Archive for the ‘Record reviews’ Category

That Was the Modern World

Posted: November 8, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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“Everywhere That I’m Not”
Translator
1982

We tend to give decades shortcut images as they recede in our rearview mirror. The ’50s are Happy Days. The ’60s are Woodstock. The ’70s are disco. And the ’80s, my favorite decade, are shoulder pads, polo shirts, big hair, and Valley Girls.

OK, those first three are true. But not so for my favorite decade! Musically, the ’80s were much more than power pop quartets of skinny guys in skinny ties, dark sport coats, and leather jackets jangling away on their guitars.

Punk got angrier (Dead Kennedys, Black Flag). Metal got even more ridiculous (Def Leppard, Queensrÿche). Grunge, rap, electronica, and the mushy category called “alternative” got ready to invade the mainstream. Christopher Cross, Phil Collins, and Sting got 20 to life for crimes against humanity. (If only.) But today, as we launch into ’80s Week here at Run-DMSteve, I want to talk about Translator’s “Everywhere That I’m Not.”

Translator was a power pop quartet of skinny guys in skinny ties, dark sport coats, and leather jackets jangling away on their guitars. (Surprise!) They were from San Francisco. They never broke into the Top 40 like their neighbors, Romeo Void, who had a hit with “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing).” They never found themselves in regular rotation on MTV like their skinny guys/skinny ties cousins in Seattle, The Allies (“Emma Peel”). But they made a huge impact on the college circuit with “Everywhere That I’m Not,” a downbeat yet driving song about seeing your lost love everywhere you go:

I thought I saw you, out on the avenue
But I guess it was just someone
Who looked a lot like I remember you do

The relentless guitars suggest The Romantics and R.E.M. while producing an undercurrent of despair that neither of those outfits could muster. But what really makes this record for me is the singer, reminding himself that of course that’s not his old flame and leading us into the best sing-along chorus since the Messiah:

’Cause that’s impossible, that’s im-
That’s impossible, that’s im-poss–
That’s impossible, that’s im-poss-ible

’Cause you’re in New York but I’m not
You’re in Tokyo but I’m not
You’re in Nova Scotia but I’m not

[whole band now]

Yeah, you’re everywhere that I’m not
Yeah, you’re everywhere that I’m not

[solo]

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not

As far as I’m concerned, Translator has only one other song in their catalog, “Un-alone.” (The official videos of these songs are now 30 years old. You can find them on YouTube, but you wouldn’t want to.) This may sound like a harsh judgment, but consider the thousands of bands that form around the globe every day. How many produce even one memorable song? Translator has two and I love them both. That’s not bad for four guys with petroleum-based styling products in their hair.

The People vs. Coldplay

Posted: November 6, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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A Rush of Blood to the Head
Coldplay
2002

My three regular readers know that I use the term “Coldplay” as a handy benchmark meaning “inoffensive crap.” Is the case against Coldplay really that simple? Probably, but let’s consider it anyway.

Coldplay offers expertly crafted, atmospheric soft rock that implies other, harder, kinds of music. They’re not manipulating anyone; they’re sincere. That makes them The Monkees, minus the laughs and the bouncing-puppy energy. I’m guessing that they answer a need for people to be part of something cool created by guys who look like them. That makes them The Who, without all the philosophy. If you like to rock but you secretly enjoy music that makes you float on a cloud, Coldplay rocks just enough to give you some cover. That makes them Pearl Jam with the corners sanded off.

Coldplay is often compared to U2. I admit that both bands are insanely popular, that there are four men in each group, and that all eight of them come from islands off the coast of continental Europe. The similarities stop right there. Coldplay will never be as pretentious as U2, which is a mark in their favor, but neither will they take the chances U2 took on The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby. And Coldplay seems to have skipped their hellcat period. It’s too late now for them to clobber us with their versions of War or Under a Blood Red Sky.

“Am I/a part of the cure/Or am I part of the disease?” (Coldplay, “Clocks”)
I’ve written before about guilty pleasures. Here’s another one: Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head.

