Poor Old Lu – Straight Six

Today’s entry is fraught with all kinds of controversy. Of course, the “controversy” doesn’t actually exist except inside my own head, but I have felt conflicted about this album ever since I began this blog and was constantly rifling through albums trying to figure out what I could and couldn’t write about.

But now it’s nearly 6am, I am tired as all-get-out, and I wanted at least one more day between Johnny Cash albums, so here we are, the-final-and-I-mean-it-this-time entry about Poor Old Lu, with their album Straight Six:

The main conflict in my head about this particular collection of songs is that, as its name implies, it is a six-song EP. Now, no matter what can be said about the albums I have talked about thus far, it can be agreed beyond a shadow of a lightbulb that they are all full-length albums, and I told myself early on that it would be foolish to talk about something as small as an EP when there were giants out there to tackle.

Well, then I got to thinking about it. I’ve talked about full-length “albums” that have 6 tracks or less and are still considered albums, and I’ve talked about albums that, despite having many tracks, are actually shorter than this album in length, and yet those are considered full length. Add to that the fact that this is Poor Old Lu we’re talking about here, a band I could talk about for my quota’s worth on just a single song, and I think we’ve got a pretty solid argument for this release’s favor. That, and it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard, EP or LP.

So what’s so great about Straight Six? Well, if you want to be fair but a little bit biting, it’s the only Poor Old Lu album out there without visible “filler” material, which would explain the “Straight” part of the title. Indeed, all 6 tracks on this little album-like wonder are praise-worthy, or at least unique in their own right, if that uniqueness isn’t worthy of such praise.

In fact, the song least likely to wind up on anyone’s top 20 is the opening number, “Lie, Lie, Lie”. There’s nothing to complain about in the song’s message or lyrical content; it’s just a “prodigal son” story set in modern times with a youth who decides to drift away from home in order to find happiness, but figures out that happiness was at home all along and happy endings and all that. The tune itself is solid enough too, but I think there’s a certain flatness to the recording/mixing that causes this song to be kind of flat. The cleanness we would expect to hear from Poor Old Lu in later releases wasn’t quite there for this one, as the guitar is a little over-present in the mix, the vocals pushed to the back and lacking dynamic, a prominent track of hand-clapping not only off-sequence but kind of isolated in the mix, and hidden somewhere in there is some truly great drum work that’s a little too trash-can-esque to be distinct. Honestly, I love “Lie, Lie, Lie”, but it could have been recorded better, even if some of all that was actually intentional. According to their own testimony, they were going for a “70′s” sound with this one, I don’t know.

The second track more than makes up for it, in fact, “Bittersweet” should, by all rights, stand up there with the rest of Lu’s “hits” as a memorable classic. I mean, for one, it’s one of the very few Poor Old Lu songs to contain an instrument that I feel they should have exploited more often: the cello. Indeed, a fairly simple-yet-elegant cello line was performed by their friend, and as the song crescendos into this noisy array of minor chords and just alt-rock awesomeness, the cello throws out this solo that I always thought was really great, at least until I started working with a cellist who has a Master’s Degree in the instrument, and now other cello players sound dumb to me. Sorry, dude!

Seriously though, “Bittersweet” is a touching song that sort of tries to connect some disconnected themes of longing and spiritual relevance, and recalls some of the bleak moodiness of their later Picture Of The Eighth Wonder style. It’s almost a window into songs like “Rail” and “The Weeds That Grow Around My Feet”, only with a cello!

The next song makes a bit of sense, a fancy spanish-sounding melody featuring acoustic guitars playing a mock flamenco style as Scott sings some good ol’ “Good Vs. Evil” themed lyrics, as it’s highly reminiscent of an evolved form of their popular “Cannon Fire Orange” song. This particular song, according to Scott, scored quite a few illegal downloads on the ol’ Napster service (now a legit music service owned by Best Buy who bought it so they could bank on the name, if you can believe the irony), because the title of the song is “Slipknot”, and of course, there was a popular band around at that time that I think are still bummin’ around the country somewhere.

“Digging Deep” is a grand song, about the closest thing you’ll ever find to a praise & worship number by Lu, as it incorporates those legendary chords: G, D, and C. Those three chords make up just about all Christian music before the 70′s or so, and are still the most powerful set of chords this side of a Wednesday Night bible study. In this case, however, it’s Lu’s modest message about keeping humble and steadfast when outwardly appealing to people about the Christian message, and indeed the “Digging Deep” into the soul is what provides such strength. Further adding to the power of this song is a rare instance indeed: a guest vocalist! In this case, it’s the “recently resurged in popularity” Jeremy Enigk of Sunny Day Real Estate, who was a friend of the boys in the band long before any of them started with music (if you recall, there’s a hidden track on Sin composed of a voice-mail message from Jeremy to Lu bassist Nick Barber accusing him of stealing a necklace). His vocals with Scott’s are really excellent, actually, except that he sounds quite a lot like Aaron Sprinkle, so much so that I had no idea that there WAS a guest vocalist on this song, until I actually read through the liner notes. Still, great stuff.

More great stuff is in another Lu rarity: a political rocker called “For The Love Of My Country”. The song is driven by one of the hardest, fastest beats and guitar/bass lines in the band’s repetoire, until it slows down to a light guitar, still playing urgently, in the background as Scott sings the words, riddled with self-doubt over the limits of what one will do for one’s country. Far be it for me to denounce the Army or whatever the kids are doing these days, I just want to say that the bridge of this song, with a lead guitar solo and super-punchy bass part, is one of my favorite moments on the whole… erm… EP.

Finally, we get another rarity, in fact a downright unique event in the history of Poor Old Lu. For one, “Speak Soft” is a cover, which is something the band has not done before nor since, as far as albums go. The other is that it’s a 6-7 minute epic poem following allegorical examples of a deep emotional bond between mankind and what we want out of life. At least, that’s the way I see it. The song follows all kinds of struggles, beginning and ending with a character called Jerry getting drunk in a bar. In the time between, the song flows in a calm sea of finger-picking arpeggios (or double-tracked flat-picked arpeggios, if you’re going to argue the point) and haunting choruses, only to completely erupt in a rock-out portion that, in no way, seems gaudy or forced. Indeed, the song merely intensifies and goes through hundreds of chord changes before calming down again, only to build up one last time before the song’s peaceful end, with its heady warning:

Don’t trouble yourself with seeking peace… go cheap.

Before ending on a droning chord that swells into the peak of what the audio will allow before fading off into nothing.

The song itself is beautiful, and was apparently written by a band called Loom (err, make that The Swoon) in the 80′s. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find any physical version of their one and only album, upon which this song appears, but apparently the album was one of the main driving influences behind Poor Old Lu’s overall sound, and this song was their homage to those guys. Well-played, boys. I was so impressed by this song, in fact, that I took it upon myself to learn a one-man cover on acoustic guitar, and I like to show it off every now and then. I just really love the song, and it makes a fitting end to an impressive-yet-short album/EP/whatever.

So there we go, 1500 words (average “I love this album” length) on a 6-song EP that I had avoided because I didn’t think the writeup would be full enough. Goes to show what I know, eh? Well, until next time!

Poor Old Lu – A Picture Of The Eighth Wonder

SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM AUTHOR: Tomorrow is my 27th birthday, which apparently only happens once in your life (corresponding age and day of the month your birthday lands on), so it’s going to be pretty special. I know we’ve been friends for a while, so I feel no shame in asking you for something. More than anything, for my birthday, I don’t want to have to decide on an album to write, so please comment here or on any other entry the name of an album you’d like to see in lights. If no requests are made (let’s face it, this blog ain’t that popular), I am going to write about the absolute worst album I can think of at that time. Thanks in advance!

