January 2010 Archives

I can still recall with absolute clarity the day I first heard Radiohead's Kid A. In early 2000 there had been some rumblings on the infant Internet about a new Radiohead album. Whispers that Kid A might be wholly different from what had come before. These rumors proved true as I had managed to score some demo songs from Napster about three months prior to the album's release date. The demos were rough, missing the final production that would flesh out the songs, that proverbial bolt of lightning to bring them to life. I was weary of what may come, how could they top OK Computer? Were the boys of Oxford really forsaking their guitars for electronic noise? Was Radiohead on the verge of committing career suicide?

For the past three years, Radiohead had been arguably the biggest band on the planet as OK Computer racked up critical and commercial acclaim at every turn. It may not have been the biggest seller from 1997 to 2000 but where OK Computer lacked in units sold Radiohead put the boy bands and the teeny boppers of that era to shame with unwavering credibility and pure musical talent.

Despite what I knew about Radiohead and the few advance demos I had found, nothing prepared me for what I heard as I drove away from Finder's on that crisp, clear fall morning. The guitars were not completely gone but at the forefront were indeed electronics, a cornucopia of soundscapes as Radiohead dismantled and then reconfigured rock music in their own image, releasing a bleak, heartfelt record that was at once obtuse yet an astute reflection of our modern world.

In the decade since, Radiohead grew even bigger, releasing three more albums and remaking the music industry's business model with their self-released In Rainbows, offered for download directly from the band's Web site for any amount the consumer wanted to pay. In 2015, the band will celebrate its 30th anniversary, so after leaving an indelible mark on the last two decades, what will Radiohead have in store for the next one? 

In a past life, Fresh and the Qualifier used to get paid to write about music. For years they toiled through a tag-team article called Counterbalance, going head to head, hashing out the relative merits of new releases for the local Chicken Dinner Newspaper. But that was a long time ago - before the economy crashed, sending their frivolous Arts & Entertainment section down in flames.

After wandering in the wilderness, lost and directionless, Fresh and the Qualifier have returned to take on their most challenging assignment: the Greatest Albums of All-Time. Do these critics' darlings hold up, or are they just hyped up?
 
At number six on the list , Marvin Gaye's What's Going On has been called the best soul album of all time. But is it truly "right on" or maybe a little bit "jive"? Counterbalance finds out what's happening, brother.
 
Qualifier: Aah... there's nothing like relaxing on a pillowy cloud of soulfulness for a half-hour or so to settle the old nerves, eh Fresh? I feel like a new man.
 
Fresh: Q-Man, you nailed it. I had no idea what I was missing. I mean, I'm familiar with Marvin Gaye - who isn't? But I never spent anytime with his albums and if it weren't for this little endeavor we've embarked on, I don't think I ever would. And, oh what I would have been missing!
 
I have a very limited knowledge of soul music, but it seems to me that there is something a little bit different about this album compared to the soul albums that had come before it. Shed a little light on this for me.

For a solid month in the fall of 2005 I was completely infatuated with My Morning Jacket's Z.  I made several posts about the album's greatness. Here, here and here. And then it got to the point where the voice of Jim James, the lead singer of My Morning Jacket, was beginning to tell me to do evil, malicious things, at which point I forced myself to put the album down for a while, mostly for the safety of those around me. Once I was able to regain my self-control I returned to the album and found that I was not suffering from some, delusional mental break - My Morning Jacket's Z was indeed a fantastic album, but there was no reason for me to listen to it over and over again for 18 hours a day.

Z marked an amazing shift in My Morning Jacket's music, away from the spacey, folky, reverb soaked tunes into more rocking territories. The band closed out the decade with 2008's Evil Urges, which was good but no where near to wonders they brought with Z.

The Black Keys are my Ohio homeboys. And for most of the last decade they have been releasing some stellar north Mississippi hill country inspired blues. There was The Big Come Up (2002), Thickfreakness (2003), Rubber Factory (2004), Magic Potion (2006) and Attack & Release (2008). Their musical trajectory over the last decade was about normal for two white guys who quit their day jobs of mowing lawn to tour the country in a hatch back and play beat up blues music. The first album was rough but showed potential, the second album was inspired, albums three and four were a bit of a let down before they recovered with the decade's final album. By the time the Black Keys released the DJ Dangermouse produced Attack & Release, the boys from Akron had built a solid name for themselves, cultivating a serious fan base with years of nonstop touring.

