December 2009 Archives

In the late 1990s I worked in a record store, so I got pretty well acquainted with the new releases and the modern sounds that the young people were digging. During the first part of the '00s, though, I found myself firmly ensconced in the past, and owning a vintage vinyl shop for a couple years only walled me off further from the present. Since then, I've had a pretty good time catching up.

As much as I've enjoyed reconnecting with contemporary music during this decade, though, I still find myself drawn toward artists and albums that wear their connections to the past on their sleeves, and my #8 pick, Cat Power's The Greatest does just that. Incorporating veterans from Al Green's old band (Teenie Hodges!) might have struck some as a blatant cred grab, and if the songs hadn't measured up it might have been. They do, though, and the result is a beautiful mix of classic soul and indie pop. The little touches of torchiness ("Where Is My Love") and honky-tonkery ("After It All") keep the cohesiveness from slipping into bland sameness.

The Greatest was Chan Marshall's first album of all-original material, and at the time it seemed very much like an artist coming into her own. Curiously, I was very much looking forward to her all-covers follow-up, Jukebox, and while I enjoy that one overall, it's this album that I'll carry with me into future decades.

Lived In Bars

I don't remember exactly which year the band I was in opened for the Flaming Lips, but I do recall two things about the evening.

1. They were so loud that the police showed up during the sound check (the song they played was a cover of A Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song").
2. I stayed in the other room that night and worked the merch table instead of checking them out.

I think I was a little burned out on alt-rock by that time, and the Flaming Lips hadn't made their move toward the almost Wings-esque sounds of 1999's The Soft Bulletin, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my philistinism.

Even so, I doubt it would have adequately set me up for the one-two punch of Soft Bulletin and the album I'm including here, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Maybe it just came along at the right time; Mrs. Q and I had just closed up our vintage vinyl shop and I had just started a new job when I first heard this disc, which wears its melancholy so proudly.

The critic Nik Cohn has a line about Pet Sounds where he describes that album as "sad songs about sadness and sad songs about happiness." That seems apt here as well. The obvious standout track here is "Do You Realize??" in which lead singer/superfluous punctuation enthusiast Wayne Coyne offers up a bit of stoner wisdom and in the process creates my pick for the song of the decade (there, I said it). (I first heard this track a couple years before I heard the disc in its entirety, as I was going through a few other tumultuous upheavals, but that's a story for another time.)

So in the end, this might not be the most adventurous pick on this list, but in many ways it's the most personal. We got diminishing returns from the group with their next album, At War with the Mystics, but Yoshimi more than ensures the Lips' place in the pantheon.

09 Do You Realize--.mp3

When I heard that Bruce Springsteen was recording an album of Pete Seeger songs, I must confess that I was less than excited. I immediately assumed that it would be another of Springsteen's acoustic outings, in the vein of Nebraska or The Ghost of Tom Joad. Considering that I had more or less lost touch with the Boss after a few less than thrilling albums (The Rising has its moments, but it's about 20 minutes too long), I sort of assumed I'd be passing on this one.

Then one day I was on the New York Times website and saw a link to the video for "Pay Me My Money Down." I clicked on it, expecting a relaxing dose of whole-grain, non-profit earnestness to get me through my morning. I was shocked by how joyous the song was, loose and fun and, most importantly, a real musical departure. Dixieland horns, fiddles and accordions swelled up into a joyous noise. Chair-dancing was involved. I started looking forward to a new Bruce Springsteen album for the first time in a long time, and I was not disappointed.

The entire album features arrangements and playing that sound at once tightly choreographed and utterly spontaneous. Many of the songs are probably familiar from your elementary school music class, but they're presented in a way that makes them as fresh as their gonna get.

Springsteen's last two albums, Magic and Working on a Dream, have mostly left me cold, in large part because they didn't build on the adventurousness of this album. It could have heralded a major musical change for one of our finest songwriters. Instead it's a fascinating detour from an artist who I hope continues to surprise us further into the future.

In honor of the Christmas season, I'll leave you to sample a curiously klezmer-influenced version of "O Mary Don't You Weep."

O Mary Don't You Weep.mp3

So the word came down from eLarceny Headquarters that I was to compile my best of the decade. Of course I procrastinated as long as possible. To tell you the truth, I've been kind of in and out as far as new music is concerned this decade. For a few years in there I owned a vintage vinyl shop, so I was digging pretty deeply into the forgotten waxworks of decades past, trying to crack the code of Northern Soul and searching out obscure garage bands whose records were collected mainly by their girlfriends. A handful of new bands drifted over the transom, but by and large stuff was flying past my head as I kept the needle to the groove.

