101 Strings Orchestra: 20 Years of Beautiful Music (1969)

(Madacy)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Easy listening has so many facets and applications now but it's never ceased to be a dirty word. With the sort of lite-jazz and adult contemporary material that currently pipes in to the discount stores and rest stops of the world, that makes sense. But what of Beautiful Music ("mood music" colloquially), the once-bustling radio format that started it all, a perverse space-age lite classical with lounge elements and considerable quirk, evocative of mythical early 1960s bachelor pads and chic parties, and with an impressive alt-pedigree -- it's one of the many key inspirations for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and its principles are not leagues apart from Brian Eno's ambient creations of the '70s and '80s.

As an example of what Beautiful Music has to offer, a lot of people will point you to the many 50-cent bin vinyl offerings of the Hollyridge Strings or the Mystic Moods Orchestra, or even the Jackie Gleason Presents series. Not this guy. Your money's well spent on any of the above; if you've got a taste for this stuff, you'll love them all. But along with Herb Alpert and Bert Kaempfert, 101 Strings are a cut above. Their arrangements will be indistinguishable from those others first, even to the Muzak aficionado, but there is some actual legitimate lounge in their catalog, particularly early on during their Latin/Mambo period. And the lush impersonality fades on many of their covers until a surprisingly adventurous layer of verve and swing appear. Their take on "Girl from Ipanema" is just about the best that exists; their "Moon River" is haunting, their "Music Box Dancer" destroys the hit, their "Scarborough Fayre" and "Call Me Irresponsible" are downright trippy.

And I'm not kidding, they deserve your attention beyond novelty; as an artistic figure, they have a certain mythic quality -- actually 125 strings, and existing in various parallel arrangements and nations, their brand stamp betrays a whimsy of purpose that often takes them in bizarre directions. Take their Play the Blues album, which finally answers the burning question of what raw B.B. King songs sound like with massive string arrangements behind them. Or the deservedly legendary exotica piece Songs of the Seasons of Japan. Or just listen to "Guantanamera," which has such lilt and bounce and boom it fits perfectly on a dance floor.

If debating the relative quality of five versions of "This Guy's in Love with You" and studying some of the most stunning art-deco LP covers of all time sounds like fun to you, and if maybe you have a jones for the saccharine kitsch of a good Jack Nitzsche or Percy Faith, perhaps you are an easy listening or Beautiful Music buff in the making. Few things are more fun (and cheap) to collect. Here's all you need to do: 1) Go to your library and check out (or go to your bookstore and buy) Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music, a definitive, fascinating look at the subject that you won't be able to put down -- one of the best books on pop music of any kind that I've read. 2) Go to your local goodwill or, preferably, record store and start digging through the cheap bins of the stuff nobody wants. The rule in kitsch, exotica, lounge, and easy listening is that the cooler and/or more offensively funny the cover is, the more you want the record. And it's fifty fucking cents (or less), for Chrissake. Just buy it. That's how you build a damn collection.

Beautiful Music hasn't really moved into the CD era, but the notoriously roughshod reissue company Madacy has brought out a lot of the 101 Strings material. And if you want a basic sampling of what this weird obsession is all about, you could do worse than picking up this CD, which is only about $5 at most places. Drawing mostly from late-'60s material (and very little from the more "legit" early records, which are far easier to track down on vinyl), it contains a few bits of Andrew Lloyd Weber nonsense, but the rest of it will brighten your evening. It's well-recorded, unbelievably lush and silly, and feels like a good frothy mixed drink. The weirdos and the old folks understand.

Great "Elvira Madigan Theme" on here too, by the way.

Belle & Sebastian: Write About Love (2010)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Reports indicate that seeing Belle & Sebastian on their current brief U.S. tour is a breathtaking experience, a communal participation in the pretty and the witty under the night sky that feels wonderful for all concerned, in a world that presently needs more wonderful satisfactions. If only they could stay over here longer. One interesting facet in the elation people are experiencing from these evenings is that they know and love all of the songs. Of course, you know all the songs at a Pixies or Pavement or Brian Wilson show, but what's different about this is the cozy but transcendent confidence of B&S's songs; they've always suggested time long past, and by (reportedly) only playing a couple of songs from their new album on this tour, they reinforce the celebration of living apart in one's own dusty, quiet universe.

That doesn't make them an oldies act. That only suggests a subservience to the stage, their surrender of exposing their new music to the larger scope of bringing their entire career to people who have rarely been able to see it performed. And yet, I can scarcely imagine a tour behind any of their last three albums that sidestepped much of the new material. Perhaps those seemed more immediate, perhaps they were just a bit stronger, but Write About Love, their seventh album, sounds like an extension of the same proto-nostalgia. Whereas their three full-length efforts of the 2000s brought them to new territory, eventually to actual power pop, Write About Love is more of a refinement, or a career summary, or even a reminder that the band still exists after a four-year hiatus.

Stuart Murdoch's songwriting hasn't flagged, but some element of his musical ambition seems to have calmed down since the last we heard from him. The majority of these songs could be on any of the records from the first half of the band's career, the chief difference being an integration of some of the production tricks and vocal expansions discovered in the years since. Only one of the songs is something for which I can't think of a predecessor in their catalog. That's the audacious beachball-juggling summer fun of "I'm Not Living in the Real World," which is utter bliss and opens up in a wild, unpolished manner that Murdoch's obsession with baroque minutiae seldom allows, less akin to the Beach Boys than the fucking Sunrays. I wouldn't mind a whole LP like it.

Nevertheless, the numbers are on their side; I count seven excellent songs out of eleven total. Full curtain opens on the beautiful, breathy vocals of Sarah Martin for the melodic light synthpop of "I Didn't See It Coming," continuing the gradual improvement in the songs not voiced by Murdoch. And as an opener, it grips immediately and properly anticipates the extra punch of "Come On Sister," Life Pursuit-like power pop elegantly bringing Holland-Dozier-Holland into the Information Age. Two perfect pop songs, momentum building, and then they have to go and crash us back to earth with "Calculating Bimbo."

