First off, I’d like to thank the Bob Dylan website expectingrain.com for plugging yesterday’s entry as the top news item of today. That was pretty swell, and brought me a lot of views, which confirms my suspicion that I should have written about Dylan long ago.

Well, today we’re not talking about Bob Dylan, but if there were ever a folk singer and craftsman of song that was just as worthy of attention, it’s Leonard Cohen, and today, in what will surely seem like a theme by the end of the week, we are talking about his newest album Dear Heather:

Reading what other people have to say about this album, released in 2004 when Cohen was only 70 year old, are upsetting to say the least. This album is widely toted as Cohen’s attempt at a “final” album, but in fact he’s still around, and though this is his most recent studio album, he has been plenty busy since its release what with lawsuits and world-wide tours and all.

Mainly, I’m upset that this album can’t be taken by its own merit, instead being dressed up in this attempt by other people to “totally call it” just in case Leonard Cohen doesn’t live to record another album. Such behavior compels me to paraphrase what Leonard said in a recent interview, in which he said he does not fear death, only the preliminaries.

I guess one of those preliminaries is to have people watching every move you make and wrapping a pretense of mortality around it. Indeed, it’s easy to do so, as I have said before, the afore-mentioned Johnny Cash (in his typically prolific way) had at least 4 or 5 “farewell” albums before passing on, and one of those, along with another very important farewell album, is coming up soon on this very blog. Cohen’s album, I feel, is different. It’s not as much an album that deals with the eventual loss of Leonard Cohen to the world, but a fond farewell from Cohen himself to others in the life he’s so richly lived.

The album starts, interestingly enough, with a Lord Byron poem set to jazzy music (“jazzy” is the theme of the album’s music and is hardly deviated from, so I’ll try to avoid the adjective). Amid very pretty female backing vocals and a wailing saxophone, “Go No More A-Roving” paints a picture of settling down in old age, the line “the night was made for loving, and the day returns too soon, so we’ll go no more a-roving, by the light of the moon” pretty much says it all.

In fact, there are a few songs in this set that were written by other people, which is something of a rarity from Leonard Cohen, given his astounding songwriting talents. Still, he can sure pick ‘em, as there is a spoken poem half-way into the album called “Villanelle For Our Time”, which was written by F.R. Scott (a teacher of Cohen’s), which will send chills down your spine, in fact the definitely-cheesy jazz in the background (featuring a Casio keyboard solo) kind of serves as an antidote to the severity of Cohen’s delivery. As kind of an odd surprise, at the end of the album, Cohen threw in a live recording of a song called “The Tennessee Waltz”, a wonderful Country song written in the 40’s, to which Cohen even added a verse or two.

Indeed, the album is a little bit scattered, which reminds me somewhat of Recent Songs or one of Cohen’s other post-folkie albums. Though there’s no mistaking the sound of his voice or the quality of his songwriting, there’s also no clear answer to the question “What the hell is up with the title track?” Indeed, “Dear Heather” ranks up there with “Jazz Police” and the entire Death Of A Ladies Man in terms of being the most unusual thing Leonard Cohen’s ever recorded. Featuring a whirling organ playing a kind of jig that seems to belong in a circus, Cohen states in a monotone voice:

Dear Heather
Please walk by me again
With a drink in your hand
And your legs all white from the winter

With a backing voice singing, also in monotone, two octaves above Cohen’s bass vocals. The result is that Leonard sounds a lot like a robot, and by the constant repetition of the above lines (which are all the words in this song) recited sporadically, one gets the idea that someone typed this into a computer and had the computer read it back. The even weirder thing is that, occasionally and with no warning, some of the words are spelled out instead of said. So strange.

Right after that, we get the song “Nightingale”, which features 4 part harmony, two vocals by Cohen’s backup singers, and two by the man himself (featuring his oft-neglected standard baritone range). The song is something like an old hymn set to a quiet shuffle, and is impossibly beautiful, at least until the Jew’s Harp solo, which contains its own ragged beauty that I suppose is Leonard reminding everyone who’s song this is.

Another poem recital occurs just after that, with Leonard reciting a poem he wrote and placed into a book back in the 60’s called “To A Teacher”. It was written for A.M. Klein, who was another mentor for Cohen. In it, and actually in a lot of places on this album, if you have nice enough headphones you can hear the whirring of electronics all around, as Leonard recorded this album entirely in a home studio owned by Sharon Robinson (a collaborator and probably frequent fling of his since the 80’s), so one can detect where the voice had been clicked in and out of the mix, and all of that is rather telling of just how quietly Leonard sings these songs. Indeed, though the man can still project, his preferred tone is an ethereal whisper that sinks impossibly low into the bass vocal range, and honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The most noteworthy song on this collection is most likely the second track, “Because Of”, wherein Cohen repeats often the lines:

Because of a few songs
Wherein I spoke of their mystery
Women have been
Exceptionally kind to my old age
They make a secret place
In their busy lives
And they take me there, they become naked
In their different ways
And they say,
“Look at me, Leonard
Look at me one last time.”
Then they bend over the bed
And cover me up
Like a baby that is shivering.

Which is a little more of an admission than most artists would make, but knowing Leonard Cohen’s long and storied history with women (let’s just say he’s prolific in his own way), this is a song that has got to be 100% true and certainly he has earned it. Just look at the video and tell me that’s not a man that has won the battle against depression, man I would not be surprised if he lived into his 90’s or 190’s.

A few less scandalous and more sentimental notes in the album are in his songs “On That Day”, where he laments the tragedy of 9/11, and his more serious treatment of his past loves in “The Letters”, chronicling an undying flame burning letters from a dead relationship.

Indeed, this album could possibly be the final album from Leonard Cohen, because he hasn’t put out another studio album yet and thus anything is possible, but this album is enjoyable not because of its status as an icon’s late work, but because it puts out its own light as a really good album. Yeah there are recording hiccups here and there, but the soul is still there, and I only hope Cohen continues on and creates more albums until he finds one that is a way to say goodbye.

