Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo (2011)

(Matador)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Boooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnnnnnng.

I'd like to leave it at that, but in the interest of being at least kind of informative: This is the sort of thing your dad listened to while he worked on stuff in the garage. The sort of music that comes on the incessantly blaring adult contemporary station that hasn't added anything to its rotation since 1992, in brief intervals between seventeen hours a day of car commercials. The sort of miserable music you hear in your part-time job, or anywhere you're stuck when you can't wait to be somewhere else, that makes you want to kill yourself. The sort of music that used to disgust people enough to drive them to create and listen to college rock, but no more now that it's lapped itself.

Everybody says Vile is in the tradition of Bob Seger and Tom Petty, and I'll add Don Henley who is the only person I can think about during neverending slogs like "Society Is My Friend." If we're approaching that palette in an ironic sense, I can't see what makes Vile any better than those ridiculously overrated, generic MOR staples. But if we're operating from the perspective that sounding like Tom Petty is something to strive for, I begrudgingly admit that I just don't "understand." Still, put this on in bar jukeboxes where it belongs, not on a label with Yo La Tengo and Fucked Up. I tentatively supported the snowballing of icky influences for the sake of chillwave or whatnot, but I give up now. Please. Stop. Now.

For fuck's sake, if you want a bleak oppressive atmosphere, buy PJ Harvey's new record, which is brilliant and enriching and will stimulate you. Not this dishwater barf.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound cranky, just... ew. Ew, ew, ew.

The Beach Boys: Surfin' Safari (1962)

(Capitol)

RECOMMENDED

"Garage rock" wasn't a fitting descriptor for the Beach Boys' music for the majority of the '60s, but in the beginning, it was a literal truth -- the band formed, practiced, and spent the majority of its earliest days in the Wilson family's garage. For all the generic lumping in they've endured with the instrumental surf bands whose heyday immediately preceded theirs, it's the mid-'60s garage explosion that the Beach Boys' crucial early singles most accurately predicted. The direct line the band's early material draws from the Nuggets era on through to American punk rock, from the Ramones to the future inconsequentials in their decades-spanning wake, is startling -- it is hardly a stretch at all to picture any number of high school emo kids yowling along to "Heads You Win, Tails I Lose" or, indeed, dismantling a pop song the way Dennis does "Little Girl (You're My Miss America)," or lovingly adapting the work of a hero like Eddie Cochran ("Summertime Blues") but making a mess of it.

Modern shadows notwithstanding, it's tempting to look back on this as all quite wholesome. But the Beach Boys, in some sense, invented the white American rock band as we know it today. It was remarkably innovative, ballsy, perhaps even stupid for Capitol Records to allow the band's publicity and work to circulate with no obvious leader, with such an initially novelty-courting, later confrontational name, with such now-astoundingly spare, harsh, rough-hewn music. But a glance at Capitol's repertoire in 1962 reveals why, perhaps, they gunned it on the Beach Boys -- the label's absence of youth appeal, their fear of rock & roll and black music and even edgier teenage music in general, was crippling. It was Lou Rawls, the Lettermen, Dick Dale and these guys. Perhaps the Beach Boys appeared to them an agreeable, whitebread, easily controllable (and marketable!) nod to the kids. It must be an accident that they issued perhaps the rawest music heard on a major label up to that time, a band with chunky guitars, floating and breathless harmonies, ridiculously quick pogo-friendly tempos, lyrics about "the most specialest girl I knew." Generations of adolescent-courting rockers wish they could've ever made their point so succinctly.

This record is the sole LP to capture the Beach Boys at the special moment when their youth was charming enough to carry them, when Brian Wilson's simplest ideas (complemented in large part by his then-confidante and lyricist Gary Usher) were carried by the others with enough freshfaced enthusiasm to make them work, when they were the most unadulterated stab of rock & roll yet to be heard in the U.S. from white boys, when it wasn't about production or romance, when it was about drivin' a 409 and anglin' in Laguna and Cerro Azul and kickin' out in Doheny too. A bunch of shit these kids (drummer Dennis excluded) knew nothing about, much as their suburban universe could offer them nothing of the worldly young wisdom Little Richard or even Elvis Presley had used to light up the world -- which perversely made them all the more subversive.

