 GMT

The Staples Singers - "The Weight"
(4:34, 6.1mb)
Track 6, The Best of the Staples Singers, 1990.

I've been going through a massive phase of liking The Band recently. I even bought their mid-70s covers album, "Moondog Matinee" the other day. I don't really know what it is about The Band that makes me want to listen to them (beyond the obvious, like the beautiful singing, Garth Hudson's organ playing, great songs, and so forth). It's something ineffable, some feeling in the music, in the playing, which communicates a certain seductive attitude towards the world.

In the Scorcese-directed film, The Last Waltz, about the Band's final concert (complete with big name guests - Dylan, Neil Young, etc etc), the Staples Singers sing a few verses of perhaps the best-known song by the Band, "The Weight". I was curious about the Staples Singers based on this performance, and I downloaded their greatest hits from eMusic. And the music of the Staples Singers has a similar ineffable feeling to it. It's an audible warmth and joy; it feels calming even when its frenetic.

The lyrics of "The Weight", written by Robbie Robertson, are mysterious nonsense, in the tradition of Bob Dylan (in fact, the song would fit perfectly on Dylan's contemporaneous John Wesley Harding); there is an impression of narrative, and there's a feeling of deeper, more portentous symbolism that you're somehow missing (i.e., that Weird Old America stuff Greil Marcus goes on about). In the Band's version of the song, some of this deep portent is inherent in the performance. It's a little weird and mysterious, and should be. The song has a deceptive simplicity; it's easy enough to play, but you suspect it really only works if you have the musical groove and the complex interaction of personalities that the Band or the Staples Singers have.

The gospel-derived singing style of the Staples Singers, however, gives the song/lyrics a different feel; it draws attention to words like "Nazareth" and "Moses" in the lyrics, to the symbolism of people and places named after biblical references. But more than that, the performance is fundamentally about the audible warmth and joy in the family's voices. There's something moving in the way that they combine in gospel harmony on the line "put the line right on me", sounding slightly cacophonous and beautiful, and briefly rejecting the laidback rhythmic groove for a more rigid pulse. Of course, one shouldn't forget the Stax rhythm section, who have a certain lust for life and groove in their playing.

tim.

Jamie Liddell - Wait For Me

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:42:51 GMT

This is my first post for some time, largely because I had a PhD thesis to write. I guess it's ewritten. I'll try and be reasonably regular from now on.

Jamie Liddell - "Wait For Me"
(3:29, 4.8mb)
Track 2, Jim, 2008.

I've decided recently that there is such a thing as good music and bad music. The difference between good and bad music, to me, doesn't have much to do with the genre of the music, the political overtones of the music, or the influences and musical references in the music (that's another story). For me, the difference lays within the ability of the musicians (and/or producer) to say, musically, whatever it is that they want to say (there is the question of whether to attribute the message to the author, or whether th message is simply the song, but that's another story too).

Most of the musicians who are typically discussed in discussions of taste (e.g., Vampire Weekend) are mostly pretty good in this sense. Musicians who don't make good music; you rarely hear about them, because the music they make is rarely worth discussing. I won't name names, but we're talking about the 75% of the other bands on the bill that never quite get a fanbase and make polite music which might appeal to fans of other bands but never quite has anything to say.

In this sense, Jamie Liddell's "Wait For Me" is undeniably good music. Lyrically, the lyrics are fairly straightforward. You don't need to get that far past the title to get the gist - e.g., that the singer is trying to convince a lover that, while he may be absent, he will be faithful, and that the lover should also be faithful. Musically, though, it's not the slow jam or acoustic folk that those lyrics suggest; instead, the song has a gleeful bounce. It's as if the singer knows that his lover will be faithful, and is, in singing about their absence from each other, celebrating the strength of their love.

Liddell's vocal performances have the kind of conviction and intensity that's typically missing from your Idol winners. And the piano playing on the track is pretty astonishing, especially the solo. But what really gets me about the song is its sheer effervescent joy for life. You can ascribe influences and sonic influences to the music (e.g., Motown, and in particular Stevie Wonder, who has a similar exuberance) and make your mind up about the politics of love described in the song, but my suspicion is that you'd be better off not worrying so much, and just listening to it as good music.

tim.

An old man's wrinkly smile at the plus one.

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:20:55 GMT

Brian Wilson - "Midnight's Another Day"
(4:17, 8.00mb)
That Lucky Old Sun, 2007.
mp3 available from brianwilson.com (or usually is - when I just checked it the site seemed to be down).

This blog has been a bit quiet recently because I've got a PhD thesis to write. I still have a thousand songs I want to tell the world about. Anyway, my girlfriend, Jadey of pet_studies fame, this year started doing a PhD thesis on the Beach Boys, and this means that I will have to overhear/listen to the Beach Boys incessantly for another 2 and a half years at the least. It's a good thing that a lot of the tasty delights of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys are subtle, and only enfold after a few listens. This song appears to contain several of those tasty delights.

"Midnight's Another Day" is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has written for at least 20 years. Apparently from some song cycle called That Lucky Old Sun, the song has a sparse, dignified sadness to it, the song of a man who's been to some dark places but somehow survived. The song has a strange restlessness to it, a sense of having lived through it, which prevents it from being saccharine despite the 'love conquers all' theme of the lyrics, and there's enough of those unexpected Brian Wilson Chords. Brian sounds there on the vocal take, avoiding that odd nasal barking he's had a habit of falling into at times.

You get the impression that That Lucky Old Sun, when and if it gets released (the amount of unreleased Brian Wilson solo work out there), might be an old's man wrinkly SMiLE, what with Van Dyke Parks helping out with the lyrics like he did on SMiLE, and what sounds like the SMiLE backing band playing in a subtle and suitable style.

Okkervil River - "Plus Ones"
(3:43, 9.57mb)
Track 5, The Stage Names, 2007.

You probably all know this by now, seeing as they mention it in every review of the album, but the general conceit of the song "Plus Ones" is that the lyrics use clever references to pop songs with numbers in the title. Plus one. We're talking about the 100th Luftballoon, talking about the 51st way to leave your lover, shooting up 9 miles high, and being in Cell 45. It's the kind of songwriting lyrical virtuosity that you can't help but admire. The thing that makes the lyrics, and the song good, though, isn't this lyrical conceit, but the way it is used to suggest the theme of things just being around for a bit too long, of not having anything left; the song, at heart, is about a relationship that's just faded away slowly until there's nothing left. Considering that The Stage Names, if anything, is a concept album about what it's really like to be in Okkervil River, the girl the song was written for was probably a 'plus one' on a guestlist somewhere, somewhen - one of the few perks of being the partner of a musician. So there's some sort of resonance with the wider themes of the album, too.

What's interesting to me about this song, beyond its fantastic lyrics, lovely melody, and interesting instrumentation (not to mention the way the guitar meanders for a couple of seconds before the song starts for real, which for some reason catches me), is this: Will Scheff stole my idea. Couple of years ago, I wrote a song where the lyrics were largely based clever inversions of commercial pop songs - sample line: "you wanted a river, but I could only cry you a creek". I think I was trying to make some point about what someone's music taste suggested about them. My song also had the same, well, end-of-relationship theme as well (though Sheff's song is considerably more charitable in tone than mine). It's a strange feeling to hear a song that's doing many of the same things that a song you've written does, except that it does it better; Sheff's song is more elegant, flows better and has more poetry in the lyrics. Maybe this is what it's like to be Noel Gallagher or the guy from Jet. In the end, though, his song is his and mine is mine; we're expressing different feelings in different ways, despite some family resemblance.

I never really got into their last album, Black Sheep Boy, beyond the sheer Bluebottle Kiss-esque emotional intensity of "For Real". Maybe I should go back and listen again; The Stage Names is an incredibly strong album, full of interesting ideas and hooks and sounds. Maybe it would have been better to write a post about "John Allyn Smith Sails" instead. "John Allyn Smith Sails" is not only equally as impressive as "Plus Ones", but it also manages to reinterpret "Sloop John B" (made famous by the Beach Boys) as an ironic metaphor for death and suicide. There would have been a certain elegant poetry to the post, it would have flowed better.

But fuck that.

tim.
PS. Note to Will Sheff: what about not needing your loving on the ninth day of the week, not being fucked trying to walk the five hundred and first mile, the leaky boat sinking in the seventh month, the 20th nervous breakdown, 12:01am in a perfect world, or the forgotten eighth nation in the army, or the 36th rainy day woman? and of course there's the one after 909.

Never Tell The Polite

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:37:33 GMT

The Silversun Pickups - "Little Lover's So Polite"
(4:59, 9.57mb)
Track 4, Carnavas, 2006.