Bob Dylan, at least in my eyes, is an institution. I have never heard a single album or even full song by the man*, and I could not recall a single line of music he has ever done, unless it’s something that’s been covered by someone else, yet I know exactly what his voice sounded like in all his various eras, I know his history as the reluctant hero of the musical protest era of the 60’s, and I know that he is the most respected songwriter, comma, period. That was an incredible run-on sentence, and I knew I couldn’t let this wondrous Christian holiday without talking about the god-damned Bob Dylan Christmas album, also known as Christmas In The Heart, also also known as holy crap what is this:

I suppose before I undertake what will undoubtedly be a rather sparse writeup of the actual music contained herein, I should make a few admissions. For one, I hate Christmas music. It’s not that I don’t love Christmas, I think it’s a nice holiday despite the expensive gift exchange that brings about a month of retail hell on earth, but there’s something about the music that just bothers me. There are only a few pieces of music I can think of that only have occasional business being heard by anyone; the “Death March” by Handel (or the 3rd Movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35) for funerals, Pachelbel’s “Canon In D” for graduations (or the more popular “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” by Pachelbel protégé Greenday) for graduations, and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” for when you want to commit a drug-fueled suicide in the bathtub. So yes, there’s a song for every occasion, but the thing about Christmas is that it has thousands of songs for just one occasion which amounts to mainly eating oneself into a coma after receiving gifts that somehow always seem to be worth about half of what you gave out, all while burning enough electricity on lighting houses and trees to power all those villages in Africa we keep hearing about, all with a sort of bastardized, commercially sterilized version of vague spiritual back-patting, all the while making sure not to offend people who don’t believe in the same Christmas Tree (sorry, “Holiday” Tree, right?)

So yeah, Christmas is fun but is generally meaningless except to serve as a cultural institution that reminds us that it’s “that time of year again”. In that way, Christmas and Bob Dylan are very similar, except one contains a lot more booze and used to actually be relevant. I will leave it up to you to decide which.

I really can not fault Bob Dylan for wanting to make a Christmas album. After all, his contemporaries have all done Christmas albums (heck, Johnny Cash did at least three), and Bob Dylan tends to bring with him a touch of class, no matter how goofy the idea is, and certainly a prominent Jew singing about the birth of Jesus is already stacking the odds against our aging songster. Still, Dylan is undeterred, after all, he claims to have grown up with the music, and songs speak louder than sense to our man, so onward he presses.

I picked up this album and began listening to it and indeed it is a treasure. Being someone who’s not particularly into Dylan and especially against Christmas music, I still found a lot to love here. For one, the instrumentation is lovely, and I mean that in all seriousness. Aside from the cheesy use of bells of the church and reindeer variety (the oldest Christmas cliche), the music is kind of a blend of old-style Country and the “less is more” sensibility of contemporary folk music. Songs like “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is colored by clean, reverby jazz guitar chords and piano, with the drums set to “brushes”, with some angelic background singers. Then we have Bob Dylan singing.

It seems unfair to talk about this album without talking about Bob Dylan’s singing. Again, being totally opposite a fan of Dylan as what I am of Johnny Cash, I know next to nothing about the man or what life has done to him, but I will tell you that it has left him with a voice that sounds something like a chainsaw perpetually trying to start, and he has a lot of the same intonations, too. I will admit, even as someone who appreciates “off” singing, it is next to impossible for me to take this kind of music seriously when Dylan’s got a voice that would make Harvey Fierstein stop and offer him a cough drop. It should thus be no surprise that this is my very favorite Christmas album, not just for its sheer impossibility, but because Dylan’s earnest, straight-forward, and absolutely ridiculous performance is the antidote to everything that currently upsets me about Christmas.

This whole focus on clean-cut consumerism that has ruined the holiday and turned the month of December into a perpetual joke is only getting worse as times go by and the economy gets worse. Maybe it’s my 5 solid years of retail selling that has opened my eyes to this, but it really is a problem. From literally the day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all parked outside of stores waiting for cheap laptops and “early bird” deals, to the day after Christmas when we’re sluggishly cleaning up decorations (or leaving them there until August, why not), the entire month just runs on auto-pilot. We have twice as much traffic, often twice as much work to do, and try as you might, you can not escape the Christmas music. It’s so robotic and soulless, it’s no small wonder that the suicide rate tends to spike just before the big pay-off.

This album serves well as a reminder that this music used to actually be music, and Dylan inserting his classiness into the music and doing his best, with a voice that sounds like it was designed by a joint venture between Pall Mall and Cuisinart, for a genuine love of the music, and without accepting a penny for his troubles (all royalties go to an anti-starvation charity, awwww), strips the gloss away and adds just a glimmer, albeit a fleeting one, of life into a holiday that needs it desperately. Hence, this is still not music I’ll be listening to in March, but next time December rolls around, perhaps I’ll be shut in and will once again avoid the retail rush (my temporary joblessness has allowed me to sit out of this holiday retail season for the first time in half a decade), and will spin this album again and feel the warmth of what Christmas is all about, and that is Bob Dylan, aging folk icon, croaking his way clumsily through “Hark, The Herald Ages Sing”. I fully plan on being very drunk at this point.

If all of that isn’t enough of a testament to this album being not so bad, check out the video to “Must Be Santa“, featuring Bob Dylan looking like a cross between Tom Petty and Tom Waits. I legitimately love this song and video, especially the line “Who laughs this way, Ho Ho Ho”, man that kills me.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

*I have rectified this, by the way, because on the same ticket as this album, I purchased Dylan’s most famous album, Highway 61 Revisited, and will be enjoying that once I get back to Austin.

Though I said I’d be visiting a lot of bands again by the time the year was out, this will be my last un-planned Album Du Jour entry. Until a few hours ago, I was racking my brain trying to think of what album would make a good Christmas Eve album, because I already know what album I am writing up for Christmas, but then I remembered that I hate seasonal music and thus today we are going to give King Crimson one last spin:

THRAK is that kind of album that instantly fascinates me not only because of the music, which is superb in this album, mind you, but because of the elements that might otherwise go unrecognized that make up its creation. When we last left King Crimson, it was the 80’s and they were actually making *good* music, which in and of itself was a rarity, but even rarer was the fact that, after the album Discipline, Crimson went on to record not one, but two albums with the exact same lineup. You might as well tell me a giraffe gave birth to a helicopter at that point, but let’s leave that uncomfortable metaphor quickly.

One thing that is far less surprising is that, after that trio of albums, the band broke up again, only instead of breaking up “forever and ever”, and based on the nature of King Crimson only requiring one member to exist, they more or less went “on hold” for about 10 years. A few things happened within that decade, but most of it was in the 80’s so who cares, right?

Well, fearless leader Robert Fripp was once again bored with not being in a very successful rock band  (he decided to take up teaching this time, which amassed for him another Chapman Stick player by the name of Trey Gunn, so he decided to bring back King Crimson again. The usual players were called, Adrian Belew returned to lead vocals after a solo stint as well as some work with David Bowie and his own band called The Bears (an appropriate name given the fate of other former King Crimson members, it all makes sense now!) Bassist Tony Levin was called away from his other gig of making Peter Gabriel suck less, and some new players were brought to the group as well. Trey Gunn, in an unusual move, was kind of made a “second bassist” as his instrument was the Stick and that’s what Levin played as well. Pat Mastelotto was brought on as drummer, having worked with one of Fripp’s interim projects, and then, the strange and awesome happened.