It's easy to romanticize this as proto-punk, which it often is, but it's also suburban amateurs singing songs about cuckoo clocks and county fairs. Just bloody kids. But I'm still skeptical of the ideological notion that they ever represented some sort of mom-and-apple-pie propaganda. They loved R&B and the Four Freshmen and Chuck Berry, so they took their innocently raunchy guitars and bottom-heavy rhythms and banged out some tunes. It's clear that they were never dangerous, and I'd venture to guess that the voices played no small role in that. Plus, at a surface glance anyway, they'd led sheltered lives. (Never mind the abuse at the hands of then-manager Murry Wilson that would become the stuff of depressing legend later.) They were not leather-clad hellions like the Beatles, who were rousing the wrong element in Hamburg while the Wilsons were finishing high school. Dennis may have been the only one at the time this was recorded who'd much of any sense of a larger world; Carl Wilson and David Marks were probably even virgins at this point.

So maybe it's more than just a result of their place in America (Americana, even, a product of the real-and-actual nuclear family; David Anderle called their hometown of Hawthorne, California "Iowa with a beach") that the guitars, frequently louder and more adventurous than you'd expect, never suggest sex or even aggression, just general vaguely dissatisfied angst, even when -- on "The Shift" -- they sing more explicitly about sex than anyone outside of what were then called race records. This plus the harmonies was new, and so was the audience. Capitol viewed the boys as safe, but for their gradually building audience they were rocking and edgy, managing to be heroic and sexy but uncontroversial. There was precedent to this, Cochran himself most clearly, but up to now nobody'd said so much on such a wide-ranging platform with so little at their disposal.

Brian Wilson's instincts as a songwriter were already promising; it was largely this facet of the band's talent, along with their fresh demeanor and the effortless but complex harmonies, that brought them from the garage to the living room of local homespun composer-producers and talent spotters Hite and Dorinda Morgan to a charting if rudimentary single (issued on Candix, otherwise best known as home to the minor instrumental classic "Underwater" by the Frogmen) to a professional demo tape made by Murry to Capitol A&R man Nik Venet's attention. If you limit it to both sides of the single, their Capitol debut, "Surfin' Safari" and "409," you've got a divinely perfect and singular moment of immediate, pounding rock & roll with much more finesse than the stark earlier independent single "Surfin'" (included here but sped up) but no less unkempt charm. If "Safari" sounds weak or facile to you, try louder volume or even bigger speakers, fleshing it out until the drum sound dominates -- it's exciting and evergreen, and "409" might be even stronger. Unlike the later "Surfin' U.S.A.," neither seems really to lead into what the band would later attempt. They're keyed into a movement of their own, and both are rollicking signature licks of the early DIY aesthetic in a league with the Barbarians' "Moulty," the Troggs' "Wild Thing," and ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears." Pretension isn't just absent here, it's unheard of.

The rest of this, thrown together in a handful of sessions with Venet acting ostensibly as producer and Brian already dominating the room, is outwardly disposable but still ingratiating in spots -- the immensely fun "Heads You Win, Tails I Lose" is garage angst at its most entertainingly petty, squeaky clean root beer anthem "Chug-a-Lug" is a delightful if whitewashed slice of authentic life. And although it's best heard elsewhere, "Surfin'" brings us back to the original conceit: a few guys who loved to sing, still learning to play, swarming on a microphone and using any excuse to do so. The group's passion for surfing and for the beach was born of a need for a novelty, a hook (Candix first wanted to call them the Surfers before renaming them without the band's knowledge in time for the single's first pressing); for Brian Wilson, any surface motivation was secondary to the love of creating and arranging songs and records. We'd never hear him and his group in so pure and young a form again.

