The Mountain Goats: All Survivors Pack (2011)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Here is the risk one runs upon having established a cult on the level of John Darnielle's: any artistic maturity, even the good kind, is met with anger and suspicion. Replacements fans in the '80s were downright distraught over Tim and Pleased to Meet Me, which seems silly today (and even sillier when modern indie rockers attempt to appropriate such nonsensical prejudices). As his recording methods become increasingly elaborate, and as he becomes less and less the sole vital member of the Mountain Goats, Darnielle deals with a base of followers whose patience with his balladeering and introspection and grownup laments, all laid down with ample studio polish, is constantly thin. To an outsider, the Mountain Goats seem to be getting better and better every year; to someone whose obsession can be traced back to the early to mid-'90s, they're not the same band.

That's why beginning with The Sunset Tree and sporadically since, Darnielle has excitedly taken the unprecedented (outside of hip hop) move of releasing work-in-progress versions of his latest songs concurrently with his actual LPs, essentially public demo tapes which -- surprise, surprise -- distinctly resemble the rough-hewn early cassette releases under the Goats' name. Prior to 2011, two albums have received the treatment: Sunset Tree begat the vinyl-only Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, an interesting if inessential item, and The Life of the World to Come was issued overseas with the bonus CD The Life of the World in Flux, which I have yet to hear. But only upon moving to flush-with-Arcade-Fire-cash Merge Records in 2011 was Darnielle permitted to slip out an actual living breathing cassette tape, just like old times, sealing the image of a bone thrown to the lifers. The artwork was Xeroxed and hand-colored by Darnielle himself, a move surely meant to impress those who feel the slickness and relative calm of his recent albums has created a barrier separating them from their once-intelligently aggressive hero.

But there is enough of an inherent falseness to the image that one wonders if it will impress Mountain Goats cultists, if the imaginative and vastly resonant songwriting Darnielle has let loose in recent years didn't. Darnielle admitted in interviews that, of course, in 2011 it's not really possible to record a tape the way he did in 1994. He can simulate the limited, fraying sound of those vocal takes, he can certainly record something alone in a room -- but it is all digital, with all the inroads and separate "uncool" limitations that creates. For one thing, these tracks are unequivocally not boombox recordings; they are clearly layered and crafted with the assistance of perfectly pleasant-sounding modern techniques available on any home computer -- that's cleanly separated stereo sound you're hearing on the guitars, and it's hard to imagine that the compression on the vocals isn't a conscious measure to make the tape "messier."

Which begs the question, was the harshness and dirt ever the point of the early Mountain Goats? It's natural to miss what you loved about a band you used to adore, who then moved in another direction, but the number of songwriters who haven't benefitted from bigger studios with more choices is negligible. Lo-fi is a means to an end, and rarely is it in and of itself a virtue. It's fine to be able to hear past the hissing, the tape glitches; what's not fine is fetishizing them to the point that you can't accept that "Sourdoire Valley Song" is an exponentially better song than "Golden Boy" simply because "Sourdoire" doesn't sound like it was recorded in someone's basement. Controversial opinion: lo-fi is a genre that exists because it has to, because it often takes gifted people a long time to find their audience. Once they do, there's little reason to continue in the same vein.

Another reason it's hard to view All Survivors Pack as a modern Hound Chronicles is that these are not designed as the final public performances of the songs. This isn't a question of being desperate to communicate something, which is a lot of the charm of the Mountain Goats in the '90s; witness the way "Liza Forever Minnelli," for instance, is an extremely vague, rough runthrough of the rote compositional facets of the song. These recordings were made to play to the rest of the band to determine questions of arrangement and production; despite the synchronicity of their release with All Eternals Deck, they are not finished songs. They are functioning demos, an aspect of a band that is typically kept private.