Ok, now that it’s Autumn and I’m starting to “feel” the more morose side of music, let’s talk about one of my top 10 favorite albums of all time, ever:

To understand why I love this album so much, one must understand a little bit about how I “grew into” this style of music. For one, kind of like how I wouldn’t watch anything “serious” or “not animated” when I was a little kid, I refused to listen to anything set to a minor key when I listened to music (unless it was classical). The reason is quite simple, I just liked the brighter side of things, and since my musical experience up to that point was pretty much Classical, Blues (which is usually major key), and Newsboys, there wasn’t anything The Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or any other “alternative” band could do at that point to please me (my Smashing Pumpkins appreciation wouldn’t manifest until almost 10 years later).

This album came out when I was 13 years old, and though I intially hated it (“You can’t even understand what the guy is saying!”), it became the album that would break me, and open me up to the other 50% of most musical scales.

How did they do it? Well, Poor Old Lu had something that other bands didn’t have, and to this day, I’m not too sure what it was, but I identified the hell with it. Maybe it was just timing, but the first time I heard “Rail” in a good set of headphones, I was hooked on this gloomy rock stuff forever. This, despite being the “final” album before their brief reunion in the album The Waiting Room, this was the first album I heard from the band and would become the basis for how I judged every other “alternative” act, even to this day.

The album, even compared to the already bleak Sin, was dark… very dark, in fact. The band’s songwriter, Scott Hunter, I feel had grown into a more consistent songwriter, and the band really seemed to have this general feeling that they didn’t have to write to be popular because they just weren’t going to be a “popular” group. Hence, the pressure was all but gone to put out a “bankable” product (not that they were ever too concerned with that), so they just let the emotion shine through. And there’s a lot of emotion to be conveyed here.

Unique to Poor Old Lu’s sound, as always, is Scott’s raspy-yet-not-metal voice, which is in top form here. Also to be noted is the stunning production by now-deceased Christian Rock pioneer Gene Eugene (a name you see often in the “good” C. Rock albums, including a few I have already written about like Kosmos Express’ Simulcast) and Aaron Sprinkle, who himself really seemed to find that winning combination of subtle tones and ways to accentuate musicality that made him the in-demand producer he is today. The album sounds gorgeous, is what I’m saying, and that’s not a phrase I use often because it’s kind of gay.

The whole thing starts with “Rail”, the band’s first official foray into songs over 7 minutes long. Its long intro is one of those “perfect” buildups to a mid-tempo rock-out. For what seems like the first time, there are a multitude of guitars layered over each other for this song, but not in that reviled “Wall Of Sound” kind of way, I mean there are anywhere from 2 to 5 guitars all playing different riffs utilizing various tones that kind of sounds like if all the types of guitars you could throw into a grunge-shaped alternative sound all got together and…. uh… played a bunch of notes (we’re keeping it family friendly here at Album Du Jour).

The lyrics to the song set the tone just right. Eschewing a multitude of words for a few simple, yet powerful, lines of spiritual longing, Scott breathes out the following words:

Jesus, tie these hands
I used to think that everything I touched turned gold
But it don’t, it turns cold

And reason guides this man
Like Spring to Fall, and wind and sand
I sway, I sway, I can not stand

What do I do, when I relate to Judas more than you?
And I can’t ever… I can’t ever see the end

Jesus, help me see
It’s not about consequence, it’s peace
And I won’t seek, I won’t seek on my own knees

And Grace is over me
It’s true, I feel, I know it’s real
But will I live what I believe?

I absolutely love those words, and you may remember how I said that, as a Christian songwriter, you can write the worst dirge of all time as long as you have the redemptive last lines? I kind of love that this song turns it right back around into doubting and lets it hang there. Indeed, we’re dealing with some pretty strong stuff here.

After the equally long and powerful play-out (with a clean guitar riff that sends chills down this young reader’s spine), the first “rocker” of the album takes center stage. The song is called “Receive” and it follows along the theme of the first song, dealing with depression, specifically speaking to a youngster, seemingly anyway. Lines like “Made a crown, for the pain, and it falls on your mind like so much rain” and “Check your name, check your head, I’ve heard more joy from some… someone dead” gives way to a chorus that is simply “Receive”. In the storm of fast-moving chords and an awesome beat from Lu’s amazing drummer Jesse Sprinkle, the bridge is one of my favorite parts, featuring Scott growling out the lines “Too close, too far, too insane”.

Indeed, even on an album as dark as these songs have been building up to, it’s good to take a bit of a break, and in fact “A Better Me” is just that. Lyrically, it’s not such a pepper-upper, but the chords are in a major key, with a bubbly guitar effect (either a flanger or fast-set phase shifter) hiding in the background, and a very interesting bridge. The band, particularly Scott Hunter, have gotten down on the song before, but I quite like it. It seems to present an idea that there is a lot that can be accomplished in this world, but not all of it is particularly beneficial for spiritual growth.

Then it’s back to the (more) depressing stuff, and what can be more depressing than a title like “What If Uncle Ben Had Lived?” Of course, one may then realize the titular Uncle Ben is from the Spiderman ethos and in fact this song’s title was taken from a graphic novel of the same name. Still, the song itself is no joking matter. Featuring acoustic guitar played over a droning organ (out of tune with each other, which bugs me but in a way that seems necessary), the song is slow and intentionally trashy sounding. The distorted guitar, run through some kind of oscillating effect, is so distorted that the tones are barely recognizable, which conveys exactly that feeling that something is wrong. Then we hear the lyrics:

Reaching for a star
With my eyes dead on the floor
Racing all the time
My soul can’t take much more

Touch the silent man
Who made himself so low

The breeze is too much for me anymore
(I’ve seen this in people who are weak)
And if I push the blade in deep
Will in break inside of me
In me, in me, in me…

Wow, you may be thinking. Indeed, such a song seems quite hopeless (and is, in fact, the first of *two* songs that refer to suicide), and the simple “Touch the silent man” lines are finished in thought at the very end of the song:

Touch the silent man
Who made himself so low
Make yourself as small
Just He, and I, and all…

Another song that the band seems to get down on is “Joy I Had Was Joy I Sold”, mainly because it was rush-written, in the studio, and kind of just cobbled together out of a few chord changes and some interesting rhythm ideas. I have to say, despite this suspect process of putting together a song, it still stands above about 90% of other alternative rock songs. Just sayin’.

Still, the very first song I ever heard from Poor Old Lu, “Chance For The Chancers”, was also written entirely in the studio. However, unlike “Joy I Had”, this track is one of those songs that just stays with you forever. It is, in fact, one of my absolute favorite songs ever made. It starts with a simple guitar melody in a nice 6/8 time signature, that then switches to 4/4 for the actual song portions. The song is one of those 4-chord “alternative” progressions, but it does everything so right that it’s hard to fault for such behavior. The song is lyrically a plead to someone who is too wrapped up in despair to realize that “Everything is gonna be ok”, and I defy anyone to try and recreate the vocal melody, because it’s deceptively difficult. Indeed, the band really outdid themselves on this particular song with its beat changes and overall “haunting” feel (as described by singer Scott), they couldn’t possibly do any better, right?

Actually, what follows is what I, in any amount of “objective criticism” I can lay claim to, consider to be the best song written in Christian Rock. That’s really saying something since it never even directly refers to God. It’s another song that starts in 6/8, only it stays there this time. The chord progression follows a downward spiral from Am to its 5th, as any good gloomy song should, and it features one of the best guitar solos in the Lu catalog in the bridge, not so much because it’s a technically amazing solo, but because it is the second most despair-ridden thing in this song. The first, of course, are the lyrics:

Choices cloud my head again
Wrapped up in myself instead
And if I fall this time, will it be the last time
For this crime

And anger has more of my soul
Than I ever wished it would hold
And as I let it go, and watch how it grows
It won’t fold

Do I love this world?
Can I breathe beyond here?