This track is a good example to cite of why Belle & Sebastian aren't Lambchop -- why they're more popular and why their cult will never be quite as emotionally intense. It's beautiful music set against quirky intellectual trash-talk -- a joke that's become less funny over the years. I don't know if Scottish kids grow up with the same class-conscious inferiority complex that we hear so much about from England, but Murdoch at times comes off nearly embarrassed at his own gifts and cheapens them with the same awkward character studies that began creeping into Ray Davies' work around 1972. But the larger problem is that the song is just indistinct in style and production. Early in B&S's career, their crafting of mood was expert. It remains potent now, but I tend to wonder by this point if it's really necessary to add any more of these dirges to the catalog; that point was made years ago and they're better at different things now. The same criticisms apply to "Read the Blessed Pages" on the second half, here with Murdoch applying his cynicism to some sort of odd Behind the Music plotline, albeit with the intriguing twist that his timewarp has officially moved forward to the '70s and a solid Richard Thompson influence.

Elsewhere, though, Belle & Sebastian's fixation with '60s iconography and alt-'80s stylistics holds fast on this album; the strongest illustration is the ingratiating "I Want the World to Stop," as indebted to the New Romantic movement (Depeche Mode, A Flock of Seagulls, etc.) -- calling back to the Trevor Horn production on Dear Catastrophe Waitress -- as to the more obvious traces of Northern Soul girl-group pop. And it wouldn't be Belle & Sebastian if these hook-filled pastiches didn't ultimately carry a certain world-weary, wistful sadness. Elsewhere, the winning, immediately treasured title track perfectly conveys a modern day cynicism against a musical jumble of stuff likely blaring out of windows at Berkeley in the early Vietnam era, Simon & Garfunkel back to the Kinks back to Nico-period Velvets. "I Can See Your Future" calls back to the Turtles-like "For the Price of a Cup of Tea" on Life Pursuit but is just as good, just as sweet and instilling of sheer wide-eyed wonder. I'm more dubious on the keyboardy "Sunday's Pretty Icons," the brightest of the period-alternative lifts here. It sounds like it could've been a Modern Rock hit around 1993, slightly in the vein of the Cranberries, but like the Cranberries often were, it is seriously kind of annoying. I don't remember saying that about Belle & Sebastian before, but there it is.

The only other song here I initially cited as a dud was "Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John," but the problem isn't really anything to do with the song. The melody is nice and the performance seems designed to evoke the country-edged singer-songwriters of the Nixon years; think Gram Parsons' albums with Emmylou Harris, or Richard & Linda Thompson, or even the Loretta Lynn albums from the period. But here's the clincher: To further this impression, they bring in Norah Jones and have her sing in an attempted Southern twang that sends the whole enterprise clattering down, in true what-the-hell-were-they-thinking fashion. Jones' voice hasn't ever really appealed to me anyway, but it doesn't fit here at all, and I can't help wanting to know why they didn't use Sarah Martin for her part. (Surely Norah Jones' commerical presence is no longer such that her credit will improve sales?) The song is good enough to mostly keep the bad feeling from bringing the album down as a whole.

Disregarding their likely discomfort about all that, it won't be difficult at all for a Belle & Sebastian fan to love this record, and it will certainly cause less backlash than the increasingly sunny pop of the last two did, but I hope we haven't heard the last of the Belle & Sebastian that was determined to change and alter its sound as the years went by. As solid as these songs are, I'm not overwhelmed with joy like I was by The Life Pursuit and Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Maybe it's the feeling that this is all sort of easy for them, or at least, easy for Stuart; is the "stretching" over? Or is the pulling back just reflective of Murdoch's detail-oriented perfectionism, meaning they just need time and they'll be thrilling again instead of merely great? Or is this all just, you know, the life cycle of a pop group? I don't want to sound ungrateful, because this record is full of songs I'll keep with me forever.

Besides, none of that applies to the true masterpiece of this album, a song nestled near the start of Side Two called "The Ghost of Rockschool." There's nothing immediately unusual about it, just Murdoch singing another lonely tune in his traditionally affected, dejectedly bouncy way. But as the song presses onward, that feeling of discovery appears and you start to hear the sort of aching melody and gorgeous arrangement made for those misty-eyed, deeply moving moments at future Belle & Sebastian shows. Or just future times alone with the song feeling every nook and cranny hidden in the witty words and vibrant music. And then you're more thankful than ever that they're still around and, damn everything, hope for a dozen more albums just like this one.

The Beatles: Please Please Me (1963)

(Parlophone)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Mark Lewisohn's been working on a full-scale, immaculately detailed, three-volume biography of the Beatles for the last five or six years; it emerged this past week that he is currently "up to Hamburg." In other words, he's still chronologically three years away from the band's debut album. Such is the status of the Beatles that their first LP barely qualifies now as a beginning; the religious converts, which in this band's case encompass much of the mainstream music audience, know that so much of the story that would have permanent impact on millions of lives, four in particular, had already occurred by February 11, 1963, the date on which most of Please Please Me was laid down. Approaching this audio document as an opening, thus dismissing with the galvanizing places -- The Reeperbahn, Liverpool, Penny Lane, The Cavern, etc. -- and people -- Astrid Kirchher, Stuart Sutcliffe, Allan Williams, Pete Best, Tony Sheridan -- touched in the prior years, seems inherently false and inaccurate because of how much we've been conditioned to the Beatles' endlessly fascinating history.

To an extent, that's a good thing, but maybe we should scale back a bit and try to view Please Please Me from the perspective that is most relevant to the majority of us and our parents, maybe even grandparents. From the outside, there were no predecessors, no signals, no avant garde-bent crowds in Germany whispering that these boys were going somewhere, no girls screaming over their secret thrill at the Caven Club. In most of the UK as of March 1963, the Beatles were just a serviceable pop group who'd done their country proud with a big hit in the form of this record's title track, now followed by the inevitable Album of the Same Name, surely for the label to cash-in on the fast fade of the pop throne. If it was unusual to discover how much of the record consisted of original compositions (over half, although four of them had already been released as 45's), it was surely bracing to lay the heavy needle down and discover an explosion like this.

