Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic

Let’s take a break from the writeups about death and stuff and instead talk about ideas like second births. In my little world of music, there are hardly any more striking examples of musical re-invention than that of Mike Doughty, former lead singer of “deep slacker jazz” group Soul Coughing, who went from fronting the most legitimately “cool” band ever to have an entirely unique sound, while himself being fronted by heroin use, to being the cleaned-up, middle-aged solo acoustic troubadour who is buddy-buddy with the stalest, most lifeless musician this side of John Mayer: Dave Matthews.

Believe it or not, in both capacities Mike Doughty is the bomb-diggity, and I’ve waited 362 entries to use that retarded phrase, so let’s talk about one of his recent albums, Haughty Melodic:

It’s kind of hard for me to state at this point that I find Doughty’s drug-feuled Soul Coughing days to be the highest point of his career (eh heh heh, “highest”), but I do find myself more frequently running back to my Soul Coughing albums after hearing one of Doughty’s solo albums. It took me almost this entire year to figure out why, but now the answer seems so simple: heroin is awesome.

Not really, I think the reason that I enjoyed Soul Coughing so much is not because of Mike Doughty, but because Soul Coughing, to me, is the booming yet eloquent drumming of Yuval Gabay combined with the god-like upright bass playing of the godly-named Sebastian Steinberg. The sample-heavy noise and Doughty’s rhythmic stream of spoken/sung non sequitors was more of another instrument, to be enjoyed rather than analyzed.

When Soul Coughing broke up at the beginning of this crappy decade, Doughty finally kicked the horse and started writing straight songs. Of course, Doughty is a better songwriter than most, with an especially keen sense of very specific imagery (one must be up on one’s brand names, for instance). In that sense, he’s a very literary songwriter, and the lack of a band really showcases that. Another thing that changed was his voice; by the time Haughty Melodic rolled around, his voice was still the nasally growl that tended to drop the pitch of a note at the end of every line (the opposite of a lot of indie acts who prefer to raise the pitch, as if asking a question), but now he’s singing notes, protracted ones, even!

The thing that was hinted at but never fully realized except in brief moments with Soul Coughing is that Doughty is a master of carving out a melody that will stick with you forever without having to try so hard. Perhaps it’s his signature singing style, but I can tell you that I know every hook of Haughty Melodic and almost none of the words, so that’s saying something I suppose.

When Doughty went out on his own to continue making music, he was, for the most part, literally on his own. From writing and recording all of the songs by his lonesome to driving himself and a guitar to all his gigs, where he personally sold 20,000 copies of his albums in the form of CD-Rs with paper sleeves, it would seem as if Doughty was a truly “independent” artist… until you realize that he was actually depending on fans he already had with Soul Coughing, but that’s neither here nor there.

Eventually, Mike ran into another musician who goes by the name of Dave Matthews. Now, don’t ask me why, but Dave Matthes is a rich and famous musician who is a big fan of Doughty’s. Upon finding out about his truly “solo” career, Dave invited Mike to finish the album he was working on at the time at his ATO studio. Doughty did so, and enlisted a full band, and that’s the album you see before you.

I suppose what I like best about the album, besides that Haughty Melodic is an anagram for “Mike Doughty”, is the string of hits that start it off. The first song is something called “Looking At The World From The Bottom Of A Well“, and despite being mainly composed of two chords, is a surprisingly “full” sounding song thanks to the stack of guitars and other band sounds that appear. Besides the chorus, which kind of gives this idea that it’s about drug-kicking, the lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense, but the melody is so infectious that I dare you not to sing it to yourself after seeing that video.

The same can be said about “Unsingable Name”, which is already a clever idea to build a song around. I am hopelessly curious what name is a “sweet and plain unsingable name”, but the song never lets on. It does say things like “I want to be your absolute ultimate”, which, despite being a straight phrase, is something that’s very Doughty for him to say.

There are some other interesting moments on the album too, there’s a rather sparse song called “White Lexus” about the eschewing of fancy goods and introducing confused Soul Coughing fans to the perplexing sound of a steel guitar backing up Mike Doughty. That is followed immediately by a second car song (no surprise, cars have been a frequently-visited theme in Doughty’s songwriting for ages now) called “American Car” which is more of a celebratory thing. I guess this album is against Japanese cars or something? Who knows.

There is a protest song called “Bustin’ Up A Starbucks” that is kind of great, even if I happen to be fond of that particular coffee place. Unfortunately, I have yet to clearly understand just what is being protested in the song, something about trade I guess. I’m kind of dumb with these movements.