The message that is conveyed is one of standing in the same place, in a rut, which is where the despair kind of gets to you. The “as I let it go and watch how it grows” line is referring to sin and how letting it go can cause it to grow, like a weed, and you can see where it’s going from there:

Flowers have grown round my eyes and ears
The soil it soaks all my tears
How I’m tired of standing here
And I’m sick of that heat that’s so near

And if we’re all right
And if we cannot be wrong
Then we needn’t fear
We’re almost there
Like I’m depressed and I hold a gun

Once again, following in the same theme, we see not only depression and torpor, but actual suicidal thoughts (second of 2 scheduled appearances of such in the album). The “If we’re all right” lines are a an amazingly bold statement regarding the attitude that being Christian is enough to be “all right”, like if you’re “saved” then nothing can touch you. The song clearly disagrees:

It’s all the same
Just falling rain
All the more the reason to stay
What is the scene
It’s brown and green
The weeds that grow around my feet

The chorus above is sung once after the second pre-chorus, and again after the solo, but then the most important part of the song brings it home, a repetition of the line above:

And if we’re all right
And if we cannot be wrong
Then we needn’t fear
We’re almost there

Which, isolated at the end of the song, uses the exact same words that, earlier, conveyed a sense of dread, now seem to be hopeful. Indeed, no matter how bad it gets, “We’re almost there”, but only “If we cannot be wrong”, and thus is presented the very core of Christianity: absolute faith constantly racked with guilt and doubt. For that reason, this song kind of represents the song that best gets it right.  The scholars may disagree, but I feel pretty strongly about it, which might explain why this writeup is now over 2200 words with no sign of slowing.

Either way, it’s about time for a fun song. Sure, “Enough” may be in a minor key, but the psuedo-circusy organ blats that form the backbone of the song along with the staccato guitar chords make it at least interesting enough to avoid being gloomy. The bass-line that is layed over the thing, which doesn’t follow the rhythm the way a bass should, is something I strongly approve of. It really makes the song. The words are good, the melody is good, but the bridge is great, and in fact it should be, they’ve used it before. Yes, this is the song that shares the bridge with “Never Said” from Star Studded Super Step, and due to that, is typically joined-at-the-hip with it in live shows. The bridge also features a neat trick involving a rubber rat toy, a lot of delay, and a lot of reverb which kind of has to be heard to be appreciated.

Finally, however, it’s time to close this mother down. First off is one of the very few overt “relationship” songs in Lu’s discography, “Hello Sunny Weather”, which of course is an ironic title. It’s about the pains of growing up and trying to be in a relationship that is growing more and more difficult, I guess. I actually can’t really tell what the song’s about, but it utilizes the great love-song chord progression in a way that really turns itself on its ear. I approve, though this has proven one of the less popular Lu tunes to people who have heard this album and lived to tell me about it.

Finally, we have the aptly-named “Closing Down”. The song is built around those late-night frustrations with life when one can’t sleep because the next day is never going to be better than the last. The song’s ultimate message is to pray, and indeed that’s Poor Old Lu’s calling card with these kinds of songs. The main draw to this song is that it has this amazing crescendo of 3 chords and a cadence that just builds up and builds up until it, well, kind of fades out. Really, a great way to end the album, it leaves you about as sad as it found you, I suppose.

Even now, almost 14 years after first hearing the album, I still get excited to hear it, and count it among the very rare Christian albums that are just good enough to be heard by dirty heathens or just anybody who likes dreary music and has had enough of The Cure (which the Lu boys admit were a major influence on their sound at this point).

Sure the guys broke up pretty quickly after this album was released (perhaps a bit of irony was that they did so right before the beginning of 1997, which was otherwise a very good year for Christian alternative music), and maybe this album isn’t any better than Sin or The Waiting Room, but it still had enough of a profound impact on my own music appreciation to warrant this extra-long entry. After all, if it weren’t for these guys, I might not have opened my mind to the variety of styles and sounds out there, and this blog either wouldn’t exist or would be dedicated to all the bands I listened to before which, trust me, you don’t want to hear about.

Poor Old Lu – Star Studded Super Step

I guess, for no other reason than that it was the only thing I could think of, I am going to talk about another Christian album from one of my favorite Christian bands (in fact, in this case, one of my favorite bands period) that lacks the production values of the band’s hey-day, but is still solid.

This one’s always had a more profound effect on my life, however, than most albums, so let’s get to it! This is Poor Old Lu’s “first” album, Star Studded Super Step:

I suppose it’s in the nature of things that, no matter how many albums one may listen to from day to day, it’s always going to be the first ones that make the most impact on one’s life. Indeed, around the time I was listening to Star Studded Super Step, I had maybe 10 cd’s and a further 10-20 cassettes to choose from in my daily listening. Comparing that to here and now, over 10 years later, where I’ve got this Mp3 player with 900 albums and a total of about 12,000 songs, it’s kind of amazing to see how far we’ve come. Even more amazing is that there are not a whole lot of those 12,000 songs that mean quite as much to me as the 14 that make up this thing.

I’m sure that such a thought was not going through the heads of the 4 kids, all high-school age at the time, when they set about to record this album. I will say, however, that this crazy dedication to making some music was there, it had to be, these guys were barely old enough to drive and had 1 full album (as “Bellbangvilla”) and a 3 song Poor Old Lu demo under their belt. To put that into perspective, I haven’t been in high-school in about 10 years, and I have exactly 0 albums and a 1-song demo that the internet almost never credits to me.

Still, I might not have ever learned how to play instruments if it weren’t for Star Studded. I don’t know what it is about it, perhaps it’s the raw production (recorded on borrowed equipment in a then-unused classroom in a church) that was a bit of an inspiration, perhaps it’s the simplicity of the actual music, since, well, it was written by highschoolers. I think, more than anything, these songs just spoke to me in a way that made me think that I could sit down and learn this stuff and maybe write a few of my own in reply.

Yes, I often credit Hot Tuna and various other groups for being my main influence when it came to playing bass, but that’s only because they influenced my uncle, who in turn was a more direct influence on the way I would learn to play. Poor Old Lu, however, is the only direct influence on my playing, and it’s this album, which I learned note-for-note in the mid 90′s, that would conveniently lend to me a sound that bands like Hot Tuna would help me to embellish upon. So, if it could ever be said that I’m a decent bassist, I have this album to thank for that.

I could go on about the songs, as there are some really good ones on here, but the track-by-track write-ups are starting to lose the effect I intended for them. I will say that, though the bass (being mixed a little louder on this album compared to most rock albums) is practically the main feature, the instrumentation all around is pretty damned impressive when you consider the age of everyone involved, and then multiply that by the fact that they recorded the entire thing by themselves. Say what you will about “indie” music, this album is true independence, an album born out of a real desire to actually make an album.

A lot of the songs would actually make it onto other releases, specifically the albums Mindsize and Sin, so there’s no real reason to go over them in great detail again. The album starts off with “Sometimes Cry”, which would later appear on Mindsize, and features some overlapping insanity toward the end thanks to a neat trick on the 8-track the band borrowed for this recording. The album also has the 2nd of a total of 3 or 4 re-workings of the songs “Cannon-Fire Orange” with its nice spanish sound and mysterious lyrics.

Other songs that appear on Mindsize are “Peapod” (in a particularly rough mix this time), “To Be Awake”, and “Tigger’s Daily Jog (Unrated)”, the last of which is more of a tribal-sounding instrumental jam on obscure instruments.