Still, Surfin' Safari is the first of many Beach Boys LPs better in theory than in practice. What's most impressive about it are the ideas that were likely unconscious, the way the songs burst in and back out before barely a minute and a half has passed, but the problem is too many of them are short on the goofy charm of "Cuckoo Clock" (Brian's only lead vocal here) and the amiable grittiness of "Heads." Instead you have the offensive, half-assed "Ten Little Indians," which was inexplicably released as a single by Capitol, and the bizarre "County Fair," a mostly spoken word piece in which a woman ditches the protagonist over his inability to ring a bell at the eponymous festival and win her a "stuffed koala bear," for which her enthusiasm seems disturbingly erotic ("oooOOOOOOHHHHHH!!!"; "Come onnn, baby!"), somehow not even the only sexual undercurrent hidden on this album (there's also Mike's vocal about "balling it" in "The Shift"; I'm tempted to also nominate the line "Dennis wonders what's under the hood" in "Chug-a-Lug"). The tracklist is filled out by a cover of the Gamblers' primitive but ghostly surf instrumental "Moon Dawg," likely present because of Venet's involvement in the original, but it only serves to emphasize that instrumentals were not the Beach Boys' strong suit (yet).

"County Fair," however, is the most prophetic song on the album, both for the Beach Boys' career and for the alternative rock future that would have its prototypical beginnings in the near future. The hero of "County Fair" is not the strong man, not Dion Dimucci's loathsome promiscuous wanderer, not Elvis' sneering sexpot, but the put-upon "loser" who tries to escape before his girlfriend makes him fight for her in a test of strength he knows he will lose. Coming from Brian Wilson, this Charlie Brownesque sense of inevitable loss and romantic doom seems far more felt than any lyric about a car or a surfboard, and soon enough his predominant themes of women and suffering would emerge. And the entire modus operandi of alternative, college, garage, and punk rock, converse to what would by decade's end become the mainstream variant, would be the celebration not of the Strong Man but of the isolated dork, male or female, whose solace comes from a guitar to weep out his or her deepest, loneliest longing for warmth, or from the headphones that provide the only known sense of acceptance. That's quite a lot for a mere disposable pop song to chew on; good thing there are unknown masters lurking in this one.

[Note: This is a revision and expansion of a review I wrote and posted on my old website in 2003. In addition, the post was edited to align with a larger Beach Boys project in 2016.]

Sufjan Stevens: Illinoise (2005)

(Asthmatic Kitty)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When this landmark album was released, Katrina was still two months away. The attacks on the London Underground were to occur in just three days. At nearly the center of a chaotic decade, it would quickly gather up associations that would allow wunderkind singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens to forever mark its time for legions. But against a flood of horror, warfare, political disgust, it placed itself in a broader historical place -- a place for the wonder of the World's Columbian Exposition, a place for Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen Douglas, a place for recoiling in horror at the bodies in John Wayne Gacy's crawlspace. The second (and likely last) volume of Stevens' fabled 50 States Project is affecting, comforting, unforgettable, massively impressive in part because of its wide-eyed and thorough separation from any modern-life subtext. It is a living dream, a dream far less of its title locale than of a sense of time, a sense of processing a world that bears down. "College rock" has never been so apt a description, for when but young adulthood is the feeling so strong of rushing to make sense of one's place in time?

Containment and subtlety are not aspects of Stevens' skill set. If anything, he can be guilty of what amounts to obsession -- a preoccupation with busy arrangments and their details -- that can either balloon even his simplest compositions into seemingly gargantuan entities or reduce all their potential into a hushed-tone baroque self-parody. But at his best, Stevens gets amazingly complex emotions and elegant, giddily gorgeous melodies across with the most consistency, and certainly the best showmanship, of his generation. He is not the first or greatest fixated, self-aware pop madman-genius, he comes from a long line of Phil Spectors and Princes, but he may be the most unguarded weirdo the rock spectrum has come across. And when someone can win you over with the naive urgency that takes hold seconds into this record, he is some kind of a master.

That Stevens isn't shy about his eccentricities and overblown sonic notions might not be all that interesting in a broad pop context, but within the scope of alternative rock, there was a time when you'd have had to be mental to release a song called "To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament" and give voice to such childlike concepts without hiding behind David Byrne irony or politics. We call it twee now, but as a stylistic move, Stevens' work was impossible to conceive just a few years earlier. It's not merely because alternative was co-opted by corporate underwriters, it's also because even in the genre's gestation, effervescence such as Stevens' was anathema to indie rock, even as a disinterest in following an inline behavior model would seem a glorious rebellion.

