She & Him: Volume Two (2010)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

What do you get if you take AM radio hits of the early '50s through the mid-'60s and drain them of all traces of subversion? The Carpenters, if you're unlucky. Otherwise, you might come up with this. Curiously, I'm finding, that's not really a complaint -- just an observation. She & Him craft a time warp stripped of context that's really about the cheekily oddball personalities who might think recreating AM gold is a great idea.

I do not come to this record with high expectations (hence the most-of-the-year delay in listening to it), but I find myself enjoying it a lot. She & Him's Volume One is an album that a lot of folks I know really love, but I never warmed to it. Although I'm a devoted fan of M. Ward, and usually of Zooey Deschanel's acting (at least in Almost Famous and The Good Girl), the record always seemed empty and bland to me, marred specifically by the somewhat by-the-numbers songwriting and production, the derivative but unconvincing performances, and most of all, Deschanel's unpracticed, hesitant, awkward voice. I see why it's charming but It Don't Charm Me.

To be frank, her voice itself isn't much better on the sequel, but the broad success that met She & Him two years ago has helped her: she comes across as plainly more confident, which makes this easier going. Better yet, Ward's involvement seems far more pronounced -- many of the backing tracks sound like M. Ward twists on established ideas rather than just hobbyist imitations of those ideas. But what really brings makes this a fun piece of work for me is the songcraft and production; Deschanel is leaps and bounds over where she was as a songwriter on the '08 LP, and the pair's assurance lends the songs a divine, irresistible shimmer.

The major convincer for me was the moment I found myself completely falling into "Over It Over Again." Positioned near the end of the album, it comes after several strong cuts, but it marked the moment when I felt my long-held convictions about this act mostly erode. For one thing, more suggestive of the Bangles than the Shirelles, it's a stretch for them, and with its sheer infectiousness and the incisive majesty of Ward's Roger McGuinn-like 12-string doodling, it actually implies something like love for the material, material that's been conceived and executed more carefully than I might have once suspected. "Home," a song that pulls more stunts and feels more complete than the entirety of Volume One, furthers the image with the revent, beautiful, ever-so-mildly tricky feel of the Beach Boys circa late '66. And Deschanel's melodicism -- if not her lyrics -- have visibly reached some level of expertise with "Don't Look Back," a distinctly '60s Laura Nyro homage that could convert or fool an expert in the field.

That's because Deschanel and Ward are experts, in the time they've spent adoring and dissecting the music from which they derive their ideas. But whereas a simple communication of that shared interest might have once been the goal, with much more of the world watching they've at least pressured themselves to raise to an equal artistic ambition with their heroes and heroines. I can say "doo wop-guitar hybrid, uplifting pop carousel, a gradual building to symphonic-pop contained catharsis" and be describing three different songs on the prior release, but here all of those apply to the casually crazed opener "Thieves," which is designed and played with enthuasism and strength, two elements virtually absent in this group's earlier effort. M. Ward fans will actually enjoy stuff like "Me and You," which features his guitar and stylistics bent lovingly for the echo-drenched retro Nashville sound, instead of grinning blankly through it wondering why the fuck. And while I had a soft spot for Zooey's Smokey, it must be said that she succeeds far less equivocally with her dead-ringer Connie Francis on the misty-eyed, undeniable cover of Theresa Brewer and/or Skeeter Davis' "Gonna Get Along without You," while she and Ward both triumph warmly on NRBQ's "Ridin' in My Car," a song which is as perfect a choice for this group as can be fathomed.

The largest victory here comes from M. Ward's production, which has abandoned the homemade generics of She & Him songs past. "Lingering Still" nearly sells itself as exotic pop pap recorded at Western or Gold Star for some Capitol lounge thingo in 1959; it doesn't just try to remind listeners of a Nancy Sinatra 45, it's inches away from being one. As the influences in the songs Deschanel is writing grow more antique and less obvious, as they perversely betray a more consistent voice, so does M. Ward's production acquire an impressive sheen of pop process that allows Brenda Lee bump and grind ("I'm Gonna Make It Better") to sit alongside dusty Dusty chamber pop ("Sing") and Patti Page schmaltz ("Brand New Shoes") without cloying, stuttering, or misdirecting. To boot, it's difficult to imagine Ward managing to find a way to present the communal choral of "Into the Sun" and disorienting prettiness of "If You Can't Sleep" with such aplomb when this was a new group. His accomplishment owes a great deal to the unabashed influence of lush period easy listening, which seems to be turning off a few fans of the slightly more ragged Volume One. Hey, if we're tossing out easy listening-influenced pop music, better let those copies of Pet Sounds, OK Computer, and Another Green World go, eh? Just saying.

Okay, but confession: I still can't quite get past Zooey Deschanel's voice. Look, I love unconventional singing. And Deschanel has improved vastly in the last two years; she knows herself and her limitations better, her voice has more stability and eclecticism, and she generally sounds like the celebration of her popcraft has offered a musical self-esteem boost. A quick listen to "Home" and "Ridin' in My Car" and any of the country-infected numbers (which actually glimpse Linda Ronstadt at times) beside anything from Volume One will illustrate a profound evoluton. But she still has that inescapable feeling and stigma of actor-turned-singer; even if her (correct) suspicion of the appeal of her songs and her modest rolling out of them is inspirational, admirable, that voice still has the thinness of the new.