The songs that are unique to Star Studded are unique indeed. There really hasn’t been a song in the Poor Old Lu catalogue quite like “Bartholomew Higgins”, it’s dark and heavy and seems to borrow a bit from a kind of Middle Eastern scale, and a little bit from Nirvana. The title, according to the band, is a nonsense name suggested by a family member, which is likely true, though that family member might have gotten it from a comic book, albeit a quite obscure one.

Another song that would make a later appearance, though in concert, is “Never Said”. It’s a bouncy, acoustic-guitar and bass driven song that is rough and mysteriously catchy. The main thing about the song is that it has this bridge that kind of turns the whole thing on its nose, as it’s not really connected to the song and only contains the words “la da da da da dow”, but it would later conjoin this song and another song (from an album we’ll get to later) in a really cool medley. This is a trick I’ve never seen before in music, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m still a little bit excited about it.

The middle section of the album, incorporating “This Theatre”, “Puddleglum”, “A Snowfallen Desert”, and the only “weak” track, I feel, on the album, “It’s Simple To Me”, is all good stuff, but doesn’t rock out quite as thoroughly as the first and last bits of the album. Still, the last bit of the album (at least in the second pressing of the album which contains 4 more tracks than the original release) is astounding. Starting with “Peapod” and “To Be Awake”, which is where the other version of the album ends, this version has two of my favorite songs as a bonus.

The first is “Center Of Your Ways”, which is an incredible song if you’ve ever heard it in concert. In this recording, it’s still quite respectable. It has a rolling bass-line that is quite catchy (since it’s at the forefront of the mix, it better be) and a cool guitar part, and Scott Hunter’s gruff-but-honest singing and interesting lyrics really tie the whole thing together. At the end is a really cool “punk rock out” section that apparently always tested the mettle of drummer Jesse Sprinkle, but that wound up working out for the tyke, as he later became the drummer for Demon Hunter, among some other groups. Either way, this song is one of my favorite “early” Lu songs, and I can’t imagine a Star Studded Super Step without it.

The other song, “Wherefore”, similarly rocks out in a unique way. It’s a bit more of a funky song (Lu incorporated a lot of funk in their sound, much to their benefit) and features some tandem riffing from the guitar and bass, which is just super cool to me. This song also kind of explodes at the end with a nice “big finish”.

But yeah, I can go on all day about this album, as I know the sound of it as well as I know the alphabet, and you could hear it too for around $2 to your local amazon dot com, but I can’t tell you whether you’re going to like it. How can I tell what a person is going to think of an unconventional album made by some truly talented highschoolers that I myself have been listening to for a large fraction of my life? I don’t know, but I guess that’s why, here at Album Du Jour, we don’t “review” albums, we just talk about them every day for reasons that are becoming more blurry with every passing album. Join us tomorrow for another one!

Poor Old Lu – The Waiting Room

Happy Easter, everyone! Or… Ressurrection Sunday, if you’re of the old school liturgical disposition. Still, more people like “Easter” because it’s got more of a pagan sort of association, and that’s more socially acceptable. Speaking of pagans and holidays, today’s entry is a very special edition of Album Du Jour, because if you would have asked me at any time of the year “Hey! You stunningly handsome blogger guy, what are ya gonna do when Easter Day rolls around?”, I would have told you that there is no better album than Poor Old Lu’s psuedo-reunion album, The Waiting Room:

Indeed, there are only 2 songs that directly have to do with the time of year, but unlike with Christmas albums, they and all the other 9 songs on this album are excellent listening all year ’round. Then again, what else could one expect from one of my favorite bands? In fact, they are by far the longest-standing “favorite” of mine, I haven’t even been a proper Johnny Cash fan as long as I’ve loved this band.

However, not all is as well as it seems, as this album was created after the band was broken up for about 6 years, and they broke up again right after. It’s not surprising, since they considered the reunion a temporary thing anyway. Since breaking up, each member (except singer/songwriter Scott Hunter) had been in numerous projects and had maintained and even refined their “chops”, as it were, so for this album, the instrumentation is among the best of the band’s work, but the work as a whole is less disjointed and raw than the Poor Old Lu of the 90′s.

Still, that’s probably a good thing, as the band’s rawness tends to keep people from liking them quite as much as I do. This band is what I would consider their most accessible, but once you’ve heard the unhinged creativity behind Mindsize, the unflappable aggression and brutal honesty of Sin, and the just-completely-amazingness of Picture Of The Eighth Wonder, you may consider this reunion album to be a bit soft. Still, it doesn’t matter, because the album’s still great, and I should probably get to my point about Easter at some point here.

The album opens up with a track called “Revolve”. This is one of the two only “hard rockin” songs on the album, which are conveniently bookmarked on the front and end of the thing. It’s a minory alternative sounding song that takes place in the dangerous realm of a 3/4 time signature (or is it 6/8? Man I need to start learning how music works). It’s a very ocean-centric song about Sin and redemption, kind of a protest song about human nature, and it’s got quite a catchy chorus, though the real hook are the stops in the instrumental portions.

“Now” is a better song, lyrically, though a little “slow” and perhaps overly “polished”, following the lines of what I was mentioning earlier about the album. If sped up and perhaps stripped of the acoustic guitar, it would be a catchier tune, but the lyrics are still rather good, touching on themes of time on a transcendent level:

Don’t dream of hours gone by
Of seconds came and spent
Don’t wish on distant stars
On worlds come and went

And, in particular, the old theme of despair and tragedy makes an appearance in the line:

Don’t swim in drowning grief
Anticipating the despair

And each line has a pushed-back vocal backup that screams the final word, a nice subtlety but come on, that could have been pushed to the front to give the song a more aggressive sense of urgency, but hey what do I know.

“Sunlight & Shadows” is particularly strange track, given the instrumentation, and deals in more ways than one with dichotomy. As Scott points out on the band’s website, lyrically there are mentions of “contrasts — dark and light, wrong and right, weak and might, etc.”, and that the choruses are a contrast to the verses. What’s also a contrast is that the verses are all given the keyboard/production tricks treatment like a few of Aaron Sprinkle’s solo recordings (makes sense, he produced this album after all), whereas the chorus is a raw minory pull-down that reminds me very much of the bridge to “What If Uncle Ben Had Lived?” from Picture Of The Eighth Wonder, so you’ve got “over-cooked” and “raw” in the same song. Also an interesting polarization is Scott’s vocals, which are simultaneously his “normal” voice, which is low and more than a bit gruff, and his own backup vocals, which are higher than I thought he could sing. So many little opposites in a song very aptly titled “Sunlight & Shadows”.

“Crushed” is kind of like the “So Good To See Me” from Mindsize of this album, and in other ways it’s like “Bones Are Breaking” from Sin. They theme of spiritual egoism pervades the verses, and the chorus “I am crushed, and I am broken, with the word and with the truth He has spoken” is a bit like “Bones Are Breaking”, though Scott himself has amended that he disagrees with his own chorus and states that it should read “I’m not crushed, but I am broken”, which I’ll admit is a fair shade clevererer. Still, the way it stands, the song is pretty clever, though it re-uses chords from a previous song in a way I’m not going to nitpick about (except to say the song of the chord progression’s origin is much better).

One of the best songs on the album is not exactly what you’d expect. It’s entirely devoid of the rawness and power of a Poor Old Lu track and is instead just a thicker, more sincere version of a straight-up spiritual. The vocal melody is also all over the place, and in a very good way. The verses are sung low, the chorus is sung high, and bassist Nick Barber gets to sing backup (a rarity but not unheard of). This song has a lot of references to cloudless skies, and I THOUGHT a reference to sunshine in the line “To step ahead and see the Son, now”, which of course is a homonym of “sun”. Still, the chorus brings it all home with the message:

Today may be the most beautiful day
I don’t sing alone
And the angels say…

It’s a very pretty song, and belies a lot of what I thought Poor Old Lu was capable of in terms of writing straight melodies. Good stuff!