Perhaps above all else, Illinoise is deservedly famous for reveling, thrilling in its own flamboyance. Florid but unpretentious, it hides nothing. Like most lengthy treatises on vague ideas, it could've used more editing, but therein lies some of its charm. Would a stylish minimalist have ever allowed the grinding, sexless choirboy rambling on "A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But for Very Good Reasons" to exist? Would a stylish minimalist have ever even written a song with that title? It's true that Stevens sometimes carries his reluctance to drop any crazy or dumb idea to a fault, that we probably did not need a mortifyingly delicate song about Gacy to worm its way into any heart. But distressingly enough, it did, which by itself speaks to Stevens' immense charm and, now as in every millennium before, music's capacity to persuade past moral and rational limit.

Stevens' compositions aren't necessarily as tricky as they sound, and his vocals are often nearly absent of affect, never (or seldom; there are exceptions on his subsequent album, The Age of Adz) one to let the song sing him. So a large part of his fame, of his impact, must be attributed to the ingenuity of his arrangements. Not one song here is not instantly pleasing, admirable, intriguing and delightful to listen to (the fragments, more or less Stevens' equivalent to hip hop skits, don't bear much reference), and Stevens knows precisely when to break the tension of his claustrophic chamber pop atmospheres with a bit of screaming guitar ("The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts") or deeply felt semi-gospel ("Jacksonville") or even lite but staggeringly assured disco ("They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!"), always just when you're about to get sick of his acoustics. It is for this reason that, for all the meanderings and tangents over its seventy-odd minutes, this lengthy album feels strangely right despite its lack of aural variance. Stevens can persuade with a banjo ditty or an expansive choir, and make the two -- the smallest noise to the most immense -- seem of a piece. As a writer and performer, Stevens is great enough, but as an arranger and producer, he is a force. He sells his record's sonics unwaveringly.

Prior 50 States project Greetings from Michigan has always been the Sufjan Stevens record closest to my heart; I find its songs less cerebral, less calculatedly busy. There are plenty of beautiful, stunning cuts on Illinoise, but nothing as otherworldly and capable of moving the listener to instant mysterious tears as "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti." But that cut's intricacy as intimacy is a key evolutionary moment for Stevens; the exploration of the banjo down to its innards, the hauntingly stark sounds and friendly simplicity it can exude, form the foundation of some of this album's highlights. "Casimir Pulaski Day" layers and compounds the earlier song, with a more upbeat -- but also, wonderfully, looser -- vocal, until it seems to exude the sound of a frontier.

Conversely, Illinoise is home to Stevens' second greatest song, the unreservedly brilliant "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" The vocals are his most sincere and effective, the performance and arrangement almost supernaturally evocative, the song dramatic in the best, most moving manner. Forget its tale of uneven childhood and memorials for Illinois landmarks, pay attention only to its musical wasp -- a butterfly-motion of orchestral power creating a moment all its own -- and then to its climax, the full-color explosion of music roughly three minutes in that encapsulates every moment of self-discovery and Steven Chbosky's feeling infinite -- an immediate monument of Cinemascope beauty for a generation. From then on, Sufjan owns the audience, and we him.

More famous, but only nearly as masterful, is "Chicago," a joyously dynamic rise-and-fall of sympathy and fever, boasting the clearest example yet of Stevens' arrangement mastery; when he uses his mad scientist gifts in service of an ever-expanding wall of vocals, the unification and realization of every Phil Spector notion in his blood, and all -- Spector again! -- in service of the simplest of sentiments, all things go, beyond its veneer of specifity. But I'm even more persuaded by the elegant summary "The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoudlers," which encapsulates everything Stevens touched on elsewhere in his narrative for a production that feels like no gut-splitting heart-opening, no valentine to a place, only the beginnings of life, the pop-music verification of the things that went away in "Chicago" all starting again, with so much more to reveal.