Bill Bruford, who you may remember from the band King Crimson, more or less saw a Crimson reformation starting up, and ran up to the group saying “Don’t forget about me!” Fripp couldn’t say no, because not only is Bill Bruford awesome, but this meant that King Crimson was now composed of two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers, and thus the idea of a “double trio” was introduced. THRAK is the resulting album of having two band’s worth of members jamming out some awesome songs.

Indeed, from the heavy-hitting introduction “VROOOM” (onomatopoeia would be a freqently-visited concept on this album) which brings back the Mellotron, to the ending track of “VROOOM VROOOM (Coda)” (I love these names), the album is thick with instruments, but not in the way you’d really expect. At no easily-discernible time are instruments just playing in tandem, and neither are they venturing so far away from each other that it just sounds like a mess; instead, everything is arranged to the core, with a noticeable lack of lengthy improvisational segments. Heck, the longest song on here is just over 6 minutes and is closer to Pop than Prog. That song, by the way, is my favorite and is called “Dinosaur”.

After what seems like a double-introduction song in the form of “VROOOM” and “Coda: Marine 475″, which kind of has lyrics but then kind of doesn’t, we’re given a Mellotron-backed diminished chord wonder with a stomping rhythm that sounds like John Lennon writing and singing a Stravinsky number. Seriously, maybe it was intentional on Adrian Belew’s part, but his vocals on this song are very Lennon-esque, and the back-and-forth guitar chords sound to me exactly like a play on “I Am The Walrus”. The song’s chorus, “I am a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones” seems to be kind of a play on King Crimson feeling a little old at this point, though plenty of groups by this time were digging their bones, Tool and Primus being notable examples. Either way, “Dinosaur” is an incredible song, and though it only bears a passing resemblance to “I Am The Walrus”, it doesn’t have the nonsense lyrics, opting instead to actually be clever with lines like “Ignorance has always been something I excel in, followed by naivety and pride”.

Instead, the nonsense lyrics would come in the form of one of the much later songs in the set called “Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream”:

Sex sleep eat drink dream
Primal tribal apple egg vegetable eel
I have a new canoe but it does not have a wheel

Not bad at all, not bad at all. This song also has a wonderful funky-to-disaster switch-up that I am quite fond of.

In fact, the more disastrous parts of the album, particularly in the instrumentals, are really fun from a music appreciation standpoint. The album even features, for the first time ever, a gol’dern drum solo in a track called “B’Boom”, which seems to be a bit of an inevitability when you’ve got two drummers going, is what I’m thinking. The album’s title track features guitars (107 of them, according to Fripp, but that’s probably a joke) playing these nonsense chords in a way that is slightly off time, just enough to overlap and refer to another part of the rhythm. Of course, those might be the Chapman Sticks as well, it’s kind of hard to tell because I have never seen any of this stuff live, as much as it would have blown my little mind to do so.

The album’s got its tranquil moments too, which are actually quite pleasing in their own way. “Walking On Air” is the first, and is a deep-toned tune that again seems to sound like The Beatles given the Prog treatment (also known as Radiohead), and it’s a nice peaceful tune with a lead guitar duet that are played in more of an ambient way, to great effect. It’s a nice counter to the more oppressive tunes, which are mysteriously broken up across the album, such as “Radio” and “Inner Garden”, both of which are kind of fragmented and scattered across the middle of the album, not to mention that there are 3 different songs with the word “Vrooom” in them, so don’t go thinking this is a pop album, it’s every bit as confusing as prog gets.

I really do love this album, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s more because of the music or more because the “double trio” gimmick is really interesting to me, but that’s like trying to decide whether you like the peanut butter or chocolate more in a stocking full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: either way, you win.

I’ll bet you thought I forgot about Supergrass, didn’t you? Well, I actually did, but not so much in this blog, I actually forgot that they existed for most of the time between the 90’s release of their self-titled album and the 2008 release of their newest album, the awesomely-named Diamond Hoo Ha. So, we should probably discuss this thing before it’s too late:

Demonstrating their British sense of spacing album releases out, after 14 years of actively being an incredible band, this is only Supergrass’ sixth album. Come on, guys, Johnny Cash put out over 20 albums in just his first 8 years, at least meet us halfway huh? Either way, the band had apparently taken the gap between their life-changing self-titled album and this one to release one incredible album that I haven’t heard yet, and one stripped-down contemplative album that I also haven’t heard but am now very interested in. In the time between 2005’s Road To Rouen and Diamond Hoo Ha, the band underwent some difficulties. For one, the Coombes’ mother died, which is a tragic thing to have happen to any writer of songs. The studio they used for the album, which once a notable studio where David Bowie had recorded, had to practically be rebuilt to accommodate the recording, which makes me curious as to why the band couldn’t just record in a working studio, but oh well.

The other thing, possibly less tragic but nonetheless a very direct distraction: the bassist fell out of a window and broke his back. Yeah, that sounds like the start of a great Rock N’ Roll story, but it turns out Mick Quinn has a bit of a problem with sleepwalking. He walked out of a first story window and broke two vertebrae and probably thought a hospital stay would be a good idea. Two of the other founding members of the band (Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey) were not too deterred, however, as they decided to go on the road, half to promote the upcoming album (which had been recorded prior to the accident) or just because they felt like making fun of the White Stripes, as a drum and guitar duo called “The Diamond Hoo Ha Men”, even going so far as to film a “mockumentary” of the experience that I doubt has come to America yet, but still. A little bit of the film can be seen here, and the band used bits of that to make their music video for the self-titled first track.

Either way, given the setbacks, I would have forgiven my favorite brit-pop rockers if they turned in an album of complete crap with “Diamond Hoo Ha Man” attached, as bigger bands have done worse, but in fact the album is really good all around, so no forgiveness needed! Apparently it’s not contrived from any of their more recent work, which I regretfully missed, and it’s certainly lacking (except for one song) that sort of “turning beautiful British melancholic tunes on their collective ear” sensibility when it came to bizarre chord progressions and adventurous tenor singing that the two albums before that contained. Thus, the only real way to compare it to any of Supergrass’ earlier work is that it’s a lot like their very first album, the wild teenage energy of I Should Coco being pushed aside for a more “mature” rock sound wherein the cheeky youth who was being busted for drugs in “Caught By The Fuzz” or crashing cars into walls in “All Right” is now a grown man for whom the drugs and cars are now a habit rather than a bit of fun.