Maybe that won't last either, but She & Him is hardly about virtuosity in any existing form or skill. What's curious about the youthful reaction to them is that nostalgia is the emotional key of their sound and vision. Regardless of the trad boy-girl lyrics, every one of the songs on both records is, because of the style and production, about a bygone universe that's beginning to bury itself in the memories of our parents and grandparents, a world that film and radio and TV celebrated and brought to life in our youth before it moved on to the expired obsessions and memories of a younger generation. Am I saying She & Him is about nostalgia for nostalgia? I am, and I'm also saying that I am at last beginning to understand why that's fun, emotionally affecting, and even.. gulp... interesting. This isn't a life-changing record, but for me as a onetime She & Him agnostic, it's one of the nicest surprises of 2010.

3 Mustaphas 3: Soup of the Century (1990)

(Rykodisc)

!! CAUTION !!

Let's get this out of the way: world music is not really a thing. Even the divisions of the term are too broad -- sure, you might say you dig African music, but of what region? What style? Groups that are billed as world music tend to be designed for those who like the idea but lack the patience required to actually learn anything about it. That's not meant as pejorative, but it's likely that those with a passion for non-AngloAmerican musics will be unimpressed with the result.

3 Mustaphas 3 is the kind of band that has a false "back story," the kind of band who gets a "grab bag" descriptor in most writeups. They get fawned over for writing Tejano songs with a klezmer bent, or country songs in Japanese about exotic food, Middle Eastern music played by dorky Britons. But this is eclecticism for its own sake and doesn't offer memorable enough creative elements of its own to be meaningful.

Most of the songs are either instrumental or sung in various other languages, which is a relief since the English lyrics are just the kind of precious "quirk" that Yonder Mountain String Band fans should enjoy. The biggest problem with the record, for me, is its production, which has all the arid cleanliness of the worst sonic advancements of its time; I'm not a "warmth" obsessive but the music just sounds so digital, and it's not interesting enough to overcome that.

3 Mustaphas 3 often get credit from their cult for "blending" styles the way Asylum Street Spankers or Andrew Bird later would; I concede that the dated production is one of the elements that hurts this claim for me, but much more importantly, Soup of the Century feels like a sampler of what sorts of music from all over the world, Scotland to Greece to Mexico to Bostwana, fuse well together in their core form. I fail to see where the bent that would give these fusions an identity appears, but maybe I just need to learn a few more languages and to accept unrelenting goofiness as a match for expert musicianship, which I have a hard time with. (I mean, isn't any musical genre at its best when it illustrates complex emotion instead of functioning for its own sake to impress someone? I digress.)

I do really like the song title "This City Is Very Exciting!" but regardless, this one's going in the reject pile.

[Editorial Note: This will be the last "archival" review for several weeks. I have a ginormous backlog of new albums I want to listen to and write up, and if I'm to get them finished by the end of the year I must buckle down. Thus, for the time being, this weblog will be reviewing 2010 releases only. Sometime in December we will return to the regular pattern of a new album followed swiftly by an old one.]

Best Coast: Crazy for You (2010)

(Mexican Summer)

RECOMMENDED

Bethany Cosentino's songs are dynamite, upgrading the tremendous shimmer, largeness, and beauty of Phil Spector and the girl groups to the era of high fuzz and low fidelity, augmenting songs in the style of the Ronettes and the Shirelles with blazing, distorted guitars and an incessant, stoked California buzz. Within modest means, she evokes the biggest, most powerful primary-color ideas in pop music, thereby offering shorthand for how the creation of rock & roll has refined itself in the last forty years. Indeed, with nothing but the most miniscule push from her tiny label, Cosentino's debut album with her band Best Coast entered the top forty. Unfortunately, these ingratiating, deightful songs backdrop some of the laziest, most anonymous vocals and juvenile lyrics I can recall.

Crazy for You comes throttling out of the gate with the in-most-ways-incredible "Boyfriend"; above a circus of gloriously backward-looking noises, Cosentino pulls out a perfect Ronnie Spector inflection (which is the most expressive her voice ever gets) as she announces her intentions to shove aside the other, skinnier girl with "the college degree." Elsewhere, she is adept at channeling circa-1963 Beach Boys ("Summer Mood") only with abrasive vocals that cross the unemotive intensity of Nico with the casual machismo of Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde or Debbie Harry (sans irony); the classic echo-ridden Wall of Sound on "Our Deal"; the chunky, sensual, deceptively simple lurching of the best and most dramatic surf music on "I Want To," which builds to masterfully schlocky teenage symphony; "Honey" moves toward the tricky hooks and adventurous texture of the Barracudas or Pixies; and "Happy" is a semi-successful stab at crackhead Dion. If you are any kind of a '60s-phile, chances are you will find plenty to love here; the tracks like "When the Sun Don't Shine" that are actually simple to the point of stupid tend to be the exception, although the classic riff on "Bratty B" can't really compensate for the feeling that it's being presented by little teenage emo girls in a band formed specifically to sing about replacing some jerk ex-boyfriend's t-shirt.

So let me preface this by saying that this is exactly the kind of music I love; therefore, the extent to which I'm troubled by the words is a testament to how awful they are. Cosentino is receiving more attention than any female performer in recent indie-rock memory, and is doing so with songs that are, nearly without exception, about "boys." The supreme nature and immense complication of boys when they are in her life, the desperate yearning for boys when they're not, the pall that a lack of a boy casts over all other elements of life, and generally a horizon that goes no farther than boys and the many things they have to offer, beginning and not ending with the tuneful feedback-alongs they inspire. And pretty much, boys.