Stevens can evoke these things on an album with fewer autobiographical strokes than Michigan because the record in the interim, Seven Swans, taught him a careful selflessness that casts him as a most remarkable creature in a grand folk tradition, the songsmith who observes and captures the world around him. Not his world, ours. According to Wikipedia, Stevens' contributions to this recording included "acoustic guitar, piano, Wurlitzer, bass guitar, drums, electric guitar, oboe, alto saxophone, flute, banjo, glockenspiel, accordion, vibraphone, alto recorder, Casiotone MT-70, sleigh bells, shaker, tambourine, triangle, electronic organ, vocals, arrangement, engineering, recording, production." All in service of capturing inner worlds, tragedies, triumphs of his audience. Does that make him Prince? Well, kind of, although it would take the far more gleefully indulgent Age of Adz to render that comparison popular. To me, Illinoise feels more like a step in a process of blooming than the fruition it's often perceived to be; Stevens' preoccupations can still hurt him at this stage, predominately because a broader look at his career shows an eclectic, exciting musician capable of far more than the relatively limited explorations of this song cycle. And even his virtues of unrestrained beauty can bog him down at times; the cleverly named "Seer's Tower" is a drag to even listen halfway to. But whatever. Anything is worth letting an anti-alternative hero like this, one who can once and for all make rock & roll actively "pretty" without making it gutless, have his canvas to discolor.

[SEE ALSO:]
All Delighted People EP (2010)
The Age of Adz (2010)

L7 (1988)

(Epitaph)

Typically, L7 is just about the closest I get to listening to metal, their early '90s work being for me a landmark of rock & roll attitude fused with a wit and consciousness I don't get out of most macho hardish rock. But this debut album of theirs, which I only just heard for the first time this week, falls too far on the grinding obnoxious boredom side of punk, thrash, and metal for my tastes. It's only sporadically terrible -- the tasteless "Metal Stampede" and endless "Uncle Bob" being the worst offenders -- but also only sporadically in the same universe as their great grunge-era work, specifically on wily opener "Bite the Wax Tadpole," the catchy Runaways rip "Ms. 45," and the undeniably fun "Snake Handler." The rest is screamy stuff just not to my taste, disappointingly enough.

Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes (2011)

(Atlantic)

RECOMMENDED

In interviews, Swede sensation Lykke Li states that she was inspired on her second album by exposure to the downright bizarre combination of Alan Lomax's stirring field recordings and the outsized L.A. rock of Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Who knows how these primal bases get absorbed into the music she's written and crafted here, but the strong affinity I hear is with Spector, Shadow Morton, the girl groups of the early '60s. In which case, Lykke can join the club. From Camera Obscura to She & Him to Tennis, no territory or root is more amply plundered by the modern rock and pop.

But like her fellow countryman Robyn, Lykke has absorbed something from the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, a crucial element that all of their American descendents save perhaps Amy Winehouse have missed: a toughness, a venom, an aggression. Ronnie Spector's voice was not merely wounded, it snarled and stabbed back; Darlene Love had a more conventionally sweet tone, but even she betrayed a darkness, a heart you'd never want to break, not merely because you'd treasure it above all else but because you'd fear the repercussions. The Shangri-Las, of course, were pure threat, and the scrappy big sisters in the Marvelettes would never let anyone get away with walking all over them. When Zooey Deschanel coos and chirps on a charming She & Him number like "Over It Over Again," the gulf between that performance and some filthy chestnut like Shape and Sizes' "Rain on My Face" or Wendy Rene's "After Laughter Comes Tears" (once covered by Lykke Li, rendering her automatically intriguing in my book) or Denise & Co.'s incredibly tough-minded, obscure (perhaps because of the threat?) "Take Me As I Am" is staggering.

Lykke stomps all over this light touch; whatever else her music is, it commands respect -- it is hardly cutesy or conveniently ironic. Thus far, her work isn't as intelligent as Robyn's, Madonna's, or even the coy but brilliant Camera Obscura's, but why would it be? Should Wikipedia be trusted, she's just recently turned twenty-five. Based on the bionic groove and metallic smash on the garage opener "Youth Knows No Pain," which despite its polish instantly recalls the Denise & Co. oddity, she knows more than I did at twenty-five. And what she knows best is the cathartic joy of performing pop, a crucial variance on Madonna, whose thrill seemed to come from crafting it, presenting it; Lykke writes well enough, not nearly as well yet as Madonna, but what makes Wounded Rhymes a valuable record is hearing her actively conquer each of these songs, to bring their conventions and quirks into a realm of bellowing emotion, rendering much of their banality beside the point.