It was all different in the U.S., where American fans often grew up thinking of Meet the Beatles! -- mostly derived from the band's actual second album, With the Beatles -- as the initial bow. That's a thunderous record, sure, and deservedly celebrated, but to hear Please Please Me is to hear the full story of lightning striking out of a portrait of stately, respectable normalcy. Insanity met the Beatles when they landed in America, but in Great Britain, their prowess and success grew out of something like an actual Establishment, and that is what makes this album subversive.

Paul McCartney's barking count that opens "I Saw Her Standing There" could never be anything but the start of something huge. He roars through the first three lines of the song, accompanied by handclaps, John Lennon's smirking rhythm guitar and breakneck drumming from Ringo Starr, and twenty seconds in, something happens, a ruthless drum fill, and a sound that already threatened to make the rest of the world spontaneously combust becomes outrageous. The powerful, melodic bass line, the relentlessly rising melody, and robust, mischievous songcraft remain stunning, and in 1963 must have been a compelling indicator of how much different things were going to be with this band than all rock & roll prior.

But not the first. Greil Marcus has written that, in America, the Beatles made everything else on the radio in 1964 sound "faintly stupid." In terms of the UK's output of rock & roll, which ironically would soon be overflowing with innovation and talent, Please Please Me must have been even more of a bullet-force scream against the tedium. Of course they had antecedents; Buddy Holly is everywhere, Chuck Berry is nearly to the same extent (his "I'm Talking About You" is the source of the aforementioned powerful, melodic bass line), and the Everly Brothers serve as the clear inspiration for the song that made them a Force. But the first incarnation of the Beatles dates to the dawn of rock & roll; who was more equipped to further the invention than a creative entity that had existed from the beginning?

Discounting their work with Tony Sheridan in Germany, the Beatles' first commercial release was the Parlophone 45 "Love Me Do" b/w "P.S. I Love You." Both songs are included here, "Love Me Do" in a brighter alternate take with Andy White on drums (Ringo on tambourine). As infectious and funky as even this origin is, their second single "Please Please Me" is the one that sold the UK public on the Liverpudlians. The improvement is startling; it's largely sheer force, but also composition. Copping a lively "Cathy's Clown"-like arrangement but without the desperation, the song has size and swagger, and John Lennon's first released lead vocal already feels wonderfully lost in a moment. Even the clever, eloquently developed lyric is a vast leap forward. And the hooks are immersive -- who can deny the almost big band-like guitar lick after each line of the verse? "Last night I said these words to my girl..." badum badum badadadada. It's the first taste of Beatles magic.

Yet, that was the sound of the band putting on their best face for a new audience. The real identity of the group lies in the raw crunch and grind of "I Saw Her Standing There" and that direct-from-Hamburg drumfill and glide into the first chorus. That is undoctored, un-gentle rock & roll, the noise and product of working musicians, for whom this was actual l-i-f-e. From that second, the most intense, exciting debut album ever made refuses to let up. The band that cut its teeth on impossibly fierce audiences in Germany rips through fourteen songs -- a mixture of their originals and a delightful set of favorites -- as if they will never even wake up the next day to see what the future will bring. The future is just irrelevant here, and even forty years later, all you know with Please Please Me on the speakers is that it's not happening in 1963, it's happening now.

If With the Beatles is the album that exposes their intensity (as if this didn't do plenty of that), A Hard Day's Night is the birth of John Lennon the singer-songwriter genius, and Beatles for Sale the moody sound of maturing, Please Please Me is the inside-out exploration of the group's dynamic, and their arresting spontaneity. That an album recorded in the space of a few hours remains as remarkable as other Beatles LPs that were months in the making says enough about their effortless bombast, their assurance and their complete love for and devotion to what they did.

The personalities are already in place. Paul, with his eclectic bass playing lighting up the proceedings, is the gruff balladeer; his b-side "P.S. I Love You" slows down the album a bit and is the kind of thing they'd soon start leaving off their LPs, but he strains nowhere else. Even on the oddball version of "A Taste of Honey," his enthusiasm leaves the amusingly tired backing of the other ones in the dust. His vocal is mannered but impassioned, and the workmanlike performance only enhances the smoky jazz-club feeling conjured up by George Martin with crude but evocative echo. But only on "I Saw Her Standing There" does Paul really get to cut loose. It's new recruit Ringo Starr who gets the floor on the wildest, most unorthodox cut, the killer Shirelles cover "Boys," not so much homoerotic as simply a shockingly bold song for straight men to sing in 1963, which lends it a defiant liveliness today and provides a welcome glimpse at the juggernaut force of the Beatles as a live band in those days.

George Harrison is given the least inspiring numbers to sing, but they still work. "Chains" is an extremely, somewhat admirably obscure girl-group number, showing impeccable taste on the Beatles' part in niche product. John Lennon's "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" is a sweeter, more personal number than it might initially seem -- based on childhood memories of a rerelease of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to which his late mother Julia took him -- but the Roy Orbison-like emotional drama of the intro and the carefully paced, playful chorus are slightly ill-suited to Harrison's voice, although the song was a big hit when inexplicably released as a single in America. The song itself is yet another early Lennon/McCartney triumph, the melody and chords sideways and intriguing, as they consistently would be in the first half of the band's Parlophone output. No matter anyway; Harrison's great shining achievement is that impossibly loud but infinitely heartfelt guitar solo on "Baby It's You," a perfect complement to an arresting love song.