With that said, the fervor Darnielle brings to some of these performances slightly eclipses the final released versions, but this is usually pinned down simply to a more spontaneous, felt vocal performance. (And it can go the other way -- on Come, Come to the Sunset Tree's "Love, Love, Love" he seems to merely be reciting the lyrics in the vein of Jason Robards' Brutus; on the LP, he feels them.) Most significant is the fine rock song "Birth of Serpents," which boasts a bit more passion than on Eternals and comes across just as fully as in the band arrangement; the ballad "Never Quite Free" benefits from Darnielle's unfussy solo take. Both songs work perfectly on the LP, but the touch of simplicity, the sense of being alone in a room with an outsized personality like Darnielle's, adds flavor -- perhaps a few of these demos could be included on the actual album next time around.

Mostly, though, for anyone who's come to love the accompanied record (one of the band's best ever), these takes seem unfinished. "High Hawk Season" is difficult to accept without the baritone choir, "Sourdoire" is so whisper-quiet it's hard to hear, as though Darnielle fears waking his wife, and if "For Charles Bronson" fails to suffer for the absence of the other Goats, it's strictly because the song itself is utterly indestructible.

For a fan, all of the demos remain fascinating to hear, and I'd encourage the band to continue these releases, but I do wish they'd find a better home for the two new songs here, whether they flesh them out with band arrangements or not. "Catherine Antrim's Kid" and "Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece" are as striking and moving as All Eternals Deck at its best. Even as they are, they would be a worthy addition, but the mind reels at contemplating drums and bass on the warm, affecting "Antrim," strings on the ominous "Mouthpiece." As it is, no Mountain Goats fan can legally hear them outside of the five hundred who scored Eternals early enough in the run to get the free cassette.

I was one such person, and I'm glad; Survivors is a thrill to listen to and a fun curio to have in the collection. But I'd gladly trade its scarcity, the joy of owning it, for those two songs to be more widely heard. Even illegally, the tracks only show up via Mediafire in two long side-length MP3s, annoying to listen to and parse out. I would post them myself but I love Merge Records and John Darnielle and do wish to incur the wrath of either. Just trust me: find a way to hear them, even if you can't track down the cassette as a whole, which is currently going for $102 at Discogs. Limited edition objects are always so fun in theory, but this is always what happens -- I'm a stickler for availability, cultists be damned.

The flawed theory at the heart of All Survivors Pack, along with its two rough-hewn demo predecessors in the Goats' catalog, is that the band has something they need to recapture. They don't; John Darnielle doesn't. No one who could issue a record as brilliant as All Eternals Deck less than six months after a very enjoyable one like the Extra Lens' Undercard, in turn less than a year after one as strong as The Life of the World to Come, needs to reach for the past. He's doing fine.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Life of the World to Come (2009)
All Eternals Deck (2011)

Parliament: Osmium (1970)

(Invictus)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Who can count up, and who would care, how much copy was wasted over the years attempting to determine the difference between George Clinton's two same-personnel-different-label outlets, Parliament and Funkadelic? Most of the time, the conclusions could've varied wildly from record to record -- sometimes Funkadelic was "darker," sometimes the opposite; sometimes Parliament was "drugs," sometimes Funkadelic was "sex." What's clear is that the distinction Clinton made between material for the two bands was private to him. The utter lack of daylight, overall, between the two groups prevents one from really considering this Parliament's "debut," as chronologically it follows at least one Funkadelic LP. But with four years to elapse between Osmium and its official followup, and indeed with a spiritual and musical crux more in line with the namesake Parliaments (the R&B outlet that gave way to P. Funk) than with the sister band, it's easy to look upon this obscure oddity as a work apart from the remainder of Clinton's insanely prolific '70s discography. That's a pity, because the record -- without qualification, without need for contextualization -- is brilliant, bearing all the crazed mad scientist genius marks of George Clinton at his best. It deserves to be as known and beloved as any of Parliament or Funkadelic's subsequent classics.

