They Might Be Giants – The Else

I was kinda saving this album for a little later, but to be honest, there’s no real reason for it. We’re nearly at the end of the year now, and there are at least 3 other albums from this band that I can talk about, but since this is They Might Be Giants’ current adult album, I guess I was thinking the event of writing about it would be something special or something. Why would I think that anything I write here is special? Enough of that noise, let’s talk about the band’s latest adult-oriented album, and my current favorite:

Now that I think about it, writing about this album is kind of timely, because I just got through talking about the Smashing Pumpkins’ Zeitgeist album. See, the two were released on the same week (Zeitgeist on July 6th, The Else on July 10th), and remember when I remarked upon the situation with Zeitgeist being given 5 exclusive retail releases? And each one contained one (possibly two) exclusive songs? Yeah, while I was still reeling about that, I noticed that They Might Be Giants took a different approach. In the initial pressings of The Else, regardless of retail outlet, there was a disc called Cast Your Pod To The Wind, a 23-song bonus disc of re-recorded songs from the band’s popular series of podcasts. That brings the total song count of this regular-priced album to a staggering 36 songs (eat THAT, Billy Corgan), and the ones on Cast Your Pod To The Wind are brilliant. Still, we’re only here to talk about the initial 13 songs on the album proper.

Recorded hot on the heels of The Spine, which is kind of a lie because the two albums are actually something like 3 years apart, The Else takes the group in a different direction, stopping by the ambitious and collaboration-heavy Mink Car and making a stop somewhere around Apollo 18’s genre-bending and somehow really dark neighborhood.

Perhaps it’s the wintery album cover that painted my attitude about the album, or maybe it’s song titles like “With The Dark”, “The Shadow Government”, and “Withered Hope” that make me feel as if this album is more bleak than anything that’s come out from the band in a decade. Maybe the return from the grade-school crowd made the band anxious to get into the heads of cynical, angst-ridden intellectuals with aplomb, I don’t know. Either way, there are two reasons why The Else sticks out as a favorite: One, because I am a cynical, angst-ridden intellectual, and this album sticks in my head like no other, and two, because everyone else hates this album.

I can’t explain why, whenever I read about others’ opinions on They Might Be Giants, it’s always baffling. I guess because they’re a band that, aside from the occasional irritating tune (one of which is on this very album), can do no wrong with me. Maybe because I’m a cynical, angst-ridden intellectual who still somehow feels that everything I liked when I was 17 is still cool (seriously you gotta try Final Fantasy 9), or maybe because I just have that sensibility that falls for the more esoteric side of music every time, but I believe that this product is consistently good, and has the added bonus of more rhythmic, bassy fun than its predecessors.

Indeed, the album starts off with a distorted, almost trashcan-like rumbling of the drums as the song “I’m Impressed” launches immediately into one of John Linnell’s strongest melodies of this decade. Throwing against that some nice distorted guitar and ploddy bass (wish some squishy synthesizers, lovely), to even a toy piano, this is a song that I have heard dozens of times without tiring. The lyrics are that wonderful blend of straightforwardness with such an obviously hidden message that it fails to surprise me that nobody seems to have picked up on the double meaning:
I’m impressed, I’m impressed
When that gorilla beats his chest
I fall to bits, I confess
I admit I’m impressed
When the torpedo in the vest barks his orders
I’m impressed

And I find that my head’s nodding yes
Though my legs are not following
I’m inspired by events
To remember the exits in back of me

On the one hand he’ll
Give you five good reasons to follow him
On the other hand
You see nobody leaving the stadium

Those seem like odd things to be impressed about, in fact the gorilla, torpedo, and the whole stanza about someone forcing you to follow him (the “five good reasons” of course means a fist full of fingers that will hit you), and since there’s an entire stadium of said people, the word “Impress” is not the verb meaning to be wowed, but in fact the act of Impressment, which is the strong-arming of naval prisoners into the enemy’s navy. Though I haven’t heard any other theories supporting this, I’m almost sure this is what the song is actually about, but I do think some of the lines follow along the more classic definition of “impressed”, such as the name-dropping of Godzilla. Godzilla is my childhood hero, so just name-dropping him is enough to make me love this song and album more than all others.

Where was I? Oh yes, there are other songs on this album. The rest of the album’s first half is fairly easy-going. We’ve got the fuzz-bass-tastic “Take Out The Trash”, which is a female-empowering breakup song sung by Flansburgh, and “Upside-Down Frown”, which makes use of a beat the Dust Brothers sent over to the band, and is possibly the only conventionally interesting thing about the song. I do love the song, however, so don’t let that throw you.

“Climbing The Walls”, which may sound familiar to Radiohead fans, is actually a complex party of guitar chords and saxophone that reminds me more of “The Statue Got Me High” without the polyphony. I do like the song a lot because of the character Linnell is singing in, which seems a very neurotic character, which John L. does very well for reasons that might be kind of obvious to people who have met him.

“Careful What You Pack” is a song about a girl that doesn’t seem to make much sense (it’s still pretty rockin’ though), but basically it was a song that was going to be used in a movie, but was handed back to the band. One might say that including it in a feature release was a lazy idea on the Johns’ part, but in fact the song serves as a brilliant segue from the “straight” rock we’ve heard so far into the insanity that follows.

First off, we’ve got “The Cap’m”, which is another brilliant character piece about an arrogant eccentric who thinks wearing a captain’s hat and hitting on ladies is success waiting to happen. The whole thing is set to a marvelously thick, pounding rhythm that brings together everything from heavy drums to distorted bass to hand-claps to something in there with slap-echo attached, to a solo featuring one of those devices the Beatles used in that one song:

Did you say… what I think you just said?
“My hat looks good on me”? I agree
I agree

Look me over, I’m the Cap’m
You act like it’s a joke, but I don’t see you laughing
People seem to think you can’t be called “The Cap’m”
Unless you drive a boat
Well I don’t

I don’t

Brilliant. The song that follows is something that also brought me back to Apollo 18, in that it’s a song made up of miniature, seemingly disconnected songs. “With The Dark” is quite possibly the most bass-heavy of They Might Be Giants’ songs (besides one very obscure cover of “Lady Is A Tramp” that comes to mind), and it’s just a ton of fun to follow the song and its bassiness through some strange places, from a girl “in love with the dark” to a world-weary pirate, to some kind of futuristic rebellion, and finally, to a simple plea “No more sunlight please”. I feel like, if Douglas Adams had decided to give up on writing the best book ever and did music instead, this song would be a cover instead of an original.

“The Shadow Government” took a while for me to get used to. It’s a playful and compelling punk rock number told from the paranoid junkie’s perspective, and for some reason I used to hate it. Maybe it’s just because the next song is one of my absolute favorites, and I just couldn’t wait, in my first few dozen listens to this album, to get to it.

Yes, “Bird Of The Bee Of The Moth” is John Linnell’s “circular” song, like “Wearing A Raincoat” before it, but mixed with the piano-driven melodic drive that made up my previous favorite TMBG song, “Certain People I Could Name”. That, then throwing in more of that obscure Beatles instrument, a majestic horn break, a smooth beat, and then John L.’s vocals layering on top of each other in different parts of the beat (kind of a “Row Row Row Your Boat” thing), makes this song impossible for me to not love.

The Dust Brothers’ second contribution to the album comes in the form of “Withered Hope”, which tells a sad tale indeed of misplaced, unrequited love between characters given nothing but names of random ideas like “Withered Hope”, “Sad Sack”, “Picture Of A Crook”, and so on. The song is compelling lyrically, but none of that matters, because the chorus with its amazing beat and horn section, recalling all the strength of the best moments of John Henry, is going to blow the unready listener away, and the song’s even better live, so there’s that.