Throughout the album and, in fact, particularly on "Secret," George Martin's attentive production is nothing but an asset... and not just for his lovely piano bit on "Misery." He seems to understand precisely what it is about the group that must be captured, and throws its emphasis to the forefront. Every note feels so convicted and undoctored that whether you listen to the mono (ideal) or stereo (better than reputed) mix, you feel as though you are in the studio. You can hear the walls and the ceiling and the floor and you can sense the pregnancy of the moment, that beginning suggested so eloquently by the opening "one, two, three, four!"

Even if Martin is owed a great deal for how he puts all this (and every subsequent Beatles record) together, and even if Paul McCartney is the most versatile band member at this stage in terms of his musicianship, John Lennon is the star of the album. His songwriting already displays a maturity and intelligence above and beyond his peers and even his idols, well before his discovery of Bob Dylan and well before rivals from Mick Jagger to Brian Wilson approached their peaks. Take "Ask Me Why," the most John-centric of the first four Beatles songs released. It's startlingly vulnerable, a more confessional piece of work than one could reasonably have expected from a rock & roller up to now; Orbison remains a key inspiration, but how much did even he look straight into his soul to his extent? I don't know many times Lennon sings "cry" here, but it's a lot, and when at one point his voice cracks under the weight of the word, it's as telling a microcosm of the seventeen years remaining in his professional career as could be devised.

There are several fine ballads on this record, some written by Beatles and some not, but "Misery" and "Ask Me Why" are a class apart. "Misery" is a compression and furthering of pop conventions dating back to before Lennon was born, beginning with an addictive hook and just bounding until it exhausts itself. It has a full but effortless sound, almost prototypical power pop. And "Ask Me Why" is John Lennon's idea of a slow burn; amidst vaguely jazzy chords and subtle but profoundingly expert writing, he lays it all out. The naked emotion and honest confusion of these lyrics is remarkable, and Lennon's enigma is in place from the beginning. He already seems so observant, angry, and vocal, like the kind of person you observe from a distance in a crowded room. His singing is dynamic, and on his numbers, even the (absolutely outstanding) Shirelles cover "Baby It's You," he seems to come from a different and separate, somehow more pained, place than the others, which only reinforces the power of the band behind him. He proves himself a master interpreter: "Anna" is a fine old Arthur Alexander obscurity, but John's pained, urgent vocals make it no one's but his own -- the pain belongs to him. All of the slow ones, but John's in particular, have a propulsion and sadness that never allows them to cloy. They sit comfortably alongside the rockers and even deepen and enhance them.

It's on the last two cuts, though, that Lennon truly makes his intentions known. "There's a Place" is the album's best original, and one of the finest songs of the early '60s. A case can easily be made that the Beatles and Lennon never actually topped this explosive cut, its message of insecurity and alienation so well-expressed so concisely. The band's precision is clean but unforced, and on a song this darkly universal, faintly hopeful, it's easy to see how they became so easily embraced as a generation's "voice," but perversely, the song's power today comes from its note of privacy and isolation (a sibling of sorts to the Beach Boys' "In My Room"). It is innovative both for its unstoppable, loud exuberance and for its deeply introspective lyric, and particularly for the fact that the two elements are matched. The song is so splendid it could only be followed by something like "Twist and Shout," something that could raise the hackles of the most seasoned rock & roll veteran.

There is a kind of vocal in rock music, a kind exhibited frequently by the likes of James Brown and perhaps Otis Redding. There is no word for it but it occurs to an almost frightening degree when a performer is so enraptured and enclosed in the world of the song he is playing that he loses all the reins on his voice until it seems as if the song is a demon that most be exorcised from his soul. "Twist and Shout," a rather mild Isley Brothers song, becomes in Lennon's hand a bloodcurdling, insane bullet train of beautiful noise. All the while, as John is lost more and more in the world of his voice, as his screams become less tuneful and more unearthly, the backup singing of the others retains its deadpan machismo, keeping us grounded in a world that is increasingly difficult to sense in the ripping vocal chords of the frontman. The trick would be employed later in the Velvet Underground's "I Heard Her Call My Name," but Lou Reed never sang like this. No one did.

The Beatles did not become legendary, at least initially, because they sang nifty pop songs and appealed to everyone of all ages. They became what they were because they were dangerous and dirty, Buddy Holly and Elvis and Little Richard times a thousand. Brian Epstein did his best to hide this for commercial interests, but you could still hear it in 1963 if you listened hard enough. Now, the cultivation of Beatles style as universal fact of our time, and the band members' rise to virtual ambassadors for Western civilization has further obscured the edginess and concealed sexuality of their initial genius. The gateway is the songs. They would, of course, Change the World and this and that in years to come. But they would never top their first four albums for songcraft, invention, passion, raw power. You want to hear why the Beatles matter, forget (for a moment, at least) the albums VH1 talks about and return to the songs that made teenaged girls scream their heads off. They knew what they were doing, and they were better at it than anyone. Please Please Me is revolution in a long, dirty day.

[Editorial Note: This is a revision and expansion of a review I wrote and posted on my old website in 2003.]

Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz (2010)

(Asthmatic Kitty)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When you left me
I went crazy.
- "I Walked"

The followup to one of the most celebrated albums of the last ten years is, in a word, fascinating. The songs are slower, more personal, more aching than Illnoise, all packaged in a wisely overstated, occasionally silly, usually beautiful hyper-media pop parlance that lightly brushes musical touchstones ranging from John Lennon to T-Pain. The Age of Adz is both Sufjan Stevens' most assured album thus far and his most uncertain bout of navel-gaze. As an audio document of a truly brilliant performer's deepest thoughts, The Age of Adz is indispensable -- a vaguely surreal painting of Stevens as American adventurer looking inward. You really don't need anyone to tell you to listen to it, I hope, and you probably already have. So I'll assume you did and then we'll talk about it.