“His Truth Is Marching On” is kind of an odd one, because I never thought Mike Doughty would be the type to do a straight Christian song. In that way that makes Doughty so unique, even in the face of such standard tunes, is that this is also the first Christian song I’ve heard that drops the f-bomb. How my love for this guy grows and grows.

Doughty released another album after this one called Golden Delicious, and between these two albums, I had been wanting to write about Doughty’s solo stuff since January, which explains why this album isn’t anything profound or special, but I am writing about it at the last minute. Haughty Melodic is definitely worth a shot, even if Dave Matthews was involved.

Coldplay – X&Y

Frequent readers of Album Du Jour may note that I had not, up until today, written about Coldplay’s second-to-latest album, X&Y. Well, the plan was to never talk about this album, because talking about X&Y meant I would have to listen to it, and I had not yet done that. Well, I have now listened to the album and I think I have some words to say on the subject:

A lot of you who have read my old Coldplay articles, particularly the Viva La Vida writeup, already know how this story ends; I only half-enjoyed their first two albums, and skipped this one entirely, and then was pleasantly surprised by the effort put into their newest album, to the end that it was actually a consistently good album from front to back.

What I didn’t consider, until researching X&Y, is that even more effort went into its production than with Viva La Vida, 18 months as opposed to 11 months, respectively. What was the band doing all this time?

Seriously, have you heard X&Y? The whole reason I never bothered with this album is because it seemed to take the most boring elements of Parachutes and Rush Of Blood To The Head and extended it to full album length. In fact, it’s hard to find “original” moments in this album without taking their other two albums, listening to them, and then marking comparisons. Believe me, all the coffee in Guatemala wouldn’t keep me awake enough for that. Not only did it take 18 months to finally record this album, but it’s the “best” songs out of over 60 that the band “wrote” for this new album.

Basically, the band wrote two albums before this one, but never released them because they “weren’t up to par” with the band’s previous release, so with no deadline, millions of dollars in capital, the love and adoration of fans of inoffensive adult contemporary pop, and all of their limbs intact, the band released an album they were happy with. It is thus, with great frustration, that I have to agree with the criticism that the biggest problem with X&Y is that it doesn’t meet the quality of their previous album, and it wasn’t even that good of an album!

There are a couple of songs on this album that could pass muster, “Square One”, the opening track, is a track that you may nod along to for a while once the beat and distorted guitars come in. It at least doesn’t have much of that terrible thing Chris Martin does where he can’t hit any notes without switching to a wimpy falsetto, so he does so with every alternating note. No, that move is a little bit later in the album.

What if there was no life?
Nothing wrong, nothing right
What if there was no time?
And no reason or rhyme

What if you should decide
That you don’t want me there by your side?

Those lines open up the second song, “What If”, which is basically a hook-less version of “The Scientist”. By the way, the song never really answers those questions, at least not in any audible way, because he spends the entirety of the chorus squeaking out a weak falsetto melody that may sound good in the hands of any capable singer, but in fact is completely drowned by instruments that aren’t even playing loudly. Also, those questions aren’t answered because Coldplay is apparently above hiring a songwriter for the group.

Ok, I just looked up the lyrics to this song that you can’t understand because they’re being drowned out by a guitar playing two notes. This is the answer to the questions presented all over this song’s verses:

Oooh, that’s riiiight
Let’s take a breath, jump over to the side

Masterful!

The album started off promising but just kind of drifts off into go-nowhere ballads like this one at least until the 9th song, “Low”, which at least has enough guitar in it to wake you up again. The songs that occupy that space are pretty cannibalizing, I noticed, take this line from “Fix You”:

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

What? Well anyway, here’s a line from the title song X&Y:

I know something is broken and I’m trying to fix it
Trying to repair it any way I can

In an interview, Chris Martin once said that he read “a lot of Charles Dickens” (presumably he read a book by Charles Dickens), and that’s what inspired him to write a lot of the songs on Viva La Vida, so I guess that means that during X&Y he was reading a VCR repair manual.

Just in case you’re calling “BS” on my claim that the lyrics are pretty much interchangeable from song to song and that the above example was an isolated incident, may I invite you to check out a line from “Talk”:

Do you feel like a puzzle, you can’t find your missing piece?
Tell me how you feel
Well I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak
And they’re talking it to me

Right, well grammar issues aside, now look at this line from the hit single “Speed Of Sound”:

The sign that I couldn’t read
Or a light that I couldn’t see
Some things you have to believe
But others are puzzles, puzzling me

Ok, on top of mentioning “puzzles” twice in songs only 2 tracks apart, apparently he has trouble understanding things too. There are many more examples of this all through the album, but I’m leaving you in charge of pointing them out.