Carnavas absolutely stinks of the Smashing Pumpkins. Sure, the band probably mentions influences like My Bloody Valentine in interviews, denying that they've ever heard of the Pumpkins, but the music just stinks of the Pumpkins. And the teenage Smashing Pumpkins obsessive hidden deep in my musical bones finds Carnavas pretty irresistable. Warm, fuzzy guitars? Check. Warm fuzzy guitars playing pretty awesome riffs? Check. Hypnotic bass riffs? Check. Oddly feminine lead vocals sung by a man, who gets a bit screechy every so often? Check.

If I'm going to go down the "they sound like Smashing Pumpkins" road, I should point out that the Smashing Pumpkins-ness is the Smashing Pumpkins of 1992 or so - the sound isn't quite as huge as Siamese Dream, and certainly isn't quite as gothic and angsty as they got later on. "Drown", the Pumpkins track from the Singles soundtrack, is probably the closest reference.

It's unfair to compare them to the Pumpkins with this much detail, of course; if you listen to "Little Lover's So Polite" based on my recommendation, you're going to see them in the light of the Smashing Pumpkins reference, and while it's interesting that a band sounds like they're from 1992 rather than 1982 in the current post-punk/dance-punk obsessed musical climate, the Silversun Pickups do have their own sound, and obviously have a different aesthetic to the Smashing Pumpkins. It's not quite as ambitious a sound as the Smashing Pumpkins, the drummer is no Jimmy Chamberlin, there's atmospheric keyboards down the back of the mix. The lead singer doesn't really sound as much like Billy Corgan as I'm making out. They seem a little more interested in sound than the Smashing Pumpkins, and there's something of the aesthetic of indie rock of this century there.

But still, maybe it's because I was nuts about the Pumpkins in 1997, but I can't listen to the Pickups without thinking of the Pumpkins. It feels like a new Smashing Pumpkins album, one I haven't listened to hundreds of times. And maybe that ain't bad.

The Free Design - "Never Tell The World"
(2:32, 4.74mb)
Track 10, Kites Are Fun: The Best Of The Free Design, 1967/1998.

I discovered The Free Design listed under the "Sunshine Pop" genre on allmusicguide, and they're certainly sunny. They were sibling harmonisers from 1967/1968 (and sound like it), and they had a small hit with a song called "Kites Are Fun" and that was about it. But, as they usually say, this band should have been bigger than they were. They seem to be besotted by odd, jazzy chords in their harmonies. Their harmonies interweave, in counterpoint, in a way that almost sounds like a Renaissance madrigal. They have cultured, sophisticated Latin rhythms chugging along in the background, and the overall effect is somewhat like the Mamas and the Papas singing over music written and orchestrated by Burt Bacharach. The lead singer of the Free Design has a pure, gentle and perhaps motherly voice, reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan, or perhaps a more tuneful Nico.

"Never Tell The World", a song about keeping mum about one's love, musically is largely interesting because of the effective call and response between the bass and organ in the verses. But the Free Design are all about the vocal harmonies. Bacharachian music has a tendency to be a bit too clever clever - all those sophisticated rhythms and harmonies and playing - and thus lack real emotion. It tends to take distinctive and very talented vocalists to pull the style off (e.g., Dionne and Dusty). The Free Design, however, have such a purity of spirit in their vocals that the Bacharachian tendency is negated, and it simply comes across as heartbreakingly beautiful.

tim.

Shackin' up with the Hussy.

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:28:47 GMT

Crystal Skulls - "Hussy"
(4:39, 6.04mb)
Track 2, Blocked Numbers, 2005.

While the music of "Hussy" sonically resembles Spoon in its musical economy and attention to the groove in service of the song, and while lead singer Christian Wargo vaguely resembles the lead singer of the Walkmen in that there's a similar amount of gravel in his voice, they're something different than the comparisons suggest. The Crystal Skulls have a certain cold, measured feel to them. It's not that they're unemotional, but its more than they're not giving it away just yet.

The lyrics are full of ambiguous sexual politics - the chorus goes "you took the hand of an honest man/ you tried to make him understand you're not a hussy anymore", but the lack works entirely because of this detached approach, though. In the hands of other singers, the lyrics could take on a smirk (e.g., "you're still the same hussy you were when you were with me, you're just in denial"), or an overly moralistic tone (e.g., "hussies are bad! i'm glad you're not bad anymore"), but Wargo's singing seems curiously unemotional, as if he's not making any judgements about hussies one way or another, but is instead just describing.

Kenny Loggins - "I'm Alright"
(3:48, 6.94mb)
Caddyshack Original Soundtrack, 1980.

"I'm Alright" appears as an important plot point in the video podcast mockumentary series Yacht Rock, which documented the genesis of the smoothest tunes in the period from 1976 to 1983. As a genre, yacht rock is Hall and Oates, Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross, Steely Dan, and Toto. And Loggins. "I'm Alright", though, doesn't quite fit in the genre; the producers of Yacht Rock use it to show that Kenny Loggins has tossed aside the raw power of smooth music, and embraced the heady embrace of rocking out.

Rocking out is relative. It's not Slayer by any stretch of the imagination. "I'm Alright" is nonetheless fascinating. While its prominence as a theme song to a popular comedy and its radio-ready sheen made it one of the biggest hits of Loggins' career, it's quite a bizarre song, schizophrenic, and oddly structured. It sounds more like 5 songs in a megamix than one song, rapidly cycling through different sections. The jerky drum rhythms and even the tone of Loggins' voice suggest Lindsey Buckingham's off-kilter work on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Elsewhere there's a Beach Boys-styled a capella breakdown, new wavey rhythms, Mellencamp-esque stadium rocker rootsy rockabilly rhythms, and odd "dub dub dub dub" vocals. Lyrically it's the kind of libertarian defiance 80s stadium rockers could toss off in their sleep - "I'm alright/ Don't nobody worry 'bout me/ You got to gimme a fight/ Why don't you just let me be".

The schizophrenia of the song can be read, it occurs to me, as either Loggins asserting his alrightness - I'm gonna do what I want, and if that includes random Beach Boys a capella breakdowns, then dammit, I'm doing that - or Loggins negating the lyrics with off-kilter, non-alright music. Maybe it's both.

The best bit in the song, though, comes just as the song is about to settle back into the catchy section I'd call the chorus. Loggins sings "I'm..." as if he's about to start the chorus ("I'm alright/ Don't nobody worry 'bout me"), and then waits for the rest of the bar, as a noticeably droll bass vocal sings "boom boom boom", before continuing. He's a trixy hobbit, isn't he, precious?

tim.

Rocking Is Golden.

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:05:51 GMT

Richard In Your Mind - "Boat Is Rocking"
(3:24, 3.12mb)
myspace/triple J unearthed tracks, 2007.

Richard In Your Mind have left me with a smile on my face when I've seen them live. There's something infectious about their woozy brand of whimsical psychedelic pop explorations. Frontman Richard, in particular, has a nerdy charisma, willing you to join his world. They're the kind of band that would proclaim on their myspace that "If you look at your watch during a Richard In Your Mind show, you will notice that the numbers have disappeared leaving only the word NOW in their place". Which in a way, is true enough.

As far as I know, they unfortunately haven't properly released any CDs yet, but their songs are downloadable from the Triple J Unearthed pages, which they incidentally won the NSW heat of (or something like that). I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they rise up and become critical darlings of the blogosphere.

"Boat Is Rocking" is one of a few standout tracks. Like much of their work, it is a grab bag of bits and pieces from disparate genres, improbably lashed together. It starts with a satisfyingly out of tune acoustic guitar plonk, as if they have the blues. Richard raps out the lyrics, with a rhythm and style not a million miles from Beck's kind of thing. Lashings of tremeloey spaghetti Western guitar coexist with what sound like otherworldly harmonicas and other random psychedelic noises, over what's simply an awesome groove from the rhythm section. "Well starlight hangs down right into your blender/ When the fire breaks down you'll bring the bowser in to mend her" - As you can see, the lyrics don't make sense. But in music like this, it makes sense that they don't.

Somehow all these elements coalesce into a coherent mix which is original, insistent, well-arranged and really fucking catchy. Musically, think Mollusk era Ween, Mellow Gold Beck. But NOW.

America - "Golden"
(4:18, 8.36mb)
Track 4, Here And Now, 2007.