By the stopwatch standard, the only major American artist who's probably released more music in 2010 than Sufjan Stevens is Joanna Newsom -- and this after a pop-oriented silence of four years, five if you don't count the stopgap outtakes collection The Avalanche. Like Newsom, Stevens is blessed and cursed with a restless creative spirit; his music, like Newsom's, is tightly composed, gentle but biting, vividly pretty -- at times ridiculously, mockery-invitingly pretty. But as an artist, Joanna Newsom rails from the direction of rationality; if she has outbursts, they are constructed with a thought to every detail. It isn't so much that Stevens doesn't care where each note falls as he is willing to give vent to every incongruous, scary, buried thing that travels from his brain to his fingertips. An unfiltered oddball, you might say; where Newsom gives the impression of someone who knows exactly how to express herself, Stevens is constantly letting everything go and then doubting it. These are two kinds of genuine artists, their approaches and tastes in noise so similar, their pathology of ruthless creating identical, their music finally on opposite extremes.

The Age of Adz, Sufjan's sixth album, offers a startling portrait of an artist's entire world, no selective process of saying what and when visible (not that it doesn't exist), only a feeling of every word and every sound being felt and honest and a piece of a man. Just enough time has passed since Sufjan Stevens' last album, Illnoise, that his warm, fragile voice is suggestive of another era. It always seemed to come from a place we weren't necessarily permitted to know. Now, when he sings, that otherworldly quality has given way to a recognition. It's a more powerful tool than ever, and by diving headfirst into his most eclectic recording, he finds its best-suited purpose. No longer just falling amongst ornate arrangements, it's a ghostly wail today above unfamiliar terrain, allowing us the luxury of a guided tour with a man we know. Still, even friendly eclecticism has its enemies, and a lot of people are upset that Stevens' new LP is, well, "different."

Different, like, skittering drum machines and a chorus of "I'm not fuckin' around!" on the crazed, jilted "I Want to Be Well." Different like the purest pop in the man's catalog, albeit with an ominous undercurrent, on "Get Real Get Right." Different like "I Walked," a wrenching programmed breakup song on which he demands "Do you think of me now?" amid tortured analyses of minute dumpee details like the lack of a goodbye kiss. Different like the unhinged, scary, gorgeous "Now That I'm Older" which will send listeners racing back to the recent EP's moving but overwrought "Djohariah" to reevaluate the ambitions focused and realized here. And different kinds of babbling-book beautiful on the absolutely classic "Vesuvius," which is pure Sufjan, though even it contributes the memorable self-referential chorus "Sufjan, follow your heart."

So yeah, it's different, but only meaningfully different in a way hardly anyone's talking about. I admit to being taken aback when I heard "Too Much" in advance of the album -- less experimentation than pedestrian goofing off, it sounded like maddening radio pap. But this is deceptive. For one thing, the opposite is just as prevalent; disregarding a bit of extra atmosphere and the words, the two-minute opener "Futile Devices" speeds a five-year gap to an untransformative instant. Stevens' consistency of craft is a miracle, seeming not to have weakened one iota since the surely draining Illinoise experience. His songs and ideas are as bracing as ever, if not more so. The change most have found jarring is the entrance of heavily electronic-leaning production, utilizing synths, drum machines, computer bleeps and bloops, and sporadic tools such as AutoTune to create a phantasmagoric, ever-changing backdrop that seems to move and evolve as fast and as unpredictably as Stevens' brain. The songs operate in fits and starts that approach something like whimsy, but it seems to come from a far deeper place than is probably the norm in precious electro-folk. The songs are still intimate when he feels like it, but like the preceding EP All Delighted People, Age of Adz finds Sufjan exploring an expansive, intricate wall of sound, augmented here and there by strings and choir, usually doing absolutely nothing conventional. The result is an album that, indeed, sounds like nothing (no one) else.

However, while these new sounds and effects are hardly window dressing, they serve to disguise the most personal, harrowingly broken songs their composer has written to date, offering his most fragile performances as a singer. Less than twenty seconds into the record, here he is pulling the blankets over his head on the couch belonging to the ex he misses horribly, like some masochistic twist on "Hey Jealousy." He isn't Antony Hegarty, but he is walking wounded. As much as the intimate productions of Stevens' two States albums and Seven Swans frequently disrupted and offset the intensity of the huge subjects he tackled, the musical toying and tinkering replace the guard that Stevens once put up within his writing. This experimental music is not about experimentation; it is a conception. It's about loss, fear, dread, all manner of dark things, but mostly a broken feeling, seemingly expressed best by coldly programmed machines.

The masterful dupicity is best exemplified by the title track, on which filthy Depeche Mode synths collide with a melodramatic arrangement and deeply affecting, audibly pained singing, the plastic noises only deepening the human connection -- CFTPA writ large. And by the way, analyze this: "I'm sorry if I seem self-effacing / Consumed by selfish thoughts / It's only that I still love you deeply / It's all the love I got." The kitchen sink production lends Stevens the fearlessness necessary to give vent to words and emotions free of his typical poetic bent, as absent of boundaries of lyricism as of genre constrictions. At the very least, it is his greatest achievement as a vocalist thus far; there are moments in which he gets to That Point, you know? The staring-up-from-the-abyss-toward-the-open-window, throwing the head back, giving the self away Point. These songs are gut-splitters, and his submission to them is a life-affirming accomplishment.

Only thing is, the shock that's greeted this adventurous LP betrays sort of a naivete about Sufjan Stevens' prior career, and moreover, demonstrates an odd distrust of individualistic pop music making that seems to have crept into Rock sometime during the '70s. (Hip hop has never suffered from a fear of the tirelessly inventive half-crazed genius, but for whatever reason, within "alternative rock" only Beck has carried an ignorance of genre boundaries to platinum territory, perhaps because his choices tend to be safer, less direct and expressive.) First off, Stevens has never committed himself to the obvious. His old rarity "The First Full Moon" is a defiant and blissy feedback explosion that suggests spacey Britpop. His second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, already displayed an interest in electronic music. And most importantly, an even rote examination of his discography reveals a musician completely unwilling to relax. The only thing that would shock me more than The Age of Adz sounding like Illnoise would be if it were a dirge, devoid of hooks, instead of the often charmingly infectious pop record it is (listen especially to "Get Real Get Right" and portions of the controversial "Impossible Soul"). Like no one since Prince, whose '80s albums serve as an interesting ancestry to what Sufjan is doing here, Stevens is expert at matching avant garde, leftfield music with mass audiences via his fixation with the earthy, the expressive, the heartfelt.

