Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde (2011)

(Fat Possum)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Guitar bands are always throwbacks, and yet they're always so very now. Chicago's Smith Westerns are disinterested in replication of a sound; their jolt of freshfaced, effortlessly hook-gushing power pop is a note of solidarity, for all its distortions and embellishments, with the permanent elegance of rock music's most basic strands. And that's why they are impressive, a wonderful force to hear and behold, and that's why their new record Dye It Blonde is the first album in ages that I've owned on vinyl within twenty-four hours of first hearing it. Without question, this will be (in my world, at least) The Record of this spring.

None of this is to say that the Smith Westerns don't have old ideas to recontextualize and play with; for certain, they mean to toy with the past, but only in the manner that anybody would want to, with pervasive and unmitigated joy. The thrill in the bouncy, open-armed Beatles conjurer "Imagine Pt. 3" is overpowering, especially the crisp, smartly recorded vocal sound of Cullen Omori, a genuine talent whose Alex Chilton-like frayed pipes can wrap around a hook in the most seductive way. It's reductive, though, to claim all this as mere power pop. For one thing, it ties itself down to no time or place; for all its recollections, it's inescapably a modern record and is delighted to be such. But the Smith Westerns' way with integration of sounds and ideas -- kids in a candy store -- smacks of young fearlessness. How many bands would temper the irresistable pop (dig that bass!) of "Still New" with a left-field integration of '70s stadium rock straight out of a scene from Almost Famous? And honestly, how many bands are able to factor in equal parts shoegaze and glam rock until something like "All Die Young" sounds like Kevin Shields fronting Slade? That cut is a versatile tower of beautiful angst, but it's tremendously spirited. Totally glam, totally Ziggy Stardust, but totally ours.

It's a credit to Slade, T. Rex, and Bowie that talented kids are still employing their tricks, but more pressingly, it's a credit to the kids that they know just how to use that meaty '70s guitar for its greatest calculated impact, gleefully engineered and maxed out for pleasure. What will end up setting the Smith Westerns apart is the same thing that set the Shins apart ten years ago for all their influence-on-sleeve sonics: a total and admirable subservience to songs. Take last year's advance single "Weekend," which lays out the road map for the album to follow: teasing and expansive, it builds emotional crescendos on melody and its flawless sentiment "Weekends are never fun unless you're around here too." They earn the credit from such finely tuned pure pop to catapult into a singalong like "Fallen in Love," or to make the ridiculous ELO piano on "End of the Night" sound not just charming but like a triumph, sitting aside a tower of vocals intoning weekend-revising lines like "Everybody wants to be a star on a Saturday night" (seriously) to craft what -- you quickly become convinced -- would be easy top 40 radio shit in another time.

The key is, that very subservience -- and the content of the songwriting -- is quietly laying a groundwork for sophistication; this is only album two, but already there's evidence of something even more special. The record's immediate classic is "Dance Away" (not, alas, a Roxy Music cover), which tosses aside the general indie-rock muddiness of Dye It Blonde as though a curtain is opening, and dives into the most undeniable, upbeat dancefloor makeout session 2011 is likely to bring, replete with ingenious left-field tempo changes and an almost smugly assured renewal of college rock's onetime inescapable cliché of the chorus that's slower (but sneakier) than the verse. Like Big Star or the Beatles at their respective best, it's the kind of song that makes a bizarre idea sound like the most commercial pop music notion ever crafted. For this blissful 2:44, the whole world stops, and that's the kind of power one suspects the band will learn to wield all the more mightily in years to come.

As in all the best power pop, every second of Dye It Blonde seems carefully considered, the playing precise but never arid. The songs show a welcome versatility without deadening the pace; the more reflective songs toward the end are still stuffed with top-level pleasure. "Only One" opens with R.E.M.-like folk-rock but circles back to the note-perfect FM radio vocals that are already the band's signature; "Smile" is the prom slow-dance, nodding to the college rockers with its priceless wall-of-sound teenage depression chorus; and closer "Dye the World" plods deliberately like Bowie but brings the love with its unabashed Abbey Road riff. It's a delightfully dirty electric guitar sound that recalls the sort of incongruity that always made glam and garage rock work so well -- it sounds so wrong, which makes it sound so right.

And one can't overstate the importance of that ringing guitar sound all over this pop record in a period of indie rock that's become known for studio manipulation and synthpop worship -- the attempted duplication, rather than evocation, of bygone noises. No interest in that from Smith Westerns; they're young, they're eager, and this is the noise of youth as we have understood it to this point. Rock & roll, right? These boys have captured this moment. I would tell you to watch them closely, but fuck that. Don't watch, listen.