You might wonder how this is different from the majority of pop music; isn't it all about the quest to get into a romantic entanglement and the lamenting of the condition of said entanglements? Well, okay, here are a few choice sentiments, across songs that are really a half hour's worth of variations on a theme: "There's nothing worse than sitting all alone waiting by the phone" ("Boyfriend"); "Maybe I'm just crazy / Maybe I'm just crazy / Maybe I'm just crazy / Maybe I'm just crazy / Crazy for you, baby" ("Crazy for You"); "How you / How you / How you'd be home soon / How you [...] He was / He was nice and cute / But he / He wasn't you" ("The End"); "I wish my cat could talk [...] Nothing makes me happy / Not even TV and a bunch of weed" ("Goodbye"); "I want to talk / About my day / It really sucked" ("Bratty B"); "All I do is think about you / Ooh-ooh la-la-la-la" ("Each and Every Day"). And in the record's best song, actually a "bonus track" apparently, the incredibly persuasive girl-group ripoff "When I'm with You," she hates, hates, hates sleeping alone and remembers how her mom told her there'd be boys like you. Yikes. The lyrics consistently lack any irony or sense of enigma; there's nothing there beyond the explicit. No problem with naked emotion on this end, except there's naked emotion (assuming none of this is market-embracing fakery) and then there's naked emotion unfiltered through any lyricism and artistic restraint.

Still, is this any worse than the lyrics Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, the Shangri-Las, etc. were forced to sing? Probably not, but Cosentino is not Ronnie Spector or Darlene Love. She hasn't even a fraction of their vocal skill or nuance, that which would be required to elevate the banalities of vastly projected personal emotions to something trascendent, idiosyncratic, moving. If anything, her closest ancestor is Stephen Malkmus, who as a diehard Pavement fan I'm willing to call a (deliberately) lazy singer. Malkmus also wrote some of the most confoundingly brilliant, witty, surrealistic lyrics in rock history. He did not sing about how empty his bed felt without a girl -- a valid sentiment, but an entire album centered around it by Malkmus or virtually any man would strike me as impossibly creepy. But equal opportunity is my aim, for I think Consentino comes off as a fucking codependent creeper too.

Throughout Crazy for You, the creeper's voice floats loudly above everything else, to the point that it makes it impossible to ignore for the discerning among us who'd be happy with this album for its production and performances alone. The lyrics are too much to get past. I hate sleeping alone, too, and everyone has the inalienable right to that emotion at some time in their lives. Lord knows that a person's actual instability is more telling than a behind-the-scenes producer's interpretation of female insecurities, but freeing them of any artful abstraction perversely renders them difficult to relate to, however universal their crux may be. I loathe the widespread media discomfort with women who display lustiness, crushiness, sexuality the same way men are expected to. In Bringing Up Baby, a film hardly from the age of women's lib, Katharine Hepburn doggedly pursues (and thoroughly controls) Cary Grant -- not a real-life scenario, but as wonderful and appealing a fantasy as any male-centric sci-fi world of buxom ladies. Lovelorn feelings, emotional loss and neediness and insecurity at the loss or lack of a mate -- these things don't define us, hopefully, but they do chase most of us at one time or another.

And I love hearing them expressed eloquently in pop music. You know who does that? Lots of people, but one female performer who comes to mind who released an album in 2010 that is exceptional and didn't get a shred of the attention afforded Crazy for You is Josephine Olausson, lead singer and keyboardist of Sweden's tremendous Love Is All. Olausson is an avowed Best Coast fan, to be fair, but the difference between her detailed, impassioned "A Side in a Bed" ("I want a seat by a table [...] I want a place in somebody's head / I Want my head resting on a lap / I want dirty dishes for two [...] I want to be somebody's favorite") and Best Coast's "Boyfriend" ("One day I'll make him mine / And we'll be together all the time / We'll sit and watch the sun rise / And gaze into each other's eyes / And know that he knows / That he wants to be my boyfriend") is like the difference between an E.E. Cummings poem and a Facebook love note. Criminally, Olausson's words are much more difficult to hear, but it's OK because her singing has, you know, character. I'd so much rather the alienated young folks (and blog buzz) attached themselves to Love Is All, or Janelle Monáe, or Alice freaking Glass, or -- going back to the more established world, because why not? -- Joanna Newsom, or Leslie Feist, or Jenny Lewis, or Neko Case, or Cat Power, or etc etc etc etc etc. You can debate the merits of all of the above, fine, but you have to admit that none of them could be mistaken for a third-hand media-savvy creation like Avril Lavigne ("Don't pretend, I think you know / I'm damn precious / And hell yeah / I'm the motherfuckin' princess / I can tell you like me too / And you know I'm right"). The most generic manufacturing is sometimes easily mistaken for the nakedest, least crafted feeling, lest we forget.

As you've likely deduced, that "recommended" tag up there is against all of my better judgment, because honestly Cosentino is existing in the groove of my life here -- I connect so strongly with the music she's copying that I can't help but get a thrill from her aping and slight repositioning of it. She deserves accolades for her economy, too; the whole mess runs barely thirty minutes, and only one track (one of the best, too, "Honey") exceeds three. Besides, according to a comment on the songmeanings.net page for "Boyfriend," "i love this song not only because its really good but also because it explains how girls feel about their guy friends sometimes." How can I argue with that.