I am not sure whether it’s intentional or not, but there is a mood cast over Diamond Hoo Ha that relentless points to vices, dangerous situations, and a kind of tiredness in Gaz’s voice where he sounds to be slurring over the night’s 35th drink. Still, layered over this, is a more pounding, rhythmic Supergrass instrument section, where the tunes are a little more standard and, well, boring in places, but the hooks are still there for the most part. In particular, “Bad Blood” has an amazing interplay between the vocal melody, the guitar counter-melody, and the bass-line even throws in another element to the tune rather than just add body to the rhythm. It’s moments like that one that really shine in this album, because there aren’t a whole lot of them.

Critically, the slurry, adult, kind of boring Supergrass have been getting a lot of flack for this album, but honestly I am fine with this thing, at least after about 5 listens. There is some variety to be heard, especially when my new-found love of David Bowie gave me kind of a “Oh I see what you did there” attitude with “Rebel In You”, which is less Kinks and more Bowie. Supergrass does “glam” really well, as they have demonstrated since the beginning, but without the actual pretense and kind of eyebrow-raising look that the glam rockers have always adopted. That’s just the thing, it’s really hard to fault Supergrass for anything, because they’re one of the few large groups that I feel have done it right. They started early with enough energy to set Godzilla on a rampage, and they matured their sound to melancholy rock magic in the very next album right around the time the singer broke the age of 20, and instead of being dragged down by predictable vices or tragedies worse than a hospital stay because of an honest accident, the band has continued on into a very comfortable middle age where they can be Hunter S. Thompson for an album before moving on to the next thing, which may be even better.

Basically, this album is worth a listen, if not for the first few tracks, which are all hits in their own right, than for the last few songs, the last of which seems to be an homage to their more traditional form of throwing out as many chords as they can whilst crooning. Supergrass is awesome, and I’m kind of glad that I realize that again when there are two more albums out there for me to find and enjoy. Until next time!

I just realized, when selecting this album, that I just did a “concept album” yesterday. Still, unlike yesterday’s album, today’s is a little more loose, a lot more popular, and a lot of fun. Let’s talk about David Bowie’s album with that most cumbersome name: The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars:

It actually took me a very long time to get into David Bowie and his sound, particularly this, his most famous album. I guess, despite being raised by very musical parents (well my dad anyway), I was kept in the dark about some of the weirder acts, and David Bowie was considered weird by just about everyone in the day and ever since. Thus, having not heard his music because of the same factors that held me back from listening to the grand majority of what other people listened to, Bowie always had this mysterious property about him. I knew he was freaky, man, but how freaky?

Well, Bowie’s freakiness certainly proved to be a well-oiled machine, but what I wasn’t prepared for was just how good his music is. Though it took a lot of listens and some listening to the albums that surrounded it, I get where he’s coming from in Ziggy Stardust and now have quite a fondness for it (not to mention I was able to borrow a friend’s copy, whereas I only had the rental version from Zune previously which put a damper on things when I lost my subscription). Really, there’s a lot to be said for an album that begins with the end of the world.

The “concept” of the album is more or less represented in a few songs, but is not as relentless as, say, an album about displacement of an indigenous people in the expansion of the United States. In Ziggy Stardust, apparently the world is going to run out of resources and dry up and wither away in 5 years’ time (sound familiar?), and Ziggy is either an alien, a robot, an alien robot, a gay alien, a gay alien robot, or a skinny guy playing an androgynous feather duster playing a gay alien robot, sent here from Detroit to tell everyone to dig on peace and love or everyone’s going to die. Or something. I’ve only listened to this album maybe 10 times and read all the lyrics and the expansive Wikipedia article and talked to various people about it, so I have no clue as to what’s really going on here (the album’s pretty dense, you can interpret that however you wish). The first song is called “Five Years” and it’s actually a really moving number. Building on a drum beat that stays constant throughout, the song swells to a string-fueled frenzy with Bowie’s amazing vocals sticking around the very back of the mix telling the tale of one man’s reaction to the end of the world. It’s quite a mellow and beautiful song to start a rock album on, but it’s easily one of my favorites.

“Soul Love” keeps things mellow, and is kind of a deranged soul song where there’s the “oooh ahh” vocal backing and saxophones, but then the chorus comes in with its millions of chord changes, and then saxophones again, and who knows what’s going on here.

“Moonage Daydream” is an interesting song, as it’s apparently about Ziggy’s rise to stardom or something, but try to pry that out of these lyrics:

I’m an alligator, I’m a mama-papa coming for you
I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch for you
Keep your mouth shut
You’re squawking like a pink monkey bird
And I’m busting up my brains for the words

Like I said, the concepts in this album are a little more abstract. A friend pointed out that an interesting move in this song is how it starts with an abrupt, crunching guitar hit right before Bowie sings “I’m an alligator” and then the rest of the verse is all soft and acoustic. I think a more interesting move is where, at various points, the bass mimics the distinct backing vocal line and strays a little bit from the beat. This is why musicians are very boring people to talk to.

Ahh, “Starman”, what a song. I guess it’s about someone communicating with a gay alien who wants everyone to be groovy and for the “kids to boogie”. This song has a beautiful melody backed up by a very good string section. Since the song was included late in the album’s construction, it’s not actually about Ziggy Stardust but just a coincidental other story about an alien (turns out such a subject has a high probability of use in Bowie’s early catalog). Still, the story was switched around to be about someone hearing about Ziggy, who is still not actually an alien. I know, it’s confusing to me too.

Though the middle part of this album is pretty great, my favorites are actually in the back of the album (a sure-fire prevention of Late Album Slowdown). “Hang On To Yourself” is about as close to the “pop-punk” sound it helped spawn than I have ever heard, which is interesting given that acoustic guitar plays a role.

The “Ziggy Stardust” song is as straight-forward a song about the album’s title character as you can get with words like this:

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were voodoo
The kid was just crass, he was the nazz
With God given ass
He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar

Great stuff, I love how the vernacular of the 70’s used to be so weird to the old people back then, and is now weird to the young people of today. Either way, this song might as well be the most famous in the album for me because it was on the first Guitar Hero game.

Another song that has made the video game rounds (along with “Moonage Daydream”) was “Suffragette City”, which is by and far my favorite song on the album. It’s another song that wouldn’t be nearly as good if it weren’t for the weird vocabulary, but it’s about the catchiest song ever, so I’d forgive it if it were about the Devil wanting chocolate cake.

Finally, we get the dramatic slow-jam called “Rock N’ Roll Suicide”, which is about the decline of the rock star, and someone who is there to help him out. Unfortunately, it’s not about the actual genre of Rock N’ Roll committing suicide, because I’d personally really like to know when and how it died, as it happened long before I ever became aware of it.

Either way, as an album made by a guy playing a weirdo playing an alien, I’d say this is about as good as it gets. I’m still exploring Bowie’s discography to get a better grasp on his overall sound, and where this album fits in with it all, but until then, it stands alone as something of a favorite.