As is somewhat typical of the more realized Lu albums, this one contains an interlude. This is the first time I can think of, however, that the interlude is given its own track, in the case of Sin it’s an acoustic break after the most terrifying song into the most hopeful one, and in Straight Six, an EP which I sadly probably won’t get to cover (since it’s not an album), each song is given a brief interlude in between. Actually, I can for sure write 1000-1500 words on Straight Six even if it’s only 6 songs long, heck I’ll just pretend it’s a progressive rock album. Yeah! I make the rules around here, buddy-boy.

Next we get “A Month Of Moments”, which is simultaneously one of the better and worst songs on the album. Lyrically, I have no complaints, it’s plaintive, yet hopeful, and contains direct Biblical references like “Abide in me” to amend the song’s hopelessness. It falls short of being particularly clever, but it’s certainly stronger than the “throwaway” songs that always make an appearance on Lu recordings. The instrumentation is what gets me on this track, I am not a fan. Every instrument seems to be dodging what the other instruments are doing, so the whole thing is kind of like a disconcerted buzz while each instrument tries to play the perfect riff without any real focus on the central melody. A petty complaint, of course, I have loved songs that are much, much worse than this, and really it’s a good song overall, I guess it just suffers from the opposite of the rest of this album, in that it could have used a bit more cooking.

I seem to have this habit of really putting down albums that I adore, which must mean that I’m being a little too objective with standards I have set up that I myself don’t even follow, and that’s really my fault. I don’t want to communicate that this album has weaknesses, even if it’s true, but I can’t write this blog as a constant stream of unwarranted praise and sycophantic non-opinions. I can honestly tell you that I adore The Waiting Room, particularly for the tracks to come, but as it stands right now, I will say this one thing about “Praying For The Perfect World”: It has a guitar riff that sounds just like early Weezer, and I can’t get that awful thought out of my head when I should be enjoying this perfectly good song about a spiritually concerned parent of young children. Even Scott doesn’t consider it a “strong” track though, so at least we’ve got some agreement here.

Finally, though, we arrive at the last three songs on the album, which are all so good that I could listen to them 3 times in a row and consider this the best Lu album, but that’s kind of mad so let’s just talk about why they’re good.

If I could choose any Christian song as my personal “anthem”, it would be the song “Crowded”. Though instrumentally there are stronger songs on this album, and it may not even by my “favorite” Lu song, it stands head and shoulders above everything else as a testament to the maelstrom of doubts and distractions that muddle my own thinking (for examples of this, see all of my writing). The lyrics go:

There are a million things
That want the best of me
Now my head is spinning
And back and forth I weave
It all looks the same to me
Is it good or bad?
But I read that the truth shall set me free

So make a sound in me
What I need to hear
Is muddled with uncertainty,
Mediocrity, and lack of sleep

There are a thousand things
That try to turn my head
And my blinking eyes
Are they easily led
It all feels the same to me
Is it good or bad?
It all feels the same to me
But I read that the free are free indeed

Good stuff, indeed. The instrumentation is very interseting, utilizing chords I had not heard from Poor Old Lu previously, but that’s possibly because they were conceived by Nick, who isn’t given credit for writing anything within the group (to this day I’m not sure what he has written other than the basslines).

After that, we finally get to the “Easter” song, as I like to call it. It’s actually called “Friday To Sunday” and is a story-driven song about the disciples of Jesus Christ between the time he was crucified and the resurrection. It explores the doubts, the despair, yet hopefulness that sprang out of that time as the faithful few are given the ultimate test, believing in a Savior who had just recently been killed before their very eyes. The song conveys that wonderfully with a very minor-y ballad kind of chord progression and some killer clean guitar leads. The chorus is a prayer sang both during the despair, and at the end, when “He is alive” and everything’s all right again, which is really profound to me because it shows that the faithful need to bear this in mind in moments of doubt and moments of the heart’s absolution:

So give me the light
To understand The fight
To comprehend the why’s
So give me the mind to step ahead
When I hear what You’ve said and hide

I love to hear these words right around Easter because it keeps one focused on that idea rather than just something to remember and then forget on Monday. Speaking of, the next song, “The Waiting Room”, is one of my favorite songs Poor Old Lu has written, and it’s possible that, personal preferences aside, it’s probably the best Christian song ever written.

The big thing about Christianity and really anything faith-based is that its entire structure is based on believing in something certain in a time of absolute uncertainty. It’s saying to the future, in which literally anything could happen, “there are things that I believe in this time will happen in that time”, and basing the way you live your life around it. To my knowledge (which is quite a lot compared to what I know about other things), there aren’t a lot of Christian songs that try to put this idea into a stunningly deep metaphor about our very existence and what seems like imagination to some people but is very real to others, but “The Waiting Room” is one of them, and quite possibly the best:

She was staring at the ceiling
I was staring at the floor
He was fixed in thought and wonder of what lied behind the door

There was a man with little movement
I knew I’d seen him here before
The people with the children were sick to death and would wait no more

Setting up the metaphor of the “Waiting Room”, the lyrics note the presence of other people and a mysterious door behind which is something that everyone is waiting for, but nobody knows exactly what it is. I’m not sure what is really meant by Scott when he wrote about the “man with little movement”, who is referred to later in the song, but I like to think that it’s the type of fair-weather Christian who comes into the room and leaves again, yet hardly moves when he’s in either place. The “people with the children” seems to note the impatience of parents who are trying to care for naturally impatient children, and that represents perhaps people trying to care for their faith when it goes frequently unrealized in day-to-day living in any substantial way. They’re waiting for the miracles to occur, in a way.

The world it can’t be moving
It’s been two thousand years or
Have I stopped breathing?
Have I stopped believing?
Believe me, I…

This is, quite simply, voicing the singer’s own impatience and doubts, something Poor Old Lu is very good at. After another great set of lines along a similar vein of waiting, in the second chorus, the last line is embellished with “I… Just want to have the patience of a saint who waits at the gate, please don’t be late”, as a weak but hopeful admission of a faith that is at least stronger than the impatience.

The instrumentation is top-notch in this particular song, with a particular kind of guitar chord and arpeggio that I wish I could define with words. It’s all very D minor-y and epic, though, and the chorus is punchy and very catchy. The whole thing breaks down after the second chorus to a tension-building mode of guitar strums and the beat at half-speed, and then the whole thing comes in punchier for the bridge:

The floors are giving in
The walls are getting thin
The clock is moving slow
My breathing comes and goes
The room is getting small
The sin is growing tall
We wait for the day
We wait for the day

The bridge lyrics are important because it shows in the metaphor that the “Waiting Room” is not just an empty room to sit in and wait, but that things are happening from which the attendants must do something, but nothing can really be done, except waiting amidst the turmoil. Indeed, a brilliant metaphor for faith and the frailty of humans compared to the magnitude of problems the world can throw at us.

After another self-doubting chorus, the final verse comes in:

She was full of good intentions
I was full with all my greed
He was holding out his hands as if to give, as if to bleed

There was a man with little substance
I know I’d seen him here indeed
The people with the children spoke so soft to confess their need

And some are getting hopeless
Some are filling up the days
I am hoping on a promise, on a gift, and so I wait…

The crescendo of these final verses, which are pre-empted by the growl of the vocal delivery of “So I wait…” launches into a full-on instrumental attack, which is almost metal in its heaviness, which is quite an ending to any album, much less one built like this one, where it seems the whole 11 tracks are building up to that last moment.