Out of all of the Black Keys' albums, I find Thickfreakness the most intriguing. It was much tighter than The Big Come Up yet they hadn't felt the need to widen their sound as they would on later releases. Thickfreakness was just a straight-ahead blues album, full of dirt and grit. Just a guitar and drums, bashing out the rock as Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside would have intended it.

In the spring of 2006, Band of Horses released their debut album Everything All The Time, a lush and beautiful album full of southern-fried indie rock. Everything All The Time would become 2006's album-of-the-summer for me and has since entered heavy rotation whenever the weather warms. Here's the quick primer on the band, just so I don't feel like I'm plagiarizing myself. Everything All The Time is one of those albums best heard while driving around with the windows down on an early summer evening. Try it on for size this spring. You won't be disappointed.

In a past life, Fresh and the Qualifier used to get paid to write about music. For years they toiled through a tag-team article called Counterbalance, going head to head, hashing out the relative merits of new releases for the local Chicken Dinner Newspaper. But that was a long time ago - before the economy crashed, sending their frivolous Arts & Entertainment section down in flames.

After wandering in the wilderness, lost and directionless, Fresh and the Qualifier have returned to take on their most challenging assignment: the Greatest Albums of All-Time. Do these critics' darlings hold up, or are they just hyped up?

Number five on the list has become practically synonymous with Great Artistic Statements. But was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band really the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper? A splendid time is guaranteed for all as Counterbalance figures it out.


 
Qualifier: Well, we've been told that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important album ever and that it's over-primped, over-cooked and over-rated. It's an insubstantial tea-and-crumpets trifle that changed the face of rock forever.
 
Here's an illustrative example: In 1974, the UK magazine NME ranked Sgt. Pepper at number one on its Greatest Albums of All-Time. When they published a similar poll in 1985, the album didn't make the Top 100. Such is the duality of Sgt. Pepper.
 
Fresh: I understand the duality. Sometimes I would listen to Sgt. Pepper and be blown away, other times it would be a bit of a ho-hum affair. Listening to it again for this project, I'm slightly underwhelmed (on the upside, I'm listening to the remastered mono version of the album and it sounds completely different than I remember). But where did all the rock go?
 
Q: I picked up the stereo remaster a while back (and in fact yammered on about that over here), so I did recently experience a Pepper epiphany. It is one album, though, that I've so fully internalized that it took something as dramatic as the remastering to kick me out of my comfort zone.
 
But you can't find the rock? This is a statement that I find to be a bafflement.

Menomena was one of the first bands to make it onto the hallowed pages of eLarceny. All of their music is made through the use of a computer program based around the collaborative process. Basically, each member records something into the computer and then passes the mic. Democracy at its best. After creating the songs in the computer they would then have figure out how to play them live, which could prove to be tricky considering how dense and intricate some of their songs can be.

Menomena's first album, The Fun Blame Monster, caught the attention of the indie rock press as much for the way it was recorded as for the loop-laden, noise filled pop songs. Their second album, Under An Hour, got even weirder - it consisted of three tracks, each in excess of fifteen minutes and was recorded as a soundtrack to some sort of interpretive dance project. Menomena's third album, 2007's Friend And Foe, sounded much more organic, compared to the first two records, as the band transitioned from using the computer to create loop-based songs to using it to produce conventional (in the loosest sense of the word) and structured material. The resulting songs are dark, lush, layered and beat-heavy taking the band's unorthodox pop aesthetic to a whole new level. Friend And Foe also has the best cover art I have every seen, as beautiful and intricate and noisy as the group's music, it features die-cut shapes that can be moved to change the cover in revealing way

"Stuck Between Stations," the first song off of the Hold Steady's 2006 release Boys And Girls In America, perfectly summarizes the malaise that was the past decade. Lead singer Craig Finn's Springsteenian tales of late night debauchery fueled by bar-band riffs, organ and shout-along choruses lent a sense of authenticity to a decade that just saw us repeating a lot of mistakes we had made before. Like drinking beer before liquor and sleeping with townies.

Unfortunately, no amount of booze or pills will erase any of the errors we made in the past decade. Luckily, Boys And Girls In America can be your soundtrack as you reflect over a passed decade of misjudgment. Or, if you didn't make any mistakes, you can live vicariously through the Hold Steady. Either way, it's a great album to remind us we were all young and dumb once. However, if you listen to this album and don't feel nostalgic, you might still be young and dumb, in which case, good luck getting through the next decade.