I have to make a bit of a confession about this particular entry. Though this album is one of Johnny Cash’s best and most important, I actually forgot up until recently that I hadn’t already written about it, but in listening to and studying this album further, I’m even more aware of its importance in Cash’s catalogue, and how it represents something I hadn’t touched on much with Cash, and that’s his Indian roots, as told in his 1964 album Bitter Tears:

When it came to his ancestry, being part Irish and part Cherokee Indian was such an important thing to Johnny Cash that it colored his songwriting all throughout his career. Thus, it was equally important, in the first few paragraphs of his second autobiography (entitled “Cash“), to share his recent findings regarding his true ancestry. As it turns out, Johnny Cash’s ancestry was almost 100% Scottish, and could be traced back to the 11th century. Still, despite the truth about where Cash came from, it didn’t change where he had been, and one of those places was among his Native American brothers at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. There, in 1968, he performed songs from this album for a crowd of the people he was speaking for, and made a comment that I always liked, “I’ve got very little Indian blood in me, except in my heart, I’ve got 100%”.

It’s interesting that this album, which to my knowledge is the first (possibly only) “Country” album by a white guy that was fully dedicated to the trials and tribulations of the Native Americans came at the time it did. The period of the mid-60’s, in America’s history, was marked by protests, division, riots, and lots and lots of folk music. It’s interesting to me that Cash didn’t do an album about civil rights or anything like that directly, instead choosing to put a spotlight on a history of genocide and rape and pillage that most people aren’t even aware of to this day.

To hear Bitter Tears is to hear the dark, austere, and almost vengeful side of Johnny Cash as he passionately speaks out in that deep voice of his about the destruction of the Seneca nation in Pennsylvania in the song “As Long As The Grass Shall Grow”, and the spite in his voice as he cackles at the defeat of General Custer in the song “Custer”. The popular “Boom Chicka Boom” sound of Cash’s albums up to this point is almost entirely missing in all but two songs (“Custer” and “White Girl”), replaced with a somber acoustic guitar and light percussion, with Cash being joined by The Carter Family on many tracks. In this way, the album lacks the fun of most of his other albums up to this point, so the thing was kind of a shock to the Country radio guys. In fact, a lot of stations refused to play the singles from this particular album, which caused Cash to throw the accusation that they “wallow in meaninglessness”, which is kind of a strange phrase when one considers the radio of today for which such a statement is one of the obvious. Really though, I can’t exactly side with Cash for blaming the radio for not playing songs from this album; the songs are just too dark for Country radio, and they only really work well in the context of this album.

The meaning behind Bitter Tears is actually two-fold. Cash was speaking the truth, as best as he could manage, with his songs about the horrible treatment of the American Indian, but on a larger scale, he was speaking to the oppressed everywhere, serving up examples of the black heart of men in power and somberly mourning the people who fell victim to that greed. Of course, history can be interpreted many different ways by many different people, so a lot of the content of Bitter Tears are kept to a fact-only basis, rather than dealing with something fictional and thus meaningless. Indeed, Ira Hayes was a real person, and so was Chief Cornplanter, the man with which a treaty was signed that guaranteed the ownership of the Seneca land between Pennsylvania and New York “as long as the grass shall grow”,  which was broken by John F. Kennedy in 1961 (yeah, Cash didn’t have to reach too far back into history at this point). The stories more or less speak for themselves, and their accuracy (at least as far as I’ve studied) is indeed respectable.

One of the reasons for the album being so “accurate” was the intense amount of study that Cash put into making the album, and the assistance he was given in writing the majority of the songs from a Hopi Indian named Peter LaFarge. Peter was an intense scholar of his tribe and all the other Native American tribes and knew just about all there is to know about their displacement. He was no slouch when it came to songwriting either, in fact he might have gotten his biggest break from his work with Cash if he hadn’t died less than a year after the Bitter Tears album was completed.

Interestingly, Cash met LaFarge through a mutual friend named Ed McCurdy, while in the throes of drug addiction. McCurdy and LaFarge were also addicts, and Ed gave Cash some pointers on how to handle himself with the drugs, though LaFarge decided to chase down some Dexedrine with too much Thorazine and took a 4 day nap. When he woke up, he and Cash became friends and started working together to create the album. Wonderful how drug-induced comas can bring kindred artists together, eh? Either way, I’m pretty sure it was party tricks like that Dexedrin + Thorazine nap that eventually killed LaFarge, I guess Cash was more fortunate in that regard.

Either way, Bitter Tears is a brilliant album, and despite Cash being nearly at his worst as far as drug use goes, the performance on the album is solid and memorable. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was Cash’s most important album, but it’s right up there, and it’s certainly one of the best examples of his dedication to quality, especially considering the rate of albums he was cranking out at that time.

On a personal note, unlike Cash, I actually am of Irish heritage with a good portion of Cherokee Indian and have studied them before. A fascinating character I ran across was Sequoyah, who single-handedly invented the Cherokee alphabet (the first system of written language in any Native American tribe) after being inspired by the English and their “talking white leaves”. Cash wrote a song called “The Talking Leaves” which tells this story, and it’s kind of a favorite of mine for that reason.

Well, this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing about Johnny Cash, but we are certainly getting close. Until then!

I didn’t really know what to title today’s entry, because in essence, I’m covering two version of the same album that are both titled differently, for today I’d like to cover a lot of ground in as few sleepy words as possible. Namely, today we’re talking about The Beatles’ “final” album, Let It Be:

We’ll also be talking about Let It Be… Naked, and I suppose this is the last entry about The Beatles, and if I had my way, I’d use the entirety of it to complain about Phil Spector.

This album was recorded just before The Beatles recorded their “actually final” album, Abbey Road, and released just after they broke up, so needles to say, this is an album with problems. In fact, in all fairness, I’d say the album wasn’t really finished until 2003, when Paul decided to fix the thing and released the Naked version.

Basically, after the “White Album” was finished, and despite the band’s insurmountable personal differences, Paul McCartney wanted to get the band back together, all recording in the same room, and make things nice and Beatley again, per chance to possibly tour again. These suggestions were met with looks of confusion and dismay from the other 3 members, so Paul chuckled and said “Just kidding!” about the touring, but the band members did think that recording another album wouldn’t be too hard a way to make millions, so they took him up on this and all got together.

In listening to the songs that wound up on the album, it’s quite evident that it’s Paul’s baby. He was the one to fight and keep the group together through this tough time (even though he reportedly was a little too excited and caused George Harrison to quit for a week), and some of his best work is on this album, I feel. In fact, when I think of the other late Beatles albums, I often paint McCartney as the idiot and Lennon as the guy making sense in how things should go, but I side with Paul in this recording. Not only for the reasons already stated, but because he absolutely hated what Phil Spector did to the album, and Lennon was the one responsible for that bastard ever getting ahold of the Beatles’ music.