So yeah, there’s no real use trying to deny it, this album disappoints on almost every level. I didn’t even want to finish the album, but I felt it was my patriotic duty, and yeah what awaited me was “Twisted Logic”, which is a bone-headed anti-oil-drilling song. Not that I’m all about using up the Earth’s natural resources to fuel such important things as NASCAR races or those horrible Hummer vehicles, but really, a band that incorporates as many trucks as Coldplay does in order to tour has very little room to speak on the subject of not burning so much fuel. I know that pointing out this kind of hypocrisy is old-hat on the internet, but seriously, look how many trucks they tour with:

And that’s not counting the tour van!

All that to support an album like this, that’s the real injustice, besides that an album this half-assed took 18 months to make. In fact, a perfect example of Coldplay taking their sweet time is in the very last track (in some album versions, it’s a secret track) called “‘Til Kingdom Come”. Coldplay wrote the song specifically so that Johnny Cash could sing it with Chris Martin, but as we all know, Johnny Cash died before they ever got the chance. He died in 2003 and this album did not come out until 2005, so that should give you some idea. The song itself is a pathetic attempt to recreate the sound of Cash’s later American Recordings albums, all the way down to the bottom octave piano, and with Chris Martin and his limp voice droning away at the very forced psuedo-Christian lyrics that might as well had been copied from a legitimate middle-era Cash song, the song is just downright sad. X&Y is sad. I have no idea why I thought listening to it for this writeup would be a good idea. I’ve made myself sad now, which should give you some idea of how sad this album is.

No, actually, do you want to know how sad this album is? It lost a Grammy to U2′s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. That’s how sad it is.

Buddy Guy – Bring ‘Em In

Before blowing every wanna-be blues stringer out of the water at the age of 70-something with the amazing Skin Deep album, legendary guy Buddy Guy put out an album in 2005 that I guess was supposed to be sold on the premise that he has a lot of guest stars (kind of like Supernatural by Santana, who incidentally appears on this very recording). The album turned out to be amazing… except for the guest stars… which includes John Mayer.

So am I going to spend the entire write-up complaining about John Mayer? I sure hope so, let’s talk about Bring ‘Em In:

I love Buddy Guy, I really do, but there is something about him and the other aging blues stringers that just makes me sad. The fact is, they’re all going away some day, and there is nobody to replace them. Oh sure Derek Trucks may some day grow out of pony-tail sporting pothead teenager and more live up to his Southern Rock-Blues roots, and there are perhaps some other up-and-comers who may somehow rise from the gutter and, without going through the Los Angeles sparkle machine, wind up keeping the meaning of the Blues alive, but as far as I can tell, right now we’ve got plenty of amazing blues guitarists, but they’re all getting very old now.

Still, while we’ve still got Buddy, he’s making some amazing records out there. The first four tracks of Bring ‘Em In, while not as brash and loud and soulful as Skin Deep (we have producer Steve “Blues? You mean adult-contemporary, right?” Jordan to thank for that), really hit it out of the park for guitar work and soulful vocals, “Somebody’s Sleeping In My Bed” being a particular highlight. As I remarked when I wrote up Skin Deep, Guy’s vocals combine the energy of a man of 20 with the wisdom and experience of a man of 150, and his guitar speaks the Blues language with such fluency you’d think he was born in it (and he was).

So why even have guest stars? The first one kind of jumps at you out of nowhere; it’s Santana and the song is Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You”. Now, I think Santana is a good player, and I don’t mean any insult when I say this: the man’s got exactly 2 riffs to his name, so you can pretty much predict how all his solos are going to go. Indeed, apparently Santana always brings his salsa rhythm section with him for all his songs, because bongos appear at the beginning of this track and disappear right after. Then we get “On A Saturday Night” which was given a little too much of the R&B polish to be considered “Blues”, though you can tell Buddy is working his hardest to make the song retain some excitement despite sounding at home as the theme song to some sitcom.

Speaking of R&B, “Ain’t No Sunshine”, with a reverby acoustic guitar solo and vocals by Tracy Chapman, actually works fairly well considering it would be defined as a tragedy if called “The Blues”, especially when the record get stuck on Tracy singing “I know-I know-I know-I know-” about 800 times. Still, once Buddy’s voice comes in you may think “Yes! I want more of that!”, but then the song starts to fade out and you can at least rest easy knowing… oh wait, John Mayer’s track is next… oh no.