Already, Parliament is -- by the fact of their very existence -- a spit in the face of staid rock conventions that had by 1970 taken firm hold on pop music. Osmium defies all critical conceits coloring FM of the period; when they're not inconsequential, the lyrics are stuboornly banal ("the sink began to think") and the band finds heaviness a thematic tool rather than a sonic end. The intimidation one feels in the militaristic hard rock on "Funky Woman" is all in the space between the instruments, the cumulative effect of the band as an unstoppable unit. The confidence, assurance, swagger that would make George Clinton a major artist of the era is in place on "Moonshine Heather," irresistible sleaze as lazily provocative as any number of P-Funk classics, and proving that Clinton was already proficient and innovative as a producer before Parliament ever played a note. Others could easy channel the melodic "There Is Nothing Before Me But Thang" into a chunky anthem, but Clinton refashions it as towering guitar pop, with a gleeful overflow of effects, that ultimately falls into a glorious VU-like shapelessness fused, improbably, with Deep South gospel. And that's hardly the peak.

Osmium is a thrilling, endlessly surprising record because its songs are all so individualistic, to the point they scarcely seem to belong together -- Parliament's first record is not merely the creation of a grand world, it's the creation of many. You can hear Clinton's joy in subverting and updating his Parliaments formula on "Put Love in Your Life," which opens as a street doo wop hymn but veers nonchalantly into spy-movie melody, organ-driven minimalism, and a triumphantly emotional vocal of soul and sex that underscores, toys with, makes something of the song's craziness and plodding drama, with its epic build and closing guiatr deconstruction subtly offset by shades of Tommy James. This is an LP of head-turning eclecticism and variance even when its genre experiments are not as explicit as the (completely convincing) funk-country-yodeling hybrid "Little Ole Country Boy." Each track is utterly distinct, the crew never stopping for a breather.

If Parliament's artistic peaks come when they are most challenging, the treasure here is "Oh Lord, Why Lord / Prayer," a deeply ironic (in the vein of the Clash's "The Sound of the Sinners") but unfailingly respectful toy piano gospel, allowing a Eurofolk stuffiness to give way to filthy, often out of tune soul. But the pleasures are just as likely to be pure and unvarnished, the undeniable "My Automobile" scoring instantly with its post-modern doo wop, warm humor, atypically simplistic sentiments ("If you be nice to me I'll be good to you / We'll both ride home in my automobile"). If all this occasionally seems inappropriately kitchen-sink, it feels less so the more attention you pay to the Parliaments' silky vocals, which attain a rare spontaneity while sliding in and out of deepest darkest soul with what sounds like little effort, at chugging pace. They can make an emotional crescendo at the snap of the fingers, with expertise and professionalism -- hired funk and sincerity.

Osmium embodies the material for an A+ album to stand with Mothership Connection and Let's Take It to the Stage, but there are a few duds -- opener "I Call My Baby Pussycat" is a noisy hard rock nursery rhyme that's somewhat nondescript musically, and the last two songs are cock rock meandering and sap, despite a memorable chrous and thrilling, sophisticated guitar work on closer "The Silent Boatman." But even with its flaws, the record scores big as the real-time establishment of an artiste, with most if not all of his motifs in place. The songs are lengthy, given room to breathe and wallow in the fear, dread, paranoia that Clinton would make a career of crafting. condemning, celebrating. Even stripped of all context, of all awareness of its place in pop history, though, Osmium is as intensely pleasurable a record as even this master could conceive. A treasure trove indeed, it deserves many times the reputation it holds.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong (2011)

(Slumberland)

RECOMMENDED

With a name like this, a band has a lot of persuading to do; there is little about their stylistic niche that doesn't initially confirm all the worst suspicions it gives. They look, sound, and feel exactly like you'd imagine a group called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart would. Conversely, the memories they evoke are unmistakably up my alley, and indeed that of most anyone interested in alternative rock 1980s to present. If nothing else, this is a band with impeccable taste in material to imitate, which they do quite liberally. We get the sound, already well-mined by the Smashing Pumpkins among many others, of the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine crossed with adolescent, melodramatic attitudes of the Cure and the Smiths -- sans the humor and wryness of Depeche Mode. It's as if they're crafting music with a specific audience of irony-free youth in mind. There's not really any shame in that, but it is difficult to buy the sincerity of grownups who propagate this sort of material with a straight face. When I listen to Cure records, I find myself wearily smiling a bit at the sheer silliness of it all -- and there doesn't seem to be any self-awareness to offset that, or to find pleasure in it.