America - yes, they of the Horse With No Name - have just released a new album. It's produced by Adam Schlesinger of the Fountains of Wayne and James Iha (ex-Smashing Pumpkins, if you wondered what he was up to these days). A few entries ago, I talked about the current enthusiasm for bands (e.g., Josh Rouse, The Bees (U.S.), The Shins, Guster, Nada Surf) which resemble the soft rock of the 1970s. Appropriately, we now we have what may well be the ultimate purveyors 1970s soft rock deliberately trying to make this link explicit. America, on Here And Now, don't sound like a band that's been around for almost 40 years. It's partially the production, which is agreeable and shiny, but full of details (not that you'd expect anything different from Schlesinger). And it's partially their predilection on the album for covers of songs by modern songwriters; they do a version of "Always Love" by Nada Surf, and "Work To Do", written by Adam Schlesinger...it definitely sounds like its written by Schlesinger. But mostly, as the bonus disc of live versions of their classics makes very clear, it's just America being America.

"Golden", a cover of the My Morning Jacket song, is cleaner, more pristine than the original. More laidback, too; where My Morning Jacket's version sounds insistent and nervy, America have a lighter, more effortless touch. It's interesting to hear the song sung without the lashings of vocal reverb which My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James invariably smothers over his vocal parts on record. It loses a fair bit of the atmosphere without the vocal reverb, but it's clearer on America's version just how good a song it is.

tim.

Top 10 of 2006. #01. Sean Lennon - Friendly Fire

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:22:05 GMT

Sean Lennon - Friendly Fire
EMI Records

"Dead Meat"
(3:38, 4.84mb)
Track 1.

"Parachute"
(3:19, 4.42mb)
Track 3.

This album got so-so reviews, mostly because people didn't dig much deeper than the surface. He's someone's son apparently. And as a result rich and famous. He looks a lot like both of his parents. Join dots. Dismiss.

The thing is, the deeps of "Friendly Fire" are where it hits. Lennon's singing initially seems kind of emotionally flat, but with repeated listens it becomes obvious that it's not emotional flatness, but, instead, understatement. The songs on Friendly Fire are full of very strong emotions - bitterness, anger, fear, dread, sadness, regret - but Lennon understates it all, lets the emotions show through the cracks in his voice. The songs aren't immediately catchy, but after a few listens they've dig in under your skin, and you can't get rid of them. It becomes clear that Lennon is a first class songwriter, along the lines of Aimee Mann, Elliott Smith, or Jon Brion.

As I said earlier:
When I first downloaded Friendly Fire, I immediately assumed that Jon Brion produced it. It has that Jon Brion sound; think of the lush orchestration and production style combined with the quirky carnivalesque instrumentation that you hear on records by Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann, and Brion himself, or the soundtracks to movies like Punch Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine. The songs are the kind of thing you'd expect to hear on a record produced by Brion - it has the clever Beatlesque chord progressions, the surprising leaps in the melodies, the personal, confessional lyrics. It's actually not produced by Brion. He plays a couple of instruments here and there, though.

Lennon seemed like he had a surprisingly weak voice (especially considering that his father has one of the most powerful voices in Western music) on what I heard from his first album, Into The Sun - you heard him singing flat a little too often. He didn't have the confidence to sell the songs, to harness his voice to the emotions he was singing. His singing on Friendly Fire, in contrast, is affecting. It feels pure. Anyway, I downloaded it and listened a couple of times, and dismissed it mentally as "eh, heard it before". It crept back up on me, though. The melodies insinuated their ways into your life; at first they're unobtrusive, and then they hit you like a sack of bricks.

"Dead Meat" sounds like resignation. It's reminiscent of late-period Elliott Smith, a song like "Happiness" or "Fond Farewell", musically - luscious chords, sophisticated harmonies, complex but understated rhythms (drummer Matt Chamberlain's specialty - listen to the drumming on Fiona Apple's albums). It contrasts with the incredible violence of the lyrics, though, which promise furious vengeance in no uncertain terms. When Lennon sings "you're gonna get what you deserve", he means it. But, in the context of the music, the lyrics take on a different character; Lennon sounds resigned to having to carry out the vengeance. He doesn't really want to, but he knows he should.

"Parachute", on the other hand, is restless, with something underneath the surface that seems profoundly uneasy. A meditation on love, it speaks of the illogicality of emotions, that we have to blindly follow our feelings despite knowing where they might lead us. Lennon seems to believe that we're fated to follow the paths we follow, and can only blindly watch as the path goes in dangerous territory. So thus, "if life is just a stage, let's put on the best show." There's a name for this kind of philosophical viewpoint, but the point isn't really philosophical - the point is more to portray the feeling of knowing you're going to make a big mistake, but knowing you have no choice.

There's a deep core of emotionality on this album that I can hear, that I can't really hear on too many albums from 2006. Maybe other worthy albums were speaking deeper in languages I don't know or didn't hear, but this was the album that moved me the most.

tim.

Top 10 of 2006. #02. Tom Waits - Orphans

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 09:06:59 GMT

Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards
Anti Records

"Long Way Home"
(3:10, 4.69mb)
Disc 2, Track 3.

"Army Ants"
(3:26, 5.28mb)
Disc 3, Track 4.

These days, Tom Waits can just be Tom Waits and get away with it. He's in the business of being Tom Waits. He could release an album of emo covers and it'd probably be good, as long as it was clear that he was just being Tom Waits. His voice is still wonderful; he has the conventional singing ability of a wet balloon, but somehow manages to pull out complicated emotions from his songs using what he has left of his voice. He has a surprisingly versatile voice, does Tom Waits - by turns he can sound like a beatnik, like Louis Armstrong, or like a death metal singer.

Tom Waits' ability to release a 3CD boxset of rarities and still have it at the top of a whole bunch of people's top 10 lists is evidence not only of his songwriting ability but of his ability to be Tom Waits. "Long Way Home" is a beautiful thing that deserves dozens of covers (it was written for Norah Jones, who covered it a few years back). It has a stately, pretty melody, and the song feels like it's going nowhere fast, and is all the better for it; after all, it's a song about not hurrying here or there, and a love song at that. An accordion or harmonium, double bass, and light brushes of drums do the minimum necessary in the background, and Waits' growls are at their sweetest - on this song he sounds like your grandfather's beard when you were 5.

And the great thing about Orphans is that, across the 3 CDs of music, you get the most authentic and varied portrait of Tom Waits being Tom Waits that he's ever released as an album. You get the bawlers, brawlers and bastards - Waits being by turns sentimental, experimental, and just plain mental. He covers the Ramones and Leadbelly, goes down to Fannin Street, and gets all Kerouac. In a way, the most affecting and most surprising song is "Road To Peace", a forceful 7 minute ramble through the war between Palestinians and Israelis, Waits' first real adventure into topical song.

And perhaps the strangest, and silliest, is "Army Ants", where Waits reads out of a kids book about strange insects, over his usual minimalist musical style, that distinctive cross between beatnik jazz and bluesy Captain Beefheartisms. It's strangely fascinating to hear Waits' voice; you can hear his wicked sense of humour and his impeccable comic timing even when he reads out of a kids' book, and you get a sense of his humanism out of it. Somehow.

Top 10 of 2006. #03. Built To Spill - You In Reverse

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 08:51:33 GMT

Built To Spill - You In Reverse
Warner Bros (US)/Spunk (AU)

"Goin' Against Your Mind"
(8:42, 12.84mb)
Track 1.

"Liar"
(5:11, 7.87mb)
Track 3.

"Goin' Against Your Mind", the first track on You In Reverse, is utterly perfectly structured for a song that's almost nine minutes long, with only a couple of verses and a perfunctory chorus. Doug Martsch is a master of dynamics and structure. He knows exactly how to build up a song and then tear it apart again. Part of the secret of "Goin' Against Your Mind" is that Built To Spill's rhythm section have never sounded so alive as they do on You In Reverse - the song comes screaming out of the starting gates, and doesn't let up, building and building for half the song. The other half of the secret of that song - and by extension, Doug Martsch's talent, in general - is that every section of "Goin' Against Your Mind" has a hook to it. You In Reverse, however, isn't just "Goin' Against Your Mind and a bunch of filler" - it's strong and consistent the whole way through.

In particular, "Liar" is the equal of any of the straight pop songs Martsch has written (see "Twin Falls" or "The Plan"). Melancholy in tone, with an aura of reassurance, Martsch sings "no, I wouldn't be a liar, if I told you that", and there's a funny bittersweetness to the phrase, as if he's not quite telling the truth, but doing it for a good reason.

It's wonderful to see a band like Built To Spill firing at all cylinders again.

Top 10 of 2006. #04. The Bees (U.S.) - High Society

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 08:41:09 GMT

The Bees (U.S) - High Society
(As far as I can tell, self-released.)