She's a mainstream pop performer in her own country, which is great; what's better is that she's an indie rock stalwart in the U.S., which is a field desperately in need of strong women. Lykke has an individualistic fervor that will serve her well in the future; for most, her vague roughness will call Stevie Nicks to mind. There's no "Gold Dust Woman" or "Dreams" here, as this record is clearly a chapter in a larger document that will display her discovery of her voice. That's the only destructive thing, I think, about a record like this garnering such ecstatic praise; it's clearly a work in progress. A career in progress, rather.

That particular part of the story is best told by a pair of high-concept pieces that don't quite make it but are still indelibly charming. "Rich Kids Blues" is an adamantly well-meaning bit of cleverness with more of the huge garage sound; most intriguingly, it marries its careful rawness to a brilliantly integrated dance-pop production that turns upside down every cookie cutter notion of what any of the mentioned genres are supposed to do. But it can't really overcome its not terribly imaginative writing and a searching performance. It's full of ideas, maybe too many. Same goes for "Jerome," late on the record and surely the standout oddity here, leading a diluted Eno dirge into hyperkinetically busy '80s pop. "I Follow Rivers" covers up those seams but is equally jam-packed, passing vague West African polyrhythmics carefully under its strong wintry synthpop in the vein of Music for the Masses, and fusing it all with a brutal but rapturous pop menace. It's nearly overloaded, too much to comprehend. But it does work.

The issue being, then, that any one of those three concepts would've been enough to make "I Follow Rivers" an interesting and valuable song. Why not spread that around? Too many others are bereft of any idea besides what seems like a vague desire to contrast Lykke Li's image of pop spectacle with an unfettered vulnerability, which is tolerable enough at times (the stark, Feist-like "Unrequited Love," which boasts some of the album's best lyrics) but cannot inject any inspiration into something like "Love Out of Lust." She can cover it with the goofball Wilson Phillipsisms of "Silent My Song," but it seems that the balladry stylistics she's toying with simply don't suit her well at all -- the contrast of "I Know Places" with the songs around it is particularly unfavorable. But the notion seems vital to her, so perhaps it just isn't time yet.

Given all that, past the first two head-spinning tracks, it might seem easy to write this off as the latest in an increasingly long line of recent semi-pop records that give off more boredom than the crazed level of hype they've received would imply. The songs do ultimately run together -- many would be stronger on their own, but the 45rpm era that could have made Lykke Li a true great is long gone -- but then she can toss off something like the ridiculous single "Get Some," a magical moment of the sort of intensely felt and smart dance pop that used to be Madonna's stock in trade. This massive Bo Diddley-derived sensual banger is a DJ's dream, and Lykke's playful vocals are what make it spin so persuasively.

If I had to guess, though, I'd say the key to the record is "Sadness Is a Blessing," not simply because it provides the title. If the independent but wildly sexual spirit that permeates the record is Lykke's prime interest at this point, she has nothing to prove beyond what she achieves on this remarkable track, which lets its influences tower. Opening with an enormous and sad "Be My Baby" reprise, against classic piano and drum persuasion, she lets a Roy Orbison-like drama build in her perfectly measured but impeccably off-the-rails vocal until it seems ready to burst, which it never quite does because the entire song is the explosion. Her voice wraps around nutty lyrics -- "Sadness is my boyfriend / Oh sadness, I'm your girl" -- until their sheer silliness becomes profoundly sad, touching. The hybrid of a zillion '50s and '60s pop conventions and '70s freak-flag-high eccentricties can be likened only to Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector's remarkable 1977 recording "Memories," the wildest, most over-the-top track either of them ever issued. In it, Cohen snarls and barks and retreats like a lost puppy into the carnal submission, explicit in his song, merely implied by Lykke's. My first temptation was to consider the two songs as a conversation, but on reflection, that's hardly the case -- they are merely two reactions to the same lover, the same desperation. If Lykke can give in to this abyss more next time, her madness will become contagious to thousands.