And with that, the album ends. Again, it’s perhaps not the best Lu album, but it contains some of the best moments the band has come together to put out yet, and it shows a real improvement in their abilities as songwriters and producers in their 6 year absence. Like many fans, I pine for the days when they were restricted by budgets and time and came out with creative and experimental works of raw edginess, indeed they could beat out 9 out of 10 of the “mainstream” guys with only 1/100th of the budget. It’s unfortunate that real-world concerns and wanting to work with other projects has kept the band from getting back together, and indeed if they ever do, it’ll be a happy Easter indeed for this young fan. But, like the song suggests, that’s something I’ll just have to wait on.

Aaron Sprinkle – Moontraveler

Well this certainly marks a first in my blogging adventures. I decided that it was about time I wrote about Poor Old Lu guitarist Aaron Sprinkle’s solo albums, starting with this, his first one, and something peculiar happened. I went to actually play the album, even if I don’t need to because I can recall every note from memory, but each track would only play about 8 seconds before stopping, freezing up my Zune, and crashing it. I tried a different album and nothing happened, and I tried re-ripping the CD itself into .mp3 and re-syncing it, but still nothing. So this is the first time that I shall be writing up an album that has defeated my already unstable technology:

I really should figure out a way to fix this problem, too, because this is one of my favorite albums. It conjures up memories of Star Ocean 2 on the Playstation, since I was playing both at the same time a lot. Not a bad thing at all, just a little mention of how far I and this album go back.

In fact, when I ordered this album it was through e-mail correspondence back before I had proper internet (remember Juno, kids? No, not the movie!) and the album came directly from Aaron’s apartment in Seattle, with a little metallic car sticker on the envelope. You won’t get THAT through iTunes, sirs and madams.

Ok, enough being old. If you, like me, had been a fan of Poor Old Lu for a number of years and Aaron’s first side project, Rose Blossom Punch (about which I will be giving hefty praise), then popping this baby into the CD player or 128MB MP3 player of your choice (ok ok I’ll stop), is quite a radical change of pace. It also marks the start of an amazing growth of songwriting skill that Aaron accumulated between Rose Blossom Punch and his new group, Fair. He went from a brilliant guitarist who didn’t consider himself worthy enough to write the words to his own singing debut on the Poor Old Lu album Sin to an articulate, poetic, and consistent songwriter, even being compared quite favorably to Elliott Smith in some reviews. Of course, I consider him miles better, but my idea of what makes a good song/songwriter is a little more simplistic than others. At least Aaron’s music won’t make you want to kill yourself.

Actually, it might have at one point, particularly with Rose Blossom Punch, but if you survived that, you can survive this, and as long as you don’t get into Reszo Seress or Leonard Cohen you ought to be fine near windows.

The album starts off with the Zune-killing track “Solace“. If I were to pick out any of the songs on the album to use as a “single”, the first one would be this one. Nearly everything on the song is a hook, which sets it apart from the Indie scene almost immediately, and actually kind of takes it out of the songwriter ballpark altogether. The drum machines (present in all but 3 tracks) are programmed to be solid, but interesting, and the electric guitar melody is amongst the most memorable in my mind. The song is a moody representation of just how grand E minor can be, and it might as well be, Aaron works very well in that key. The lyrics are metaphorical, with a hint of mystery about them, but can probably be traced to some Christian roots, with some interesting choices in words:

Solace came with a drop of blood and a taste of shame
When You took my turn You struck a match and You let it burn
And it makes me ill the way you love me still

I think back to the days I was around
And it brings me down to a place I’ve never been
I think back on a picture of a child and dream awhile
All the more I miss Your perfect ever shaking heart

The next song is even more abstract, in that I still can’t figure out what it’s about. It seems to be about some dire consequences affecting someone he feels very strongly about, perhaps a wife or lover or somesuch. It’s given a simple acoustic guitar pattern, again in E minor, and contains a very dreary organ part indeed. It’s called “I Wish I Were You” and that’s a strange thought in and of itself when thinking about a love song.

All that you’ve known up ’til now
You could trade for this thought
I’m singing about

That now and again, I’ll play the fool
But I love you so much
I wish I were you

Odder still is the next song, “Antennae’s Wife”. This one trades the acoustic guitar for a trippy upbeat tempo and electric guitar, with an emphasis on a nifty bass-line (oftentimes guitarists write the best bass-lines). It’s apparently about a girl, I suppose the wife of someone called “Antennae”? She’s caught by the fuzz and arrested, despite her protests that she’s just a victim of association, and the whole thing tells a story that seems to have a few things missing from it, like who is this Antennae guy and why is the story about his wife? Either way, the song is rockin’ so I forgive its oblique nature.

The next song, “Not All Bad“, should ease all the confusion, as it’s lyrically just a really good “frustrated lover” song. The chorus is particularly straightforward:

So I cry myself awake
To keep from sleeping all day
And I think I’m borderline
Losing my mind

The instrumentation is fairly country-esque, with lap steel (Aaron is fairly fond of this instrument) and read drums provided by the drummer for Rose Blossom Punch. It has a portion in the middle of the song where the timing changes to a very strange count. I can’t even tell you what the time signature is, mostly because I can’t listen to it on my Zune and count along, but such is life.

The next song, “A Friend I Had“, is one of those songs that I could easily put on a list of “favorite songs ever”. It’s 4 guitar chords all the way through, and never deviates from its simple 6/8 time strumming, and the only accompaniment to the first guitar is a second guitar playing a beautiful melody and a piano echoing the chords on the final few measures. The vocals are powerful, and though sung in falsetto in the studio, come out as big, booming tenor when he plays the song live. It’s all in the melody, really, so I guess you’d have to hear it.

“Mae” is a bit of an unusual one. It’s again about a friend with an unspecified problem, but the solution must be a really heavy bass-line and almost lounge-like organs accompanying a trippy drum machine beat. The song has a very rainy “cool” vibe to it, something one would expect from a rainy cool place like Seattle, I suppose. This and “Antennae’s Wife” are both kind of one-off number stylistically, Aaron has yet to draw from them in his later songs, having abandoned electronics in favor of straight up acoustic folk rock.

“What Sorry Could Be” is a little more like the style he would stick with. It’s got a simple acoustic line that’s constructed much in the way that “I Wish I Were You” is, only it’s in a major key this time. The drum machine in this one hits particularly hard in a way I’ve never heard before, I guess it’s best described as “extra punchy”.

We visit the key of E minor again for the antepenultimate track, “All In A Day’s Work”. The subject matter of the lyrics are a little more obvious, as like most good Christian music, it’s about Jesus. It’s rather beautifully done, however, and the song is a little more ambient and “jammy” than the more standard songs on the other parts of the album. One thing that I can’t help noticing, however, is that the chord progression is nearly the exact same as a Jars Of Clay song (specifically “Frail” from their sophomore release Much Afraid). I can’t really fault anyone, however, as it’s more or less an ordinary chord progression and could just be a coincidence.

An unmistakably original song, however, is “A Step Ahead”, which is done in a style I wish Aaron would have re-visited at any point, because it’s quite interesting (also interesting is the fact that he worked on and considered doing a second album of songs more like “Antennae’s Wife” and “A Step Ahead” when I was corresponding to him at the time). It’s mostly bass-line centered (in E minor again) and has some almost techno-styled drums, only in the simple tones that one can punch out of a plain drum machine. It’s kind of like Drum N’ Bass I guess without the glitz, but I could be completely wrong. Either way, the guitar is hardly present, and is actually ousted by an accordion (or an accordion tone on a keyboard). It’s interesting and rocking, and I wish there was more of it, but this would be a unique song in Aaron’s catalogue, unfortunately.