"The Country Life"
(2:39, 6.08mb)
Track 1.

"Catch Yer Own Train"
(3:16, 7.13mb)
Track 6.

These Bees aren't the ones paying back that chicken. They're the UK Bees. Anyway, in the early years of this decade, various bands made a name for themselves by being nominally indie bands who were making music influenced by 1970s singer-songwriter soft pop - Josh Rouse's 1972, Nada Surf's Let Go, and Guster's Keep It Together, for example. The music had the unassuming, winning melodies and sweet harmonies of bands like Bread, America, or the Eagles but without being quite so...inoffensive. The Bees (U.S.) have made an album that seemingly distils indie soft pop into its purest form.

"The Country Life" was one of the singles of the year for me, as I wrote earlier this year:

"The Country Life" is tremendously catchy, the stereotypical example of an effortless sounding perfect pop song. Reminiscent of the Irish soul shuffle of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", the interesting hooks never stop coming; it starts with an acoustic guitar with a prototypical rock'n'roll riff (see: "Rip This Joint" by the Stones), before a drum fill leads into the first verse. Over a walking bassline and insistent piano, the lead singer, Daniel Tashian, sings, "her Mama thinks I'm made out of money, her Daddy thinks we need more time, sister's got her own opinion". Into the chorus, "So long" goes the hook, with great harmonies. The chorus ends with the lines I'm gone, I'll trade the trouble and the strife for the country life. The angelic harmonies on "country life" makes the country life sound like it's the best thing ever.

My Dad moved to near Mudgee when I was 15. To be honest, I found the country life pretty boring. I'm a city boy at heart.

"Catch Yer Own Train", a break-up song of sorts, with its shimmering honky tonk piano and blasts of harmonica, is surprisingly bluesy, but also unusually upbeat and bouncy for soft pop of this nature. Traces of country and Elvis creep into Tashian's voice as he sings the verses - they are from Nashville after all. By the time the singalong choruses have kicked in, it's sunk under your skin. Perfect pop in it's own little way.

I suspect that the rise of soft indie pop has a lot to do with the rise of emo. The music industry loves a bit of yin and yang sometimes - indie is nothing if not reactive to the mainstream. The mainstream of rock at the moment seems to be emo kids - your Chemical Romances and Panic! at the Discos. Against that, soft pop makes a lot of sense - if the current thing is tortured souls, teenage angst and transmogrified pop punk, there's a certain satisfaction in listening to music that doesn't even know that punk exists, that is too subtle and tasteful to scream out its angst.

I can't wait for indie yacht rock. Bring on all the bands influenced by Hall and Oates, Christopher Cross and Loggins and Messina.

Top 10 of 2006. #05. L.E.O. - Alpacas Orgling

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 08:25:35 GMT

L.E.O. - Alpacas Orgling
Cheap Lullaby Records.

"Goodbye Innocence"
(3:51, 5.61mb)
Track 2.

"Ya Had Me Goin'"
(3:10, 5.05mb)
Track 3.

A year ago, if you had told me that my 2006 list would have an ELO tribute band featuring Hanson higher in the list than an Augie March album, I would have laughed. Ho ho ho. The thing is, "Alpacas Orgling" is #5 in my list, and Augie March is #6.

Hmmm.

L.E.O. are a pastiche band, doing tributes to the style of ELO rather than faithfully copying songs. Think the Rutles, but a little less silly. I think the thing with this album is that L.E.O. are basically an improvement on ELO. ELO were pompous, self-consciously trying to ambitiously combine rock music with orchestral music. It was all very serious in that 1970s proggy kind of way. However, the thing with ELO is that the prog-orchestra stuff was pretty boring. At their best, they were basically just a band that played some straightforward pop songs in a distinctive way.

What makes L.E.O. basically interesting in a way that ELO aren't is that L.E.O. are a hell of a lot of fun. They're not taking themselves seriously. And there's that postmodern aspect - some would argue that ELO were more or less a Beatles tribute band themselves. Jeff Lynne and compadres famously claimed they were trying to start where The Beatles' "I Am The Walrus" left off. A tribute to a tribute band.

The lyrics are knowingly silly - at one stage, a chorus repeats "beating a dead horse, beating a dead horse, beating a dead horse to death". Irony intended, I suspect. The songs are nothing but pop songs that use the style of ELO, and, I have to say, they're better songs than ELO's. Pretty much every song is catchy as hell, from the "Telephone Line"-isms of "Goodbye Innocence" to the revved up Traveling Wilbury-ness of "Don't Let It Go".

"Goodbye Innocence", co-written by Jellyfish's Andy Sturmer, and featuring some of his vocals, features George Harrison-esque slide guitar, those distinctive ELO backing vocal harmonies clever/ridiculous lyrics. But above and beyond the "Telephone Line"-isms, it's simply a great song. "Ya Had Me Goin'", in contrast, is a pastiche of "Evil Woman", and its combination of the power pop backgrounds of most of the guys involved in LEO, the 70s prog-pop of ELO, and the disco beats of "Evil Woman" is strangely reminiscent of late 90s boybands like 5ive or N'Sync, except strangely musically satisfying.

It's strange; L.E.O. should be an interesting exercise and little else, but instead, it's a living thing.

Sorry about that last sentence.

Top 10 of 2006. #06. Augie March - Moo, You Bloody Choir!

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 08:11:21 GMT

Augie March. Moo, You Bloody Choir!
Sony BMG Records (AU).

"Bottle Baby"
(4:28, 4.72mb)
Track 9.

"Bolte And Dunstan Talk Youth"
(4:59, 6.18mb)
Track 12.

I knew "One Crowded Hour" was one of the most fantastic things I'd ever heard when I first heard it in 2003, Glenn Richards performing it solo at an afternoon show at the Hopetoun. What I didn't know was that Australia would agree with me. The song catapulted my favourite little indie band into the big leagues - now they're headlining festivals here in Australia, and "One Crowded Hour" is certain to be at least top 10 in JJJ's Hottest 100. And what was immediately clear upon hearing the album, which I excitedly bought on the day it came out, was that they were no longer mine. For better or worse, Moo, You Bloody Choir! is an album of compromise, Augie March doing a pop album. Robert Forster's lengthy review in The Monthly of the album suggested that it didn't go far enough in becoming a pop album - he was frustrated by the songwriting idiosyncrasies of Richards; my own thoughts were that it went too far in becoming a pop album, and that too many songwriting idiosyncrasies had been erased. I think the general view was that it wasn't quite a pop album and wasn't quite an art album, and thus sat half-way in between, pleasing nobody. Except all those people who bought the album, of course.

When the album got it right, it was superb - "Cold Acre" and, of course, "One Crowded Hour", are perfect. Glenn Richards can spit out good lines and write good melodies in his sleep. "Just Passing Through" has fire in its belly, and "Bottle Baby" is a stark, lovely, ballad that scares me to the point of rapture. There's plenty of pretty songs like "Bolte And Dunstan Talk Youth". The production is a little unfriendly to the more idiosyncratic songs, though. Someone told me that someone had told them that Sony had remixed the album without the band's knowledge to make the album more radio-friendly. I don't know if it's true, but it's definitely true that the album is Augie March done all shiny and radio-friendly. I liked listening to bootlegs of these songs much more, with all the grit and imperfections you get in live performances.

But still, Glenn Richards' songwriting is a step above almost anybody else in Australia, and as much as my feelings about this album are mixed, it's still arresting in most of the right ways.

Top 10 of 2006. #07. The Divine Comedy - Victory For The Comic Muse

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:42:46 GMT

The Divine Comedy. Victory For The Comic Muse
Parlophone/EMI Records.

"To Die A Virgin"
(3:40, 8.73mb)
Track 1.

"The Plough"
(5:14, 11.93mb)
Track 9.

Neil Hannon comes from the kind of school of songwriting in which you write lyrics full of wit, forming character portraits with incidental social criticism, with kind-of-theatrical music hall melodies. An English Randy Newman, perhaps. Hannon's voice is reminiscent of Scott Walker's; it's oh so English, clipped and ascerbic, but with overtones of mournfulness and playfulness in turn. "Victory For The Comic Muse" was apparently recorded quickly, using old-style tape - but who really cares! It sounds great; the Divine Comedy in the past have sounded a little stilted and plastic due to the production style.

Lyrically, the album mostly targets the upper classes, from the female celeb of "Diva Lady" to the accountant of "The Plough" to the album's centerpiece, "A Lady Of A Certain Age", where the disgust drips from his voice as he details the utter vacuousness of the life of an aging socialite. The sweetest song on the album is "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" - I had assumed from the title that the song would detail what Arthur C. got up to in Sri Lanka with little boys - but instead the song is a sweet love song; the narrator is saying that women are a mystery that should be explained on a TV show called "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" - but despite his lack of understanding of women, he - aww! - still loves her mystifying feminine behaviour.