Now, my problem with John Mayer is this: he’s a rich Conneticut-born white (and I don’t just mean white because of his particular shade of melanin, I mean white) kid with a shiny Berklee music degree, a Xanax prescription, and a shiny guitar with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s name on it who is trying to sing the Blues. Yes, I know that the end of that sentence should have been “Who works at Guitar Center or Abercrombie & Fitch”, but in fact he only works for them when it comes to posing for posters to go on their walls. John Mayer is a man with no soul, and you can’t hide that when you are trying to play the most soulful genre in music. Blues is about life getting you down, and trust me when I say that being rich, college-educated, white, rich, and being the go-to rebound for Hollywood’s skinniest blonde actresses puts you at a severe disadvantage when you’re trying to convey any kind of heartbreak for the common man through music. I didn’t have a problem with John Mayer back when he was the next Dave Matthews, he filled that niche quite nicely, being vacuous and putting that nasally voice to work de-pantsing college freshman girls faster than if there were a coupon for a free small-of-the-back tattoo for sleeping with him. It’s when this privileged little tyke suddenly decided that, in having his parents purchase a top-of-the-line music education for him, that he had the Blues and the means by which to convey them. Indeed, every attempt he has made so far has been absolutely flat, soulless, and devoid of any kind of emotion, like someone who clearly can’t speak English giving a Shakespearean oration spelled out phonetically.

Mayer’s contribution to the song is minimal, he whines out his lines and harmonizes with himself, and Pro-tools make him sound like the robot he is, and the song is already uninteresting so really his guitar playing on it only exacerbates that by a little.

“Lay Lady Lay” is similarly bland, and I don’t know whether to blame Anthony Hamilton, Robert Randolph, or just blame John Mayer again for putting his sterilization stink all over the last track and having it bleed over into this one. Either way, it dissipates just in time for a song called “Cheaper To Keep Her/Blues In The Night”, which recall the excitement I used to have for this album, even if the production makes it sound like everyone but Buddy are trying not to wake up the neighbors. Either way, the song is great because the idea that it’s “Cheaper to keep her” is because alimony is an expensive bitch. I love when Blues gets misogynist, how I wish Albert Collins was still alive.

There actually is a great collaboration on this album, and it probably won’t surprise you to know that it’s from Keith Richards. Yeah, sure, Keith is only still with us because of sorcery, but he still contributes some awesome guitar licks to “The Price You Gotta Pay”, which is an emotionally honest song about how cheating is wrong. It’s unfortunate that the song is on the ass-end of the album, and you have to wade through John Mayer, “I know-I know-I know- I know”, Anthony Hamilton and that awful number with Santana (for the record, there is yet to be a version of “I Put A Spell On You” that does Screamin’ Jay even an ounce of justice) to get to it. That, indeed, is the price you gotta pay.

So yeah, Bring ‘Em In is a good album because Buddy Guy is awesome, but it falls just short of being an awesome album (like Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues and Skin Deep) because there is a deliberate attempt to sterilize and clean up The Blues being made here by people who just don’t understand. The fact that they did all of this with Buddy’s implied consent means that the future of The Blues is a grim one indeed, unless some folks come along in these trying times and start making some more Blues without the candy-ass production and derivative pandering to the pop audience trying to make Blues sound hip. The Blues ain’t hip, people, it’s real.

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm

Ok, so I’ve been putting off this album for way too long, it’s time I just man up and write about Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm album:

Here’s the thing about Bloc Party: I’m conflicted. On the one hand, this band was suggested to me by someone I’m quite fond of, based on our similar tastes otherwise (English moody music, basically). Upon listening to the album, my reactions would predictably come in this order:

1. Excitement
2. Oh yeah, the singer sounds like that
3. Acceptance
4. Boredom
5. Next album

For this reason, there are few instances of me hearing the second half of this album. Still, I consider this album “Good”, or at least as good as indie music gets, because it does enough things right to belie its stamps, which include such titles as “indie rock”, “post-punk revival”, “alternative dance” (seriously?), and, last and certainly the non-trendy least, “alternative rock”.

Interestingly, despite it all, this is one of those few bands to which the phrase “alternative rock” actually hits a mark. The mid-90′s and that generation of here-sayers use to call everything “alternative”, thus removing all meaning from the word, and indeed the word “indie” has the exact same connotation nowadays. Bloc Party’s mission statement seems to be, however, to actually provide an “alternative” to rock bands (or dances?) in constantly changing their style or doing things a bit differently and thus it’s all good.

Thing is, despite being “alternative” and “different”, there’s something about Bloc Party that reminds me of something. Actually, the entire Silent Alarms album reminds me of a lot of things, so it’s not so much that one hears “original” sounds out of this band, but instead a collection of sounds that vary within the album’s parts. The first part is kind of that “alternative rock” colored of course by staples of the indie sound, but lovingly kept from being too predictable by the band’s ability to actually put melodies together without making the whole thing a jumbled mess (sometimes).