“Contrecoup” is one of the very few songs that predates The Else by any margin. The story of the song is awesome: apparently a journalist challenged John Linnell, who is known for being not only a great songwriter, but a fairly quick one, to write a song utilizing the following archaic, obselete words: “Phrenology”, “Contrecoup”, and “Limerent”. What came out of Linnell’s pen was an acoustic guitar-driven  (somewhat reminiscent of “Hovering Sombrero”) tune about someone suffering a head injury and falling in love (or limerence, rather, which is like love only more based in one person’s obsession with the chance of never, ever winning the love of the object of their desire). All words are used deftly, and we have this winning tune to show for it.

“Feign Amnesia” is the tune that I said earlier was irritating. Honestly, I’d rather just leave it at that, every album is allowed one weak track, even among the best ones.

Finally, we have “The Mesopotamians”, a nice little play on “Hey Hey We’re The Monkees”, only set in ancient times, with some nice anachronistic moves like talking about “Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh” being in a rock band and driving an Econoline van. The whole thing has a very British Invasion vibe to the tune, especially with its 3-part harmony in the chorus. In fact, the song even has lines about the bassist being supposedly dead, and if that isn’t a reference, I don’t know what is.

Anyhoots, don’t listen to the reviews, The Else is a dark, hopeless album that is a lot of fun, which was pretty much They Might Be Giants’ mission statement from day 1.

Beck – Mellow Gold

Few artists quite rock it like Beck, the guy’s one of the most respected artists around, evidenced by the tendency for people to excuse his Scientologist roots (“Well he was born into it“) and his working with Dangermouse (“Modern Guilt is a modern classic of classic modernism, I intend to listen to it someday.”) Indeed, it’s hard to fault the guy for just about anything, and that sentiment pretty much goes all the way back to the near beginning, when his “debut” was released and became one of the most unlikely hit albums pretty much ever:

There seem to be a lot of misconception manufactured around the idea of Beck at the time this album, especially its hit single, and what drove him to create this thing. Perhaps this was to Beck’s benefit, certainly the success of “Loser” was a surprise to everyone involved, but read any review of this album, even today’s rife-with-revisionism blog writeups (hello), and you’ll see two words associated with 1994’s Beck: Stoner, Slacker.

Anything weird created by someone young is invariably going to be traced back to drugs at some point. I don’t know if I’ve touched on this myself, since I do make the odd joke about performers/writers being on drugs while making music, but drugs do not actually improve ideas (except LSD, they invented the double-helix on that stuff). Beck’s creativity is a very genuine thing, and whether he has smoked the reefer or not, I highly doubt this album or “Loser” were really that inspired by it. Remember, Frank Zappa was clean his entire career.

As far as the “slacker” label goes, I can kind of see it, after all the entire Indie Rock movement is comprised of milk-fed hipsters who write lo-fi trash while laying around on couches (while on drugs! See I can do reviews!), but believe it or not, Mellow Gold would have more likely been Beck’s final album than his major label debut; the dude was poorer than dirt, homeless, working for $4 an hour, and only playing shows when there was a spot open at the mic at open mic night. In fact, it was some free-association rapping he used just to troll indifferent audiences that gave him the idea for a free-association rap song that, once released, would be played on the radio every single day from then until the Apocalypse.

It was that fateful day in the house of Carl (Karl?) Stephenson that Beck wrote and recorded his most enduring hit song, a nonsense rap about nothing that was crappy at best on the rapping front, to which Beck affixed a half-Spanish chorus declaring, with all sardonic sincerity, “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” It was this line, combined with Canned Hip Hop Beat #6 and an expertly-placed slide guitar sample, that gave birth to a star.

Once the song hit all the tiny college radio stations (that you better believe were run by actual stoner slackers), it became such an in-demand number that it hit mainstream radio, and Beck had to sign to a major label because they were the only ones who could actually print as many albums as the public demanded.

Indeed, a star was born practically overnight, and thank goodness, otherwise the only song Beck would ever been known for otherwise would have been “MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack”, which would be unfortunate because nowadays “smoking crack” is, respectively, the unfunniest verb and noun in the English language.

So we’ve got the hit, it opens the album, so now there’s the pesky rest of the album to deal with. Thankfully, at least half of the album is listenable by reasonable standards. “Pay No Mind” is kind of a trademark of Beck’s early sound, a nearly in-tune acoustic guitar dug up by archaeologists in a recently-uncovered Sumerian Renaissance pawn shop (3rd Dynasty) while Beck sings about money and poop right after waking up with some bronchial infection. This is the best song on the album.

Actually, there are a couple of melodically sound pieces in this album, I particularly like “Fuckin’ With My Head”. It’s a grand little tune blending all kinds of little hooks here and there while Beck kind of shouts the lyrics before the whole thing gets pushed aside for a truly sweet chorus melody. Another one is “Soul-Suckin’ Jerk”, which is a more solid (and coherent) rap than “Loser”, and should really speak to anyone who has ever worked fast food for minimum wage (hello).

My favorite tune on the entire album, however, is “Beercan”. I don’t know what it is about this song that I love so much, but I’m putting at least a buck on the bass-line and two bucks on the backwards-tracked droning instrument. That, with more creative free-associative lyrics than the rest of the album, is all held together by Canned Hip Hop Beat #12, which is way better than #6 in my ears. Also, the sample in the middle (from Care Bears, of all things) which is a child’s voice saying “I’m sad and unhappy”, is then tracked backwards where the last word sounds like “ass?”, and that’s kind of hilarious in a weird way.

The rest of the album is good enough stuff, with a few breaks for some time-wasting, such as the recording of Beck’s “Truckdrivin’ Neighbors Downstairs” fighting that he happened to capture on a tape recorder. Again, the album is an unlikely success, being genuinely strange, lo-fi, and the last ditch effort of a struggling, hard-working artist to finally have a chance at success, which he would find in spades thereafter.

Certainly, despite a string of extremely successful and very good albums (and Modern Guilt), Beck will always (perhaps ironically) be known as the guy who wrote “Loser”. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia, you may notice the entry for Mellow Gold is about 1/10th the size of the article for “Loser” (and the two articles can’t seem to agree whether this is his 2nd or 3rd album, or whether Carl Stephenson is actually “Karl” or not). It’s a song that overshadows an otherwise creative album, but for good reason: Beck’s at his best when he’s being catchy. Either that, or the stoner/slacker crowd have a lot more clout than we think.

Smashing Pumpkins – Zeitgeist

Oh boy, here we go. I really wanted to talk about Adore, but due to the fact that I can never seem to hold on to a copy, time is nearly out for this blog, so it’ll have to wait another day. For now, let’s talk about Smashing Pumpkins’ newest album:

Zeitgeist, the band’s newest and seventh album (yes, a band that has been around since the late 80’s has managed to put out only 7 albums so far), was released 2 years ago to “mixed reviews”.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but “mixed reviews” pretty much describes everything the band did after Mellon Collie. Starting with the actually-quite-good-but-sans-drummer Adore and continuing on through the I-haven’t-heard-them-yet Machina and Machina II, the band insisted on straying farther and farther away from the chunky, multi-layered guitars and amazing drum beats and just overall rock sound that had made them such a fixture on God-forsaken outlets such as the radio and what used to be called “music television” before it became Youtube. Each time the band absolutely refused to put out another epic 28 song double album of genre-defying guitar-heavy art rock, the reviews were “mixed”, meaning some people appreciated the band’s new direction, while probably adding in side-notes about how great it would be if the band would record something a whole lot better, like, say, Siamese Dream. The other side of those reviews would just tell it like it is, that they hated the bleepy bloopy stuff and would they please go back to guitar rock in a hurry because they’re one of the few bands who ever did it right.