And like Prince, he is a consummate showman. There's a case to be made that some calculation is at work here, at least on business terms. Stevens probably likes the idea of people creating a rumble about a radical departure from his biggest success; though it too displays craft and purpose well-suited to the central lyrical conceits of the album, the cover art by troubled artist Royal Robertson seems designed to confound those same people, even though if anything it fits well with the corny in-jokes populating the front of his last LP. Robertson was a fabled schizophrenic who flew into a seemingly permanent rage upon being divorced by his wife and forever afterward created images of science fiction space creatures screaming misogynistic insults at one another. The oblique sympathy and glimpse of grotesque hatred in his story feels like a classic Sufjan eyeballing examination of Discomforting Things, a visual representation of the wronged man buried deep inside him slash us who says and thinks horrible things, such as the bleakly cynical "Don't walk away when I am speaking!" on "Bad Communication." How telling that the sentiment is made almost serene by the intriguing, retro-futuristic Atari FX surrounding it.

In a recent interview, Stevens showed a remarkably progressive viewpoint toward the changes in the music business and how they affect perception of the album. He is a fan of the Internet free-for-all that allows additional vent for a prolific artist and thus opened the door for something now economically viable like the All Delighted People EP, an hour-long oddity that would've been unthinkable a decade or two ago. He also enjoys the lack of "event" now afforded a new LP release. I tend to agree, but there are cracks. First is that the final track here, the 25-minute "Impossible Soul," feels more like four songs of tangential relation strung together, and sure, they belong together, and sure, Sufjan feels they must be heard together, but in another age it wouldn't have been necessary to glue them together. (We'll talk about Lovesexy later.) The annoyance of this may be less than obvious until you imagine everything on Abbey Road from "You Never Give Me Your Money" to "The End" grafted together as a single cut. The overwhelming nature of the track somehow works against it, as grand as the music is.

And then there's the matter of momentum. With a five-year lapse, did Sufjan lose his audience? I couldn't figure out, given how many people were altered by Sufjan early in the last decade, why more hype didn't seem to be attending a record this long-awaited. It's just long enough for the Illinoise interest and goodwill to have faded, not long enough for Stevens to acquire a mystique with its own commercial viability and conspicuous absence. A new album in the three years after Illinoise would have warranted far more excitement, I think, than at this stage, when the artist has receded just enough that people are starting to need a reminder. That's the part of me talking that misses people looking forward to, marking their calendars for a new record. I got in the spirit and wouldn't listen to NPR's stream of Adz or any of the leaks, only hearing it on its actual release date. What can I say? I'm a sap.

The thesis statement of Age of Adz is buried in "Now That I'm Older": "I'm not over you," he confesses, and the story never goes much further than that. But the telling, sad details that anyone who's lost a lover will recognize end up carrying the album, and will resonate enough to end up being the bulk of its legacy, long after the quaint sonic tricks' novelty fades and we're left with another set of marvellous Sufjan Stevens songs. How about that.

[SEE ALSO:]
All Delighted People EP (2010)

T.I.: King (2006)

(Atlantic)

RECOMMENDED

Atlanta's T.I. is one of those artists who makes it tiresomely difficult to be altogether dismissive of mainstream radio in America; his work is built to blast, pure ear-candy for anyone with any more-than-passing interest in hip hop, including but not limited to those who regularly decry the dire landscape of commercial rap. Probably all the more frustrating for those who bank their existence on the "album-length statement" is that to be properly understood, T.I. needs more than an hour of your time, and he actually uses that hour extremely well, which must drive the haters nuts if they ever bother to give him such an opportunity to prove himself.

To the cynics' credit, there was a point when an awful lot of stuff on R&B radio sounded like T.I.; I don't know whether he was the pioneer of the juggernaut-arena sound that correctly forecasted the mainstreaming of live performance as integral facet of mass-consumer hip hop. But "What You Know" is the single that will instantly spring to mind when describing the sound of the mid-2000s to someone. There's nothing live about it, of course, but it has the sound and battering-ram crowd-surfing intensity of a stadium concert that somehow manages to get directly in the face of all bystanders. There were fresher songs on the airwaves then, but few of them stand up as well as "What You Know," which still gets the blood running all these years later, and feels like it stands apart from its imitators and even predecessors in its straight to-the-bone perfection. It is, above all, a pop single. And pop singles can spawn pop movements; you don't have to give a whit for modern hip hop to get why it connected.

But T.I.'s intent with King probably wasn't to chase everyone else out of the room with the outrageous, the loud, the big statement. The record actually is rife with lower-key moments that are often its strongest; other big hit "Why You Wanna" runs a teasing wronged-man tack over a Q-Tip hook around minimal backbeat, and the amazingly effective love song "Hello" is built on such a classic formula of rap-n-soul, replete with Isley Brothers sample, it could be a Common single (and Common guests elsewhere on the album, proving himself surprisingly capable of a killer verse as late as '06). But others, like the stunning Grandmaster Flash nod "Goodlife," the breathless "Told You So," and the instantly classic closer "Bankhead" practically enter wall of sound territory. The heavy, chilly anthems are the reason the album succeeded, but people stayed for the oddball stuff, the ballads, the slowed-down and slightly eccentric back half.