So for the duration of Belong's title track, I'm connecting the dots. Its "we just don't belong" chorus hits hard like the best '60s instances of grown weirdos like Shadow Morton making little girls sing crazed odes to the immensity of teenage passion, like a reality distorted. And the song shoots out of the speakers like some 1989 college rock juggernaut, guitars relentless with the shimmering, anthemic spirit of youth. It's the closest TPOBPAH can come to finding the human essence their skyscraping tunes grasp for, that added depth and intensity that makes Arcade Fire and U2 (on a good day, which was long ago) riveting and not embarrassing. To make music this sweeping and grand work, one must move past communication into an empathy that this crowd, like Robert Smith before them, is too preoccupied to track down. It's a hell of a voyage but with no touchdown.

Soon you come to recognize the broad strokes and thickness provided by Flood and Alan Moulder, whose work on a constant parade of '90s commercial-alt classics puts them second only to Butch Vig as defining the rock radio sound of that decade. Like the band, this pair seems stuck in time somehow, only they seem to have an excuse -- they were hired to duplicate a feeling. Hirings and duplications hint at a deeper problem for bands like Pains, whose obsessions drive them more than their discoveries. Spend enough time listening to the classic indie and alternative records from the 1987-91 period this record plunders and you find the same thing you find when you spend too many hours on the pop station: all this shit has a formula too. In a true sense, genres are formulas, or formula applications, and this one can finally go only so far in confirming individuality. Without distinctive songwriting to back up an addiction to a noise, you're left only with a briefly gratifying fridge buzz. "Heaven's Gonna Happen Now" coulda been on the radio between Screaming Trees and Catherine Wheel songs and you would bob along and wait for the next non-filler tune to come up. And twenty years later you'd hear it on the radio and it would bring that period alive for you and you'd wonder why you didn't love it then. But the unfair advantage of advance memory accumulation should not be the prime stock in trade of a vital new band.

It sounds like there is an identity hiding somewhere in here; I've been one to lament the tired "why listen to [new band] when you could listen to [old band that influenced new band]?" argument, but never has it been as tempting as when I hear "Heart in Your Heartbreak," a song whose throwback tendencies are so explicit it feels manipulative, and "The Body," a lift from the group's collective favorite, the terminally underappreciated O.M.D. And yet... something begins to happen to even the best of us, that feverish party-dream sound becomes hard to resist. You want to stay away from these towers of propulsive kiddie synthpop, but oh, that chorus... And this is why grownups are hooked on young adult lit, why a film about adolescence done right with depth of feeling (like Adventureland) can leave even a cynic woozy, why Depeche Mode's coy songs about teenage lust are high art -- because there is immensity, truth, and the delight of the universal in these emotions. Because they are important, and they long ago laid the groundwork for us. And here they are again.

At the midpoint of Belong, it becomes genuinely and completely seductive. It's shoegaze power pop, a concept of endless possibility. The suite that makes Belong impossible to ignore begins with the Church / Echo and the Bunnymen oddity "Anne with an E," whispered posturing that feels incredibly good. And there are songs! Real, complete songs, perpetually lacking on the remainder of the disc. The pick hit here is "Even in Dreams," which could have been on the soundtrack to Lost Boys (or Donnie Darko!) or, better yet, any midnight you've ever spent staring straight upward -- it's note-perfect midnight glory; you can almost see the stars swooning past in some perfumed bout of inspired private or shared troublemaking or wandering. This is what introspective rock & roll is all about. But Pains also offer their 2011 equivalent of last year's baffling Midnight Juggernauts masterstroke "Lara vs. the Savage Pack" in the form of the improbably ingenious pop work "My Terrible Friend" -- dynamic, maximized synthpop with thoroughly ingratiating stop-start momentum. It's like bubblegum Cocteau Twins.