Indeed, Zeitgeist is the result of said reviews, and other concerns, like Billy Corgan’s crippling bandophobia and the rest of the band’s interest in “playing the ponies” instead of playing the shows (by “playing the ponies” I mean sweet, sweet heroin) which caused the band to break up for 5 years. After branching off into less-than-stellar solo careers (apparently Corgan’s “super-ground” Zwan’s name comes from the number of people who wanted to hear it, a totally imaginary number), Billy Corgan decided maybe, just maybe, it might be worth it to put out just one more album of drummy guitar music, bringing the band’s total guitar-and-real-drums album output to 4. Not bad for a band just starting out, and apparently not bad for 20 year veterans of alternative rock.

So, Billy Corgan sought out his band, finding only drummer Jimmy Chamberlain suffering from his own solo career. They quickly became roommates (what?) and started writing and recording an album together. Yes, Billy “This Is MY Band” Corgan conceded to having a writing partner for this set of songs, and recording the whole thing the old-fashioned way, which involved playing for weeks on end into the same analogue 24 track recorder they used to record Mellon Collie, probably bleeding out of pores with the exertion (I really doubt Corgan actually shaves his head, I think his recording methods just caused his hair to refuse to keep growing).

The end result is an earnest “Here’s your freaking drummy guitar rock album” from the newly-reformed Smashing Pumpkins duo, a 12 song release made with all the care (and overdubs) that you would expect from a top shelf album, a cohesive, strong release with guitars all over the place, and drums even better than when the band was at the peak of their powers.

The critical reception?

Mixed reviews.

What else did you expect? Fans are impossible to please, and when you’re not exactly known for just tossing out an album every 2 years, you have to expect that your output is going to be put under that much more of a microscope. Sure enough, there are Pumpkins fans who refuse to even listen to the album, much less give it a fair shot as an actual album, and some Pumpkins fans (at least enough to pack a stadium or two) collectively declared “it’s good enough!”

Perhaps my experience is a little different, because this is the first Smashing Pumpkins album I actually paid attention to, because the song “Tarantula” and its crazy-but-fun video are what drew me into actually giving the band a second shot (along with my super-fan friend BBH). My entire experience with the Pumpkins has been a fairly positive one, I guess because, instead of working from their established hits and judging everything else based on the merits of their master work, I’m finding a lot of albums that are better than Zeitgeist couldn’t possibly have been, and I still consider Zeitgeist to be a good album, as far as albums go.

I mean, the album starts off with a real cracker of a rock song (starting with a drum solo, which I sternly approve of) laughably called “Doomsday Clock”, which will unfortunately forever be associated with that terrible Michael Bay Transformers movie. It combines more distorted guitar than I care to even think about, and the tune is catchy enough, and it’s fast-paced and energetic. Then we got through rock music that sort of tapers off on the energy, before introducing a mid-album rock-out in the form of the swing-tastic “Tarantula”, and then in the back of the album, we slow it down but not without the 10 minute “United States” jam, and then end the whole thing with… well, that depends on which version of the album you bought.

I got mine from Target, expecting the “Zeitgeist” title track to be something of a necessity, which it turned out to not be. In total, there were something like 5 retail versions of this album, and then 2 more subsequent re-releases that tried to combine said tracks. It was majorly confusing, but most people knew enough about stealing music from the internet to have a “complete” collection, so no big deal really.

The big highlight, for me, was “Tarantula”. To me, it kind of takes that final rock-out portion to Muse’s “Knights Of Cydonia” and turns it into its own song, with some truly bitchin’ guitar solos all throughout. It really transcends my appreciation for the Pumpkins in general and has become one of my all-time favorite up-tempo rock songs, where it joins “Highway Star”, “Ace Of Spades”, “The Number Of The Beast”, and the afore-mentioned “Knights Of Cydonia” in a special play-list I used to use when I wanted to get somewhere really fast on a bicycle.

Another big highlight for me was the “United States” 10 minute jam, which might be vaguely reminiscent of “Silverfuck” from Siamese Dreams, but is basically an extended session of low-note guitar wankery against a tom-heavy beat while Corgan bellows out a politically-charged song about what I can only assume is the country we both live in. Lyrically, I’m sure the song tries to come off as very, very important, but since Corgan’s whisper-to-a-scream vocals are a thing of the past, the kind of ho-hum way he sings the entire album sort of takes the teeth out of whatever point he was trying to make. Indeed, one of the primal screams from Mellon Collie can scarcely be replaced by the kind of hilarious “OWWWWW” that Corgan throws out at some point in this song, more Michael Jackson than metal, really. Still, the drums and guitars more than make up for it, like with the rest of the album, and at least there’s a good tune in there somewhere.

So this may sound like a “mixed” review, I suppose, but take my word for it, I do enjoy this album. I’m really optimistic about the next project that the Pumpkins (without Chamberlain of course, old habits die hard, and Corgan’s bandophobia dies hardest) have lined up, even if it’s Billy Corgan’s intention to kill the album format. That seems a real shame considering that the man really does know how to put together an album, and that’s something we appreciate here at Album Du Jour.

Anyway, if I can get ahold of a copy of Adore without too much trouble, we may bring up the Pumpkins one more time by year’s end. Until then!

Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon

Q. Why did Al Quaeda, under the direction of Mr. Osama Bin Laden, burn, in a public town square in Kabul, Afghanistan, over 10,000 copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album?

A. Because it’s a horrible album

- Neil Hamburger

You know, for most of my life, I would agree with my favorite comedian on that remark, but since giving it yet another shot, I have decided I actually quite like Pink Floyd’s most famous album. Yes, I know the album doesn’t exactly need my acceptance, but I feel it worthy of mentioning for the purposes of this tiny, unreadable blog.

See, I bought this album based on the advice of everyone ever at Wal*Mart during my brief tenure of employment there. Believing myself to be a fan of “that sort of thing”, since you know, every band I totally like nowadays owe it all to this album and everything, I figured it would be a life-changing album of extraordinary magnitude.

Turns out it was too boring to listen to all the way through.

Yeah, my teenaged self wasn’t impressed with Dark Side Of The Moon. I believe this is due to a condition I have decided to call Sgt. Pepper Syndrome. See, when an album so ingrained into the cultural mindset is experienced for the first time by someone who is ridiculous disconnected from the mainstream (i.e. yours truly, at least for most of my life), and that product is judged by its own merit without any context or knowledge, that thing could be judged harshly and, often, wrongfully. Of course, enjoyment of music is a subjective thing, but someone like me apparently appreciates context. In order to appreciate Pink Floyd in general, I had to know exactly where they stood against all the other acts of the day, and how their sound evolved from what it was to this album. In doing so, I have gained what I would consider a healthy appreciation for the making of this album.

Of course, like with the other “best album of all time” with which I’ve had this experience, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, I still call to question whether this album is truly as remarkable as everyone makes it out to be, considering the context and history. Something about this album had to have failed to pique my interest in the first place, and all the lengthy, lengthy Wikipedia entries on the album and each individual song (which I spent all last night reading word-for-word, mind you) can’t remedy that.

Don’t get me wrong, internet, I really enjoy this album, especially now that I’ve a wider perception of music in general, especially in that most sacred era of the 60’s and early 70’s. Considering this album utilizes sounds (particularly in the synth and guitar department) that wouldn’t be heard for another 15 years or so, and even then with far less class, it’s quite a feat.

However, it’s no accidental feat. I am almost sure I’ve heard tell of albums into which more blood, sweat, and tears were drained, but I can’t recall a single one. The Dark Side Of The Moon was an incredibly concerted effort by all the members of Pink Floyd (not just the bassist, as apparently would become the trend in later albums), and it really shows. For being an album presumably about mental illness and chaos and the darkness of the soul, it’s an album that reeks of polish, especially compared to earlier works.

It’s kind of interesting, in listening to this album that spent 14 years in the charts, that it sounds like it does. Not because it’s “weird”, I actually consider this one of the most sensible albums (long instrumental breaks notwithstanding) that the band has put out, but because it’s so drawn out.