Also unique is the album’s finish, “Motorcars“, which is a very distorted guitar being played, unaccompanied save for a second, undistorted surf guitar, as Aaron sings about the spiritual life using a strange allegory:

I’m beginning now to understand
That its nothing I can say
When motor cars with racing stripes
Keep getting in my way

But this time I can see
The very one thing that I need

And with that, the album ends, unless you have a Zune, in which case the album kills itself after 8 seconds.

Still better than Elliott Smith though, I say.

Poor Old Lu – Mindsize

Today we re-visit my old friends Poor Old Lu. The album for today is their first album on any kind of label (their first album was “re-released” later in their career since they initially did everything independently for that one), and more than being a smash debut, it was kind of a collection of the best they had written up to that point. For that reason, it’s perhaps a little less polished or cohesive than the other albums, but for a long time it was my favorite album by anyone ever of all time, so that’s saying something, I guess.

Much like Sin, the album has a variety of styles and a lot of energy, and the overall sound can’t really be confused with any other band, which is refreshing if you listen to an awful lot of music. The unique points of Poor Old Lu are mainly in the singer and drummer. Scott Hunter is quite a unique vocalist, though this has been cited as a detriment as much as a benefit to the band’s sound (people who call it a detriment should be drawn and quartered, however, just saying). Basically, his voice is gruff and very raspy, as if he’d spent the first 20 years of his life screaming over the sound of train engines. However, his vocal style is delicate and usually in the falsetto range, so the result is something like a very dangerous whisper. It works quite well for the overall sound, especially when he goes for a rocker-esque “OWWW”, which he does often enough to make it something of a signature.

The drumming is just manic, the guy hits everything he’s got as often as possible. It’s magical, really.

All right, on to the album. The band starts off rather adventurously with “More”, a chunky, riffy, diminished-chord wonder which works really well to open the album up (despite everything else being a bit more “standard” in the way of chord progressions). It might have been a mistake to make it their first single, as the band themselves put it, but I enjoy it quite a lot in the grand scheme of Mindsize. The next song, however…

We have “All Pretty For The T.V.“, possibly the band’s best single, if that honor does not go to “Bliss Is” from Sin. It opens up with something I have never done quite this way: the guitar strums a barre chord Em, and then the harmonics on the 7th fret are played rhythmically (if you don’t understand all this, I shan’t bother to explain it). It actually took me a LONG time to learn how to do that on my own guitar, as I had no idea what was going on. It also helped to tune the guitar down a half-step, as the whole album is pitched-down to that (actually I think the band tuned their instruments flat, a fairly popular move). The particular things I love about this song are numerous. For one, the vocal melody is quite creative and contains some “OW”s that rival Michael Jackson’s best work. For two, the guitar riff mentioned above, which is altered to distorted power chords for the verse and switched out entirely for almost country-picking for the chorus. The fancy drums and playfully-following-the-guitar bass is also done to great effect, and the bass even gets kind of a one-note solo that you shouldn’t think I didn’t notice. I have no idea what the samples in the middle of the song mean or even say, but I will say they are replaced in live concerts by a rapper who sometimes joins the band for that segment. This can be heard on In Their Final Performance and any video of the song being played live that you happen to find. It’s…. not as good as the samples, usually, but I’m not one for mixing rap into my rock music.

The next song is a bass-tastic wonder called “So Good To See Me”, which is a bit more of a straightforward song than its predecessors, and for that reason may be shunned and ignored by the masses (as well as the band itself apparently). Moreso the shame, it’s a very good song and if you skip it you won’t get to hear those great rhythmic screamy bits after the chorus.

There really aren’t a lot of Christian bands who dare to write about God in the 1st person, that is to say, through the eyes of the Man Upstairs. “In Love With The Greenery” is one such song, and it’s actually from their very very very first thing they ever did, in the 80′s, no less! I don’t know how old these guys were when they wrote this fiery number, but I know I wasn’t writing songs this good at that age.

Another older song is “Sometimes Cry”, which has been improved upon a bit, but is more or less the same song as on Star Studded Super Step, and in fact that album’s title is derived from the lyrics to this song. I would go on about how good the lyrics are, because they really are, but “Star Studded Super Step” pretty much sums it up. This song contains one of the first bass-lines I ever learned, but it’s not the first Lu song I learned on bass.

“Do I?” is the first song I learned on the bass. It opens up with plucked octave notes that move in a simple progression, but it’s so catchy that only the even catchier phase-shifted guitar part can draw attention away from it. The lyrics are dark, very dark, in fact probably the darkest on the album, as they allude to depression, possibly suicide or drug use, and a deep need to be rescued from the mire that the very dense bass chords and waves of guitar represent quite nicely musically. The live version contains some screamy bits that are exquisite, but were not thought up in time for the album.

Scott Hunter, the lead singer and sole writer of Poor Old Lu’s lyrics, considers “Tried & True” to be possibly the weakest song on the album, and really I can’t help but agree. It’s got an immensely fun bass-line if you’re into bass, but really nothing else is “striking” about this song, even the lyrics are just a straight up “Winners Don’t Do Drugs” kind of message, so it’s perhaps William S. Sessions‘ favorite track on the album.

Moving on, “Cruciality” is another unique number, as it focuses on a very country/western-style guitar riff, but the rhythm is very much Poor Old Lu. The lyrics, sung in quite a high whisper indeed, are among the best on the album. It’s simply about putting “causes” (particularly political ones) above one’s own spirituality, and it has a particular line that I quite like:

Turn my eyes, and to the stars
Is there life so very far?
Or better, is there any very near?

The song nearly blends right into the next track, “To Be Awake”, which is very acoustic-guitar centered, which is rare for an early Poor Old Lu song. It’s got some of the tightest bass/drum action, as the drums seem to be focused on accentuating rather than embellishing, whatever that means. The lyrics are also some of my favorites, despite being rather simple, but it hits one chord with my philosophy on life and it rings quite loudly:

This world wants to drown me with
The things it’s thinking of
So now I don’t want to see or breathe
In this place that cannot love

And I would rather lose my life
Than to ever, ever lose my mind
But in this world, in this land
It’s our thoughts that we cannot find

That about says it all for me. This song is also featured on Star Studded Super Step and is great on both versions, just a much cleaner, full recording version is on Mindsize, so it’s the better version, I feel.

We then go into a room full of instruments and 4 lads playing them with everything from hands to feet to a jungle rhythm for “Tigger’s Daily Jog”. It’s a one-minute instrumental that works quite well as a segue from the folksy rock to the straight up funk that’s about to be introduced by Bob Ross:

“Let’s get crazy… hmm….. leeeet’s get crazy.”

Said in his trademark smooth hippy voice, the Bob Ross sample gives way to the funk-slappity bass-line and wah guitars that open up “Peapod”, another Star Studded Super Step song, this one is just as fun, if maybe not as dense lyrically (the chorus is literally “It’s all right” repeated many times). The breakdown at the end features one of those little plastic laser guns you could buy that made the little bleepy bloopy noises, and I love that, since I had one of those when I was a kid.

Finally, the album ends with the unfortunately-titled “Shine”. I say “unfortunate” because there are at least a dozen alternative rock bands from the 90′s with songs entitled “Shine”, and I can’t really explain why. Well, this is the best one anyway, and it not only features acoustic guitar, but piano! The lyrics are perfect for an “ending” song and would only be trumped by a later Lu album. The song is about being distracted by a world that “can only turn so many times”, and despite the dire state of one’s mind as one struggles through life with the questions dealing with our very existence, the singer still says “I know where I belong”.

Indeed, Mindsize might not be Poor Old Lu’s “best” album, but in 13 years of listening to it, I’ve never had any trouble listening to the whole thing all the way through, and I always feel better for it.