Then comes the afterparty, and the whole colorful Psychedelic Furs foundation collapses as if all the appealing, blissful stuff were just a put-on (like a Strokes LP). "Girl of 1000 Dreams" is a rock dud that lamely approximates My Bloody Valentine circa Ecstasy and Wine, "Too Tough" is a hungover guitar thing briefly conjuring up current college rock's bizarre fascination with Tom Petty, and "Strange" simply meanders, droning and singing off into the darkness. Despite the strong impressions Belong's highlights leave, it really consists of three excellent songs, preceded by four good but hyper-derivative ones and leaving three mediocrities in their wake. There isn't enough here to form a complete picture of a group that knows what it's doing; it's not even particularly their fault, but this is why it's so much harder for new artists to develop in the 2010s. A band with obviously considerable potential can record an album that only realizes some of it -- this is Pains' second goround, and as of yet I cannot comment on their first -- but gets half-crazed notices filled with hype, inevitably leading future audience members to look for a fully formed group that is in fact still learning who they are and what they want to do.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are doing a fine enough job so far; their hearts are unmistakably in the right place. They could stand to have a little bit more fun, to allow their integrity not to morph into an odd, crushing absense of sensuality, to write more of the spellbinding and evocative songs of which they're clearly capable. I hope everyone gives them time and keeps listening; for merely the pleasure I get from nodding and grooving along to "My Terrible Friend," they've got me on their team.

Air: Moon Safari (1998)

(Caroline)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Having never adequately explored any Air LP until this week, I admit wondering a lot to myself now why it took me so long. As documented in this space, I am something of an easy-listening, lounge, and beautiful music diehard -- and in combining Muzak with punk rock ethos, the Versailles duo is conceptual gold to me on a level with the Velvet Underground. This is what I've been wanting to exist for years, and I can't explain why it hadn't found its way to me until now.

No matter. With a smart lushness far beyond master of rock & roll elevator music Eno, who favors a starkness that is a world away from Air's floridly cloudy textures, Moon Safari is irresistible. If it converts so many without a prediliction for electronica or lounge, imagine how special it ends up being for one with a collection of 101 Strings Orchestra and Bert Kaempfert LPs. Air manages to extract a thick essence from the idea of aural atmospheres while piling on towers of percussion and dream-pop as on the hit "Sexy Boy," or offering musical ideas so beyond quibbling as to render any objection to the stuffy background moot, like the appalling snakelike bassline on opener "La Femme d'Argent."

You don't come to this for songs, really; you come to it for something to put on in the bedroom, lights off or dim, to let yourself drift. The Chemical Brothers fan in me digs the Beth Hirsch contributions that vaguely recall the now-untouchable dance classic "Where Do I Begin," which chillingly enough was barely a year old when Moon Safari was issued. The Moby fan digs the clever use of pleasurable samples throughout, a contrast to clip artists who'll use sordid junk to try and craft high art. Of course the Beach Boys fan in me is thrilled that the wicked drum sound from "Do It Again" found its way to something like "Remember."

But the music fan is craziest about "Kelly Watch the Stars," the kind of sonic bliss that usually only a wall of guitars can provide for me -- and when something as detached and cerebral as Beautiful Music generates that sort of reaction, you're in the hands of a couple of masters. But the best track here, for me, is the one that puts Air's debt to '60s lounge music and BM on plainest display. "Ce Matin La" could come directly from a 101 record, only its wry, bachelor party pillow of noise has the subtlest -- but most striking -- hint of sadness and loss, indescribable and vague but unmistakable, that makes the band near-automatic masters of a craft devised for cynical reasons long before they existed.

I have listened to this three times in the last six hours. New addictions are what makes life grand.

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)