Like many albums of its kind, it’s basically about 4 songs drawn out to feature length, using anything it can to keep the songs going, like in the case of  “Time” and “The Great Gig In The Sky”, in which an R&B singer apparently goes through 4 1/2 minutes of a Brazilian Wax performed by a porcupine in a roller coaster. It just feels like there is a lot of empty space in the album, especially since the thing is so damned cohesive you only seem to ever notice the song changing when one of the in-your-face sound effect introductions ushers in the next thing (the money-clanging between “The Great Gig In The Sky” and “Money” startles me every time).

Those 4 songs that are drawn out to lengths unimaginable are still damn fine songs, of course, it’s just mysterious to me and I think everyone else involved that this album did so well. I can understand the appeal, I mean it’s those Pink Floyd weirdos doing straight songs with understandable, straight-forward lyrics and only slightly confusing musicality. I mean, “Money” may have 7/4 timing, which is very confusing, but the guitar solo is done in God’s own 4/4 timing, because really who wants to do a guitar solo in 7/4. Ok I can name one guitarist but I won’t.

For me, it’s certainly less boring than when I used to be more musically narrow-minded, but still nowhere near what I consider the “best” album, not even of Pink Floyd’s career. Personally, I’m still more into their earliest stuff, particularly with Syd Barrett, and I think it’s probably because I don’t need to hear an album about insanity, but instead find Syd’s actual insanity perpetuated through the music he wrote to be far more interesting.

Still, the evolution of the band to this stage was a necessary one, and definitely a good one. It was kind of an abrupt jump going from Ummagumma to this album, but we’ve precious little time left on this blog and I don’t have any of the albums between that one and this one, so until I suddenly run into more Pink Floyd albums, this may be my last word on them for the blog proper. Indeed:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

(“Time”)

The Rolling Stones – Beggar’s Banquet

When we last left The Rolling Stones, they had just answered the siren call of psychedelia in making an album that was interesting, but hardly an album of “songs” or anything. Their Satanic Majesties Request was a nice experiment, but clearly it was time for one of music’s biggest, loudest blues/rock bands to get the guitars back out and rock out again, and boy did they rock out:

Beggar’s Banquet is an album I somehow missed for a long time. It is right between Their Satanic Majesties Request and my favorite Stones album, Let It Bleed, filling out the middle of their trio of albums designed to make fun of the The Beatles (the original cover to this album was apparently a plain card like title with the title and “R.S.V.P.” written on, to look like The Beatles’ self-titled and all white album). Either way, I discovered it some time last year, and hearing “Sympathy For The Devil” playing, seemingly out of nowhere, at work today made me think about this album and how I should totally write about it.

Basically, while Let It Bleed was an album, well, bleeding with creative and epic blues/rock songs, there needed to be a kind of rebirth of the band, so that people wouldn’t get too confused when they went from the confusing psychedelic stuff they had gotten into to the kind of music they’re supposed to play. First off, they had to come out with a hit single that would really showcase their hard-hitting blues finesse. That single, very unfortunately, wasn’t actually on Beggar’s Banquet, but I felt it necessary to at least mention because it is my favorite Rolling Stones song: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. Maybe it’s something about the awesome yet simple circular guitar riff, maybe it’s the completely bananas lyrics, or maybe it’s because it’s such an integral part to one of my favorite rhythm-based video games Elite Beat Agents, who knows. I just love the song, but we’re here to talk about an album.

Now that the band had picked up their guitars and were ready to wail again, they needed to grab people’s attention. Hmm, how about a mamba song about Satan? Sure, Mick, why not. Sure enough, the lead off to this collection of jams is unlike anything else on the album (which, to me, evokes memories of Aftermath). “Sympathy For The Devil” is a grand old song, something that might belong in a musical or something, if musicals were actually good or if the song otherwise really sucked. It tells, in first person, about the Devil (in his charming, egocentric rock-star self that all the metal bands have been masturbating to since the 80’s), and some of his exploits. The song is fairly powerful, and I’d say a touch high-class for something Mick Jagger wrote:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith

And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

Easily one of my favorite Stones song, and my absolute favorite mamba, no competition.

The rest of the album settles into taking turns between slow, bluesy acoustic ballads, making fun of Country music, and rock songs that just aren’t quite as good as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. The first slow, bluesy acoustic ballad is “No Expectations”, which is a fine song, recorded with all members of the band sitting around some open mics. The song tells a soulful story of loneliness and, uhm, being alone. Sorry, the Stones have kind of lapsed into that rushed sort of songwriting where they just put stuff together until it works, in fact they kind of work in that mode for the rest of the album.

In fact, one of the later tracks on the album, and one of the band’s biggest hits is “Street Fighting Man” (located infamously at G SEVEN if you know the movies I know). The song itself is a rocker, through and through, and probably the hardest rocking song to come out of the 60’s recorded almost entirely on acoustic instruments. The lyrics evoke thoughts of the race riots, and other general riots that were going on at the time, and you may think this is The Rolling Stones’ way of silencing all that with their proud song of the streets. In fact, nobody has been able to tell in 30 years what the song is really about, there are literally thousands of interpretations (and I know the meaning of the word “literal”, I really mean there are over 1,000) and I have not read them, but I am hoping at least one of them is “Mick or Keith got a little tired and forgot to put some kind of point to the song before falling asleep”. Either way, great song, no “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, but what is, really?

A song I quite like, though it has gotten some flack in the past, apparently, is “Jigsaw Puzzle”. It’s got this wonderful trip beat by Charlie Watts (a vastly underrated drummer), and apparently is supposed to contain some kind of Dylanesque stream-of-consciousness writing. Well, I’m not sure about all that, but I do kind of like the random imagery being tied together with Mick singing about trying to do a jigsaw puzzle before the rain starts up again, because it kind of makes each of these seemingly random ideas sort of come together to form one cohesive whole, like a damned jigsaw puzzle, see? The completed puzzle is the song, made up of all the seemingly random parts that are put together almost arbitrarily yet tied together by the very concept of ideas being joined together. Makes perfect sense, if you ask me.

Actually, I’m on some pretty trippy cold medicine so now you may know why I not only am rambling a bit in this writeup, but why I chose The Rolling Stones as the band to do it with. No matter what my state of mind, however, I will say Beggar’s Banquet is an awesome festival of bluesy rock music like what The Rolling Stones are supposed to be making, and though there are better albums, this one is at least not Their Satanic Majesties Request, and I think we can all be thankful for that.

Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter

As you may have gathered from my Fleet Foxes writeup less than a week ago, I am concerned about the present and future of folk music. Being a fan of music that relies on lyrical prowess that could be related from just one guy and a guitar (see: yesterday’s Johnny Cash writeup), I really hate to see how things are going to go when the great songwriters have all left us. Who will take up the mantle of songwriting when we no longer have Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen? I’m not sure, but there’s at least one solid candidate:

So what is it that puts Josh Ritter above all the others? Those beardy guys with their vintage instruments vying for the position as music’s next great songwriters? For one, he doesn’t have a beard, which is automatically great, but the more tangible reasons are in that little mind of his.

I say “little”, but the dude’s got a streak of genius that shows not only in his music, but in his pre-music career. Basically, the guy, despite growing up in Idaho, was going for a degree in neuroscience when he thought to himself “You know what’s better than neuroscience? Folk music.”, and immediately set aside studying brains for studying Dylan.

There are about 4 other albums that pre-date Historical Conquests, but this is his first album that has seen a large amount of distribution. In it, he apparently went from a more old-fashioned folk sound to something that incorporates a nifty brass section, crap electric guitars, rockabilly drums, and various other faux lo-fi studio effects. This is the part of the writeup where I would be complaining about this stuff, but even a particularly cranky music listener like myself can’t really fault Josh Ritter for his studio tricks. Some of them are downright effective, while some of them only exacerbate songs that are already not quite up to snuff.