Nice folks seeking consciousness rhymes aren't likely to find them here, even if the shit inevitably makes their heads bob; T.I.'s big motif, as recent headlines have made all too explicit, is drugs and everything about drugs: obtaining, selling, taking, paying for, charged for. And he won't win the Father of the Year award, either; "Top Back" announces "Think I'm bad now, shoulda seen me before I had children." He does compensate some for the eye-rolling misogyny inherent to so much hip hop of his time with some genuine, knowing, Prince-like romantic tenderness on "Hello" and "Why You Wanna." Just as importantly, the man gives a fuck about his craft, throwing himself into his rhymes and flow like few other rappers -- you can almost hear him break into a roar a few times; no casual apathy here -- and even when there's a touch of telling lack of detail or just tired trash talk in his lyrics, he chooses producers wisely and comes up with a consistently powerful, slick set that is full of artful surprises, excellent beats, and songs that catch and won't let go. Disregarding the four or five duds (all on the first half), every track here is memorable.

Those duds also tend to be the longest tracks; after an opening 1-2-3 punch of genius tracks, T.I. decides to bore us to deah with "I'm Talkin to You," which comes off like a low-tier recording of the Wu-Tang Clan members all shouting over one another, followed by the obligatory Jamie Foxx cameo on the dull "Live in the Sky." The agreeable throwback funk of "Ride Wit Me" picks things back up, and after that the only song that makes me reach for "skip" is the intolerably annoying "Get It." But I did say song. Rant alert: Anybody who loves hip hop will admit to you that the genre has its baggage like any other. The same way I hate most 103-note guitar solos, I am immensely irritated by the "skits" that come packaged with most rap records of all eras. Even the best of them are funny, at most, twice, and these tend to come on records that are worth listening to over and over and over again. It's a simple matter of programming -- usually. But T.I. commits the double offense of tacking skits on to the end of several tracks, including the perfectly ill "I'm Straight," which runs 6:35 thanks to a nonsensical obscenity-laced rant at the end. The phone call at the end of "Goodlife" is slightly less bothersome, and the worst of the bunch, a lovers' quarrel that precedes "Why You Wanna," is skippable. But with an album that's already about a quarter-hour too long, these are needless indulgences. I wish we could scale back the template a bit on these records, but maybe most folks like these skits, hell if I know.

With the real age of the gangsta long past us now, the hip hop world has become a sort of poetic apocalypse -- we've entered an age when the most exciting, innovative rap isn't necessarily the most fun rap. The problem is, as Mos Def has argued, both divisions of the music have value that's consistently undervalued by occupants of the other contingent. I'm a Roots guy myself; De La Soul and Run-DMC are still my favorite hip hop artists of all time. If I have to pick the current masters, I can't escape the cliché that Jay and Kanye are the kings because that'd be like saying the Beatles and the Rolling Stones weren't the kings in 1968. But I was listening to a lot of urban radio when this album came out and ultimately found that a lot of my resistance crumbled in the hands of the sheer rock & roll mastery of what amounts to an elevation of classic populist folk and blues. What T.I. is basically doing, whether he's boasting or lamenting a real injustice or bawling about some shit that's his own dumb fault, is what John Lee Hooker was doing fifty years ago. It's sometimes an ugly -- if catchy! -- world he and many of his peers seem to occupy, in the real world and on store shelves, but goddamn if it isn't as evocative an artful distortion-slash-representation of reality as pop culture has ever offered us. Testimonials about drug dealing and other unpleasant matters set to music this sick from talent this deep sure beats a Wall Street Journal op-ed about rap being mindless junk, doesn't it?

Tame Impala: Innerspeaker (2010)

(Modular)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

No longer a kitsch notion, psychedelia lives on today, filtered through the new capabilities and pop-historical consciousness of current rock musicians who long for an ideal of near-institutionalized mainstream experimentation, even if such a thing was largely mythical. Some bands actually experiment; some issue fervent, loving valentines to the age when everything seemed like newly forged territory. You'll find a bit of the latter in this Australian band's trippy, Beatlesque new album. It is a full-on retro move, with vocal and guitar and melodic pop doodling that will sound comfortably familiar, but it's so much fun -- and the songwriting is so solid -- that the derivative elements wash over into a respectful, personal new investigation of late '60s music. As immediate as the best power pop, as serious-minded and convincing as the tightest post-punk outfit, this is music that requires no setup, no introduction. The second you hear it, it feels like it's all in the blood.

And that sounds like a case of backward-looking fever, but it's actually the mark of extraordinary skill. I'm miffed by the idea that someone can't make a kickass record steeped in '60s artifact without accusations of unoriginality. A band like Tame Impala configures the past as a palette to draw on, and they're too young for the baggage -- political, social, musical -- inherent to their period of strongest influence. They don't necessarily know about the scenes, the pomp, the attitudes that produced Jefferson Airplane and the Doors, but they know what sounds cool, and by reliving the notion of sounding cool within a pop joy free of Airplane and Doors iconography, they render something altogether more special. It can evoke a memory while feeling alive, creating dreamlike waves.

There was a lot, as you know, both good and bad about rock music in the late '60s. For someone to filter all of that into comfort food like this -- rock & roll with cutting, vibrant energy and imagination -- is commendable. Given the band's youthful appearance, it's startling how confident and grown-up they sound when dabbling in light guitar funk on "Solitude Is Bliss" or just laid-back mod rock on "Lucidity." Each track is distinct but all share an identifiable, instantly enjoyable style. And the record only gets more interesting, brighter, niftier with each listen.

It's a mistake to suggest Tame Impala is all rejuvenated vintage and distorted Beatlemania. There's dream-pop here too, for one thing, on a pair of beautiful tracks ("Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind" and "Expectation") that offer a Jesus & Mary Chain tower of college-rock sound and even conjure up the pure, modern infatuation with beauty of a Sufjan Stevens or Owen Pallett -- and a bit of shockingly fresh U2 arena rock in "Alter Ego" -- but they also are wise enough to comprehend the sheer voltage of guitars, bass, and drums, a medium that never dates. Their melodies and performances are strong enough that all other definining characteristics are embellishment, whether they're fearlessly exploring Roky Erickson heavy (and archetypal wide-eyed '60s lyrics) on "The Bold Arrow of Time" or offering up true psych-rock epic, replete with McCartneyesque bass, on "Runaway, Houses, City, Clouds." Tame Impala's Beatles costuming is handiest less because they're soundalikes (although vocalist Kevin Parker is at times a dead ringer for John Lennon) than because they share the older band's propensity for filtering big ideas through precision and economy. A six-minute song here can pass by like nothing at all.