Who knows why anybody likes Phil Spector, I recently watched 2 full documentaries on him and it made me hate him all the more, though it did give me an understanding of how he came to work with The Beatles. Apparently, Spector was busy being a recluse and locking his wife in his mansion from 1966 until 1970, all because one single to which he had applied his repulsive “Wall Of Sound” dared to peak at #88 on the Billboard chart. He was brought to England to work with John Lennon on his solo stuff, as John was a fan, which makes sense because Phil Spector was the “big thing” between Elvis and The Beatles for reasons that people speculate have to do with “no-one else being available at the time”.

Either way, after all the hundreds of songs got recorded for Let It Be (known as the “Get Back” sessions, because the whole concept of the album was McCartney wanting to “get back” to the band’s original way of doing things) were essentially shelved because nobody wanted to go through hundreds of songs’ worth of tapes and put together an album. Phil did, so he was given the job as producer of the already-recorded album, and while just finding the tapes, cutting them together, and calling it a day would have been just fine, of course he applied his terrible production standards all over it. It’s like drizzling honey over a priceless painting: yeah it’s pretty sweet but is it art?

I will admit, there are some things that Spector did to the album that were pretty good. For one, he took bits of dialogue and banter and spliced them in between songs, which gives the album a kind of good-natured vibe that keeps the thing from taking itself too seriously. Of course, when you realize that The Beatles were fighting all the time during the recording and had broken up by the time the album was released, that might have been a better idea to utilize about 10 albums ago. Admittedly, some of the string arrangements sound lovely, but that’s where I must segue into a short version of his huge list of crimes.

One example of something that could have been so right but went so wrong is the song “Across The Universe”. It’s a beautiful melody by Lennon, which is made even sweeter by acoustic guitar and sitar at some point (I think). Spector added in a lot of strings, which were too many strings playing too few notes, so it wasn’t that effective, but still sounded all right. Oh, but then he slowed the song down by lowering it half a step so that both the guitar and singer sound weird, then he applied an echoey sort of prickly effect on the acoustic guitar, then drowned the melody in reverb. I used to only half-like this song until I heard the Naked version, which is so much better, though I do kind of miss the strings.

McCartney was perfectly right to be furious about Phil Spector working his “magic” on this album, mainly because the album was McCartney’s idea, and his biggest obstacle in getting anything done was Lennon anyway, so who was Lennon to let Spector loose with all the tapes? Really, none of this would concern me as anything more than an amusing anecdote that happened to get turned into a whole album if not for one nagging notion: if this album would have been produced the right way, and with the right amount of care, it would easily be the Beatles’ best album.

See, I love me some Beatles, but there are two things, especially during their artistically meritable stage, that I will invariably put down about them when asked. For one, they were all great musicians (yes even Ringo), and for the most part they had brilliant ideas, but functioning as a band was something they could only do until they got too famous to need to be in a band anymore, then they just seemed to get in each others’ way all the time. For two, a lot of their most lauded albums are kind of a mess as far as cohesion goes, I always feel like I’m putting the album I started listening to on hold while some interloping song comes through, usually sung by Ringo, and then the show’s back on the road or has changed entirely.

In Let It Be (or, at least the …Naked version), the fact that all the members of the band are playing the parts at the same time with a minimal amount of overdubs at least lends the album the appearance that The Beatles are this amazing band that aren’t have any trouble at all, and it’s nearly a palpable feeling that makes me kind of sad for once that they didn’t continue on after this. The other aspect to the album is that, not just because it’s an album without a “Ringo” song on it, all the songs fit together so nicely that the album just flows from start to finish. Indeed, the …Naked re-mix of the album is a lot better than the official version, but I still feel like it’s more of an idea of how good the album could have been rather than being the end-all best Beatles album. At least it’s a lot smoother than the Spector-produced version. In that version, the inclusion of an unfinished song (“Maggie Mae”) and a bizarre excerpt from a meaningless jam (“Dig It”) trip things up, with the former ending too abruptly and the latter sounding more like Mick Jagger had infiltrated the studio as he’s known to do. Not the most cohesive thing ever, for sure.

Either way, no matter which version of the album you prefer, Let It Be has some incredible songs in it, and it’s occasionally well put together. This is, of course, the part where I point out that it’s a little ironic that an album called Let It Be has received the opposite treatment. Indeed, the album was shelved for a long time, but instead of letting it be, they tried something like three times to get an album out of the tapes, and then Phil Spector got involved, and then McCartney got angry, but couldn’t let it be until 33 years later, when the …Naked version came out, and indeed one could “let it be” at that point, but then the original Spector-produced version came out as a remixed album which does sound better but still… let it be.

Today I am a tired fellow. In an effort to sort of “loop” my atrocious sleep schedule around (my average time of posting these writeups has been about 5-7am after being up all night), I stayed up all night last night and refused to sleep until tonight, when this writeup is done.

Hence, today’s album writeup began with some very specific criteria: 1. I am going to be too tired for even basic coherence, so it should be an album that is easy to talk about without all that pesky research and 2. Since the writeup will suffer accordingly, it has to be an album I do not care about in the least.

We have a winner! It’s The Wiseguys with The Antidote:

It all started, like my brief infatuation with the Eels, with some late-night MTV2 viewing back when that channel used to play videos because MTV wouldn’t (I wonder who plays the videos now? Oh right). I was watching videos, with my VCR recording the whole thing on one of those 6 hour cassette tapes they had back in the day (you kids and your DVR, why back in my day etc. etc.), and there are very few, in the sea of thousands of videos I must have watched, that actually stuck with me. Not only did a little video from The Wiseguys stick with me, it was all I could do to get it unstuck for a while there.

I’m talking of course about “Start The Commotion“. For one as unaccustomed as I was to this style of music back then (I’m still ignorant of it, actually, because I don’t know what to call this stuff besides somewhere between techno and hip hop), the idea of taking bits of real instruments, sampling them, and adding them into a groovy mix that builds on itself every 4 measures and then referencing every added part with a little video that is repeated like the loop was just dang brilliant. In fact, I’ve not seen a video work quite as well as this one before, in being utterly and perfectly fused into one entity, one may forget or entirely ignore that the song is kind of terrible really.

Still, the “unique” factor got me hooked, and I had to know more. I consulted whatever store it was where I bought CD’s before Best Buy opened anywhere reasonably close to me 10 years ago, and picked up a copy of the album.