The general praise given to Josh Ritter (and there’s lots of it) basically put it forth that he’s a mix of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Nick Drake, and Jesus Christ of Nazareth (ok not really, but hell while we’re at it). Naturally, this is a lot to live up to, and if it were all true, he should have a fan-base that numbers in the hundred-trillions. In my own little opinion, I would say that he sounds like a guy who was inspired by Bob Dylan to drop his inflection after every line, Leonard Cohen to incorporate references to makin’ love to women in his songs, and I don’t know where the reviewers got the rest of that stuff. Essentially, Josh Ritter is a folk singer like many I have heard in Austin, with that oh-so-necessary care with lyrics-writing added in, and who actually can afford a large band to do his bidding.

Historical Conquests‘ general tone is bright and fun-loving, with hardly a downbeat song to be heard (which should really disqualify any Cohen comparisons, if you ask me). It’s the kind of music that contains the spirit of Bob Dylan’s over-confident ragged genius, with some unusual use of percussion and all of today’s production values available. Still, the presence of a few stand-out tracks propel Josh Ritter above comparisons to other artists.

For me, that stand-out track is “The Temptation Of Adam”, which begins with a sad brass section blatting out the song’s superior melody by way of a kind of 40’s military style. Josh starts in singing with a lovely finger-picking acoustic guitar about falling in love with a girl in a missle silo. The song’s lovelorn lyrics and soothing, whispered melody really conveys a sense of passion and lends the song a rare sort of clarity, like you’re hearing a story rather than a song, but when the brass section comes back in the middle of the song, suddenly emotions erupt and you may find yourself wiping away a sad tear for the situation. To me, no matter what one may think of the rest of this album, this is the song that makes me hopeful for the future of music as its greatest heroes dwindle down to nothing.

There are other highlights too, a particular favorite being “To The Dogs Or Whoever”, which may very well be contrived from a 1960’s acid trip from someone who wasn’t even born in that decade, but really, have you heard a song like that done effectively since the 60’s? It could perhaps be the wonderful drum beat that comes in, the sweeping guitars, or just the general sense of fun, but something about this song just wins me over. Of course, in winning me over, I noticed that it takes these great trips across the singer’s sense of free association:

Deep in the belly of a whale I found her
Down with the deep blue jail around her
Running her hands through the ribs of the dark
Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc

I love the way she looks in her underwear
I lose my page then the plot then the book then I swear
She makes the most of her time by loving me plenty
She knows there’ll come a day when we won’t be getting any

The stain of the sepia the butcher Crimea
Through the wreck of a brass band I thought I could see her
In a cakewalk she came through the dead and the lame
Just a little bird floating on a hurricane

I was flat on my back with my feet in the thorns
I was in between the apples and the chloroform
She came to me often
I was sure I was dying
It was always hard to tell if she was laughing or crying

I thought I heard somebody calling
In the dark I thought I heard somebody call

Another really fun one is “Next To The Last Romantic”, a sort of rockabilly track (possibly the reason people consider him Cash-inspired) that tells the story of a notorious lover. The song has some excellent wordplay contained in lines such as “He’s stolen hearts like they’re horses, and horses when hearts can’t be found”, and the song just has this general sense of fun that makes one wonder why it couldn’t be put closer to the front of the album.

Of course, the album has some weak points, musically speaking, but it’s consistent enough at least lyrically to be more of a matter of taste at that point. This album grows on me every time I hear it, and I’m fairly confident that, if folk music continues to have an audience that extends beyond an Austin open mic, Josh Ritter will be among the top artists to usher in the new to mix with the old. More than any other artist that’s trying to usurp the aging kings of song, Josh Ritter has this sense of genuine, unpretentious love for the music that should earn him the rightful place among them, and truly a historical conquest that would be.

Johnny Cash – Personal File

Johnny Cash put out about 96 albums (depending on how you count them) in his lifetime, albums that started with Johnny Cash And His Hot And Blue Guitar to The Man Comes Around, and in between was everything from an album about the Grand Canyon to an album about sea-faring (a strange topic for a Country album) to weird albums to amazing albums. Of all of those, there isn’t an album out there quite like Personal File, so it figures that this album went unreleased until a couple of years ago:

Basically, Personal File was collected from a box of tapes (out of the hundreds of tapes that sat around Cash’s home studio, The House Of Cash, at the time of his death) that were literally that, a personal collection of songs that Cash had started recorded in 1973 and continued to record on through the 80’s.

You might think to yourself that a random assortment of songs that Cash recorded by himself wouldn’t work that well as an album, but in fact, it was an album that Cash had in mind when he started recording this stuff. Basically, he put together the majority of these songs in order to pitch them to Columbia as a radical idea: an album of just Johnny Cash and a guitar. Columbia, in their ineffable wisdom, told Johnny Cash that an album of just him playing songs on an acoustic guitar would never sell, and thus business for Cash went on as usual. Of course, right after that, Cash wouldn’t have another “hit” album for over 20 years, when in 1994 he put out American Recordings which, guess what, was an album of just Johnny Cash and a guitar.

So yeah, Columbia was retarded, that’s not the point of this whole thing.

Personal File is actually much more than just a collection of songs by Cash with his guitar. The songs that were put together for this album are remarkably cohesive, and nearly all of them entirely unreleased on any other albums, so the album actually functions just like an album. Each song, or set of songs on a certain topic, are prefaced by Johnny Cash’s charming narrative, as he talks either about writing the song, or where he first heard it, or what memories he has that are attached to the song, or just about anything.

Another interesting aspect to this album is that it has crystal-clear production, due to the sparse instrumentation, and thus it’s one of the few albums that really showcases what I feel was Johnny Cash’s best years as far as his singing quality goes. When one listens to American Recordings, Cash’s 60+ year old voice is shaky and old, and that certainly lends it the necessary character to sing the weary songs he presented on that recording, but here on Personal File, Cash is but a child of 41 or so, and his voice was marred by neither drugs nor age, and sounds downright effervescent at times, despite being a rich baritone.

For that reason, and for the utterly laid-back and relaxed atmosphere of this collection of songs, Personal File is one of Johnny’s most relaxing albums. Time just seems to float on by while listening to the legend sing these unknown songs and hear him talk about them as if they were his best friends.

Johnny Cash has some interesting friends in these songs, too. Starting with a heartbreak song called “Letter Edged In Black”, about mother dying, we’re treated to a few more songs on the topic of “Mother” as Cash talks about how important home is to him. We’re then treated to songs so old that their most modern recording (other than Cash’s) were Edison wax cylinders, and we’re even given traditional songs that he had recorded previously, like “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes”, and we’re taken to many different places where the living is rough, like with “Lousiana Man”, “Girl From Saskatoon”, “Saginaw, Michigan”, and a June Carter-less version of “When It’s Springtime In Alaska (It’s Forty Below)”. Later on, we’re treated to some of Cash’s originals that never really saw the light of day, and all of them are actually good! One I liked in particular was “A Fast Song”, which is as interesting a song as the story behind it. All of these songs are just on the first disc!

The second disc is actually entirely spiritual songs, whether hymns or just folk spirituals, Cash just goes to town on the songs that you can tell he loves best. There are even a couple of originals here that are wonderful as well. For one, we get the wonderful “No Earthly Good”, which you may remember as being covered by Billy Joe Shaver, and is a brilliant song about the sanctimonious crowd who are “so Heavenly minded you’re no Earthly good”. Another one I love is “A Half A Mile A Day”, a wonderful, utterly charming little story about Cash visiting a church during a kind of prayer service (not an actual regular service), and in the midst of all these Christians standing up and making these bold claims of going to Heaven in a ship, a rocket, and everything else, a little old lady who was sitting in the back declares that she’ll get to Heaven, she reckons, making about a half a mile a day. I adore this song.