The opener, "To Die A Virgin", is the funniest song of the year. The lyrical conceit is that the narrator does not wish the song-name upon himself. His girlfriend had promised, on their first date, that she would let him deflower her as his birthday present. "Hooray, it's my birthday!" he sings in the first verse. The best lyric in the song, though, is the narrator trying to convince the girlfriend to honour her promise about the birthday; "with all the bombs and the bird flu/ we're probably gonna be dead soon." (That would work on how many of you ladies?) All this over a sort of musical amalgamation of 70s glam-rock and broadway sleaze which somehow seems entirely suited to the topic matter.

"The Plough", later in the album, is nowhere near as funny as "To Die A Virgin", but there's a certain something about that song that catches my heart. It could be a song from a broadway musical, in its tone, melody, sense of melodrama, and instrumentation. A song about a man who becomes disillusioned with his accountancy firm because of their embezzling funds, which eventually leads to him assassinating the police commissioner. It is a ridiculous and surreal story in a bunch of ways. But there's a heart to this song, which somehow emerges through the silliness. The song is about the difficulty of fitting into a fickle world obsessed with surfaces, full of people who gloss over complex issues and try to find easy answers.

Top 10 of 2006. #08. Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:16:32 GMT

Midlake. The Trials of Van Occupanther
Etch N Sketch Records (AU).

"Roscoe"
(4:49, 6.96mb)
Track 1.

"Head Home"
(5:46, 8.48mb)
Track 3.

I get the impression that Midlake have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand the music they make at all. Their first album, which has a stupid name I can't remember off the top of my head, is a bit of a mess - it's not terrible, but nothing to write home about. Sounds like the Flaming Lips or Grandaddy or something. Sure, they're jazz-trained guys who can sing and play like their lives depend on it. But Midlake have completely the wrong idea about the 1970s. I read a recent interview with them when they recently toured Australia, wherein they talk about the 1970s being a time of innocence, and how they wanted to capture that innocence on "Trials of Van Occupanther".

They're wrong. The 1970s wasn't a time of innocence. Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - Midlake's most obvious 1970s influences - took so much cocaine back then that it's a wonder that they still have noses. After the 1960s, every rock history and biography paints the 1970s in terms of loss of innocence, in fact - it was the time when the business guys regained control of the music. Moreover, Trials Of Van Occupanther has some cockamamie concept to it, and clumsy prog-rock poetry, which especially on the written page - "my young bride, why are your shoulders like that of an old woman?" - come off as a bit silly. There's even prominent flutes all over the album.

So, to recap, Midlake have no idea what they're doing, they're jazz guys playing rock, they have clumsy lyrics. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but somehow their album is compulsively listenable. It just wants to be replayed. I suspect that the secret of Midlake is that in trying to emulate their heroes, but misunderstanding where the music originally came from, they have created something new. Their music does have a sound of innocence. They're not making the music so they can go on tour and get $1 million dollars each per show (see Crosby, Stills and Nash - how else were they going to pay for all that cocaine?). They're just making stuff they like. And they seem to have figured out how to write good pop songs since Peppercorn and Beefsteak or whatever their first album was called - namely, stuffing your songs with hooks and shamelessly ripping off your idols. Worked for everyone else, after all.

"Roscoe", the first track on Trials of Van Occupanther, and the best, sounds a whole bunch like Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon". Except, somehow, it transcends mere theivery; the jazz and prog-rock influences, the winding melody and the silly lyrics somehow bring out a new side of that kind of sound. I don't know how they do it, and I don't think they really know either, but it works. "Head Home" starts with a flute melody over Days Of Our Lives piano parts, before segueing into more moody Fleetwood Mac rhythms. It's one of those songs, however, where every bit of the song has a hook of its own (much like the best of Fleetwood Mac in the mid-70s); The flute melody is a hook, the groove of the rhythm section is a hook, the winding vocal harmonies that melisma on the word "home" after the lead singer sings "I'll think I'll head..." at the end of the verse - that's a hook and a half. And then there's the chorus, which breaks out of the tension of the verse, with more instrumental hooks and vocal melodies that are hooky. Did I mention all the hooks?

Top 10 of 2006. #09. Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:01:30 GMT

Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country
Popfrenzy Records (AU)/ Merge Records (US).

"Lloyd, Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Track 1.

"Let's Get Out Of This Country"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Track 6.

I bought Camera Obscura's first album a couple of years ago, and I appreciated the biting lyrics and the melodies, but - gosh darn it! - I found it a bit hard to get past the fact that they really wanted to be a girly Belle and Sebastian. We're talking Belle and Sebastian circa 1997-1998, at their twee-pop peak. Their album cover looked like a Belle and Sebastian album cover, the songs sounded like Belle and Sebastian songs. There was a niche to be filled, I suppose, since Belle and Sebastian have been closer to Thin Lizzy than Love recently.

On Let's Get Out Of This Country, however, Camera Obscura find their own niche. No longer are they a Belle and Sebastian tribute act. They soak their sound in wall-of-sound reverb, filling the sound with organs, accordions, string sections, percussion, the kitchen sink, etc. We're talking Phil Spector and the Ronettes here. But, unlike the cold paranoia of a Phil Spector production, the sound of </i>Let's Get Out Of This Country</i> is lush, brightly coloured. It simply sounds beautiful. Over the top of the wall-of-sound floats Tracyann's wispy voice, intimate and warm as she sings biting, self-depreciating lyrics lamenting indie pop love lives.

What's more, the songwriting is topnotch - the first track "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" is simply a better song than Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?", which it famously answers. And Lloyd Cole's no slouch in that respect. In a way, the combination of upbeat melody and sad lyrics which "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" trades in has been done to death, but there's something about the chutzpah with which Tracyann and company do it which is endearing. Suggesting that you're ready to be heartbroken the way that she does it has a certain combination of carefree devil-may-care romanticism and bitter cynicism which somehow works. They say that cynics are merely disappointed idealists, after all.

Top 10 of 2006. #10. Bluebottle Kiss - Doubt Seeds

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:41:31 GMT

Bluebottle Kiss. Doubt Seeds
Nonzero Records.

"Nova Scotia"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Disc 1, Track 2.

"Slight Return"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Disc 1, Track 8.

The thing about Bluebottle Kiss that strikes me is how they seem so unhinged, yet so utterly in control. They're a shambling bear, immensely powerful, but deceptively agile. Musically, they have one foot in the camp of "let's make weird noises with our guitars" rock - see late 80s Sonic Youth - and one foot in the songwriting aesthetic of a Nick Cave or Augie March - probing the dark side of the Australian psyche. If they resemble any other band on Doubt Seeds, it's The Drones, another Australian band that have a similar aesthetic, though Gareth Liddiard of the Drones' voice is less controlled than Jamie Hutchings', and Bluebottle Kiss are more versatile than the Drones.

Bluebottle Kiss are equally capable of both sweet, melodic, piano-based tunes like "Scrub The Mist", the Tom Waits aping on "The Weight Of The Sea", full-bore rockers like "Nova Scotia" and jangly pop like "White Rider". What's more, they're capable of doing a very varied double album full of different genre exercises, yet they still sound mostly like Bluebottle Kiss. Jamie Hutchings has reservations about the current state of rock and roll, but it's in fine hands with him as far as I'm concerned.

"Nova Scotia" illustrates the power of Doubt Seeds as well as anything else; Hutchings begins the song with an arrestingly hoarse cry of "well!" before it collapses into a groove, rubbery bass, ominous warlike drums and grinding guitars colliding with spaghetti western Morricone guitars and Hutchings' well-constructed melodic phrasing.

"Slight Return", in contrast, starts off as a comparatively straightforward piece of modern indie rock; a ringing guitar figure calls-and-responses with three notes on the bass and drums. Lyrically referencing men who haven't sung since 1973 and Dante's Inferno, it's reminiscent, in a way of the lyrical concerns of Glenn Richards. Musically it has the rhythmic drive and drum patterns of Interpol or Joy Division - the vocal part has their staccato barking, too - but none of the cool reserve of Interpol. Instead, a relentless intensity builds through the song until it explodes.

Top 10 of 2006. Dubiously late. And long. Part 1.