The first song displays this sound in earnest, and also introduces Bloc Party’s single best element: their drummer Matt Tong. Basically, you get one of those droning guitar notes coming in, which is followed by a high note on the bass being plucked quickly, and then suddenly, this massive quick-shot drum part comes in, and it’s surprisingly rocking! Then… the vocals come in.

One of my points of contention about Bloc Party, and it’s really hard to get around, is the vocalist/guitarist Kele Okereke. His lyrics aren’t so bad, but basically his vocals range from this kind of male cheerleader command to low kind of mumbling in the album’s middle parts. It’s kind of a shame, because he can clearly sing melodically, it’s just not something that, in the album’s strongest instrumental tracks, he feels is that necessary.

Still, nothing can take anything away from the album’s best song, “Helicopter”. Starting with two guitars pummeling away in this kind of dry-toned riffing, harmonizing with each other and being kind of awesome, despite my allergic reactions to all-down-stroke guitar playing (I call it “Green Day Fever”). The drums, again, are what really make this track, I would call them reminiscent of Mitch Mitchell, who at various points has been my favorite drummer, and indeed he even refers to (whether intentional or not) the infamous drum fill to Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” in the song’s final measure. I’m all about that!

Things go along like this for a while, as I struggle to reconcile the vocals and amazing drumming into a solid opinion about the band. The guitarist and bassist don’t really do anything for me that isn’t painfully planned out, and hell, even if I respected the guitarist’s playing, I’d still have to get over the fact that he looks like this:

Yeesh. Anyway, after the see-saw guitaring of the otherwise so-so fifth song “Banquet”, the album suddenly starts to plummet. It starts with the backwards-tracked sounding jazz chords of “Blue Lights” with the vocals suddenly a slurry mumble. Then, we’re treated to a beat that is solid, yes, but never changes. Yes, I guess we’re into the alternative dance now, and this is the point where the drums (no matter how repetitively catchy) are only augmented by hand-claps from here on out, at least until the final part of the album, which is nearly as good as the first part of the album, if you can stand that middle section.

It starts with the “dreamy” reverb-and-arpeggio-laden tune “So Here We Are”, which has no real points of interesting except that the drums are nice and trippy, with snare hits going on everywhere, and the army of shimmery guitars effectively drown out the lead singer, and if it were possible for me to high five a guitar, I would do so for that.

Then we get a straight-forward rocking beat with a lovely distorted bass line and endlessly-delayed guitars in “Luno”. The singing isn’t such a problem in this one, as the monotone verses and chanty chorus are both catchy enough. I really have no problems with this song!

We are then treated to a trend in albums that I haven’t been quite able to trace among “alternative” albums, yet I can’t help but note their appearance: the twin 4 minute album closers. It’s like the band wrote two “Wall Of Sound” style songs with layered boring bits culminating into songs so thick you want to top a bagel with them, and then couldn’t decide which one to end the album with. Then, in a brilliant realization that “more is more”, they decide to stack both songs together at the end of the album, like a tar-pit at the end of a roller coaster.

So yeah, this album isn’t bad, honestly, I think I just have personal issues with it due to my own tricky tastes. Interestingly, the band has recently (as in, 3 weeks ago) announced that they were probably breaking up, because the drummer has become frustrated with the band’s direction and tired of their sound. I like to think that this scientifically proves that I’m right about the juxtaposition of talent here. With that, I am going to retire to my bed for blissful, smug sleep.

Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings – Naturally

One of my all-time heroes, Dylan Moran, made an excellent point about musical conventions in this day and age versus how things used to be. The very best music in the 60′s and 70′s came from ugly people. Nowadays, with our exiguous little blonde waifs cluttering up the airwaves with pop du jour songs that they neither wrote nor really even sang, with canned beats, vocoders, instruments that can be switched out and replaced with even worse instruments for the “remix”, it’s really hard to actually find music nowadays in anything. It’s really no wonder iPods come packaged with the cheapest, most terrible headphones imaginable and nobody cares, it’s because what have we got to listen to that we would need to hear it well?

Enter Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings:

Now, in my previous statement, I don’t mean to imply that Sharon Jones is ugly. If anything, she’s one of the most beautiful women out there performing. She was about 49 years old when this album came out, and had no compunctions about working up a sweat on stage crooning these perfect little danceable funk/soul/awesome numbers, written by a guy called Bosco who plays an amazing bass, and the reason I say she’s beautiful is because she’s real. There is not one trace of vocoder, awkward cuts, or disingenuous lyrics based around some kind of pre-cut, manufactured hook. This is just amazing music, recorded in analogue for those keeping score, and it floors me to listen to such heart in a recording made in my life-time, much less within the past 5 years.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that there aren’t hooks on this album, man the whole first half of the album is full of them. Of course, as I mentioned when I last spoke of the Dap-Kings, these are the guys responsible for Amy Winehouse having a killer soul-based sound, even if she herself is a self-destructive vacuous marketing ploy to try and raise the sales of sailor tattoos. Sharon Jones doesn’t play the pop star game, and as such, we’ll probably never see the group chart a single or her picture on the cover of some damnable magazine made up of 80% ads and 19% garbage and 1% the credits page.