13th Floor Elevators: Easter Everywhere (1967)

(International Artists)

RECOMMENDED

Psychedelia has been kitsch since before you and I were born; even those of us who love the Seeds do so half-ironically, and the garish LP covers of the late '60s are choice monuments of tastelessness -- beloved, maybe, but mocked just as much. But Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators would prefer you to take them seriously, thank you very much. On their second album, they tone down the excesses and overstated incongruities of their 1966 debut Psychedelic Sounds to craft something no more commercial but far starker -- and even less fitting with the San Francisco definition of drug music. Like the first LP, Easter casts a remarkable net through the underground: at least two other bands with small followings, too quiet to be heard over the Airplane din, were crafting similar textures in the same period, most likely without a clue as to one another's existence. It's not nearly as strong, but this is easily of a piece with the long-players Love and the Velvet Underground were busy on this same year. More importantly, this strange, subtle record is a steaming and admirably restrained bit of left-field rock that (accidentally?) proves all roads lead back to the Byrds.

That's because the guitar wash in general -- really, theirs along with everyone's -- is infected with the sound of "Eight Miles High," which may lay claim to being the most earth-shaking single of the '60s. But more specifically, meet your new favorite oddball Dylan cover: the Elevators' "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is an amazingly hunkered-down, passionately singular moment -- as revealing and stunning an instance of total recasting as the Box Tops' "You Keep Me Hangin' On." In its own perverse way, it's a reverent cover, as over five minutes Erickson and Tommy Moore and cohorts get farther lost in the song than they ever seem to in their own. Experiments like this have tremendous curiosity value and emotional payoff, and more to the point, they feel prophetic -- which makes it all the more unfortunate that after this was issued, the band was basically done. "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" has twice as many layers than are instantly apparent, "Postures" rambles pricelessly, "Earthquake" successfully weirds up the Stones, and "Dust" and "I Had to Tell You" knife their way through everything with unexpected pop expertise.

One thing for sure -- this isn't more of the same, even if Moore's electric jug is an obvious bridge. The fooling with guitar textures throughout Easter Everywhere, as much as it may owe to the hilariously studious devotion to LSD insisted upon by Moore, is a shimmering proto-shoegaze; there are times when you could easily mistake this album for a recently-recorded treasure from Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth; the devotion to pop filtered through distortion, feedback, and beautiful fuzz and force are as pronounced as the velvet Underground's. Revert to 1980s indie and the forecasting is even more pronounced.

But those are all the parts when the guitars take over, when it could just as well be an instrumental LP. Where the Elevators fall short is, alas, the increasingly lost-sounding, distant, flat vocals from Erickson, who came off snobby and sneering on Psychedelic Sounds and simply unfeeling and bored here. His ample, horrific troubles -- electroshock therapy and years in an insane asylum due to being caught with a single joint -- were still ahead, so why does it already sound like he's holding us at arm's length? Disturbingly, it's like he's already afraid of being hurt, like a part of him has already resigned. All the same, the first two Elevators LPs will live on as Erickson's legacy, and as a fascinating curiosity serving to prove the point that we really had done everything by the close of the '60s.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)

Wire: Red Barked Tree (2011)

(Pink Flag)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

The Everly Brothers: Walk Right Back (Warner Years) (1960-69)

(Warner Bros.)

RECOMMENDED

This shouldn't be your first Everly Brothers purchase, or even your second. A compilation of their '60s material for Warner Bros. is best reserved for after you know the handful of legendary Cadence recordings back to front. It is, after all, those songs that forever sealed the Everlys' artistic legacy. For anyone who loves the group, though, this is where it gets serious, and the two discs of Walk Right Back are the strongest and most vivid telling of their transformative years -- their greatest commercial success, their sharp decline, their surreal reignition -- and as with any great rock performers, it is in these muddy, idiosyncratic years that the richest and most personal pleasures are to be found. Walk Right Back is only a gateway drug ahead of the surprising depth to be found in the Everlys' WB albums, but it remains an essential stopgap that promotes a more nuanced understanding of the band's mature years than a survey of the intimidating catalog can quickly offer.