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:23:02 GMT

For all the good songwriting, clever lyrics, interesting sounds, etc - sometimes songs and albums become your favourites not necessarily because of the goodness of the music, but because they get at who you are right now, because they pull some heartstring of mine. I want to point out that "Every Night" by Lazy Susan and "56k Hearts" by Jane Vs World are more or less the things that get at who I am. This shouldn't surprise anybody, as I played keyboards (and cowbell) at Lazy Susan's album launch, and contributed handclaps to "56k Hearts". I heard early versions and demos of both "Every Night" and "56k Hearts", I know the history of their gestations, what with ill producers and bedbug infested houses and whatnot. I know what Jadey's songs are about. I know there are songs on "Every Night" that Paul originally wrote for a commercial pop singer, who changed her mind and decided not to use the songs. Both are utterly fantastic. Lazy Susan's album is the best they've ever done, with great song after great song - it was a pleasure to play keyboards at the launch. "56k Hearts" is perfect pop, some of the best work that anybody connected with Jane Vs World has done what with all those catchy songs, clever harmonies, good piano solos, etc. I also feel, for some reason, that I shouldn't include "Every Night" and "56k Hearts" in my list - assume they're #1 and #2 in my heart.

I wrote this list of my top 10 sitting at home about a month ago. There's a variety of reasons why I haven't posted it until now, which aren't very interesting. If I were to make the list today, other albums could well have replaced the ones here. In particular, "Costello Music" by the Fratellis, "The Land Of Pure Imagination" by Roger Manning Jr., "Twelve Stops And Home" by the Feeling, "Casino Twilight Dogs" by Youth Group.

List follows, with mp3s, with a post for each album.

Pulling A Different Meaning (From The Song)

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 04:27:54 GMT

Squeeze - "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)"
(4:00, 5.98mb)
Track 1, Argybargy, 1980.

I remember seeing an ex-member of Squeeze, Glenn Tilbrook, sing a song solo on an Australian variety show maybe 8-9 years ago. And I remember expecting the song to be like "Cool For Cats" - think of the almost rapped vocals with a strong Cockney accent over New Wave backing. Of course, I was vaguely disappointed, as the song he played was much more melodic and nuanced - and thus less entertaining - than their one hit wonder suggested.

You could say that it more closely resembled "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)". It's simply a great song, from their third album, Argybargy. The song has a nice, subtle, dynamic push and pull, and sonically resembles the trebly, upbeat production of an Elvis Costello or XTC (Costello produced their next album, in fact). It has a great piano solo from pianist Jools Holland, who soon left Squeeze and later went on to host a UK music television show. The vocals of Glenn Tillbrook have a naivety and smoothness to them that you don't hear in Squeeze's contemporaries. If Elvis Costello had sung "Pulling Mussels", it would have been with a sneer, or at least a snide knowingness. Instead, the lyrics, about working class people in the UK on holiday at the beach, are a portrait rather than overt social commentary.

Two fat ladies windowshop something for the mantelpiece
In for bingo all the nines, a panda for sweet little niece

The emptiness of the holidays portrayed is implicit rather than explicit - you hear it in the chords and rhythms and in the dynamics rather than in the vocals or the lyrics.

Iron and Wine - "It's The Same Old Song"
(3:01, 5.54mb)
Random track I found at the Passing Afternoon fan site.

Sam Beam is reliable, in a way. Count on him for an unusual and effective cover of a song from a completely unexpected genre. Those who have heard his cover of the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" (it was featured in Garden State apparently, I haven't seen it though) know this. He took the upbeat synth-pop and deconstructed the song by slowing it down, getting rid of anything electric or electronic, and making it sound like it was recorded in country Tennessee in 1935.

He does the same old trick for the Motown classic, "It's The Same Old Song" (written by Holland, Dozier, and Holland, originally performed by The Four Tops presumably backed up by the usual Funk Brothers).Sayonara the riff at the start, bye bye the Motowntastic bass and drums. What's left is the bare bones of the song, slowed down a bit, with a bit of slide guitar, and the country Tennessee in 1935 treatment. It sounds mournful despite the major chords, with Beam's shy voice betraying a whole bunch of resignation and uncertainty.

The country Tennessee in 1935 thing is a neat trick actually; Beam actually records his demos track by track on a computer with a shitty microphone, the same way I used to record my old songs last century. And that's probably Iron and Wine in a nutshell. That he re-records a tune called "It's The Same Old Song", and gives it a different meaning would be funny in itself, but that he records the song so it sounds like every other Iron and Wine song is the icing on the cake. Very droll. At the same time, the sentiment in the song is still genuine; it is these contradictions and emotions that give Iron and Wine the tug on the heart.

I'm half-tempted to take a bunch of Iron and Wine songs and give them the pop treatment: add 120 beats per minute to the tempo, add a distinctive riff or two, put in big pop beats, and release them under the name of Irony and Whining, or Plastic and Mixers, or something.

burning spectacles.

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 05:22:35 GMT

Sean Lennon - "Spectacle"
(5:24, 7.66 mb)
Track 5, Friendly Fire, 2006.

When I first downloaded Friendly Fire, I immediately assumed that Jon Brion produced it. It has that Jon Brion sound; think of the lush orchestration and production style combined with the quirky carnivalesque instrumentation that you hear on records by Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann, and Brion himself, or the soundtracks to movies like Punch Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine. The songs are the kind of thing you'd expect to hear on a record produced by Brion - it has the clever Beatlesque chord progressions, the surprising leaps in the melodies, the personal, confessional lyrics. It's actually not produced by Brion. He plays a couple of instruments here and there, though.

Lennon seemed like he had a surprisingly weak voice (especially considering that his father has one of the most powerful voices in Western music) on what I heard from his first album, Into The Sun - you heard him singing flat a little too often. He didn't have the confidence to sell the songs, to harness his voice to the emotions he was singing. His singing on Friendly Fire, in contrast, is affecting. It feels pure. Anyway, I downloaded it and listened a couple of times, and dismissed it mentally as "eh, heard it before". It crept back up on me, though. The melodies insinuated their ways into your life; at first they're unobtrusive, and then they hit you like a sack of bricks.

Maybe it helped to know what the songs were about; most of the songs are inspired, one way or another, by his girlfriend cheating on him with his best friend, and then the best friend dying in a car accident after Lennon was willing to forgive him but before they had a chance to reconcile. "Spectacle" is a bitter, perceptive character portrait, presumably of the girlfriend (Bijou Phillips apparently). If the song had a raucous backing band and, say, Dylan in 1966 spitting out the vocals, it wouldn't be a million miles away from the triumphal anger and disgust of "Like A Rolling Stone". It certainly has some wickedly bitter lyrics - try out "your smile was so rehearsed" or "you told me this, wickedness was a myth that was invented for losers - cos baby, the truth hurts". Instead, the tone of the song is resigned and mournful, I think mostly because the song is just too pretty to be so angry. A string section, slide guitar, that kind of perfect-for-the-song drumming that Matt Chamberlain always gets right. Lennon doesn't break his composure, though you can almost hear him forcing himself not to express anger at times. And maybe the song is more heartbreaking this way.

The DVD that comes with the CD is extraordinary, in terms of the effort that's gone into it, the production values, etc - is it the first time that an artist has made a video for every single song on the album?

John Lee Hooker with Canned Heat - "Burnin' Hell"
(5:28, 8:53mb)
Track 09, Hooker 'n' Heat, 1971.

This one starts with a minute or so of studio banter between John Lee Hooker and Al Wilson of Canned Heat, before they decide to settle into a remake of a John Lee Hooker song from 1950. They discuss making a triple album, the cooking of a guy from the Grateful Dead, and Hooker praises Wilson. "I dig this kid's harmonica - dunno how he follow me, but he do!"

John Lee Hooker, at least according to Charles Shaar Murray's Boogie Man biography, was born in 1917, or maybe 1920, in the depths of the deep South. An illiterate millionnaire, his father a sharecropper, his parents divorcees, the man didn't even see an electric lightbulb until he ran away from home as a teenager, making his way to Detroit. He learned the blues from a boyfriend of his mother's and a suitor of his older sister's. Murray makes the case that John Lee Hooker is the blues impersonified; the style of his blues has elements of the delta blues of the likes of Robert Johnson, but he plays an electric guitar and can sound like the Chicago blues and rhythm and blues that more or less fathered rock music.

In some ways "Burnin' Hell" is the polar opposite to the lushness of Sean Lennon. There's barely a melody, there's only one chord in the whole song, and the lyrics are repetitive. There are two people playing on "Burnin' Hell" - there's Hooker singing and playing an electric guitar, and Al Wilson (who died in the woods only months after this was recorded) playing harmonica. What sounds like a bass drum is Hooker stomping on a wooden floor. For all that, it's electric to listen to, never boring. It sounds like a full band, especially when they really get going - two guys, no drums, and it makes you want to dance. The harmonica playing is great, the response to the call of the vocals.