The album showcases Coldplay’s strengths: Their flair for simple-yet-dramatic musical moments and their skill at constructing relatively short, punchy pop songs. Some of them are short and punchy, anyway. Unfortunately, A Rush of Blood also showcases their weaknesses, like their habit of repeating all of their simple-yet-dramatic musical moments. You can do a lot with half a dozen keys on the piano, but must it always be the same half dozen? Then there’s Coldplay’s Yes-like tendency toward bloat, and finally we have their singer, Chris Martin. Mr. Martin’s voice is breathy, high, and at times whiny. When Bono gets worked up about another issue bedeviling the world, which is every day, his voice goes striding across the land. Martin’s goes flat. It doesn’t help that he married Gwyneth Paltrow.

But man, does this album whip up a mood! At least it does in me. Playing A Rush of Blood on my headphones has made many a task zip right along. How did Coldplay win me over? My theory is that I first heard A Rush of Blood on a temporary job where I spent much of the day feeling sorry for myself. Coldplay is the band for you if you’re feeling sorry for yourself! They are melancholy without being terminal, cathartic without making you curl into a ball. They provide a valuable public service.

My conclusion on the Coldplay question is that these boys are all in their 30s. They work hard, they love their fans, and they take care of themselves. We’d better learn to live with them because they are not going away. And that makes them The Rolling Stones without all the egos.

 

Careful with That Axe, Eugene: Diagnosing Pink Floyd Syndrome

Posted: October 2, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Women dislike Pink Floyd. Certainly all the women I’ve married dislike Pink Floyd. I’ve only married one, but she’s not backing down on this subject. Or any subject.

I can’t recall ever meeting a woman who publicly stated that she liked Pink Floyd. I wonder if there’s an unattached woman anywhere in the world with Pink Floyd in her music library, and I don’t mean something left behind by some long-gone guy. In college I remember a mistreated girlfriend burning holes with her cigarette in her ex-boyfriend’s copy of Meddle. It all seemed very sophisticated, plus it taught me to hide my LPs.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon may be the most gender-imbalanced record in music history. When Floyd released their masterwork in 1973, it immediately went to the top of the Billboard Hot 200 albums. Plenty of albums surface in the Hot 200, but Dark Side of the Moon was still bobbing around there 15 years later. Dark Side of the Moon is the third best-selling album of all time, trailing Justin Bieber’s My World but outpacing Honus Wagner’s entire Ring cycle. If women aren’t buying this thing, every man on the planet must be.

This leads me to ponder what makes music palatable to women. Here are my hypotheses:

What Women Like in Music
1) Something you can dance to, or might dance to if you could find the right partner.
2) A doomed romance.
3) The possible start of an exciting long-term relationship.
4) Living your own life and setting your own rules.
5) Attractive performers.
6) Four minutes and you’re done.

Here’s how Pink Floyd matches up with What Women Like in Music:

1) Pink Floyd is every bit as danceable as Led Zeppelin.
2) Everyone who has ever appeared in a Pink Floyd song was doomed.
3) Floyd’s idea of a long-term relationship: “There’s someone in my head/but it’s not me.”
4) Empowered women are scary.
5) Even when they were young, Dave, Roger, Nick, and Rick were nobody’s idea of a boy band.
6) They managed to hold “Echoes” to just under 24 minutes.

Given that Dark Side of the Moon is my favorite album of all time, ever, period, it’s a wonder I’ve been able to form and sustain relationships. Fortunately, God gave us headphones before She gave us Floyd.

Pink Floyd fun fact: “San Tropez” is a hybrid of “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Lovely Rita.”

I love Dark Side of the Moon so much that I only play it a couple of times a year. I always want it to be a treat. This same principle explains why I waited 20 years to go back to Apocalypse Now.