The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

(Verve)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It's kind of a miracle that hip cachet has remained with this album after all this time; the knee-jerk reaction to it in 1967 seems like it would be identical today. What kind of wankers put out a record with a shitty conceptual "pop art" cover like this? And oh god, liner notes describing "happenings" and all that nonsense, photos of the band in these nonchalant poses with sunglasses. And they have a "chanteuse." How, one might wonder, is it any different from a thousand other low-tier psych-rock bands of the period?

But psych-rock is a red herring here, and so is 1967. This album was recorded and should have been released a year earlier, in which case it would be not just an alternative landmark but an earth-shakingly innovative effort. By '67, the rock world hadn't caught up, but it was inches closer. Not the band's fault. Still, there's that damned cover. Andy Warhol was a showman who doesn't seem suited for rock & roll; is it likely he was a supporter of the Velvets' aesthetic? The Velvet Underground's separation from the peers and the places where they stood by the late '60s was their dogged belief in rock & roll as originally conceived. Warhol probably saw the VU as a vehicle, a representation for his own notions of popular music, a channel for his ideas more than a sovereign entity? But luckily, they weren't having it, album cover aside. And without Warhol, they might have floundered as perpetual NYC garage secret for all eternity.

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the event that gave rise to this infamous collaboration, is the best idea Warhol ever had. Commanding and unrelenting, loud and unforgiving and demonic, it shattered the audience by removing all familiarity and placing the room in an apocalyptic (and artless) state. The band and dancers played on a stage with Warhol's goofy, disorienting films playing behind them. Sometimes a woman would jump out into the audience and scream unsettling questions ("DOES HE EAT YOU OUT?") at random people. Of course much of the crowd would be annoyed by the whole business, a few people would actually be disturbed, and some would take it all in, hypnotized. That's one form of rock & roll, but the soul of the Velvets is prefaced most obviously by a man whose world seems thoroughly divorced from the surrealistic pretensions of the EPI: Chuck Berry.

Berry is the man who first fused literary ambitions, poetry and eloquence, with fuzzy, clanging guitar. The Velvet Underground simply plugged the idea in and kept pushing it until it exploded. Warhol wanted them to be pure "threat," and theirs were hardly the most inviting sound, but it hid nuance, sophistication, cleverness beyond what the Doors and the Airplane would be offering in the next four years. The screeching viola, the feedback, the ritualistic drums gave them their signatures and their eclecticism, but what made the Velvets a touchstone was their restlessness, their intelligence, their committment to the rawest, basest rock & roll, and most of all, the songs. The strongest sampler is this, their debut album; for all its flaws (it is the least satisfying of their four original LPs), it presents the ideal Velvet manifesto. Hear it in mono if you can. The stereo version isn't awful but is poorly engineered compared to the appealingly frayed sound of the mono mix, which is now widely available so there's no reason you can't reach it.

You can hear the entire album in one of its songs. "Heroin," more than likely the most potent anti-drug song to come from any rock performer, is violently manipulative and teasing, opening as a somber funeral march with desperate crooning of stunningly felt addiction-psychodrama lyrics by Lou Reed. Then the pounding picks up, the words' connection to reality blurs and weakens, the intensity builds and falls and builds and within seven minutes the whole foundation collapses and bursts. The fine, bluesy rockers of Side One had to come before "Heroin" or else they would seem inconsequential. As it stands, both are part of a prelude to a harrowing drama: Reed's streetwise confidence, so fragile and tattered on "Heroin," is in full swing on "I'm Waiting for the Man" (about scoring dope in Harlem) and "Run Run Run" (a fast-paced illustration and lament of alleyway oddballs from Seasick Sara to Beardless Harry).

Generally, the gentleness or abrasiveness is more focused than on "Heroin." At the core, the Velvet Underground is almost from the Phil Spector school of songwriting, paranoid documents like "Sunday Morning" swooning with melody. "There She Goes Again," copping its riff from Marvin Gaye's "Hitchhike," doesn't bother to hide the debut: it's a blatant girl group song, a compelling, harsh essay on boy/girl love, need, hate, and violence. Musically, the Velvets aim for the jugular, their antecedents obvious, but their obsession with going farther than is expected in the rock & roll framework is both their innovation and their portrait of where a more conscientious, artful base of mainstream performers may have taken the genre: the band's comprehension that the limits to their music exist for a specific reason, and limits to the subject matter and nature of their lyrics are baseless, is the reason they are considered pioneers. But they're impressive today because their focus was so easy to corrupt, their sound so formless and mutant; what's scary is that the softest songs are tied up in a feedback-ridden package that oozes with lust but also reels you in with hooks and choruses and guitars worthy of the Beatles or the Byrds. The Velvets are those bands plus the Who (times a thousand), the Stones, Berry, and Bo Diddley all rolled into one mammoth force. Sonically, there is no avoiding them. You hear them and it will affect you somehow.

The band's musical prowess is a part of this feat -- Reed and Sterling Morrison's maverick guitar work, John Cale's wild bass playing and wilder viola stabs, and more than anything Maureen Tucker's crazed, precise but manic drumming. When Tucker is behind the kit you don't know whether to dance, run away, march, or fire your rifle -- but the biggest credit goes to Lou as a songwriter. He was and remains a remarkable creature, for certain one of the all-time best and most cerebral lyricists in rock music. The S&M fantasy in "Venus in Furs," the bizarre imagery of "The Black Angel's Death Song," and particularly the bracing complexity of "Heroin" and equally bracing simplicity of "Femme Fatale," skirt clichés with glee and aplomb, and Reed -- an underrated, masterful rock vocalist -- sings most of them with a palpable joy that he's doing his best, and failing, to hide behind the shades.