Hooker's lyrics are effectively a rejection of the Deep South black society of the time, based as it was around the church. "There ain't no heaven, there ain't no burnin' hell" he sings, "where I die where I go, nobody know". Blues is the devil's music, after all.

tim.

Fine, Let It Go!

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 05:56:33 GMT

The Easybeats - "She's So Fine"
(2:08, 6.08mb)
Track 7, Easy, 1965.

In Australia, once upon a time, the Easybeats were as big as the Beatles. Postwar migrants from Europe, the lot of them, but they exemplify Australian rock, and you hear their influence in everything from ACDC to You Am I. "She's So Fine" is the Easybeats' "She Loves You", in a bunch of ways - the single that really broke them in Australia, the start of mass hysteria, and not far behind "She Loves You" in the awesome stakes. It starts with a four note guitar riff, and a tambourine, before Little Stevie Wright, the lead singer, screams "waahhhh!"

Musically, "She's So Fine" is more rhythm-and-blues based than the Beatles tended to be, with more emphasis on the riffs and less on melody. As such it resembles the likes of "Baby Please Don't Go" by Them or "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, but where Them are menacing and unsettling and the Stones do something resembling pure rock and roll, "She's So Fine" is a pure rush of giddy energy. The backing vocals in the chorus approach tunefulness. The bassline over the vocal breakdown at the end of the chorus is a mile a minute. "Oh c'mon, Harry!", Stevie bellows before the guitar solo, which seems to use every note on the guitar. After the guitar solo, Stevie says, tartly, "Ta, harry!"

The lyrics are rushed, essentially meaningless and beside the point - something about some girl he can't find, who's so fine. They could be about Hitler for all anyone cares. Little Stevie's voice is a great rock and roll instrument, occasionally reminiscent of the teenaged innocence of Buddy Holly, occasionally with the adult knowingness of John Lennon. You don't think that Wright just wants to hold her hand.

I've just read Sorry: The Wretched Tale of Little Stevie Wright by Jack Marx, which documents time Marx spent with Stevie Wright in the late 1990s on the South Coast of New South Wales. It's a wretched tale, just like the title says, and it's terrible to think that the Stevie Wright of "She's So Fine" fell into heroin addiction in the 1970s, and has had an incredibly hard life as a result.

L.E.O. - "Don't Let It Go"
(3:24, 6.08mb)
Track 8, Alpacas Orgling, 2006.

A power pop supergroup which includes members of Jellyfish, the Candy Butchers, and (improbably) Hanson, LEO are a tribute to 1970s symphonic pop band Electric Light Orchestra, the only band in history that would have incorporated a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven into a cover of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven". The modus operandi of LEO is all ELO pastiches, all the time. The results sound pretty good - pound for pound, the songs are catchier than ELO's (though there's nothing quite as awesome as "Telephone Line" on Alpacas Orgling.

The verses from "Don't Let It Go", however sounds like ELO lead singer Jeff Lynne's production work from the late 80s - we're talking Travelling Wilburys, we're talking Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever, we're talking George Harrison's Cloud Nine, we're talking Roy Orbison's "You Got It". Jeff Lynne's production work has always been incredibly, mechanically, metrical. Not much funky syncopation in the drumming on those albums. Just four beats in the bar, the snare on the backbeat. But more so. There's a swampy guitar riff, soaring strings, and that Sun Studio vocal style (think Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis Presley), with lyrics about "revvin' up the Chevy" and "you can never tell her daddy that we did it in the back of a caddy". But then there's the chorus, and it's ELO time - the massed harmonies of "ooooh-oooh, don't let it go!" are striking, the chords have a lighter feel to them compared to the swampy riffing of the verse, and there's string arpeggios in the background.

LEO aren't pretending to be anything but completely and utterly cheesy and derivative pop. Like ELO, really - they were only really taking the more symphonic psychedelic Beatles - "I Am The Walrus", etc - and making a career out of it. And like the best of ELO or Jeff Lynne's late 80s production work, it's extremely catchy, well-made cheese. We're talking the smelly stuff with holes in it, here, and not the Kraft singles of most recent pop.

tim.

Country Hitler

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 04:07:34 GMT

The Bees (U.S.) - "The Country Life"
(2:39, 6.08mb)
Track 1, High Society, 2006.

Important note: these Bees are not the UK Bees, who are known in the US as "Band of Bees" (to confuse people further, there is also a "Band Of Horses"). Neither are they the Bees who, in the 1960s, had a slice of psychedelic rock and roll called "Voices Green And Purple", which ended up on the famous Nuggets boxset. Thus it is important to note that no chickens will be paid back. neither will your minhas be meninhaed.

These Bees, instead, are a duo from Nashville. And, it is a big call, but judging by High Society they might even be better than The UK Bees. There's not too much of a country twang, but the songs do have a bit of that Nashville smoothness. They have the clever songwriting and smooth, flowing sound of Guster, there are the occasional Ben Folds Five harmony or piano line, and there's a depth of sweet melancholy reminiscent of Nada Surf's Let Go. It doesn't surprise me to learn that the lead singer is in fact in Josh Rouse's band either, as there's a lot of Josh Rouse there.

"The Country Life" is tremendously catchy, the stereotypical example of an effortless sounding perfect pop song. Reminiscent of the Irish soul shuffle of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", the interesting hooks never stop coming; it starts with an acoustic guitar with a prototypical rock'n'roll riff (see: "Rip This Joint" by the Stones), before a drum fill leads into the first verse. Over a walking bassline and insistent piano, the lead singer, Daniel Tashian, sings, "her Mama thinks I'm made out of money, her Daddy thinks we need more time, sister's got her own opinion". Into the chorus, "So long" goes the hook, with great harmonies. The chorus ends with the lines I'm gone, I'll trade the trouble and the strife for the country life. The angelic harmonies on "country life" makes the country life sound like it's the best thing ever.

My Dad moved to near Mudgee when I was 15. To be honest, I found the country life pretty boring. I'm a city boy at heart.

Nick Lowe - "Little Hitler"
(3:02, 4.39mb)
Track 3, Jesus Of Cool, 1978.

It's hard to not associate this song with Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers", which came out the following year, on Armed Forces (I have the great 33 1/3 Armed Forces book by Franklin Bruno, which mentioned Lowe's solo work, and this song in particular, and made me curious enough to have a listen). I'm not entirely sure of the relationship between the two songs. Nick Lowe did produce Armed Forces, however, and he was on the same record label as Costello. "Little Hitler" is obviously an unusual phrase. Bruno alleges that "Little Hitler" is in fact about Costello, and that "Two Little Hitlers" is Costello's reply. Lyrically, it certainly sounds like it could be about Costello; "Little Hitler, what you doin'? Is the passion inflamed again?" - Bruno talks about how Costello had "little man" syndrome. Regardless, both songs are worth a listen.

Nick Lowe's late 1970s albums, which I've recently discovered, are not unlike Elvis Costello's late 1970s albums (gasp! no!), especially My Aim Is True. Same production style, same kind of emphasis on songwriting, same kind of focus. Lowe wrote "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love, and Understanding?", one of Costello's biggest hits, after all. Lowe doesn't have the same rage and anger in his voice as Costello had, though; the tone of his voice, and of his music is more...snide as opposed to Costello's out-and-out spleen. He also doesn't have the unpleasant, nasal edge to his voice that Costello has (and which makes Costello's ballads hard to listen to).

The Beatlesque-ness is never far from the surface in Lowe's music either. "Little Hitler" has a slide guitar solo heavily reminiscent of George Harrison's slide guitar soloes, Beatlesque harmonies ("wahh ahhhh!"), and a sweet McCartneyesque melody.

tim.

I Love It When You Fade On Me.

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 03:54:52 GMT

The Feeling - "Love It When You Call"
(3:33, 6.49mb)
Track 8, Twelve Stops And Home, 2006.

Welcome to the 1980s revival. It was bound to happen, I suppose. The Feeling, in their interviews, made a big noise about being fans of cheesy, cheesy pop, your ELOs and 10cc's. I wasn't really convinced that they were any good until I saw them live; my girlfriend being the big fan. Live, they're worth seeing; they're tight, lead singer has charisma (even if he does look silly in a cravat), they know how to rock and executed perfect harmonies again and again. And that's the stuff you pay attention to live.

Onstage, the lead singer said something to the effect of: life's too short to be cool. Which is perhaps a reason why "Love It When You Call" reminds me of none other than "The Power Of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News. Let's face it, Huey Lewis will never be cool, even if his "Hip To Be Square" seems strangely prescient in this age of nerd-chic.

