The Walkmen: You & Me (2008)

(Gigantic)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Seeing the Walkmen live for the first time last year and noting the way that they, as one of the very best bands in the world at going for the jugular, prefer to resist doing so, instead lingering and drifting around their melodic and emotional points, gave me a chance to reflect on how unusual their career trajectory thus far has been. The unfortunate portion is that it hasn't found them the widespread popularity that once seemed possible (they're still opening for bands like the Black Keys that aren't half as talented as they are); everything else about the Walkmen story so far is a model of how we wish these things always worked for young bands. Busting out with the '90s hangover of Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone and the massive impression-maker Bows and Arrows, the band proceeded to craft a world-weary, underrated road album with A Hundred Miles Off and then suddenly, in 2008, changed their entire direction. The nocturnal alienation band of 2000 had made a remarkably linear progression to cathartically joyful and deeply thoughtful music, more akin to Van Morrison than to their onetime "rock savior" peers.

You & Me, their fourth proper album, wrestles to my mind only with the subsequent Lisbon as their finest work to date; both are rare gems in the sense that they document a band's conscientious maturity without the usually accompanying retreat into adult-contemporary blandness. Lisbon is a refinement of this album's atypical sprawl and languid pacing, but there are days when the heartfelt mess of this recording is preferable to anything more carefully constructed. Disregarding what came later, the record is in any case a major departure, sweet-natured and achingly, almost overwhelmingly romantic. Better yet, it very distinctly comes across this way not because that's what their career points to as the next big score, but because it is a bald evocation of a mood, something being felt at the time; you can sense something in the room where it's been recorded, like you could with Please Please Me or even In Rainbows. It's magic, as weighty, rocking and direct as the National but as transportive as Galaxie 500.

It also illustrates an evolving sense of the real utility of music; the Walkmen had once been one of many New York City bands fighting for attention and meaning to strike out with their detached, tossed-off Richard Hell decadence. Even the slow songs, not unlike Interpol's, smacked of despair and the old punk rock trope of alienation. By now, after the audible frustrations of A Hundred Miles Off, it's not just warmth and love that seem to have overtaken the Walkmen -- it's an awareness of the power of memory. You & Me, despite its obvious thematic interests in shared lives and desires, would make a good companion to Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest, due to its concern with capturing how feelings far and near live on, vaguely or precisely, in the mind.

Like Lisbon, this record is among indie rock's most skillfully sequenced, formed into rather distinct thirds: a muddy and intense buildup, gradually collecting into the beautifully expressive midsection, and a hung-over denouement. The record also handily moves along from its predecessor; "Dónde Está La Play" is the opening mystery, and on it you can actually hear the spy-flick machismo of A Hundred Miles Off giving way to something eerily pretty, the slow takeover of a sound that has arguably now become the band's signature. Two songs later, it happens; we get "In the New Year," the first real explosion of this kind of unguarded feeling in the Walkmen's catalog. The enormity of the song's romance is bound to leave one familiar with "We've Been Had" and "The Rat" taken completely aback at first, then that stunner of a chorus gets under your skin and it becomes a large enough thing to be a brand new NYE tradition. In my house it is, anyway.

The Television comparisons that all NYC bands must wrestle with had always dogged the Walkmen, but they become something close to reality here. Musically, the Walkmen's recent work specifically reminds me of Television's masterful and underappreciated 1992 reunion album for Capitol (see especially "Postcards from Tiny Islands"), but in Hamilton Leithauser's vocals it's all Tom Verlaine circa 1977, especially in the sense of his sheer passion, kicking against apathy with inarticulate need; listen to how he's too excited to keep up with his own words on "Seven Years of Holidays." The endearingly ghostly backing whistles, well-sustained drama and build, and bass-heavy arrangement offer strong band interplay on "On the Water," but it's Leithauser's voice that makes it so irresistible and gives you such an unstoppable need to hear what's next.

Even at You & Me's occasional lackluster points -- which do exist; not all the fat got trimmed off this one -- you can still imagine yourself standing in front of the band and enjoying that certain total feeling of release. If the record overreaches a couple of times (see "Seven Years" and the slightly too on-the-nose "If Only It Were True"), it's because they're contending with a newfound force they've only just discovered themselves. These songs are more half-formed than the others, as though they can't resist trying to keep capturing that lightning with the same sort of base impulses; the drumrolls and kicks and devotion to playing the hell out of the songs never flag. As they conquer such shapelessness, the Walkmen are obviously the most assured and powerful they've ever been.