To my delight, a lot of the songs are just like “Start The Commotion” (fancy that!), there’s “Ooh La La“, and the album’s title track, “Re-Introduction”. I was fine with all this, but then the album turned into 15 songs, all of them long, even the short ones, and well my enthusiasm for this album wanes about as quickly as it comes.

I am not sure if this techno hop drum babble hip nonsense is supposed to be listened to in the “album” format, or if the album is a cheaper way to get all these little dance club singles that were originally released one by one every 15 seconds when the world had just forgotten about them. There’s no account for taste, of course, but the repetitiveness just gets to me after a while, and there’s gotta be something wrong with that, because about half the genres I listen to are firmly rooted in the tradition of repeating choruses until a reasonable person wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.

There are some pretty OK raps in here, “Experience” is one that particularly stands out in my mind, but there’s another problem at work here. I have no idea who these people are supposed to be. One of the reasons I dislike rap and hip-hop “as a rule” is because so much of it is based on image and persona, and I just don’t have the energy to study up on personas, opinions, brand-affiliations, or any of that garbage. Music should speak for itself, and just blatantly reporting the situation of your current financial status or the frequency of sleeping with women is tiresome at best, and at worst, well let’s just say I prefer Phil Spector.

I actually can’t remember if there are any instances of ego in the many rap segments of The Antidote, because it’s all done through “guest stars” that I have also never heard of, and I remember the lyrics being pretty vague. I suppose if I knew Jerry Beeks and Season & Sense Live a little better, I’d know firstly if they even ARE rappers, and secondly if their track record of opinion-giving has been consistent with the report on this “Experience” song I was so happily grooving to until a heavy-handed message started drilling itself into my subconscience.

Of course, occasionally the group goes a little crazy and pulls out oppressive sounding stuff like cellos and hollow drum sounds in a track like “Face The Flame”, which is actually a pretty cool little song. I also like how they turn elevator/Weather Channel jazz into a really groovy little tune called “The Executives”, which should be an easy title to recognize because that’s also all the lyrics.

Probably the strangest song is “Cowboy ‘78“, which has some strange Eastern music held up by the samples of voices chanting something or other. I could swear to you on the holiest of underwear that they are chanting “Dig Dug”, and that’s why this song haunts me in my dreams to this day.

So yeah, the album is consistent, I’ll give it that much. “Start The Commotion” became quite the hit, in fact the only way I was finally able to break the spell that song had over me was to see it used for the promotion of the film Zoolander, with which a “remixed” video was made featuring clips of the film, totally ruining the song/video’s flow. That kind of made me hate Zoolander (that and the comedy) the first few times I saw it. Of course, the irony is that now that’s a film I really love and I don’t really care for the song anymore except as a novelty. Well, maybe that’s no irony but I am very sleepy.

Anyway, The Wiseguys broke up soon after achieving fame and one of them went on to work with Fatboy Slim which absolutely aborted any interest I might have gained in this group upon hearing this album. Hopefully you will enjoy them more than I will, until then!

Ah, you probably thought I forgot about Primus, didn’t you? Well, actually I probably did; in fact, I frequently do. Though I enjoy Primus immensely, I only really listen to them when in the mood for them. The reason behind this is probably that I have only heard a few of their albums, and was only recently introduced to their most popular stuff.

So I was thinking we could talk about the album that I’ve had the longest, Antipop:

Apparently I picked a bad album to have as my go-to Primus album. Antipop was created during the “Brain” years, when Tim Alexander, the group’s original drummer, had left the group for reasons I’m not clear on (I think because they got popular because of “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”?) Either way, his replacement was a drummer who actually had auditioned to be the original drummer, Bryan “Brain” Mantia. This is the second of two albums the group recorded with Brain before calling it quits forever and ever… for 3 years anyway.

On top of not having their original (and, in my opinion, much better) drummer in the group, Antipop is also marked by a veritable slew of guest appearances from members of groups that I would consider “Pop”, at least in my own definition of the term. I consider “Pop” to be any kind of music that is far too slick and engineered to appeal to the masses to be in any way realistic, so yeah Britney Spears and Nickelback could be considered pop, but so could Metallica and Limp Bizkit. Sure enough, James Hetfield of Metallica and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit appear on this album, the latter of which thankfully as a non-talent-contributing producer of one song. Also present is the more legitimate Tom Morello of Guitar Hero III fame, and every hipster’s fantasy, creepy uncle Tom Waits, who contributes the best material to the album.

In fact, the album starts with Tom playing a Mellotron (a suitably creepy instrument for the old codger) and counting off the first song, a nice little ditty called “Electric Uncle Sam”. In it, the singing makes Uncle Sam (the old guy representing our country by pointing at guys from posters) out to be a creepy evil guy:

Don’t get caught with your fingers in my pie
Mess with me and boy you’re surely gonna die
If ever you’re in doubt about who or where I am
I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere
I am your Uncle Sam

Anti-America more like, Primus! Of course, I’m kidding, they’ve always been that way. The song has a nice hard groove, though is unfortunately a little light on that fancy bass work that makes Primus so great, but that’s ok because there’s plenty of fancy basswork to hear.

“Natural Joe” has a really cool drum and bass groove, with lyrics about… a guy… named “Natural Joe”. The lyrics don’t amount to very much, other than that it’s about a guy who is normal but likes to go to seedy places for a little bit of something, which is never named but implied with a cool chromatic bass run-down, except for the very end, where apparently he goes down to the liquor store for a little bit of… a sample of noises from a war like machine guns rattling and people screaming. I tell ya, I love this band but I do not get them much.

The “hit” of the album (in that it has a video) is “Lacquer Head”, which is an anti-drug song about people who huff gasoline. Personally, I think that one shouldn’t huff on gasoline, and I’m glad that a band has decided to pick up on this too. This is the song that is “produced by Fred Durst”, and other than it being a little heavy, I don’t really hear anything that is particularly soul-destroying on this recording, so I guess his evil influence isn’t that present. The oft-repeated line at the end of the song is “Keep on sniffin’ ’til your brain goes pop”, and though I know that they mean “pop” in the sense of damaging your brain until you’re retarded, they could also mean “pop” in the sense of Madonna-flavored music (can music taste like veneral disease?)

Primus is very against this “pop” thing, and they demonstrate this in the album’s title track, which comes hard and heavy and with rather clever lyrics that say just what they mean.

It’s after this song that my interest in the album begins to wane, and it’s mainly because the next track is “Eclectic Electric”, which is 8 minutes and 34 seconds of James Hetfield and Jim Martin of Faith No More playing guitars for the most boring song to ever feature delay on a bass guitar.

Things pick up after that, though not a whole lot. First is “Meet The Sacred Cow”, which is kind of “back to normal”, but is a little too much metal mixed in to be particularly exciting. “Mama Didn’t Raise No Fool” is much better, though it very unapologetically features guitar work from Tom Morello, but is at least catchy enough to make up for the riffiness.