Fresh got me back into the game by asking me to review new stuff for the Chicken Dinner Newspaper, and I became a man reborn, an insatiable consumer of new stuff and suddenly well qualified to talk to young people about music. No longer would their eyes glaze over as I compared everything to Mott the Hoople. Once our arts and entertainment section fell victim to the Not-So-Great Depression, I drifted away from new music once again. We'll follow Fresh's lead and do 11 albums. There's no real way to quantify this, so hopefully this list will offer more of a story than offer a ranking. At any rate, here's the big takeaway from one middle aged man's relationship with modern music.

Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, from 2007, was just the sort of thing for aging pop fans. From the Lennonesque opener "Don't Make Me a Target," through the '60s soul via '80s new wave "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" and onward to the Billy Joel-y "The Underdog," this was an album that brings up as many reminiscences as it does discoveries. But the album is certainly a lot more than just a game of Spot the Influences, and because of that it's one that I've come back to many times since. The disc's combination of minimalism and pop craftsmanship works to the band's advantage, as tiny musical touches (percussion, horns, etc.) introduce themselves with little danger of crowding out the sparse lyrics.

 

It's especially meaningful because it was an album that Mrs. Q took to almost as much as I did. I always find it especially gratifying when I can introduce her to new music. Gimme Fiction might be the album that's better regarded by the critical cognoscenti, and I can see why. On a personal level, though, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the Spoon disc to which I've grown the most attached.

Don't Make Me a Target.mp3

As promised in the most recent Counterbalance, I have an early recording by a pre-Velvet Underground Lou Reed. It's credited to a group called the Beachnuts, which is presumably a makeshift studio ensemble that was created to fill up space on budget LPs in the 1960s. To that end, the song succeeds admirably.

Whether it would be of any interest had it not been co-written and sung by one of the prickliest pears in the pop panoply, however, is a matter of taste. It's kind of fun to listen to, but mainly because it points up the sturdy melodic backbone that always set the Velvet Underground apart from other avant-gardy types before and after.

There are a few other tracks on the album that were also co-written by Lou, but this is the only one he sings on. And interestingly, hearing his Pickwick-era songs sung by people with, shall we say, more traditional singing voices does kind of rob them of their rough charms. Without Reed singing, they sound more like the teen fodder they actually are.

I purchased this album at a garage sale a couple years ago. I'm not sure what possessed me to buy it, since I wasn't so intimately familiar with Lou's pre-VU output that I would recognize the Beachnuts name at a glance. Maybe it was the Joe Tex song. Maybe it was the pretty girl on the cover. Regardless, I was pretty chuffed to discover that amid the Vic Dana and Tommy Roe there lay a genuine rock oddity. (You might think such a disc would fetch a pretty penny on the vinyl market, but prices among dealers are generally between $10 and $25. Still, a decent return on my $1 investment, should I ever be moved to part with this.)

At any rate, judge the relative merits of the Beachnuts for yourself:

01_Cycle Annie_The Beachnuts.mp3

By the by, the Qualifier family has recently acquired a gizmo that digitates the vinyl with the greatest of ease. Hopefully this will lead to pronounced uptick in my blogging, as I'm discovering all manner of additional oddities in my collection that I'd like to write a bit about.

A few years back, I got a wild hair (am I using that term right, old-timey prospectors?) to start collecting original versions of songs that later became big hits for other people. Situations where the student surpasses the master, or something like that. I first got the idea at a party I was hosting. I had one of my beloved party mixes going and was sitting there nursing my drink when a woman I know said, the scorn dripping from her voice, "Who's this butchering Blondie?"

"Uh, it's the Paragons," I said, perhaps a bit too defensively, "They recorded it first, in the '60s. Blondie's version is the cover.

Her stony silence led me to believe I should probably opt out of the conversation. In retrospect, I suspect this woman was not fond of me. But it give me this idea, and a pretty cool mix disc that I'll be sharing with you in weeks to come. Let's start things off with the "Un-Cover" that got the ball rolling for me -- the Paragons' 1967 rocksteady classic, "The Tide Is High."

To my way of thinking, each generation of white rockers has a black music styling that they adopt and adapt in their own way. British rockers of the '60s took the blues to heart, while garage rockers loved Southern soul. For new wavers and punks of the '70s, though, it was the sounds of Jamaica. I can't really explain it. It may have to do with the crappy weather so prevalent in England and New York City. At least that's what I'd prefer to think -- the answer is probably more weed-related. Oh, sorry, spliff-related.

At any rate, I've been enjoying the original version for so long (I think this little hobby of mine dates back to 2002), I forget that other people might not have heard it. Actually, that's the case for a lot of the songs I'll be presenting. Record collectors' tend toward the really obscure, and these songs turn up on compilations fairly frequently. But that's not the same as hearing in your local produce section, so if you haven't heard it, here's the Paragons butchering Blondie performing the Un-Cover of "The Tide Is High."

The Tide Is High.mp3