One reason is that the ballads here are as boisterous and explosive as the rock songs; the sheets of guitar falling over a wailing Hamilton on "Postcards" give such a dose of breathless excitement. And I keep harping on this, but we must note the "half moon and your pretty eye," the unabashed romance; among the 2000s' crop of major alt-rock bands, only TV on the Radio can do it better. This leads us into the Walkmen's biggest one-two punch to date. Trying to write about "Red Moon" is just ridiculous; it's a wedding song, right? Total slow-dance shit, and it's lovely when it begins but it just gets more and more so. The glorious horn section is set up against the reflective charm of just everything, and you're left with an otherworldly and painfully grand nominee for their best-ever track. "Darkness is wrapped all around me tonight," Leithauser sings, and we know what can save him; the song evokes no less than the Nat King Cole sequence in Terrence Malick's Badlands, when Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek start dancing in car headlights out in the desert. One can practically imagine Sheen's character putting a line like "you shine like the steel on my knife" in that song he wished he could've written.

"Canadian Girl" continues this unstoppable stretch with a touch of pop bliss and doo wop, the vocals actually conjuring up visions of Cole himself at points, with a wonderfully twisted and blurry guitar backing. This yet again, it must be said, is wedding music of the highest order, and any single element of it could stop you in your tracks, but the singing is what's most arresting of all, what makes it so hard to deal with its wondrously quick fade away. Between these two astounding cuts and "In the New Year" alone, this is one of the most heavily (but admirably controlled) cathartic and emotive LPs of recent years.

After the run of chamber pop in the center, "Four Provinces" is like a burst back out into open air. The poetry presses on, laid here against more percussive material, banging with lilting beauty up to the total release of the instrumental break, in the meantime giving Leithauser a chance to shout for something. The lost-nights moodiness and reflection go on after that; "Long Time Ahead of Us" is a campfire interlude of sorts that exemplifies the Walkmen's simultaneous pull in numerous directions, a crucial prelude to the top chorus of the album ("What happened to you??") on the essential "Rat" followup "The Blue Route." They're as great as ever at recording this kind of cut, always and forever their specialty, only now it seems more detailed and universal. Some old schoolers might even place "The Blue Route" above everything else here, but not me; I love the gushy stuff, and by the time the guitar and strings come on in the prior song it's like, agh, I'm yours, guys.

The final act of the record is marked largely by the beauty of the guitars. "New Country" just about lives in 'em, eschewing drums in favor of vocal meander a la some of R.E.M.'s stark Appalachian material on Green. The final surrender is in "I Lost You," the first touch of desperation here; the melody by itself is ominous, driven by a drunkenly beautiful and sad vocal and lyric, the sentiment unmistakably heartbreaking. What happened to you, indeed. It's in some ways a pity that so much genuine feel for devotion and cherished partnership across the LP must end in this kind of a stark goodbye, but part of the appeal of great albums about relationships from Pet Sounds to In Rainbows is they leave ample room to remain universal, even if you lose the special one. That's why we need this when we're alone. But we'll need it at our wedding too.

[SEE ALSO:]
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002)
Lisbon (2010)

Talking Heads: More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978)

(Sire)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

It's been called the "day of reckoning." It seems so common for a performer to dump all resources into a debut and then to come up empty for the followup. Talking Heads, to begin with, were too prolific and daring to fall into such traps, and moreover, they were reserving their best early material for the ideal producer, which Tony Bongiovi was not. Upon finding a soulmate in the great Brian Eno, they unleashed all of the live classics from their years at CBGB's. These compositions are rife with creative spark, and the imagination of the performances and production result in a leaping, enveloping record and an innovative band in peak form. This is the sophomore anti-slump, not to mention the unsurpassable apex of new wave and alternative rock.

The aptly titled More Songs About Buildings and Food contains an incredible number of this band's signature works -- "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls," "Found a Job," "Take Me to the River," "Artists Only," "The Big Country," "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel," "With Our Love," etc. -- that bristled with energy in live performance. Eno did such a flawless job transferring the power and bliss of the live Heads to disc, with the same savvy studio intelligence that has made him famous, that you want to hang on to immortalize every second, and you feel yourself grabbing at all the nuances to try to keep them.

David Byrne's selection of lyrics this time around find the open windows in "No Compassion" and "The Book I Read" and fly out of both. He is still an angry young man, but much more so than 77, this album is full of moments in which he seems vocally to grasp something beautiful that lies just beyond his reach; he fulfills the promises of the early demo "I Want to Live." On "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel," he achieves rock & roll ecstasy while the others bang out a loud loud loud Velvet Underground groove and Eno turns every guitar note into a Spector wall of sound. On "With Our Love" and the rather shocking Prince-on-amphetamines cut "Stay Hungry" he expresses desires that are almost human, but of course in a sublimely aloof fashion. ("Here's my shoulderblade" is his idea of a come-on.)

The uncredited "No Compassion" sequel "I'm Not in Love" makes the 10cc song of the same name sound like "The Way We Were." "There'll come a day when we won't need love," Byrne snarls. He's ever more alienating on "Warning Sign," on which he finally gives it all up, ignoring the music and simply shouting at the listener as if through a megaphone, "PAY ATTENTION! PAY ATTENTION! I'm talking to you and I hope you're concentrating!" It's a moment that eerily foreshadows the undoing of his persona on the following album, Fear of Music.