From the first hits of the dry, raspy drums and squishy guitars untouched by amp modeling or post-processing with some wicked bass-lines to the last slow jam, each song on Naturally sounds just that: natural. It’s like the songs were grown in some kind of funk garden or some equally bad simile. I should also mention, as a bassist, how impressed I am with some of these bass-lines, especially in the album’s stand-out funky track “Natural Born Lover”, which contains this really catchy and kind of weird line “He’s a NBL and he TCB”, but really with the shuffly, trippy drumming, one can’t complain. The song has an interesting theme behind the lyrics, as it’s about an imperfect man who I suppose she’s with because he’s a “natural born lover”, because apparently “taking care of business” is better than being faithful or anything. Hey, at least she’s being honest about it, most pop/R&B songs don’t admit that side of the smooth talkers out there.

There’s an entertaining little duet with a guy called Lee Fields in the song “Stranded In Your Love”, about an ex-lover of hers that seems to have had his car stolen, and thus is forced to have to stay with her for the night, even though it seems he was just desperate enough to get his woman back to either lie about it or stage the theft. Either way, it totally works, which is just great.

Another odd number is “My Man Is A Mean Man”, which has a very James Brown-esque staccato to the instrumentation, but with this wonderful rolling bass-line, the kind that inspired me to play the instrument in the first place. The lyrics are spoken from the viewpoint of a lover done wrong, but they’re done with this intriguing vibe of introspection and total awareness of the situation. I would reprint said lyrics, but yeah of course they wouldn’t be online. Still, the song goes into double-time at the end, which is awesome, makes me wish the song would hang around a little longer.

The drumming intro to “How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?” makes this song one of my favorites on the whole album, and the song gets even better from there. I guess there’s a reason Homer Steiweiss, the Dap-Kings’ drummer, has the nickname “Funky-Feet”. In fact, I have yet to figure out what this song is about other than the title because I just can’t get my ears off the instrumentation on this particular track, plus the protracted notes by Sharon make her voice blend with the instruments moreso than accentuating the lyrical content. No complaints here, this song is beautiful.

The album’s centerpiece is something that everyone who has talked about Naturally tends to mention, and I’m no exception. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings apparently saw it fit to do a funk/soul/blues cover of one of America’s best-loved folk songs: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”, done in a slow, minor-keyed and sultry way that might make you scratch your head while moving your feet. Either way, the song retains its original political lyrics in this version, and I really appreciate that, no matter who it’s coming from. Why yes, if you didn’t know, the song originally had the following lines:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “Private Property”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, so it must be
That side was made for you and me

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple
By the relief office, I’d seen my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Sharon was kind enough to include them (changing “relief office” to “welfare office” you know, since that’s what exists now). This cover alone makes this album better than its predecessor, Dap-Dippin’ With…, since I did get a slight whiff of contrivance from that album. Indeed, Naturally I feel was a huge step forward, offering up funky hit after funky hit, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to listen to the new album, and I’ll be talking about that one too, I’m sure!

Indeed, music like this needs to be cherished and enabled, before the robots who are creating our music take over our lives. Do it for the good of humanity!

The Pale Pacific – Urgency

Every once in a while, I run into a band that is in every way good enough to “change my life” and what-not, but they are so buried in obscurity that really I’m only able to get about 1 or 2 albums from them before they disappear forever.

Such a band is The Pale Pacific.

Now, as I understand it, The Pale Pacific are considered “indie” and I am not sure how to take that. They definitely produced their stuff independently, and they do enjoy reverb on guitars and such, but if I had to call it anything, I’d call it melancholy pop, something that sounds great on a dreary rainy day, of which Washington state (where the band resides) has plenty.

The band actually started out a lot more upbeat, back when they were simply called The Pale. Actually, if one took the previous album to this one, titled Gravity Gets Things Done, it was more half-upbeat, half-dreary, and very long. I suppose the addition of “Pacific” to the band’s moniker signaled the advent of a new all-dreary sound. The only Pale Pacific album, Urgency, however, is really good for being so dreary.

The album opens up with “In The Sun, Pt. 2″, the first part of which is on the Rules Are Predictable EP, the Pale Pacific’s first EP under that name. Really though, the song is not a true sequel, it’s actually just a re-recording of the original, where driving beats and distorted guitars are replaced with mellow E-piano and acoustic guitar. The song is quite short, and almost sounds unfinished, but serves really well as an intro to what’s coming up.