Hidden beneath the menacing aural stomp of "Venus in Furs" is a song of delicate beauty and undeniably sexual power. Restraint never being the band's strong suit, the production pushes it beyond subtlety into a universe where the viola is a symbol of evil. Remove either the dirty but ornate production or the sensual melody and you'd have something nice, but it would not be the Velevt Underground. And of course the aforementioned "Sunday Morning," "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Run Run Run," "There She Goes Again" -- all seeming like the closest the '60s offered to the primal pleasures and raw emotion of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, met with a forward-thinking ambition and crucial false ambivalence. That's called "attitude." The Velvets were the heirs to rock & roll, not to "art rock," a fact which may have made their cutting of ties with Warhol inevitable.

Warhol had time to slap his name on this album and force the band to take in a German chanteuse he fancied, Nico, famous for her modeling and a walk-on in La Dolce Vita -- everything but her voice. Whatever the band's feelings about her, her legend was forever fused with theirs by this record and its preceding singles, both of which featured her prominently on the A-side. Nico was foisted on the VU and was not the ideal method of expression for some of Lou's songs, at least "Femme Fatale," on which she reportedly wanted to sound "like Baab Dee-lan" but never quite came off, but there is a strange, baroque perfection to her involvement here. (And her accidental music career would prove fruitful in the years following her departure from the Velvets' camp.) The creeping, smirking classic "All Tomorrow's Parties" -- a distinctly '60s masterpiece if ever there was one -- is impossible to imagine without her.

The other two Nico songs are more of the instantaneous standards Reed was capable of churning out with startling speed. "Femme Fatale" is a song that could only have been written out of immense hatred and bitterness, "I'll Be Your Mirror" a love song that could not possibly come from the mind of a man who didn't mean it. These are two of the most sincere testaments in pop music history, the latter among the most beautiful love songs of the rock era; when Reed sings them on Live at Max's and other stage recordings, you feel his attachment to the words and melodies. Nico sounds appreciably sincere on "Mirror" but botches "Fatale," and yet the songs are so strong it scarcely matters.

As a statement of purpose, The Velvet Underground & Nico tries a bit too hard to be different, but this was a point worth pursuing to establish a foothold in the then-highly competitive rock marketplace. They didn't make it, but in the hearts of those who discovered them in time, the Velvet Underground reignited the garage band as the American ideal; by crafting literate, unrestrained, maxed-out rock & roll, they by default became the greatest in their field. And they'd only get better after this, freed from the limits of the Warhol camp.

To boot, they would learn more about themselves. The loud, repetitive, long closing track "European Son" is manufactured insanity, with a great riff but a sense of tight, canned routine in its attempted wild shapelessness. As an avant garde experiment, it's not nearly as shocking as intended, as Cale himself would later point out -- just tame and contrived. One doesn't doubt that the band could infuse these creative urges with the same conviction that lighted the hummable pop tunes of this LP, and of course they'd prove it soon enough across three of the most wildly wonderful and smart albums in rock & roll. But every extremity is explored in some sense here, and it's unbeatable as a starting point in an appreciation of one of the maverick forces in U.S. rock.

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

The Extra Lens: Undercard (2010)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Now that the Mountain Goats are a capitalized Big Deal, it's hard to remember a time when a John Darnielle song with a complex, full-band arrangement was an unprecedented event. But back in 2002 when he and his school friend Franklin Bruno released Martial Arts Weekend as the Extra Glenns, it was a jarring deviation from the norm of Darnielle's home recorded tapes of legend, on which he shouted to be heard over the hiss. The Glenns' album sounded restrained, professional, even slick at times; it also had the immediacy and precision of real collaboration, met with the depth and nuance of Darnielle's usual songwriting. One can't really know if this was the beginning of the shift that would create Tallhassee, The Sunset Tree, and Darnielle's other subsquent releases, but it definitely comes off that way.

These days, Goats records are far more intricate than they were ten years ago; last year's The Life of the World to Come was a moody, complex conceptual piece, its songs far more carefully crafted than one once would have expected from Darnielle's frontier cassette recorder days. Not only is this a mark of a change in his interests, it's a reflection of the fact that the Mountain Goats are now an actual band -- and to boot, albeit unofficially, Bruno is a part of it on most studio and live performances. As such, the difference between the Extra Glenns and the Mountain Goats seems suddenly as hard to define as the difference between the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the Magnetic Fields.

Oh, and they've also signed to Merge Records and lost two letters for unknown reasons (Darnielle claims that they "rotted") to become the Extra Lens. But Martial Arts Weekend is such a consistently pleasurable, touching album that one can't help but greet the semi-revival of the name with excitement. The result, Undercard, is unsurprising; viewed in the context of its predecessor, it's a slight scaling back of arrangements and immediacy. Viewed in the context of the Mountain Goats, it's pretty much a Mountain Goats album, a mild step back from the bold, lyrical, thematically driven Life of the World to Come and back into Darnielle's land of brief, stabbing character portraits.