Really, it’s no good for me to talk about any of these songs at length, because Cash does such a good job of it in the actual album. That’s one of the reasons why this is one of my favorite Johnny Cash albums. The unique thing about Cash is that it’s not so much his voice or his songs or his guitar playing that one is really listening to, at least in the advanced stages of Cash fandom, but his character. What Personal File means to me is that it’s a 2 hour session of Johnny Cash, a man of almost 100 albums and thousands of songs, just sitting down in his own little studio, on his own time, completely free of any obligation, just playing the songs he loves and talking about them accordingly. Every song feels important, and the richness of the tone of both that wonderful Martin guitar and Cash’s golden voice make this album a pure pleasure to listen to. You’d do well to seek out a copy of this thing, as I really think it’s not so much just trying to get extra content out of The Man In Black now that he’s passed on, but I really feel that he wanted us to hear these songs, but never found a willing ear until his other solo acoustic album wound up doing so well.

 

Warren Zevon – Life’ll Kill Ya

Now that the end of the year, and the end of Album Du Jour*, is approaching, I am finally able to freely talk about just about any album I want, and indeed one of the items that has been in the queue since the beginning is the first of a final trilogy of albums from one of my absolute favorite artists, Warren Zevon. Let’s talk about Life’ll Kill Ya:

After Mutineer, Zevon once again found himself without a label or very many prospects for reclaiming the near-fame and almost-fortune he had once had. The album was brilliant, but weird, and I can tell you that *I* have never heard of  Giant records. Not to be deterred, Warren got right back on his feet and got signed to newly-formed Artemis records… about 5 years later.

When presented with the opportunity to create a new album, Warren took a different approach. For one, this is the first album since Excitable Boy that Warren didn’t produce himself or with the help of one of his friends. Instead, he enlisted the help of Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, who were brought on mainly because Zevon had heard that they worked with Radiohead, whom Zevon admired greatly (in an interview, he considered them one of his favorite bands, out of a total of 2 or 3 bands that he even liked). Of course, I imagine that someone didn’t tell Warren that the only Radiohead album they produced was Pablo Honey, but nevertheless, they got the job.

One of the other “different” elements to Life’ll Kill Ya is the sparse arrangement of instruments. Most of the songs are little more than Warren with a guitar, his best friend Jorge Calderón on bass, and a couple of subtle accompanying instruments, usually also played by Warren and Jorge. This is the most bare-bones of Warren’s studio albums (his most stripped album in general was the solo acoustic live performance Learning To Flinch), so every nuance of his vocal performance and lyrics are brought right to the forefront.

Speaking of, if one were to listen through the other albums in chronological order, one may notice how Zevon’s voice started to thin out from the booming baritone of Excitable Boy to the more delicate tenor of Mutineer, but in Life’ll Kill Ya, Warren’s voice actually sound deteriorated, almost like Johnny Cash’s had at that point after getting double pneumonia, coincidentally around the same time. Indeed, listening to this album may actually make you uncomfortable at times, especially on songs like “I’ll Slow You Down”, where he hits some incredibly shaky high notes. I’m not sure why he didn’t just re-write the melodies to fit a register he was more comfortable with, but according to every source, including the man himself, he had no idea that anything was actually wrong with him.

Really, you would not know it by the album’s recurring theme of mortality, aging, sickness, death, and the inevitability of it all. I’ve always hung onto the belief that Life’ll Kill Ya was Warren’s subconscious trying to tell him, in song, that something was indeed wrong with him, but in Warren’s mind, it was just business as usual, and the resulting work is something that is at times clever and insightful, but other times, downright scary.

The whole shebang starts off with one of the most grating instruments for someone to just assault you with at the beginning of an album: the harmonica. Zevon takes the Dylan approach in playing a harmonica and strumming a 12-string for the opening to “I Was In The House When The House Burned Down”. Still, whatever your feelings on harmonicas, this song is quite a highlight of the album, for (what else but) the lyrics:

I may be old and I may be bent
But I had the money till it all got spent
I had the money till they made me pay
Then I had the sense to be on my way
I had to stay in the underground
I was in the house when the house burned down

On top of these are some cusses, some allusions to Jesus Christ, and the usual array of lines that make you go “huh!” Not too bad a way to start an album, if you ask me.

Another thing that may make you make go “huh!” is the title track for the album. Sung in a voice that almost sounds like it’s sneering at you, Warren lays it all out there:

From the President of the United States
To the lowliest rock and roll star
The doctor is in and he’ll see you now
He don’t care who you are
Some get the awful, awful diseases
Some get the knife, some get the gun
Some get to die in their sleep
At the age of a hundred and one

Life’ll kill ya, that’s what I said
Life’ll kill ya, then you’ll be dead
Life’ll find ya wherever you go
Requiescat in pace (Latin: “May he rest in peace”)
That’s all she wrote

Yes, right off the bat, Warren Zevon makes a reference to terminal illness. In doing so, he’s not only unintentionally predicting his own fate in a way that so few musicians get to, but he’s also intentionally making an admission about his fear of doctors, which would come into play later in his life. The song’s chord structure is very much Mutineer-like in its insane incongruity, the melody doesn’t fit together in a way that’s almost disturbing. Of course, this was probably the intended effect.

Utilizing a much safer chord structure and melody, one of the other highlights of this album is Zevon’s second song that calls on the spirit of The King: “Porcelain Monkey”. This song tells the cautionary tale of Elvis Presley’s final days, and was inspired by a postcard picture of this porcelain monkey he kept in his living room (it actually exists!) that Warren saw. Is it possible that the “porcelain monkey” could also represent Elvis on the toilet, which is the legendary throne upon which The King overdosed on drugs and died? Who knows, it fits really well in the theme of the album, that’s for sure, but it really works well on its own.

“For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” is a sweet little love-lost song that uses some clever-as-hell wordplay:

I can saw a woman in two
But you won’t want to look in the box when I’m through
I can make love… disappear
For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer

The song has a bounciness that could very well fit in with any of Zevon’s earliest albums. The vocals on it are among the shakiest on the album, but are nothing compared to the next song.

“I’ll Slow You Down” really should have been tuned down a few steps (or an octave, why not), and it’s a real shame because the lyrics are pretty amazing. At least the harmonies kind of fix things, a bit. The song is mainly a “she’s too good for me” kind of song (a theme that would be re-visited later), and yeah.

“Hostage-O” is a bit of a strange one, mainly because I can’t tell why there’s an -O at the end of the word. The rest of the lyrics in this whispered acoustic ballad are a little too rough for me to go up and ask any of them. There’s a clown mobile, a creepy mask, other “tough love” references including chains and maiming, and well this is just a dark song all around, but not too bad for a love song.

“Dirty Little Religion” picks up gloriously where “Mr. Bad Example” left off, with Zevon once again playing the part of the unrepentant sinner, this time turning his vices into a religion:

I like to think I’ve earned my reputation
For rushing in where angels fear to tread
I’ll take you home to meet the congregation
We’ll all get together in my tent

I make a dirty little religion out of lovin’
I’ll make a dirty little convert out of you

Nice, is all I have to say about that. This song also has a pretty great shuffle, and the vocals are kind of mid-range and thus sound great compared to most of the rest of the album.

Next we have a Steve Winwood cover, which marks a rare occasion in the Zevon discography, since he rarely did covers, but would be a trend for the next two albums. The song, “Back In The High Life Again”, is an amazing choice for this album, because the severe way Zevon performs the song and considering the rest of the album, you would think he was being sarcastic with every word of the song, yet there is this element of sincerity about it. Of course, when confronted directly about whether this song is being sung ironically or not, Zevon deftly avoided a direct answer, instead stating two things: One, to try and define irony in turn defeats irony, and for two, whether the song’s meaning is ironic or straight depends on which one is more entertaining to the listener. Dude wasn’t called a genius for nothing.