This album is oozing with goddamned fun; it's hard to say what the best song of the crop is. I vote either the stoned-addictive "Lucidity," with its snakelike melody and ample cool, or the closing pop bliss move "I Don't Really Mind," enough of an infectious dazzler to call to mind your favorite garage rock nugget (or, naturally, early-to-midperiod Beatles 45). Whatever. If you love rock & roll and psychedelia, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot and feel the unqualified-awesome shimmer of this fantastic record. Indie rockers need a little more of the '60s in their juice, and folks stuck in the past need to hear what the youth are up to; what better and more delightful compromise could there be?

2 Many DJ's: As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2 (2002)

(PIAS)

You're looking at a mashup album, a mix tape with the twist of recontextualization, here aimed for dimly lit dance clubs with a cheery, almost masochistically over-the-top sense of fun. The rush of pleasure comes out of recognition of a zillion popular favorites; the secondary aristic appreciation is a gut-level wonder at how many records are being culled from at once, and how they are jumbled together into what sounds bizarrely logical. If the mashup album is a genre, As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2 could reasonably be described as one of two quintessential examples.

The other one? That would be Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a far more focused and linear fusion of Jay-Z and the Beatles, which was never legally released but virtually launched DM's career. But the mashup existed well before the 2000s; it is arguably an outgrowth of early underground hip hop. Sampling was so advanced and admirably reckless by the end of the '80s that records like the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (produced by the Dust Brothers) and De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising (Prince Paul) render every use of the tool thereafter nearly beside the point. Still, Beck's Odelay and the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust slowed down and discovered nuances in the tool that the feverishly paced earlier records were too drunken on a million possibilities to investigate. And a tool was what it remained; the sampling, the mixing, the tampering, the twiddling was a rush of interactive joy providing the backdrop to these performers creating something wholly unique, something beyond its sources.

Though I'd consider making a case for Paul's Boutique since nothing else the Beasties did came even close to its brilliance, the only great record that's actually about sampling, indeed the masterpiece of the "mashup" ideal before there was a mainstream term for it, is the Avalanches' Since I Left You. One of the reasons Since I Left You is so compelling is that it doesn't sample a damn thing you've ever heard of. Actually, it samples the sort of unloved leftovers you find in the fifty-cent bin at your local record store or goodwill: spoken word nonsense, easy-listening, obscure dusty soul, bad jazz, worse disco, worst Beautiful Music. It is the crafting of divinity from tripe, of something from nothing -- art, right?

So you can think of this 2 Many DJ's record as the same idea with another school of thought: the speed and pace of sampling is just as breakneck even if the rhythms and detail are less densely layered. The difference is that you've heard an awful lot of these records. Probably not all of them, sure; Erykah Badu's approval notwithstanding, the overlap of Emerson, Lake & Palmer (and/or Mancini) fans with Breeders fans, much less Basement Jaxx fans, remains miniscule. But anyone who has been alive and not living in a monastery at some point in the last forty years will recognize a significant number of the songs used on this album.

Rather than carving out an experience of its own like Since I Left You, and thus becoming a singular work, the 2 Many DJ's record draws upon the listener's emotions, culture, and experiences. The mashup trend of the 2000s relies muchly on a hardline view of pop music history -- it throws around touchstones, gems, and nearly-forgotten distractions of the prior fifty years and blips them in and out speedily, just enough time for that sheer rush of recognition. The latter is what all pop music DJ's thrive on, but I've always preferred the ones (and been the one) who let the songs play out untouched, little attention given to BPMs and mixer-melding. When in service of music like this, such trickery plays for me as almost cheap -- an easy way of proving one's adept genius at mixing and matching, a way of speeding up the process of enjoying music to a simple system of momentary impulses, button-pushed feelings.

There's value in that, to be sure, and the record is a fun listen. Once. I miss the feeling of something new laid on top of it, and moreover I'm distressed at the chronology drawn upon, in service of an eclectic but blind-spotted nostalgia that generally cuts off at the dawn of the MP3 age, nods to Destiny's Child and "Fuck the Pain Away" aside. We are much more in the service of "9 to 5" and "Oh Sheila" here; there is the notion of an underground in the form of, well, the Velvet one, but that savvy and prescience is locked away in 1967. I can't imagine the record would be much different released eight years later, when mass awareness of popular music has cut cleanly between those who really, really care and those who don't pay much attention at all. Radio Soulwax serves as a slightly disturbing reminder at how the communal experience of pop has been cut off at its knees since the dawn of the millennium. I usually don't miss it, but the magic-discs-in-The Time Machine quality of the permanent rotation and re-re-revision of past generations' keystone moments here is disheartening. Like listening to classic rock radio in 2010 that isn't aware the world kept moving after 1974 (in ways beyond Guns N Roses, AC/DC, and The Wall). There's nothing wrong with Top 40, but to so limit a joyous scope only serves to in turn limit future perception, untrue perception, about the worth and meaning of Western popular music. That's operating on the theory, of course, that the 2 Many DJ's record would prove an exception to this cutoff point, which I admit is probably not the case.

I hasten to add that I understand why this has accolades. I have nothing but admiration for the skill and calculated aural button-pushing required to put together something like this, which I'm certain was not easy. I can't identify with it because it feels like a celebration of music that it truncates, rather than a ruthless chopping-to-bits of it all into something genuinely new -- a rapid-fire flipping of the proverbial channels. And even when you're dancing, well, nonstop is nice. But the occasional tense, pregnant, giddy pause is better still.