It was once said (by Bruno, I believe) that an Extra Glenns song was a Mountain Goats song with more than two chords. Now that a Mountain Goats song with more than two chords is, well, a Mountain Goats song, the side-projecty Extra Lens name mostly allows Darnielle to loosen up a bit in the vein of his earlier work and even sing a song or two he didn't write -- in this case, Randy Newman's "In Germany Before the War." Bruno's songs (one of which, "Some Other Way," has Darnielle threatening suicide for an ex-lover's sake in a tale that could easily be mistaken for pre-2002 Mountain Goats), melodic contributions and arrangements gel perfectly with Darnielle's sensibilities -- almost too perfectly to make a distinction. Only three songs here seem to be in a significantly different league than the stuff Darnielle's been doing with the Goats for the last four or five years. The Newman cover is the most obvious, banking on the M-agery with stark, eerie production and hushed vocals that seem to take a macabre thrill in the subject matter. Disregarding the chirpy singing, the financial crisis jam "Rockin' Rockin' Twilight of the Gods" is dangerously close to commercial alternative rock -- clipped, hook-filled, and quite entertaining, although it embodies some of Darnielle's most pedestrian, bizarre lyrics. The album's final cut, "Dogs of Clinic 17" -- one of several tracks with heavy prison imagery -- comes off like some intellectual deconstruction of riff-rock, the guitars clean and dry, the notes of discordance rare.

But even though a couple of the best tracks here were fully composed by his bandmate, you came for the new John Darnielle songs more than you probably came to hear what Frank Bruno's up to (sorry, Mr. Bruno, no offense), and you're unlikely to be let down. Here he is on "Only Existing Footage" connecting dots with a truckload of filmmaking trials and metaphors ("Lousy continuity, the coats won't match from shot to shot"); wandering a lonely netherworld of canned foods and cell phones on "Programmed Cell Death" ("I wore my suit from Hong Kong to the store tonight / 'Cause it fits me just right"); here he is on "Cruiserweights" boxing for his life ("Take a couple of shots right to the liver / Then remember what the food was like in prison"); and on "Ambivalent Landscape Z," here he is taking Lennonesque pleasure in turning a fallout shelter into "a shelter to fall out in." One of the strongest moments is the vague, powerful "Tug on the Line," a wispy, nearly inaudible ballad of a family fishing trip which yields some triumph or grotesquerie, it's hard to tell which, the stricken shorthand note of a rapid coming-of-age expressed more beautifully than in a hundred young adult novels. As ever, Darnielle's gravest minimalisms reveal his true literary brilliance -- and what nails it is his attention to detail. These songs in particular are almost nothing but detail, which makes them all the more affecting (and fascinating).

Two of my three favorite tracks here -- the other one is Franklin Bruno's "Communicating Doors" ("I know people who dig up graves just to label the bones"), chiefly because it carries one of the loveliest, most lilting melodies Darnielle has yet to sing -- come in flash-fiction bursts that reveal and tell a staggering, enticing, please-go-on amount, each in less than two minutes. The opening guitar burst "Adultery" captures rapid fire Polaroid photos to back up its title ("I'm standing in the same spot where your husband stood"), while Bruno's unforgettable, shattering "How I Left the Ministry" carries a similar tale (the same tale?) to its inevitably tragic, tremendous conclusion: a heart she draws on his leg with her finger as he drives ("My god, what an infantile gesture... my god, what an indescribable high") distracts him enough to forget where the brakes are located. The song cuts to black just before the payoff, leaving us reeling; I almost wish it were positioned as the finale here.

Even if this isn't the revelation Martial Arts Weekend was, it's a model of the increasingly underrated virtue of consistency. I don't know that all the compartmentalization is necessary, though; I have the slightest instinct that his current Mountain Goats records, great as they are, could use a bit of the levity evidenced here. And I wouldn't mind if John Darnielle covered a song more than once a decade, even if "In Germany Before the War" isn't as stunning as the Glenns' take on Leonard Cohen's "Memories." But all this griping is just minor on the face of this formidable gift for storytelling and musical illustration, a gift that continues to serve him and his audience marvelously, as I'm sure it will for years to come.

Oasis: The Early Years (1992-95)

(bootleg)

Forgetting for a moment that you think Noel and Liam Gallagher are wankers, what was Oasis exactly? Some say charlatans or ripoff artists, but I say masters of muscular, anthemic pure pop music. The reason I care about an unauthorized recording of their demos circa 1992 is that I believe in what Oasis was founded to put across: meaty, hook-filled, uncomplicated rock & roll with a highly melodic streak, configured for mass appeal. And to hear how they arrived at the formula that crafted a short-lived streak of unpretentious mastery is, for me as a pop fan, irresistible.

With that said, this is of more interest as a portrait of band's creation than it is as acttual pleasure, particularly since much of it predates Noel Gallagher's emergence as a compelling songwriter. The recording is presented in three stages -- we begin with a low-quality, decently performed demo, not the famous one that got them signed to Creation Records a bit later, but a roughshod one consisting of songs that the band did not rework. These are very much of their time, somewhere between imitation-shoegaze and high school garage band punk. The songs are competent enough, but generic; the opening track, "Colour My Life," sets the stage. There are no Gallagher hooks, and Noel's lyrics ("My shapes of confusion dig holes of frustration") are worthless, his voice unsuited to the material.

"Take Me" is a slight improvement with Liam taking the reins, his quaint arrogance already bleeding through. The song is built on giants of the period (Nirvana, Pixies, Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Catherine Wheel, etc.); it doesn't sound much like Oasis. These tracks are harder, sludgier, more lo-fi than what the band's known for (on "See the Sun," they could pass for big dumb stoner rock), and this isn't where their abilites lay.