The Action: The Ultimate! Action (1964-68)

(Edsel)

RECOMMENDED

Like the Tremeloes, the Action are a good band primarily known for their very peripheral association with the Beatles. But whereas the Tremeloes, the band Decca signed instead of the Fabs, achieved some commercial success in the '60s, the Action have remained mostly obscure. George Martin signed them to Parlophone mid-decade and worked very closely with them across a couple of LPs and many singles before their relationship with the label soured. They never sold many records on either side of the Atlantic, but in the decades since, garage and British Invasion cultists have elevated their output to fame in their circles. Still, few who get giddy over the sound of the Beatles' records or even who have some interest in Martin's body of work (his easy listening record Off the Beatle Track is a forgotten treasure) rarely afford the Action much attention, which is a pity.

The Action is a relatively standard mod group, a cut below the Kinks and the Who in their early years, but one can imagine what Martin saw in them -- for one, their devotion to Swinging London cool (check out the most detached version of "Land of 1000 Dances" in history) is absolute and seemingly quite marketable. For another, although the band is tight enough, Reg King is a stellar lead vocalist -- macho but tuneful, closer in league to Steve Winwood from the Spencer Davis Group than to any of the first-wave bands. The band's tougher edge and driving, grinding beat is a stark contrast to what Martin was used to in working with the Beatles, so the thrill in large part is in hearing how Martin would have approached a band somewhat in the same general class as the Who. It's revelatory to hear his crisp Abbey Road Studios sound applied to aggressive rock; listen to the way he has the backing vocals swirl around a delightfully crunchy band performance on the catchy 1966 tune "I'll Keep On Holding On."

Some have accused Martin of sabotaging the Action due to his preoccupation with the increasingly exciting directions the Beatles were taking, and in turn attempting to shoehorn the Action into similar evolutions. It's hard to parse this out on this compilation since it's not in chronological order, but there is a conflict between rough-hewn R&B and studio psychedelia that, in retrospect, is more intriguing than a large dose of either could probably be. Plus the flowery 1967 numbers like "Never Ever," a stunning Box Tops / Buffalo Springfield hybrid with trademark Martin horns, have aged beautifully. The compilers manage to keep it interesting, and the band certainly does their part, applying amiable enthusiasm even to dumb songs like "Harlem Shuffle." It's hard to imagine any producer being more sympathetic, or offering them more opportunity.

The strongest tunes are either ageless, like the towering piano-driven 1965 R&B slammer "Baby You've Got It" given Martin's trademark "Money (That's What I Want!)" approach, or injected with what now feels like period flavor, like "The Place," which puts conviction behind its simplest pop ideas. Best of all is the Odessey and Oracle-predicting "Shadows and Reflection," the band and Martin at peak with a bouncing, exquisitely harmonic arrangement and a tricky, elaborate composition -- it's the kind of weirdness a soul group can get behind, not at all labored under any Flower Power ideals. The Action excels equally at dance music, and most of all on their American R&B covers; although their take on Curtis Mayfield's "I Love You (Yeah!)" is a dud that comes off like a butt-stupid Van Morrison, they really hit with the serious reconstruction of Martha and the Vandellas' "In My Lonely Room" (putting the Kinks' Vandellas cover to shame) and most of all with the killer Temptations cover "Since I Lost My Baby," peerless prom slow-dance stuff, perfectly realized. All of the above are recommended for DJs looking to move and bewilder.

So even if the Action sit several spaces below the elder statesmen in the British Invasion chest of drawers, their work will still hit hard any advocate of that sound. "Come On, Come with Me" is practically an archetype of the time, and the menace of "Something Has Hit Me" will make you wish Martin had gotten a chance to take a stab at a Stones album. But all this posturing does get boring occasionally, and seventeen cuts of it is a lot to take in one sitting; best to get this one in quick 45rpm doses. And try to avoid the bizarre homophobic dance song "The Cissy," which has a leftover vibe and lyrics like "You got to be a little shy / Although I know that you're a guy."