We noted the last time we talked about the Everlys a couple of things that bear repeating here. First, along with Elvis, the everpopular indie vs. major narrative begins here. One would be hard pressed to find an earlier example of the generally accepted loss of vitality upon the can-of-worms signing to a big label; it's so accepted it's a cliché. In the case of Everlys, there's some truth in the argument. The chronological arrangement of Walk Right Back can be an endurance test, particularly in the messy middle period. But the joyous bounce that crops up early on and the artistic ambition (and accomplishment!) that surfaces deep into the second disc give the lie to any broad strokes. The Everlys lived up to the hints of sophistication in their early material, they just had to struggle and suffer with the volatility of the changing music business to make themselves heard. And ultimately weren't able to do so.

Everything is rosy at the outset. Phil and Don began the decade and their Warner Bros. contract with back to back juggernauts. Pop in disc one and you are confronted with "Cathy's Clown" followed by "So Sad" followed by "Walk Right Back" followed by "Love Hurts" -- an onslaught few compilations can match, and these are from rock's supposedly "dead" period. "Cathy's Clown" is the biggest hit and the biggest miracle of the bunch. Above an incessant pounding, a tower of vocals shimmers with confident hurt. Pop seldom gets more giddily appealing and triumphantly bitter; the Don solo drips with swagger and soul beyond even his many treasured Cadence moments, and every sense the song comes across "bigger" than anything they'd previously done. In the classic Spectorian sense, it casts operatic teenage misery as shadow puppetry; the pleasures are huge, the dramas bigger yet, and the beat shuffles and stabs at all of it. Beneath it all, it seems an apt narrative placement for a band's move to greater financial security. To boot, it represents an artistic coup; a band best known for interpreting songs written by others scores its biggest hit with their own composition.

Perversely, then, the followup is starkly opposed. "So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)," written by Don alone, embodies adult dread couched in boy-girl terminology. As ever, the emotional content is fascinating in its contrasts and extremes; the wailing of "It makes me cry / To see love die" has its melodrama offset by the calm, collected acoustic backdrop. The Everlys by turns capture anguish, resignation, fear, anger, and the actual pain of memory in the space of two and a half minutes with but the simplest of lyrical ideas. The detail is exclusively in their mannered, intelligent use of their own voices and harmonic abilities. This time around, Don's solo approaches keening, and the intent of embodying actual loss and grief becomes obvious.

This may not be the time or place, but the other point I need to reprise from our Cadence Classics writeup is that "Walk Right Back" changed my life. This is the song I heard at just the right instant that set me on the path of exploring early rock & roll with a devotion that no other obsession can ever really match. The simplicity of expression in that guitar lick doesn't really bear explaining, but the vocal and emotional complexity is just as intense as on "So Sad," only now the brothers begin with a plead and develop into desperation -- "Bring your love to me, don't send it" -- and finally an embattled self-examination. So lonesome every day. The guitars aren't the jilted lover, the guitars are the awareness that these immense problems are a ticking consistency of life itself, for all their relative pettiness, an elucidation of the concept the Everlys eloquently explored in "Problems." And again, it's all over in 138 seconds.

Finally there's "Love Hurts," more famously performed by Roy Orbison and a host of others (including but not limited to Cher and Nazareth), but Boudleaux Bryant wrote it for the Everly Brothers. They never turned it into a hit, but they could have; their version is the finest ever record, approached with the same complexities and ambiguities as their other early WB sides. Where they trump Orbison (not an easy task) is on the audible near-smile that breaks through even when they sing about "lots of pain."

Then comes a sign of trouble: "Sleepless Nights," a heavy-handed ballad, still isn't beyond help, but it is the first track on Walk Right Back not to noticeably evolve from the Cadence period -- or at least attempt such. Luckily, a couple of album tracks, "Nashville Blues" and "What Kind of Girl Are You" bring back the raw swagger, leading the apocalypse of the blistering, strange Little Richard cover "Lucille," originally the b-side of "So Sad," featuring droning, atonal singing that would make (and probably has made) John Cale smile. Innovation continues with the bright bubblegum of "Made to Love," but the Everlys at this point remain enjoyable even when tackling the fairly conventional country-pop bounce of "Radio and TV" and "Stick with Me Baby."

The pleasures become less frequent here. There are bright spots. "Crying in the Rain" is classic Everly, a shatteringly sad Goffin/King number as brilliant and resonant as any of the Cadence material; "I'm Not Angry" -- but they are, forecasting the Mountain Goats' "No Children" ("I hope your mail always fails to reach you") -- successfully recaptures the buried fury of Cadence singles like "Problems" and "Bird Dog," while the pair's increasingly sophisticated guitar work shines on "Don't Blame Me." It's interesting to hear the group take stabs at staying alive in an unfamiliar industry that seems to have turned against them; the hits dried up soon after "Walk Right Back." They could've done far worse than the elaborate chamber pop of "Nancy's Minuet" and still kick with life on "How Can I Meet Her?" and the persuasive "Muskrat." Most promisingly, a major country infection rears its head on "Just One Time," pounding and thrusting with a massive guitar sound, a welcome change.