Wise men say that you’re never too annoyed for Floyd. Notice that it’s only men who say that. The truth is that once you leave the safety of Dark Side of the Moon you can get very annoyed with Floyd. Pink Floyd can be as bloated as Yes, but without the hysteria. They can be as pompous as Queen, but without the camp. They can be as meaningless as Black Sabbath, but without the medieval camouflage. They can touch your heart with “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “Fearless,” and then try to trap you in “Echoes,” which starts well but after 7 or 8 minutes veers straight into Spinal Tap’s “Jazz Odyssey.”

It’s about time someone said this: 75% of the Pink Floyd catalog is Deep Purple with a PhD.

Shine on you crazy diamond
Thus we can define Pink Floyd Syndrome as a two-part phenomenon:

  • Men are from Pink Floyd, women are from Pink.
  • If you’re a man, you either love everything Floyd or you only love Dark Side of the Moon. Either way, you’ve learned how to hide your record collection.

In a future post we’ll entertain the proposition that Nebraska is Bruce Springsteen’s best album. Until then, keep your headphones on and your partner happy.

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark. 

You make a grown man cry

Posted: September 24, 2011 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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Superheavy
Superheavy
2011

Superheavy (I’m already tired of typing that) is a supergroup with the following super members:

Joss Stone – English soul singer with super hair.
Damian Marley – Reggae musician and son of Bob Marley. Also has super hair.
Dave Stewart – With Annie Lennox, he was The Eurythmics.
A.R. Rahman – Indian composer of film and orchestral music.
Mick Jagger – Whoever this guy is, he does a pretty good impersonation of Mick Jagger, even better than Billy Idol’s impersonation of Billy Idol in The Wedding Singer.

This cross-pollinization of cultures and genres fails to germinate, except for the track “I Can’t Take It No More,” which is almost bearable. The other songs fade from memory while you’re listening to them. Despite its super-heavy origins, Superheavy is nowhere near as good as Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Wayne Shorter’s Super Nova, or Rick James’ “Super Freak.” I’m willing to bet it’s inferior to Liberace’s Super Hits, but I’m unwilling to do the research to find out.

Cover of the Week
Eels is a one-name underground indie god best known for “Novacaine for the Soul.” I was surprised to discover his cover of The Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina,” but I guess you’re never too cool for ’60s pop. Eels retains The Left Banke’s baroque string flourishes, but he speeds things up (his version is about 15 seconds shorter) while plinking away on what sounds like Schroeder’s toy piano. The original featured a male falsetto; Eels is quite hoarse. He sings “Pretty Ballerina” to a crowd that not only doesn’t laugh him off the stage, they cheer. I did too.

“Pretty Ballerina” was released in 1967 when I was a dreamy 12-year-old who didn’t know the difference between love and lust. It took me decades to figure that one out. Hearing the original always zaps me back to junior high, so I’m relieved to have Eels’ tough-love interpretation to drag me home.

The Left Banke had another, even bigger hit with “Walk Away, Renee.” The Four Tops covered this one, though on the chorus they sound like they’re channeling the Baha Men (“Who Let the Dogs Out?”). Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy on Adieu False Heart combined their beautiful voices on “Walk Away, Renee.” It’s too gorgeous – as much as I love this song, I have to say that The Left Banke don’t deserve it!

Fans of ridiculous pop bands that experiment with classical music are asking themselves right now, Should I go back to The Left Banke’s catalog and see what I missed all those years ago? No you should not. This time I did do the research. I can report that “Barterers and Their Wives” is a mildly entertaining juxtaposition of classical music and psychedelia. One song will surprise you: “What Do You Know.” It’s country, there are two guys singing instead of the usual high-pitched male lead, and they’re both slightly flat. I can’t tell if this was meant as a joke.

Steve of the Week
I forgot to list my latest post at The Nervous Breakdown! I write about typewriters, mimeos, and other machines that once decided the fate of empires. I hope they are not coming back.