One of Warren Zevon’s most notorious songs from this era is the bare-facedly brazen “My Shit’s Fucked Up”. Featuring a catchy acoustic guitar riff backed up by some really squishy sounding Fender bass action, Zevon again sings unsympathetically about something that would soon become very prophetic for his own life:

Well, I went to the doctor
I said, “I’m feeling kind of rough”
“Let me break it to you, son-
Your shit’s fucked up.”
I said, “My shit’s fucked up?”
Well, I don’t see how-”
He said, “The shit that used to work-
Won’t work now”

I had a dream
Ah, shucks, oh well
Now it’s all fucked up
It’s shot to Hell

The song is kind of depressing when one considers the truth of the matter, but Zevon’s use of explicit language (which hilariously didn’t earn him a Parental Advisory sticker, see also Smash by The Offspring) really helps to lift the curse. I don’t know, something about him being so upfront about it all, using uncharacteristically bad language (which is hilarious coming from a doctor character, by the way) makes me just want to shrug and say “it’s true!” rather than despair over my own wasted years.

Indeed, this twisted positivity is a perfect segue into the song’s final parting words, the first being a self-styled “Celtic hymn” that Warren and Jorge wrote called “Fistful Of Rain”

When your grasp has exceeded your reach
And you put all your faith
In a figure of speech
You’ve heard all the answers
But the questions remain
Grab a hold of that fistful of rain

Of course, in being all positive n’ junk, Warren opted to use some very cliché aphorisms to convey this message. Now, I know this isn’t weak songwriting on Warren’s part; the man is extremely well-read and is generally considered to be the best songwriter ever.  Ok, that last part is an exaggeration (except in my mind), but still, the man knows how to write. It’s kind of a mystery why he would write things like this song (except for the line “When the diamonds turn back into coal”, because that line is dash clever), and a mystery it shall remain. The point is, it’s impossible to grab a “fistful of rain”, so the fact that Warren is telling you to do so in order to combat these cliché troubles might be some clue as to the song’s hidden meaning, if any.

Another song that could very well fit in Zevon’s earliest work is the song “Ourselves To Know”, as it’s a historical ballad set in 1099, and is about a holy crusade, though the song doesn’t go as far into it as something like “Frank And Jesse James” or “Vera Cruz”. Either way, the song is much like “Vera Cruz” in spirit. What it’s doing in an album about death, I have no idea, but somehow the thing seems pretty significant.

Finally, we’re graced with what I consider one of Warren Zevon’s best songs, the third in a trio of songs on this album that were unintentionally prophetic about Zevon’s demise, and short of actually saying “cancer”, these songs pretty much have it all down. This song is different from the other two, however, as it doesn’t hide behind humor or darkness and is instead as sincere as this songwriter gets. “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” offers up a simple prayer or request to whomever it may concern:

Don’t let us get sick
Don’t let us get old
Don’t let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be strong
And make us play nice
And let us be together tonight

The acoustic guitar plays this beautiful melody along with the vocals, which are delivered with all the conviction that could be mustered. One of the verses, seemingly unconnected to anything, really struck a chord with me:

The sky was on fire
When I walked to the mill
To take up the slack in the line
I thought of my friends
And the troubles they’ve had
To keep me from thinking of mine

What does any of this have to do with being sick or old? What was Warren trying to say with this verse? There is an interpretation I have of this particular stanza which will have to wait for a later writeup.

Life’ll Kill Ya is an album that, if Warren was still here with us, would probably be considered a below-average offering with an arrogant, insensitive look at the reality of death. It might actually be that, I don’t know, but Warren’s fate more or less dispelled any uncomfortable feelings one may have about this album, and the way in which he redeemed himself gave a whole new perspective on how he must have been feeling at the time, and for that reason, this album is actually counted among my absolute favorites. Of course, Warren would have his fun for one more album, but then things get seriously. We’ll be covering both of those albums before the year’s end, hope to see you there!

*Ok, it’s probable that this blog won’t die on January 1st, 2010, but the project will be considered “done” so the content is going to shift dramatically.

Leonard Cohen – Recent Songs

Tonight’s entry is going to be pretty interesting to write, as I am under the influence of some night-time cold medicine, and am fairly tired after an evening of attempted night-time photography, and I’m about to talk about one of Leonard Cohen’s most evasive albums:

Every review I’ve read on this album has said it, and I’m no exception, as I feel it’s worth mentioning. This album is Cohen’s “return to form” after his brief departure from reason in the ludicrous Phil Spector-produced disaster Death Of A Ladies’ Man. Indeed, this album came out only 2 years after its predecessor, which marks quite an anomalous speed for Leonard Cohen (who has been known to release albums at a rate of once per decade if the 90’s are any indication).

The other reason that mentioning the previous album is significant here is that this is perhaps the only album Cohen put out in the 70’s that has any semblance of good cheer and hope. The 70’s were apparently not too kind to our favorite poet, starting with the gray and hopeless Songs Of Love And Hate (perhaps my favorite Cohen album), and going on through the decadent and perhaps-too-raw New Skin For The Old Ceremony and the insanity and outright anger of Death Of A Ladies’ Man that lied underneath the bad production, which itself was kind of a lashing out. Maybe it was the elements that led up to the creation of the latter album that led Leonard to being held at gunpoint (or crossbow, or both?) by a madman shabbily disguised as a music producer that led him to re-assess his musical situation.

Thus began Cohen’s journey away from the earthy folk music he was known for, and towards the more band-oriented jazz/soul sound he would become known for in the 80’s. Though the most obvious transitional period would come 6 years after this album with Various Positions, Recent Songs, to me, marks the final resting place of Leonard Cohen’s “folk” period, though there are some jazzy moments here and there.

The main descriptive word to pin on this album is “gypsy”, thanks to the inclusion of a violinist who actually was a gypsy, and an oriental instrument called the “oud”, which is the stringed instrument you hear being strummed quickly in the background in places. This sound is juxtaposed in parts by a jazzy ensemble that evokes a darkened street corner in the mind, with a lamp post for Cohen to lean on as he sings “Came So Far For Beauty” while smoking a cigarette. None of these “new” elements detract from this being a Leonard Cohen record, through and through, and the fact that I can hardly stay awake through it should be some indication of that.

The other indication is, of course, the lyrics. No matter what his troubles, Leonard Cohen is a poet first, and musician second, and poet third and fourth. There are some amazing songs on this album, a particular favorite being “The Window”, with these last lines:

Then lay your rose on the fire
The fire give up to the sun
The sun give over to splendour
In the arms of the high holy one
For the holy one dreams of a letter
Dreams of a letter’s death
Oh bless thee continuous stutter
Of the word being made into flesh

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love
Oh tangle of matter and ghost
Oh darling of angels, demons and saints
And the whole broken-hearted host
Gentle this soul

Man, that’s just amazing to me. As you can see, the artist is far from depressed, but at least there’s hope there.

It’s not mentioned nearly enough, it seems, but have you ever heard a mariachi song in French? Well, listen to “Un Canadien Errant” if you ever want to. The lyrics are pretty interesting, if you have a working knowledge of French or access to online translation sites.

Leonard’s more sensual side (that is, the outside) is shown in the string-tastic “The Traitor”. It’s kind of hard for me to get a true sense of the story being told here, except to say that the imagery is beautiful, as it pairs war and romance and death and life and all that stuff beautifully. There is one line that I particularly like, more as a humorous thing than anything:

I told my mother “Mother I must leave you
preserve my room but do not shed a tear
Should rumour of a shabby ending reach you
it was half my fault and half the atmosphere”

One of my favorite songs on this album is the opening, “The Guests”. Lyrically, it hints at some vague happenings, but ties it together with a very simple chorus that is simply “Oh love, I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you, oh”, which is stuck in my head about 7 hours out of the day. The song contains the most prominent use of the oud, and that gets stuck in my head too. The part I quite enjoy about this song, however, is how it opens on kind of a dissonant chord, and thus opens the album that way.