“Dirty Drowning Man”, which features Stewart Copeland of The Police (what happened to anti-pop, Primus?) on production duties, is better than the last track, but also quite similar, except it has a really cool instrumental break about halfway through and a fast-paced groove all throughout.

“Ballad Of Bodacious” is the moment where I declare the Middle Album Slow Down to be pretty much over, as it’s a funky Primus jam of the highest calibur, as it has some cool envelope filter bass and some of that good ol’ “what the hell” Larry LaLonde guitaring. All of this for a song about bull riding, specifically a bull called “Bodacious”. I kind of love how Primus doesn’t really have a reason to write songs but does so anyway.

“Power Mad” is amazing just for its beginning sample of a guy talking about panties, but it’s also a really fun song, Tom Morello notwithstanding. Actually, I really do like Morello’s part for this song as well as that other song where I was making fun of him, having such “recognizable” guitar playing, he fits right in with one of the most recognizable bands in rock music.

The album nearly ends with a spacey synth noise and squishy bass line for nearly 2 minutes before the song “The Final Voyage Of The Liquid Sky” fully unfolds and then fades out again into the bass soloing again. I love the squishy distorted bass-line because it sounds a lot like a guitar noise I created once that I was particularly proud of.

The Mellotron starts up again in order to take us out with the best song on the album, called “Coattails Of A Deadman“, which is a spooky, almost carnival-like tune that Les Claypool sings with an over-the-top kind of singing style as he sings a ballad of how evil women are. I would say Tom Waits wrote the song, but the lyrics might as well be from the Bible. I will say, I don’t know why Tom Waits is so popular, but I kind of like how he sounds like a pirate on this particular recording.

Anyway, that’s Antipop, I guess it sure was anti-stuff. On top of Pop, we’ve got anti-America, anti-drugs, anti-women, and anti-bullfighters, which is an effective enough vendetta for one album at least. I do enjoy this album, even if it’s far from the band’s best, and I look forward to hearing their popular stuff now. Until then!

There is not a lot that I know about producer Danger Mouse, but his work seems to follow me around in my musical listenings of late. From turning Cee-Lo into Gnarls Barkley, to turning The Black Keys into crap, his touch is undeniable, marked by faux lo-fi (faux-fi, I now dub thee), “sparse” arrangements that tend to leave a lot of scattered bits everywhere, and annoyingly forgetable production.

He seems like a perfect match for Beck! Let’s see how that worked out:

Now, Beck’s been kind of on my less charitable side for about, oh, a decade. His release of the admittedly good Midnite Vultures was about the last time I really paid attention to him until he released The Information. Since then, the only album I have yet to hear is the supposedly excellent Sea Change, so we’ll leave that one out of this.

Basically, since Y2K failed to destroy any of our computers, Beck has been on somewhat of a downward spiral in terms of re-capturing the spirit of his early albums that made him such a success. The only thing I can say about albums like Guero and The Information is that they at least produced some memorable tracks in their wealth of songs (those albums were nearly 50 and over 60 minutes long, respectively). Modern Guilt is, by comparison, just over the 30 minute mark, and given that some of the reviews I have read for this album actually compliment that fact, you know we’re in for some trouble.

To be perfectly honest, I would love to just blame Danger Mouse for all this, since nothing he has produced has been very good (aside from Gnarls Barkley, but even then, I much prefer Cee-Lo’s solo work so take from that what you will). On the contrary, there are some studio tricks and textures to the music that are far more charming than the songs ought to be. Beck sounds in this release like he’s not even trying anymore. His voice is an afterthought, placed somewhere in the background, right behind the cymbals on the drum kit. In fact, the entire 33-or-so minutes sound like the whole thing is building up to a hit Beck album, so by the time the poppy “Volcano” ends (literally poppy, it sounds like there are pops in the tape), you may be left thinking “that’s it?”

Again, that is not to say there aren’t some amazing moments on this album, the nice double-snare beat in “Gamma Ray”, combined with the simplest guitar riff I’ve ever heard, should not fail to get the head bobbing. Interestingly, the guitar riff in this song is called a “spy guitar riff” in reviews, which leads me to another point about this album: it seems to be critically lauded by critics who have no idea what the album sounds like.

For one, hitting 4 staccato notes on a stale guitar does not a “spy guitar” make. Guitars in spy themes tend to be like slowed-down surf music, really reverby and punchy Fender guitars either playing notes slowly or quickly, but always with that sort of “ring” to them. It’s hard to describe even though I just did it perfectly, but even then, the axiomatic “spy guitar” sounds different than “Gamma Ray”, and anybody who gets a paycheck for more than 30 cents should know that.

By the same token, the entire album has been called by more than one source a “throwback to the garage band era of the 60’s” and that the production is very “old school”. Unless I’m entirely wrong about the “spy guitar” riff, in which case it can be included, I’m pretty sure there is 0% of this album that could be confused by anyone for a “60’s album”. It’s just Beck with more echo and all the manic DIY creativity replaced with boring production and admittedly infectious beats. Seriously, I forget what genre into which you’re supposed to blump the super-fast-trippy beat in “Replica”, but I know that genre is some off-shoot of techno, and since there is precious little other instrumentation in this song, you could basically call it a “techno” song, and by proxy, a “techno” album, and you’d be more accurate than calling it a “throwback to the garage band sound”.

Speaking of infectious beats, which I think I did at some point, my absolute favorite song in this set is the title track, and most of that is directed toward the beat, but it’s also got an actual discernable melody. There are little bleeps and bloops carefully placed after the vocal lines, and a really cool guitar hook placed right in the chorus, and really if the whole album took more of a cue from this particular song, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about what a disappointment this album is.

Really though, I am not going to pretend that Danger Mouse’s production on this album adds any excitement, or that he’s totally to blame. Honestly, this album’s got bigger problems than that, and there’s one that stands head and shoulders above all: Beck, with all the power and glory of being the only “indie” artist who could potentially lend credibility to that reviled title,  is just not being the genius we all believed he was back in the 90’s. Some folk were upset that he did too much rapping for Guero, and they might be happier with this album since there’s no rapping, but that’s not the way in which Beck lost his way (remember “Loser”? Yeah, that was a rap song). The thing is, Beck could take an old toy recorder, a broken guitar with 3 strings, and a junk pile of useless objects and create a better album than Modern Guilt with it, and he doesn’t need Danger Mouse to do that either. He might possibly need Nigel Godrich, but the jury’s out on that one.

So, at the end of the day, I suppose about the only thing I have to say about Modern Guilt is thank goodness it’s only 33 minutes long.