After the outlier of the riff-oriented "Snakebite," two songs give some clue to the sound Oasis would soon establish. "Must Be the Music" and "Better Let You Know," though the former has more than a shade of Golden Earring, provides some evidence of the germ that would -- astonishingly soon -- develop into "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Live Forever." What's odd is that the supreme confidence with which Liam's often excruciating voice would soon be presented to the world has yet to appear at this stage. His vocals are buried on one, distorted beyond recognition on the other, precisely the sort of hemming and hawing that the band at their height would adamantly oppose.

The second stage of the disc isn't nearly as interesting or listenable. It consists of several live cuts, some of them duplicates of the demos. Liam is insufferable here, apparently not yet familiar with his own vocal limitations. The acoustic horror "Live in Vain" smacks of someone's first pass at songwriting, and was rightly left buried; by bursting out of the gate with the songs and LP they produced in 1994, Oasis erased all memory of nonsense like this. I do confess an instant soft spot for "I'll Show You," which sounds like classic late '80s jangle pop, only with -- alas -- obnoxious fucking vocals. The live set closes out with a couple of unlabeled fragments that sound like a John Mellencamp rehearsal, plus an endless instrumental take on "Fade Away" to which I have yet to manage a complete listen. Go ahead, try it.

By default and a longshot, the third and final portion of this collection is the best, but also has the least to do with the rest -- not to mention its very title. The three closing tracks are a Noel solo acoustic performance from the mid-'90s (not "early" by any stretch), after the band had been well-established. It does provide an interesting contrast and reminder of where all this mess was heading, which can lend a bit of much-needed magic to the muddy inconsequentials that make up the bulk of the disc. They also prove that Noel is many times the singer Liam is. Liam may know his way around a hook, but Noel wrings unheard-of emotion from these songs. I'd actually forgotten how wonderful "Cast No Shadow" was until hearing this version; fans won't be surprised by the loveliness of the stripped-down "Don't Look Back in Anger" (tied with "Live Forever," in my opinion, as Oasis' finest song) or "Wonderwall," but I found the indisputable evolutionary evidence a treat.

So the actual Early Years material you only need if you're an obsessive, but anyone who loves a fine melody beautifully presented needs these Noel Gallagher acoustic cuts. Perhaps a one-man tour is in the cards? I'm there.

Old 97's: The Grand Theatre, Volume One (2010)

(New West)

For me, Old 97's are on a level with Radiohead, Pavement, and the Magnetic Fields as just about the best rock band to emerge in the '90s (and yes, I am aware Stephin Merritt would oppose his characterization as being part of a "rock band"). Heartfelt, angry, country-tinged romanticists, these Texas boys have all the sky-gazing conviction of purest, basest '50s rock & roll, all the crazed abandon of the Replacements, and all the detailed storytelling prowess of the Kinks or Neil Young. Rhett Miller's heartbreak is as real and vividly expressed as Smokey Robinson's, his put-upon wit as sharp as Neil Tennant's. They are, in short, everything you ought to want. And in 2010, they are starting to come off as tired.

It hurts me to say some of this about a band I admire so deeply, a band I've plugged incessantly for years, a band whose records I want everyone to buy, this one included, just so they'll know people care. Let me express quickly that they have not released a bad album here; if I was unfamiliar with their older work, I might actually love it. Their arrangements, writing, and performances are as tight as ever, if maybe a bit less impassioned. And these guys are S-M-A-R-T, I'd argue as smart as any of the other three I named in the first line as their '90s equals, and in my opinion smarter than at least one of them (which I won't name). Any sound or quirk or ambiguity you hear in the emotion or structure of a record, they probably put there on purpose. If they sound weary, it's likely because they mean to. But I'm going to risk coming off like an asshole and give my version of why I feel they're losing me a bit.

Old 97's are an exception to a lot of rules. They were the best band in their given subgenre but they did not turn out to be the most successful, or even widely successful at all, remaining a just-under-the-radar cult band that, in the pre-Internet days, would've been on a level of national acclaim and public indifference with the Replacements; and in the pre-fanzine world, on a level of complete unjust anonymity with Big Star. Most importantly, they've spent most of their career as an indie rock band but recorded their three best albums for a major label, Elektra, which signed them in the heat of a curious notion that Alt-Country was destined to become the next Grunge.

The albums before the Elektra contract -- Hitchhike to Rhome and Wreck Your Life -- have a number of classics, as do the albums since: Drag It Up, Blame It on Gravity (a mood piece I spent a lot of time defending), and now The Grand Theatre, Volume One, first half of a projected double. But the grand statements come in larger sizes on the three major LPs: Too Far to Care (raw, youthful, manic depressive), Fight Songs (confident, alternative, manic depressive), and Satellite Rides (grandly written, power poppy, manic depressive). The Elektra albums plotted the band on a gradual trend from drunken-on-late-night-possibilities Texas twang to expertly crafted, multilayered, gently emotional pop music. Most importantly, there's something imperceptibly wonderful about listening to those three records; they're alive, evocative, and full of gifts.