“Our Lady Of Solitude” is a lovely song as well, containing weird instrumentation that pairs a weird, spacey synthesizer and a lap steel guitar, complete with violin, in kind of a jazzy, spacey western song, which is about the weirdest kind of song I’ve ever had to describe.

Speaking of western songs, one of the few instances of Cohen writing an actual Country song closes out the album and is called “The Ballad Of The Absent Mare”, which starts being about a lost horse, but ends up being an allegory for lost love. With the exception of the pizzicato violin and the return of the mariachi horns, it sounds like the kind of song that belongs on Songs From A Room.

I just realized that I’ve named nearly every other Leonard Cohen album in talking about this one, how strange. Well, Recent Songs stands out so much among them, mainly because it’s the only album that isn’t truly derived from any of the others, and none of the others are truly derived from it. For an album with such a plain name (which wouldn’t be Cohen’s last, as he did come out with an album called Ten New Songs), Recent Songs is a rather unique album in the Cohen catalog. It is, at the very least, a silver lining around the cloud of Death Of A Ladies’ Man, in that is shows that Cohen was ready to move past the mistakes of the past, and evolve his songwriting into what it would become, and it’s still going. Hopefully Leonard Cohen will be around for a long time yet.

Audio Adrenaline – Some Kind Of Zombie

Well, I kind of didn’t mean for this to happen. I guess “zombies” would be a good thing to write the Album Du Jour entry for the 31st of October about, but in fact I was just thinking about this album and how I would like to write about it. So let’s talk once again about Audio Adrenaline and their fourth album, Some Kind Of Zombie:

Now, really, I shouldn’t be writing about this album without talking about how they got to this album (my favorite of theirs) from their first two albums, which if you remember, were almost entirely made out of cheese. Well, there are two reasons for this anomalous album.

For one, the album that precedes it was something of a big artistic step forward for Audio A. Their album Bloom was a huge seller, mainly based off the merits of its stand out single, “Never Gonna Be As Big As Jesus”. Though that album may get its own writeup someday, for now I will just say that it moved Audio Adrenaline from being a hip-hop derived rock band that were hot on the heels of such acts as “I Luv Rap Music” artists DC Talk to an actual rock band. It was full of riffs, actual drums, and basically actually fit the band like a glove.

For this, their follow-up, that rock sound is explored more, and certainly there are riffs (including one of my favorite guitar riffs, if you can believe it), but the band decided to take things in an entirely different direction. In fact, for Some Kind Of Zombie, they took it in all kinds of directions. The album doesn’t suffer from its exploration, however, in fact the whole is cohesive enough that its explorations into many different facets of “alternative” rock are easy enough to follow.

Still, the apple didn’t fall too far from the same tree that brought us songs like “P.D.A.“, so some of the songs, though great, might be a little hard to take as seriously as they should be for this album to be greatly appreciated. It doesn’t help either that the band would go right back to goofy pop music right after this album. Still, while we’re here, let’s talk about some highlights.

For one, the album starts off with a song that I am quite fond of. It’s called “Chevette”, and if you’re not familiar, the Chevette is a type of car that, well, it’s a car. It’s kind of a popularly terrible car, but that’s the point of the song. Basically, it’s the singer recalling his poor (but rich inside) father buying a Chevette and how it was awesome for what it represented rather than what it was. It’s a solid enough metaphor, and the song itself has a great tune built on a drumming cadence and a kickin’ guitar solo-tastic bridge at some point. The guitarist, by the way, is different in this album than the previous albums, I felt that worth nothing.

“New Body” is an interesting song as well, mainly for its electronic feel (which kind of evokes more Skillet than Audio Adrenaline, but you know the two were label-mates, maybe they accidentally swapped songs at some point). Either way, the song is about being pretty much physically worthless as a human being (I think we’ve all been there), and how we’ll be rebuilt in the afterlife, taking a rather literal scriptural stance, which is always interesting in song, as it takes literally something that may be metaphorical and then turns it back into a metaphor. Either way, the chorus is catchy, what more do you want?

The main feature of the album, and really one of my favorite songs in this crazy Christian Rock genre, is the title track. “Some Kind Of Zombie” is a masterfully built rock song as far as its ultra-catchy riff and that exemplary drumming goes. The song, like the previous two songs, is a rock song, but has this pretension of high art in there somewhere (just check the video to see what I mean). While I appreciate this dynamic contrast from their previously goofy selves, it’s still a little hard to take all that seriously (maybe it’s the highschoolers dressed like goth kids). The song itself is kind of an item of interest as well, because it’s the one and only example I’ve ever heard of Christian music mixing two concepts that would typically cancel each other out, that of re-animation, or Zombies (which usually has dark conontations and/or some metaphor about the evils of humanity), and the supposed re-birth that Christians are supposed to go through. The best part is that, unapologetically, the song makes it cool that Christians, when re-birthed, are just mindless slaves to whatever is commanded of them.

It’s really a crazy concept to consider, but it’s written right there:

I hear you speak and I obey
(Some kind of zombie)
I walk away from the grave
(Some kind of zombie)
I will never be afraid
(Some kind of zombie)
I gave my life away

Really, I just wanted to draw attention to that and see if anybody else considers that a little weird? The worst part is how well the concept fits into both overall ideas.

Of course, after blowing our minds with such (possibly unintentional) interesting ideas about humanity, the band goes and does an anti-evolution song. Ok, so this one isn’t as bad as This Train’s “The Missing Link”, but it has the same overall concept of God literally creating Man out of sand, and to back this up, the chorus starts with the lines “I’m an original species,
more enlightened than Nietzshe”, ’nuff said!

The band then kind of goes into a “fun” part of the album, and really it still kind of fits in with everything. In particular, the popular (I’d say second most popular) Christian ska band The O.C. Supertones make an appearance for a song called “Blitz”. Now, if there’s one thing Audio Adrenaline knows, it’s how to, well, make audio that is adrenaline-based in some way. In this instance, it’s about a church (?) football band travellin’ down to Mexico (?) to play some football, and that winds up being this high energy motivational kind of song that doesn’t really say a whole lot outside of “Fourteen kids in an old church van”. The best part about this song is how you can’t tell whether the Supertones guy is singing it, or Audio A’s own Mark Stuart, or at least I can’t, and I’ve have this album for a very long time.

The album goes into yet another direction with an admittedly catchy acoustic ballad called “Lighthouse”, and then an e-piano bluesy English sounding thing called “Flicker”, which contains a lead guitar part that plays in a different key than the rest of the song, which is hugely irritating to me, so I skip this song often.

After one more electronics-infused acoustic ballad called “God-Shaped Hole”, the band pulls out a one-off rocker unlike anything they’ve ever done. The song is called “Superfriend”, which may evoke visions of Wonder Woman and Aquaman, but is actually about, well, guess who (who is always the “friend” in Christian music?) The instrumentation is more what I’m getting at with this album. It’s all based around a minor key riff, which is already unusual for this group, but the beat is also hard rock via Motörhead or something. The other interesting bit is the guitar solo, which has this crazy filter that makes it sound entirely hollow and kind of great. Basically, this album ends with a crazy good rocker of a song.

Really though, all of the songs on this album are good in a way, some of them are even really great, and are songs that I enjoy fairly regularly. If I were to recommend any Audio A album to listen to (unless it’s for a laugh, in which case my recommendation goes to the first two albums, bar none), it would be this one. Of course, this should be no surprise to people who read Album Du Jour regularly. Remember when I said there are two reasons that this album is their best? Well, the one reason is because of the growth of the band that’s made apparent in their eclectic mix of interesting ideas and good alternative rock, and the other reason is because this album was recorded in 1997, which, as we should very well have figured out by now, was a very good year for Christian Rock.