On the whole, though, Ultimate Action is a feast of hooks, chorus, and soul that's addictive to the ears, and easily recommended to anyone who wants more of that indescribable Studio Two sound. This is a fine band doing find work; it's a shame they weren't rewarded for it.

Okkervil River: I Am Very Far (2011)

(Jagjaguwar)

RECOMMENDED

Will Sheff's entire career with Okkervil River has been a struggle of discovery and expression; their albums have always been glorious messes, overreaching but no less felt for their flaws. The Stage Names in particular is alternative rock at its cerebral best, literate and precise yet far too fucked up to fully comprehend. Sheff has always seemed an appealing eccentric waiting to break out of his overly mannered or carefully inexpressive shell. For him, I Am Very Far -- the band's elaborate, difficult, sprawling new record -- is an unparalelled triumph, the revelation of his accomplished, unencumbered voice at last. Even if he gives vent to less raw emotion here than hardcores might prefer, he's never impressed more or so easily.

But the shifting, intriguing songs he's written don't necessarily coalesce with the ornate arrangements he and the band provide here. If anything, they sound like they could stand a bit more modesty. Within a few seconds of the album's opener "The Valley," a completely unnecessary high-octane drum sound has nearly overtaken the stage, turning a pleasing, complex folk-rock number into some sort of vaguely embittered anthem, Arcade Fire ten years in the future. While one mustn't doubt that these songs would fall together thrillingly in the band's live show, and it's easy to get a spark of delight from hearing the band navigate through these intricate walls of sound (dig the Wrecking Crew mystique on "Wake and Be Fine"), a suspicion that a minor gulf separates Sheff's ideas from their execution does permeate. "We Need a Myth" (already demonstrably superior in live arrangements, courtesy Youtube) has U2-level melodrama slathered all over its gentle yearning, and potentially graceful starkness in "White Shadow Waltz" gets buried under a weirdly tentative tower of echo and noise that nearly shrinks Sheff's thin vocal down to nothing; drum fills and strings inject busy drama the song is good and smart enough to eventually overcome. Eccentricities like the Talking Heads-riddled "Your Past Life as a Blast" sound either wildly inappropriate or obliquely impressive with the slick, panoramic production style in use here; it's hard not to long for the canned grandeur of Destroyer's Kaputt.

Still, even if I Am Very Far comes off as a slightly botched experiment, this doesn't interfere with basic enjoyment of the album. No doubt it's a relief to hear an established band so prepared to fuck around and fuck up, to release something so much at odds with what their fan base is probably expecting, and fans of Big Star circa Third will nod in loving appreciation at the discordant fall-to-pieces of "Show Yourself," for which Sheff's most psychodramatic singing is almost magically suited. And there are other all-around exceptional tracks here: "Hanging from a Hit" has the arranged subtlety and shimmer one wishes had been in wider practice across the album. "Piratess" is one of the band's most impressive songs to date, a dead-on Bowie imitation with a wickedly fiery edge. And although its chorus oversells itself a bit, a production fault as much as a performance one, "Rider" is a driving delight.

It can take years for a singer like Sheff to train us away from the way we've long heard his voice, to treat his more emotionally complex moments with the seriousness afforded his screeching, struggling anger (witness fan reaction to John Darnielle's conversion to balladry), so it's a sign of hope on this record that features his strongest vocals to date that he pulls off a Rhett Miller / Ray Davies ballad with chutzpah on the countrified pop tune "Lay of the Last Survivor." Of the options presented here, the Bowie lift aside, I could most easily live with this being The Future of Okkervil River. His synthpop swagger on "Past Life" is quite ingratiating, too. But "Piratess" is still my first choice. Assuming chaos is where Okkervil wants to head, Ziggyisms are a far better match than the creaky Appalachian barbershop harmonics of exhausting closer "The Rise," second only to Iron & Wine's "Your Fake Name Is Good Enough for Me" as the year's most interminable LP climax. And the goddamn flute. Yes, "Caroline, No" had flutes. This isn't "Caroline, No." Don that glam rock makeup now, Mr. Sheff.