Kristin of the Week
My friend Kristin Thiel is reading with two other writers on Friday, October 7 at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, here in Portland (our fair city). This event is part of Wordstock, you philistines. Kristin and her colleagues all have stories in a new anthology I can’t wait to read, Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience. I’m certainly going to be at Powell’s on October 7. I’m hoping Kristin can clear up a few issues for me.

 

The album experience

Posted: September 18, 2011 in music, Record reviews
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Hot Trip to Heaven
Love and Rockets
1994

Tubular Bells
Mike Oldfield
1973

Key Lime Pie
Camper Van Beethoven
1989

Today I will spare you a rant about the vanishing concept of the “album,” a group of songs that are thematically linked or that fix an artist in time. That concept didn’t even exist until The Beatles came along, and if the album is no longer needed in an era of music on demand, well, The Beatles aren’t around anymore either. Things change and I like change.

But I do want to recall for a moment one aspect of the album experience, and that is having to buy an entire album just to get one song.

You might remember Love and Rockets from their 1989 hit, “So Alive,” which sounds very 1970s to me, like a lazy lounge version of T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” They also did a good job with their cover of The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” Love and Rockets was a sort of goth/psychedelic act with an enthusiastic though small following. I wasn’t enthusiastic about them until I heard “Body and Soul” from Hot Trip to Heaven.

Like most people, I love a 3-minute record with a beat. But I also like a lengthy, mesmerizing song. I write better in a trancelike state (I also write better after I’ve had my shoes shined) and I find that playing lengthy, mesmerizing songs at work keeps people from bugging me. “Body and Soul” (which has nothing to do with Billie Holiday) is a 14-minute chunk of musical hypnosis, even at the 6:45 mark where the song abruptly picks up speed.

(The lyrics are another issue. The main theme in the first half of the song is “Body and soul,” which isn’t explained. In the second half it’s “Spin the wheel,” and I can’t shed any light on that one, either. Love and Rockets graduated from the same school of lyrical obfuscation as did Screaming Trees.)

The rest of the album I never listen to, though a couple of songs (“Trip and Glide” and “Be the Revolution”) are almost sort of catchy. But in 1994, if you wanted to own “Body and Soul” by Love and Rockets, you had no choice but to buy the entire album. That was about a $12 song. The cover art looks cool if you leave the CD sitting on your desk, but people listening to iTunes tend to snicker when they see any CD sitting on my desk so this is not the benefit it once was.

Another example from my experience is Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a snippet of which became the theme from The Exorcist. The actual title is “Tubular Bells, Pt. 1,” and it weighs in at a hefty 25:49. Don’t let that figure deter you – you don’t have to listen to the entire epic. Thanks to your computer, you can start precisely at 17:04 and immediately get to the meaty, mesmerizing part. It even has an announcer to introduce the dozens of instruments Oldfield played, as he played them. When I bought this album in the ’70s, I had to memorize where on the vinyl I wanted to go and hope I dropped the needle in the right place. (Side two, the cleverly named “Tubular Bells, Pt. 2,” is a mere 23:20. I probably played that side once. It’s way too short.)

Sometimes buying an album to get just one song resulted in a happy surprise. I wanted Key Lime Pie because of Camper Van Beethoven’s cover of the 1960s’ psychedelium masterpiece, “Pictures of Matchstick Men.” Camper Van was an early indie band with a violin and a sly sense of humor, as you can see in their legacy to contemporary music, “Take the Skinheads Bowling”:

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same
There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything

For years I took out this CD and skipped to track 13, “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” played that song a couple of times, then popped the disc out of the machine. Even though David Lowery of Camper Van went on to form Cracker, a band I like, it never occurred to me to listen to anything else on Key Lime Pie. But then one day at work I slipped the CD into my computer just as a co-worker came over to speak to me. Before I could punch in track 13 the music started and I found myself listening to the entire album. I loved about half of it! That’s a whole lotta love in my snobby world.

My experience with Key Lime Pie proves that you should always make time to talk to your co-workers. You should always be prepared for change, too. I don’t know what’s going to happen to albums, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

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