Mediocrities abound, though, for much of the set's midsection. The ballad downturn begins with the overrated "Always It's You," and the rockers become unconvincing somewhere around the "Claudette" clone "Temptation." "True Love" is plodding, "Burma Shave" strained, "Lonely Street" and "Sweet Dreams" light and absent as air. But the first disc is at its worst on, ironically, two of its more popular selections. "Ebony Eyes," the b-side (and chart equal) of "Walk Right Back," is the worst song the band recorded in its first decade and a half, horrendously maudlin "Tell Laura I Love Her" nonsense that renders "Take a Message to Mary" a masterpiece of restraint in its light. Only the Shangri-Las should ever have been allowed to record tripe like this.

But at least that cut displays the Everly Brothers taking a stab at well-trod commercial ground. On "That's Old Fashioned (That's the Way Love Should Be)," as disgustingly squeaky-clean as its title implies, they dig their own grave. The song is everything rock music should never be -- for one thing, designed for parental approval. "Wake Up Little Susie" was dangerous on its own, and downright subversive compared to this. Portions of disc two are just as rough going. "Give Me a Sweetheart," weak-kneed balladeering, is inoffensive enough. But things get ugly for a stretch starting around "Don't Forget to Cry" and "Nothing Matters But You," dull dishwater leading to the barely tuneful teenybopper ballad shit of "It's All Over" and "Empty Boxes." And if you think songs with titles like "Love of the Common People" and "A Legend in My Time" can possibly score, you're reading the wrong weblog. Both are guaranteed to make the most seasoned bad-music buff want to scream.

Strip all that baggage away and here's the shock: you're left with a second disc that is not only stronger than the first, but nearly as interesting and exciting as Cadence Classics. We begin with raw country ("The Price of Love") and a triumphant cover of "Love Is Strange," and then the Beatles hit and everything gets shaken, especially in the Everlys' world. ("Please Please Me" was, after all, a remake of "Cathy's Clown," and "I Should Have Known Better" a revision of "Til I Kissed You.") "Man with Money" tempers its credible Big Beat with irony and "You're My Girl" is sheer Dave Clark Five, but by "Gone, Gone, Gone" the Everlys are fully convincing as British Invasion soldiers, displaying not their debt to the younger bands -- if anything, these fans from across the pond helped destroy them -- but their solidarity with them.

Even if the Everlys proved themselves adaptable in 1964, it's the folk-rock movement that gave them a place in the modern world, though the world wasn't any more receptive to them than before. "Kiss Your Man Goodbye" and "Shady Grove" are dead ringers for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds respectively, and with the credibility that comes from being there first. And even the Byrds couldn't merge their pure folky aspirations with psychedelia as well as the Everlys on the over-the-top "Bowling Green." These cuts begin an upward trajectory that carries through to the band's most strongly artistic album-length statement, Roots. The 1967-68 songs here sound shockingly modern; a revision of the '50s chestnut "I Wonder if I Care as Much" amounts to lo-fi reappropriation of drugged-up late '60s rock. "Lord of the Manor" and "Sing Me Back Home" provide some bridge to indie rock, and bringing back the Byrds rifling, "Cuckoo Bird" and "I'm on My Way Home Again" amount to impressively prescient alt-country.

But all excuse-making aside, Walk Right Back undeniably captures a loved artist in decline. You can hear them battling their age on "Don't Let the Whole World Know" and "T for Texas," juggling Orbison melodramatics with hardened Appalachia and silly novelty. "You're the One I Love" suggests the baroque country path they could easily have taken and couldn't shed their egos and ambitions enough to try (perhaps thankfully). But the most telling cut on the compilation is "I'm Movin' On," which is the raw and assured rock & roll the Everly Brothers are good at, the very thing they're supposed to do, unmistakably recorded by older guys (relatively -- this was only 1964, an eternity after "Cathy's Clown" in pop music terms) who must think they're past this sort of thing but are still incredibly proficient at putting it across. There's life for you. You get old, and then you do what you know you're supposed to do. Is that giving up, or is that wisdom?