The difference between "The Power Of Love" and "Love It When You Call" is that "Love It When You Call" is even catchier. There's hooks all over the place in this song: 1) the guitar riff in the intro and the first half of the verse; 2) the simple, singsong melody of the verse over the guitar riff; 3) the way the lead singer sings "I-I-I-I-aye" instead of "I' in the line "I wonder if you ever get to say what's on your mind"; the classic build up of tension in the prechorus, when he's singing "take a little time"; 3) the chorus, repeating "I love it when you call" four times, with the effective punchline "but you never call at all"; 4) the way the line "so what's the complication, it's only conversation" stands out in the chorus and the song, especially as "complication" and "conversation" are pretty much the only words in the song with more than two syllables; 5) the way that when you think the chorus is over, they go into a second, still catchy section, with backing vocals singing "he loves it when you call", with great harmonies; 6) the guitar solo, which is great, but shamelessly 80s and cheesy, reminiscent of the Darkness's "Girlfriend".

Strangely enough, the same things that make "Love It When You Call" so catchy are the same things that were bothering me; basically, the straightforward "we want to write the most catchy pop song ever" means that the song lacks a little bit of subtlety. It's a particularly obvious song, rarely does anything unexpected. The nature of the monosyllabic singsongy verse is such that it takes a great songwriter to fill it with great lyrics, and the Feeling don't quite have that great songwriter; the lyrics are more or less forgettable. Similarly, their chord progressions are often predictable and obvious, though there are nice touches here and there.

But I think what was really bothering me about the Feeling was that the music is, simply, straightforward pop. It's really, really good straightforward mainstream pop, but still. It's music that's made for the charts, made to appeal to the public of 2006 (as all pop should really). Whereas, my music taste is based upon my assumption that most people are idiots - music made for them is just not music made for me, that authenticity and personal expression is important. The catch, for me, is that, while I have these assumptions about music, I have such a sweet tooth from years of listening to the greatest hits of the 60s 70s and the 80s on the radio. The sugar in The Feeling's music is appealing to my sweet tooth, and while part of my brain is telling me that the Feeling are too mainstream for me, another part of me wants more sugar, dammit.

Magnolia Electric Co. - "Don't Fade On Me"
(4:18, 6.52mb)
Track 1, Fading Trails, 2006.

Jason Molina's formula these days is straightforward: simple, repetitive songs? check. Rootsy sound, reminiscent of Neil Young, emphasising the quavering in Molina's voice? Check. As many mentions of the following words as possible: "moon", "fade", "dark", "star", "road", "cross", "ghost", "lonesome"? Check. The thing with Molina that makes him worth talking about is that he rises above the formula. As many songs about dark moons and fading ghosts as he writes, it's as if the moon and ghosts are ciphers for what he really wants to say, and the fascination with Molina is in the tension that builds when he tries to say what he has to say within the limitations and rules of his style. There's a spark there.

The irony of "Don't Fade On Me"and Fading Trails in general, is that it's further evidence that the spark of Jason Molina - the thing that makes him worth listening to - has faded. Songs:Ohia's Magnolia Electric Co.* was incendiary, songs like "Farewell Transmission" and "John Henry Split My Heart" evidence of a man who was channeling frustration, rage, and anger into songs that evoked the rootsy Americana of 1970s Neil Young; earlier Songs:Ohia effectively channelled the spark into Oldhamesque Appalachian folk. Molina's work since then hasn't had that strength of heart on it though; Magnolia Electric Company's What Comes After The Blues, Molina's first studio album after Magnolia Electric Co., was partly disappointing because of the forgettable songs, and partly disappointing because it lacked the spark.

The plus side of Fading Trails is that, more or less, it's a much stronger album than What Comes After The Blues; it has better songs, with good lyrics and thoughtful performance (though, it's a bit all over-the-place, what with it being a distillation of four albums Molina's intended to release this year). The con is that it's missing a bit of the spark. What makes it interesting is that you get the impression that Molina knows the spark has gone. "Don't Fade On Me" is a meditation on fading; lyrically he seems unsure, doubtful of whether his "darling" has faded on him or not - he sings "you faded on me" and "don't fade on me" at separate points in the song. There's a fatalistic feel to it. The complexity of the emotions Molina dredges up in a song like this...it still isn't as powerful as whatever propelled him before, but there's a certain fascination to it, something that makes it still worth listening to.

tim.

Dirty Chelsea

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:02:42 GMT

The Fratellis - "Chelsea Dagger"
(3:35, 6.52mb)
Track 5, Costello Music, 2006.

In the UK, every week seems to bring yet another band that sounds halfway between the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines. In a way, you can't blame the soundalike bands for trying, but by and large, unless you truly love the genre, most of the stuff is garbage. I still just do not get the Arctic Monkeys at all, by the way - what with all the hype I gave the album a download and a try, and...I'm obviously an old fogey, or something, because I don't get it. There's competent lyrical content, but the rhythms aren't interesting, the chords are repetitive and the melodies are just entirely missing. There's a certain lack of energy. Ahh, hype. Or maybe it's expressing something in youth culture at the moment that I'm completely missing out upon. Whatever.

At first, the Fratellis, from Glasgow in Scotland, are one of these 'yet another bands'. I first encountered them on a pay TV channel in Italy, with a video for the song "Chelsea Dagger". They have that same kind of energy as the Libertines had, a similar Clash via the Strokes aesthetic, in some ways. But that's only really on the surface. What's interesting about the Fratellis is the deeper resonances in the music that a) their songs are well-constructed and catchy and b) they obviously are just simply fans of British guitar pop music in general. On their album Costello Music, I hear snatches and echoes of The Beatles, Madness, T-Rex, Gomez, The Coral, The Clash, Supergrass, Elvis Costello, XTC, and the like hidden under the standard Libertine surface.

"Chelsea Dagger" reminds me heavily of a song by now disbanded Melbourne band Klinger called "Acne & Peroxide", because of the Northern Soul derived rhythm they both share. Speaking of the Northern Soul, in a way, it even reminds me of fellow Scots Belle & Sebastian. Obviously, Belle & Sebastian are too gentle and introverted to be quite as exuberant and rocking as The Fratellis are - Belle & Sebastian would never stoop to the lager lout soccer-chant "doo-doo-doo" that's the main hook of "Chelsea Dagger", but there's a family resemblance there. Maybe it's the gender confusion, the Scottish accent and the use of Christian names in the lyrics, though the characters in the Fratellis' lyrics are more likely to be debaucherously drunk in pubs rather than drinking coffee at the caf. But it does remind me of Belle & Sebastian's poppier songs - your "Blues Are Still Blue" or "She's Losing It" - in its shameless devotion to the feeling of release you get from great, energetic pop music.

The Pipettes - "Dirty Mind"
(2:43, 4.58mb)
Track 4, We Are The Pipettes, 2006.

In contrast to the Fratellis, who hide a classic rock sensibility behind the surface of the cool music of now, The Pipettes hide a modern post-feminist fashionable sensibility under a 1960s girl group surface. Ostensibly styled after the likes of the Supremes or perhaps the Shangri-Las - three girls singing harmonies with each other, those classic Motown rhythms ("Dirty Mind" vaguely echoes "It's The Same Old Song" by the Four Tops) - the Pipettes have a separate backing band, The Cassettes, and reputedly some svengali type put it all together. However, this is all skin deep in some respects, as the Pipettes are irrevocably not a 1960s girl group. Motown was a chance for black singers and writers to compete with mainstream America on their own terms; the music of Motown was clean and safe - the beehive hairdos, the immaculate dresses of the Supremes represented black America's rise to middle-class respectability in a bunch of ways.

The Pipettes are not clean and safe in the same way; as if to illustrate this, the word 'cunts' - prominently, and beautifully harmonised - appears in a recent b-side, "Feminist Complaints". Instead, they're foul-mouthed English girls; they're not afraid to sing "dirty" as "dir'ee", and not afraid to make the songs sound messy, not afraid to squeal or shout. Neither are they great, soulful singers in the manner of a Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross; in fact, the overall effect of "Dirty Mind" is reminiscent of the Spice Girls' "Stop!"; Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell aren't exactly known for their singing ability. What separates this from the Spice Girls is that it has oodles of personality, and that this is sophisticated music for adults, rather than teenieboppers. You can hear it in its cluey lyrics, which fairly effectively chronicle modern relations between the sexes, with songs about one night stands and songs about boys with good personal hygiene but dirty, dirty minds.

tim.