The chief problem with Old 97's in their post-major period has seemingly been a reluctance to give in to evolution; each of the first five albums was markedly different than everything before it, showing off growth and experimentation. As performers, the 97's still seem like kings; few reports from their concerts are not ecstastic. As songwriters, Rhett plus his gifted cohorts (Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea, Phillip Peeples) have never stopped bringing it; Drag It Up and BIOG only felt like letdowns for what seemed like a tiresome insistency about the idea of "going back" to the band's roots and "recapturing" the intensity of Too Far to Care. A central problem I can't imagine these guys aren't aware of is that "recapturing" anything is diametrically opposed to what works in rock & roll.

So it is with Grand Theatre: advance publicity hypes the ambition to rechannel The Urgency of classic Old 97's, all the same stuff advance publicity hyped last time. Critical reviews have it as the best thing they've done it years, just like reviews last time (when do these "years" begin and end, one wonders?), and cultists decry that it's not country enough, which is what they've been prattling on uselessly about since 1999. Listening to the album offers an experience that none of these reactions suggest: familiarity. The songs are Old 97's songs, their composition and production vividly tailored to generate memories of (or ape) this or that classic of their catalog, but barely any of them sound new. The ones that do seem suggestive, much like the best songs on BIOG and especially Drag It Up, of a capability for stronger material that the band still possesses but that they're reluctant, for whatever reason, to exploit, too determined to (or stuck on?) being what people what them to be, and not necessarily pulling that off either. The record becomes a compromise that will please few people who actually love the band, and which I'm reluctant to believe pleases the band either.

The economy for a rock band approaching the start of its third decade being what it is, I'm worried that they've grown afraid of taking risks; I'd have expected they were too smart to fall into that, but I'd have expected the same of lots of bands it's happened to. Much of the new album sounds like a set of examples of what they believe Old 97's are "supposed" to sound like. "The Magician" is a middle-tier song but it's made up and flaunted like it's "If My Heart Was a Car," which crushes it under the weight of trying too hard. The enthusiastic manufactured-show-stopper "A State of Texas," which is a dead ringer for "Timebomb," is a catalog of alt-country clichés: "I'm living in a state of Texas / And Texas lives in me."

There's nothing actually wrong with sticking to a signature sound; Rhett has two excellent songs here, his best in some time, that are instant classics and both could be on any prior Old 97's full-length. "Let the Whisky Take the Reins" is delicate, instantaneously affecting lonesome country -- hoarsely sung and self-deprecating but convincingly outlaw: the lament of the badass male hero who knows he's fucked up. Nearly as strong: "The Beauty Marks," a hushed, trippy widescreen drama that could've fit on the soundtrack to The Last Picture Show. Both songs are whispered, as fragile as the best song of the band's post-major period, "In the Satellite Rides a Star." The key is that these are unforced; they don't tread new ground for the group, but they feel natural and organic.

It's a mistake to overlook the willingness to expand that still remains here. Unfortunately, sometimes the band's forward pole-vaults lead them in a direction that simply doesn't suit them. This record's sole absolute dud is the lusty stalker-shuffle "The Dance Class," which comes off like a really bad musical number wedged into the movie Talk to Her. Other problems could have been repaired neatly with a few extra rewrites (not rehearsals, which they still don't need): "Every Night Is Friday Night (Without You)" finds the band doing a respectable job of cutting loose on the pop sound, but the lyrics are terrible ("I was dumb as a rock / I could not read a clock"), thus short-circuiting part of the appeal of their finest moments. The nearly great "Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving" opens as routine road-movie music then falls into a delightfully tricky, memorable Eddie Cochran-quoting interlude that leaves the rest of the song far behind, gasping for air.

As ever, bassist and secondary vocalist Murry Hammond can be counted on as a consistent joy, whatever the rest of a given album is like. "You Were Born to Be in Battle" is a surprisingly convincing Johnny Cash imitation, marred only by a rote Tex-Mex arrangement lacking the emotional depth of Hammond's best cuts. But (not for the first time), he also contributes the highlight of Volume One in the form of "You Smoke Too Much." The most distinctly "New" Old 97's track in some time, this slice of Lovin' Spoonful-ish pop heaven with twang is where I wish this band would let themselves go. Not that they'll ever read this, but please guys, more like this.

None of the other songs will surprise the longtime fan. The title track is a classic Rhett Miller singalong, in the vaguely menacing vein of "The New Kid," awkwardly pastiched with the band's mid-'90s sound. "Champaign, Illinois" is a (credited) Bob Dylan rewrite that will please alt-country obsessives. And "Love Is What You Are" is well-sung but boring balladry in the fashion of Miller's solo work. All of these songs came from the same sessions, and those produced much of what will be released as Vol. 2, with the result that it's difficult to discern what that record will be like. The band initially wanted a double album with twenty-odd tracks but thought better of it. Some are murmuring that such a configuration would have helped these songs, but I'm not so sure. The weakest cuts don't bother me so much as the mediocre ones like "A State of Texas," "Love Is What You Are," and "The Magician," and their problems are self-contained enough that even the mighty force of recontextualization wouldn't help them, unless -- I hasten to add -- I were a new fan unfamiliar with Too Far to Care, which might make the songs sound fresher.

The Grand Theatre, Vol. 2, despite the sequel-syndrome its title evokes, will be a crucial Old 97's record for me, as it's probably the one that will decide for me if I'm still going to follow their new records as devotedly as I have been. I wonder currently if the time's finally passed that they'll really be able to put out an artistically triumphant, impressive LP. It's been almost ten years, but songs like "You Smoke Too Much" and "The Beauty Marks" give me hope that these four heroes have more yet to prove to us, and that they've still got the fight in them.