The song “Sucker Punch” should rightfully be considered the best song on the album, which is not to take away from the rest of the album, but it’s a really good song. The beat is trippy, the vocal/e-piano melody gorgeous (hence my hesitation to call it an “indie” song as they hardly ever feature any kind of discernible melody), and the guitars are reverb’d to the moon. The only thing that keeps me from declaring “perfection” with this song is the awkward bassline that doesn’t really follow anything. I guess it works, but I guess being a bassist myself, I can’t help but imagine it being better.

The climactic ending of “Sucker Punch” brings the album up quite nicely from the murky climate it had established into a slightly more energetic phase, and that is continued with the song “Tied To A Million Things”, which features a sinister wall of reverbed guitar and a crunchy bassline that makes me forgive the bassline from the previous song.

After that wall-of-sound mess (a pleasant mess, mind you), we are then treated to a cleaned-up pop song called “Identity Theft”, a straight-forward song about not getting into a life of crime with your dad. It’s got a catchy beat that the song is more-or-less built around, and despite the fact that almost NOBODY I show this album to ever warms up to this track, I think it’s great. It features some real quick strumming from the guitarist as well, which is always fun.

The album is then brought down a spell by the irrepressibly mellow “Fortune Folds”, which is a track that I probably shouldn’t like because it really does kind of sound like an “indie” song at least until the chorus, where it is really a magical little number. The lyrics are really vague though, but in a way that kind of helps to not pay attention to them. After all, if the melody’s good enough, who needs words that make sense?

Speaking of which, the next song is another more “cleaned up” number called “Your Parent’s House”, which is apparently sung from the perspective of a dude who really hates hanging with his girlfriend’s parents and likes to complain about it for 4 minutes in song. Despite the wussiness of the lyrics, it’s a rockin’ track that is every bit as strong as “Sucker Punch” as far as the arrangement goes.

We then move on to “Written Down”, a straight-forward guitar-driven song again sung from the perspective of a selfish wimp, someone who just had a child but wanted a son but got a daughter and proceeded to be all bitchy and passive-aggressive about it (I am guessing anyway, the whole thing is slightly vague). All in all, a fairly fun song.

The tone is then slowed down for “The Strangest Second Chance”, which tells the story of an alienated small-town friend who leaves her group of jerk friends to drive in her truck until she feels better about a recent fall-out. She then proceeds to fall asleep and crashes the car, waking up with amnesia and doesn’t remember the bad stuff her friends did, and loves them again, hence “The Strangest Second Chance”. Uhh, I kind of told the whole story of the song there, but hey if you like really mellow guitars and a slow beat, you should still give the song a listen.

The next song is more of a straight-up pop song, and I’m as fond of it as the others, but it is put together quite well. “If Only She’d Leave Town” is a song about pushing away a woman the singer feels ambivalent about or somethin’ like that. It is one of the only “upbeat” songs on the album, and maybe that throws it off for me.

The album slows down with “Back To You”, about an awkward childhood moment the singer reflects on. It’s a nice, introspective number that I’m sure many particularly sensitive people who recall their pasts often can relate to. I don’t know any of those people, though.

Finally, the album ends with the epic 8-minute crawl of “Fall To Place”, a song so slow you can sometimes forget you’re listening to it between the beats. I really dig it, and in fact the previous album had a very long ending track too, so I guess it’s a running theme. The song is very sad, and in a way that seems appropriate to the overall feel of the album.

It’s not so bad
When you look back
Keep your chin up
But don’t hope for more than you should

It takes an entire minute and a half to sing that much. There are some really fun low frequencies that drone on in the background, though, so I always wind up listening to this track for the duration. Subtlety, eh?

So that’s the album, and it was probably my absolute favorite album for the entire year of 2006, the year after its release. I was pretty depressed all the time, though, and one tends to gravitate to these kinds of albums when that happens. I still am quite fond of it, and I really would like The Pale Pacific (and maybe their “sister” band, Fair, of whom I will definitely be speaking of alter) to come back to Texas, as the only time they came out this way was in 2005 touring with Dredg, of all bands. I was so impressed by their performance that I bought all the CD’s they had available. Still, such is the curse of “independent” bands, they are almost never independent of the amount of money and time it takes to go touring. Moreso the shame, but maybe they’ll put together another album and tour, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on their Myspace page to be in the know when they do.