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Poor Old Lu – Sin

After yesterday’s abysmal entry about an album I actually kinda dig (except, well, you probably know), I decided it’s time to write about an album I really like. In fact, it’s one of those albums from my past that I can remember owning on cassette for years before even starting a compact disc collection.

I’m-a-talkin’ about my once-favorite band: Poor Old Lu (still favorite in many categories, but ousted from all-time-favorite-of-all-genres by Gentle Giant some time ago). Before I explain much further, Poor Old Lu is most definitely a Christian band, so possibly won’t appeal to all palettes, but I say to true music fans that appreciation for music should not be hindered by religious belief or lack thereof. I can say in all honesty that there are atheist, agnostic, and even Buddhist music acts I consider in my favorites, and anyway what kind of person would dislike someone like Johnny Cash for instance simply because he’s Christian? Such thinking is very narrow indeed, and I don’t need you losers reading my blog (but do tell your friends to stop by).

Right, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about Sin:

One of the reasons Poor Old Lu has retained its spot in my heart with much larger acts is that they are quite a unique sonic outfit. Not just unique for a Christian band, I mean there really is no band I have heard that sounds like them (not saying much on my part, I have a very limited experience with American alternative rock bands). Their sound is a blend of chunky, full guitar chords (none of this power chord nonsense), kind of thinned-out and melodic bass that doesn’t sludge up the mix, and perhaps the most unique, the fantastically busy drumming and raspy vocals that don’t seem to realize they’d be much better suited for something MUCH heavier. The team of Aaron Sprinkle, Nick Barber, Jesse Sprinkle, and Scott Hunter (respective to the instruments above) are no strangers to variety either, particularly in this, their sophomore album on the Alarma Records label.

The other curiosity to this album is, if taken by its vinyl (or cassette!) A side and B side, is almost entirely dire and angry on the A side and the “hits” (at least the ones that warranted music videos) are all tucked away towards the end of the album. This kind of works since there’s certainly no Late Album Slowdown to deal with, but the two sides contrast rather sharply so it could be that the most “accessible” tracks being right at the end might have driven away a few new customers, but oh well their loss.

The album actually does start out on a high note with “Complain“, which is one of their stronger opening songs, I feel (my favorite would be on an album to come that I will certainly write about). It’s strong, fast, and the angry people’s key of G, so all is well.

The next song, “Bones Are Breaking” kind of starts into a melancholy feel that speeds up for the chorus and is a really smooth track all around (despite the false-start). The one thing that can be noted about Poor Old Lu’s songwriting, and really a lot of “good” Christian rock, is that the lyrics can be as earth-shattering and dour as you can imagine, but there’s almost always a redemption verse right at the end, or during the bridge. Often it’s subtle, but the chorus and bridge lines of “Bones Are Breaking” are an excellent example of how Poor Old Lu redeem themselves in their lyrics:

Well I can’t hold this weight
upon my shoulders anymore
My bones are breaking
Hands are shaking
With everything

So I
Give all
To You
My God

And really, if it weren’t for the bridge, this would practically be a suicide song on par with Rezso Seress. Fortunately the album picks right up after that!

Actually… no, it doesn’t. It goes into a fast-paced and rather aggressive tune called “My World Falls Down“, which is an anti-sanctimonious song that is quite the concert favorite (most likely due to the heavy guitars and straight-up screaming rock finish). Then comes “Slow”, which takes it down a notch back to grief-stricken depression set to an interesting rhyming scheme dealing with colors and elements to correspond to emotional turmoil, and ultimately redemption. It’s a good track though not very popular, I get the feeling that the band isn’t even that fond of it.

Lyrically, the next song, “I Am No Good” is one of my favorites. It’s a song that completely tears apart the idea of Christianity equating to unfettered self-confidence and positive thinking. These types of songs in the so-called Christian genre are very few and far between, and often fly under the radar until they offend someone (I remember a Southern Baptist friend being very negative on this song). The music is wonderful in this track, but really the boldness of suggesting a very fundamental yet feared aspect of belief in any Higher Power (that, indeed, the presence of a Higher Power makes us a much Lower Power) instantly wins me over. There are only a couple of other Christian singers that I have seen do this with a lot of success, and one of them is Johnny Cash.

The next song, “Thoughtless”, is a follow-up (though written apparently at a later time) to “I Am No Good”, and follows the same idea that I just spoke of. It’s a really powerful song, and uses the idea of quantifying all of your worldly good with pocket change:

In my money, I was at home
To the beggar, I was so cold
In my pockets, all that I could hold
As I left here, this was all I was told

Well I get a dime for all of my good
A nickel for all that I could
And a quarter for all I said I would
And I was left poor, poor, poor
Oh my how poor

Again, if it wasn’t for the spiritual side of this album, one would well imagine this being simply a self-loathing mess. A little while after this intense song chimes its last chord on a cliffhanger, a single acoustic guitar comes in and plays a very nice bit of instrumental melancholy, which indicates the switch from Side A to Side B.

Side B starts with a very upbeat (almost a “punk western” song if I were to call it anything) track called “Hope For Always“, which is entirely about the Hope that defeats the loathsome feelings contained in the previous side. This theme is continued in the phase-shiftastic “Where Were All Of You”, which is more pop-sounding and is the first straight up evangelical number (in that it mentions Jesus Christ being “crucified for you and I”).

The next track is the amazingly funky “Bliss Is”, which is incredibly fun though the lyrics deal with being raised in a dysfunctional family and even contains direct suicidal elements, but is redeemed by a very unusual but honest line:

Savior, save me from what I know
Save me from what I know

The video is just plain goofy. I love it. This is one of my absolute favorite Poor Old Lu tracks, in fact, but that’s not to take away from anything else on the album.

The next song is “Cannon-Fire Orange”, which is a song the band has recorded many times and has its own story attached. It’s a good track, perhaps incongruous with the first part of the album, but an excellent fit for the second, and certainly a good segue into Aaron Sprinkle’s (of whom I will be making many entries seeing as how he’s a prolific solo artist and has another band now) singing debut, “Ring True”. I’m not super-crazy about this song, to be honest, except when I can sing along and harmonize, that’s really fun.

If you thought the A-side to Sin was dark and depressing, have the guys got a surprise for you. The next-to-final song on Sin, “Sickly“, is not only a band favorite, but very nearly the guys’ best song. Incredible, seeing as how it was written apparently without the writer’s knowledge (he consistently states he doesn’t remember writing it, only that it was there when they recorded it). It deals with a very tricky subject, and that is contrasting elements such as “Is it sunny, or is it raining out today?” that seem akin to Bipolar disorder, and in fact the whole thing seems to spell out hopeless depression (“I don’t know, but I think I’m going crazy”) against which prayer (in the very final line, “I think I’ve gotta pray”) seems to be the only answer. The “seems to be” part of this song is really what gives it a haunted feeling, because the other “redemption” songs rather bluntly put it to you that there IS an answer to the problems stated in the song, but “Sickly” takes it to the level of real fundamental problems, whether emotional or mental, and leaves the answer open. It really stirs up some emotions if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing.

The very last track is a Jesse Sprinkle original instrumental played solely on 12-string acoustic guitar. He would later re-record “Come To Me” on his own solo stuff, so I don’t consider this a significant track other than the attempt to NOT end the album on “Sickly”. It’s still pretty, though.

There’s also a secret track (as there is on 2 other Poor Old Lu albums) which is an answering machine message from emo pioneer Jeremy Enigk as a child to Lu bassist Nick Barber about a missing necklace. Did I mention I love Poor Old Lu?

Anyway, if I were to recommend Poor Old Lu to someone, I might recommend a later album since they are far more polished, but I would be remiss not to recommend listening to Sin at some point, as it is a gritty and very raw album that deals more maturely with the spiritual and religious life than a whole stack of Michael W. Smith’s.

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