[SEE ALSO:]
Cadence Classics: Their 20 Greatest Hits (1957-60)

Teddy Thompson: Bella (2011)

(Verve)

!! CAUTION !!

Read my review at Metro Times.

Van Morrison: Best Of (1965-89)

(Mercury)

RECOMMENDED

Some artists were never meant to be compiled; from such a textbook arrives Van Morrison's first officially sanctioned greatest-hits, issued back in 1990. There had been compilations of his Bang Records material, but never with his blessing. In the years hence, Morrison had traveled across every realm of commercial success and obscurity, so in covering such mountainous terrain, Best Of becomes a dilution of the premier blue-eyed soul singer, the man whose intensity of feeling and hard-hitting starkness seem so resonant and resistant to reduction. As introductions go, you could do worse, and from "Jackie Wilson Said" to "Moondance" to "Wild Night," this has the bulk of the songs mainstream listeners are likely to know. As an introduction to an artist with depth, however, it falls short, perhaps because it aims to please rather than to impress, which it very easily could.

The new arrival to Morrison will nevertheless find this album an immediate charmer. His personal reputation notwithstanding, Morrison is possessed of one of rock's true miracle voices. His virtues are many, but his subservience to emotion sets him above and beyond most others. From the opening bounce of "Bright Side of the Road," this music is open-armed forgiveness for all. The years have perhaps allowed many of us to forget how packed with power and joy something like "Wild Night" truly is, but on those '70s selections, Morrison betrays a wisdom and grace far beyond his age at the time.

Some of the MOR excursions of later years (seven tracks from the '80s, most of which are hardly as misguided as is their reputation, and many of which have entered an inescapable pop culture lexicon -- "Have I Told You Lately" above all) don't really fit with the peerless '60s-'70s material, but the most jarring selections are clearly the three tracks by Morrison's seminal garage band Them; while classic, they belong on a Them CD -- at least one of which should be owned by every rock fan. Those quibbles aside, the number of emotional crescendos here is truly staggering, and makes for a surprisingly enriching, comforting listen -- particularly for the soul in distress.

A point worth making is that Best Of signalled the beginning of a career renaissance for Morrison, who would -- after somehow managing to create an Event out of his licensing of a best-of, a decade before the Beatles would do the same -- go on to record some of his strongest-ever albums in the '90s. It's a pity that this package remains tied firmly to a reverence for the material prior to that emergence; while "Wherever God Shines His Light" is tolerable, even if it sounds vaguely like a Buick ad, there's really no excuse for "Wonderful Remark." Polish has never fit Morrison's scrappy performance style, even as his writing has remained strong.

On the whole, my advice would be not to start here; the collection is rushed and wastes too much time to explore Morrison's career in its real breadth. Look, the correct progression is: Astral Weeks; His Band and the Street Choir; Moondance; Tupelo Honey; Saint Dominic's Preview; Into the Music; It's Too Late to Stop Now; and you're on your own from there. Any one of those is guaranteed to make you more of a fan than this will and to entice you to continue. Oh, and grab a Them package while you're at it. Fun as this CD is, once you've heard those you can build your own Van mixtape that will trounce it, and hearing "Sweet Thing" stripped of its Astral context is quite heartbreaking for anyone to whom that record means something, which should fucking well be every single person reading this, and you are required to get it immediately if not.

Still, major point -- this is the best-ever context in which to hear "Brown Eyed Girl," Morrison's career-blueprint classic, one of rock & roll's indisputable 45rpm masterpieces. Its haphazard grace and emotional intelligence -- his lead in to the chorus is wrenching every time -- must constitute some of the loveliest noise ever captured on tape. Everything Morrison has done since 1967 has been an outgrowth of that moment, which retains its youth, sexual buoyancy, melodic charm, and odd sadness even now. In fairness, this is the only place short of a Various Artists comp that you can hear "Brown Eyed Girl" on an LP that doesn't surround it with vastly lesser material. For that alone, Best Of warrants a home in the canon alongside those stunning full-lengths.

Vampire Weekend: iTunes Session EP (2011)

(XL)

RECOMMENDED

With brass this sweet and spontaneous, and with that bounce in Ezra Koenig's voice on "Have I the Right," at this point it wouldn't matter if they were singing about yachting clubs and vacation homes. This is the sound of a good band effortlessly becoming one of your favorites in the world, calm, live, tight, and joyous. "Cousins" is better, "Holiday" unrecognizable (perhaps for the better following its teevee overexposure), "I'm Going Down" classic. Buy/download now.