 

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The Mars Volta – Frances The Mute

I was kind of wanting to write The Mars Volta’s albums up backwards from the band’s latest album, The Bedlam In Goliath, since that’s the order I listened to them in, but I decided to go with Frances The Mute because it’s the one I’ve been listening to lately, since I found it brand new in a local CD store for $4.99. So there you go:

Thom Yorke of Radiohead described In Rainbows as Radiohead’s version of a  love-making album (he must have forgotten he said the same thing about Hail To The Thief). If it is indeed the case that listening to Radiohead is like making love, then The Mars Volta are the kind of lover that kicks the door down and charges with an electric egg-beater in one hand and what can only legally be called “The Obliterator” in the other, wearing nothing but the pelt of a Wolverine he killed with his bare hands. A night with The Mars Volta may mean extensive hospital rest, but you’ll never be quite the same afterward and will probably find yourself wanting more.

In particular, Frances The Mute brings the stunning chaos of The Mars Volta’s sound in excess, starting right after the acoustic intro to “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus”. The whole thing is just a chaotic mess of busy drumming, dynamic bass to match, and crazy guitar riffs that really demand repeat listening in order to take it all in. The lyrics… well we’re not going to talk about the lyrics, as a good portion of them are in Spanish and the English ones make no sense anyway. Such is the way of these things.

It’s quite all right, since vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala (that is an awesome name) suscribes to the “voice as an instrument” theory of singing, where high notes and loosely-strung-together ideas (also high) are just fine. It’s interesting, because the guy can sing any note that Matthew Bellamy can, but it’s not the feature of the song, it just goes right in with the mix of craziness. Only the song “L’via L’Viaquez” do his intense high-notes really stand out, that is, unless you’re listening for them, and for the 4 minutes of aggregate rocking, there’s about 7 minutes of meandering whispers of music.

That is, perhaps, the reason people seem to prefer the band’s other albums to Frances The Mute (though one fan I know considers Frances his favorite). The album rocks, all right, but may be better for beginners who want to ease into the band’s insanity, as there are frequent slow-down portions where the album nearly crawls (such as the entire 13 minutes of “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore (A) Vade Mecum”), but if you make it through these portions (or, you know, just skip ‘em), some amazing rock awaits (like the next track, “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore (B) Pour Another Icepick”). I guess it’s all a matter of asking yourself: just how much time do you have in your day for rockin’? If your answer is “All day man I’m stoned out of my mind!” then Frances The Mute is the album for you. If you only have a few minutes to spare between dropping the kids off at soccer practice to rock out to The Mars Volta, might I recommend Bedlam In Goliath as a more “all rock all the time” kind of experience.

Mind you, I am fairly new to the Volta sound myself. I really enjoy the albums, but like with most progressive rock, repeat listenings and intense concentration are required to make any sense of it all. I knew from the moment a friend played me a portion of a Mars Volta album in the car that I would need a lot more time to devote to listening to these guys to get a clear idea of what’s really going on. That seems like crazy-talk coming from a Gentle Giant fan who likes Prog in general, but these two dudes from El Paso, Tx. really have something going for them here.

If you didn’t notice, I’ve avoided going for a track-by-track analysis of the music, and the reason for that is because the whole album is a song, practically. “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus”, “The Widow”, and “L’Via L’Viaquez” stand alone as their own tracks, but two of those tracks are over 10 minutes long, and then the next two… uhm… Suites, maybe? The two multi-song songs are “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore” which is 4 tracks in one, and “Cassandra Geminni” is a 5-parter, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to tell you where one ends and the other begins.

Incidentally, I noticed that “L’Via L’Viaquez” is one of the tracks on the new Guitar Hero game, and I initially wondered how they got an 11 minute long song (well that isn’t “Freebird”) onto Guitar Hero, particularly given that more than half of the album meanders into improvised-sounding horn solos, but then I heard the song and found that there’s a “single” version that’s only 5 minutes long. It kind of makes me wonder why they didn’t just do that with the entire album?

I think the answer is “Genius”. Mr. Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez seem to fancy themselves as such, which is really how progressive rock gets started – when artists think they’re too smart for standard rock. They are probably correct, after all The Mars Volta enjoys an audience of people much smarter (or at least more pretentious) than myself, except for the Tool fans. For this reason, I try not to mention them too often in public, except to say they’re great and I enjoy their music when I have time to listen to an entire album.

Frances The Mute is really growing on me, as well. Despite its ridiculously long slow segments, there is more than enough jammin’ tunage to fill out a lengthy bike ride. In particular, the “Cassandra Geminni” segments are a lot of fun, despite the singing occasionally lapsing into slurping. I also think “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus” is a great way to start an album, 13 minute length notwithstanding. Indeed I would say the night of passion is worth the weeks of pain, and I’m going to stop using that dreadful analogy immediately.

 

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