A set of three songs at the halfway point of More Songs permanently raise the bar. "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls" is driving and intrusive and seductive in all kinds of ironic and sincere ways. "Found a Job" casts Byrne as either Shel Silverstein or one of Roald Dahl's Oompa Loompas as he belts out the story of Bob and Judy, who didn't like the shows on TV so they started writing their own. The result is bitter social commentary that climaxes in a simple but riveting, breathless jam with some of the hardest and loudest piano banging since the the unforgettable intro to the Chiffons' "One Fine Day." Byrne is at his most unguarded -- and funniest -- in his clever encapsulation of the creative process, "Artists Only," which boasts an incomprehensibly grand Heads performance, always hard rocking but subtle and more attentive to rhythm than bombast. These tracks alone would certify this an essential recording.

Eno has a great deal to do with just how astounding this album is. He has removed the space between the songs to create relentless pacing that never allows you to pause for a breather. More importantly, he has done away with all of the problems that made some of Talking Heads: 77 such a tinny mess. A band this great deserved better than that treatment, with Chris Frantz's drums seeming like an afterthought and Tina Weymouth's bass hardly noticeable at all. For Buildings and Food, Eno understands how important their energy is to the group and emphasizes them above everything else, making this a new wave record slightly closer to R&B than punk. In a sense Byrne's voice feels like a percussive effect in these songs ("Found a Job") while Eno casts a multilayered soundscape around him.

Instead of using subtlety as an excuse to let the songs sit there, Eno utilizes pop method to pump each track with power and enormity. Where "With Our Love," "Stay Hungry," and "The Good Thing" would have been jangly and indistinct on 77, Eno recasts the elements of the songs and lets them spring to life, each note bouncing out of the speakers, every detail out in the open, and the music never sounding minimalistic even though it is. "With Our Love" is suddenly an epic psychodrama, "Stay Hungry" is "Things We Said Today" except it evokes fucking in words and otherwise and degenerates into a murky, stark jam at the end, and "The Good Thing" is an emotionally exhausting, fast-moving cartoon with a fabulously busy climax. The automatic reaction is to dance; it's no surprise that the Heads loved disco. They promote the ideals of musical hedonism through the propulsive, unstoppable beat that runs through this record like a pulsating force of life. It's a genre of its own, ironic detachment dance music.

On the last two songs, the band ditches the first two ingredients. Their hit version of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" really isn't punk-irony at all, it's just proof of the Heads' belief in music as universal thought, and it's telling that Green's lyrics on the track blend perfectly with Byrne's on the rest of the album. But it's "The Big Country" that will leave the biggest mark. Dark and almost visual in its panoramic beauty, it may be the finest ballad in rock music, rigorously unsentimental yet ultimately devastating. Wailing with yet another powerful bass & drum heartbeat and some gorgeous slide guitar, Byrne quietly examines America and the activities of its citizens from an airplane, coming to the bitter conclusion that "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." He can't find the virtues in any place; he doesn't feel at home anywhere. He has no Waterloo sunset. The final verse is stunning: He admits that "I'm tired of looking out the window... I'm tired of traveling... I want to be somewhere" but, in a painfully real moment, is unable to confront his feelings so he says "It's not even worth talking about..." and descends into gibberish. Without abandoning the breakneck immediacy of their aesthetic, the Heads have created something genuinely moving.

More Songs About Buildings and Food is, of course, very early in the career of Talking Heads and comes ahead of foreceful, magnificent recordings like Fear of Music, Little Creatures, and especially the crowning Remain in Light. But this second album is their defining moment, capturing the glory and strength of the best of the CBGB's bands when they were still making music that was identifiably punk. It captures them in their classic, pure moment, and for that reason it remains -- for all the beginnings it fostered, from Eno's position as their only ideal producer to the flirtation with black music -- simply their loveliest effort. It is absolutely an album for the ages and should be heard by everyone, because everyone deserves the opportunity to dance in the ways only this group can make you dance.

[Originally posted at a different venue in 2004.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Sand in the Vaseline: Popular Favorites (1975-92)
Bonus Rarities & Outtakes (1975-92)
Talking Heads: 77 (1977)

tUnE-yArDs: BiRd-BrAiNs (2009)

(Marriage [orig] / 4AD [reissue])

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I don't have to tell you, if you read this blog or my other writings or if you freaking know me at all, that I am pretty well in awe of tUnE-yArDs, more so than I've been with an artist in a number of years. That would've already been the case had Amber and I not seen her live this past October, standing in the front row in the mass of dancing bodies, inches away from Merrill Garbus, but that certainly didn't hurt. Garbus has won many hearts in these last nine months since the release of her second album under the tUnE-yArDs rubric. How, then, does the proverbial fan of w h o k i l l approach her prior release, BiRd-BrAiNs, once the myriad tunnels and grooves in the subsequent record have all seemingly revealed themselves? The answer is -- with great, fresh joy, as was always intended, as if there is no later classic for it to bump up against.

The differences are major, though in final effect they really don't mean much. Clearly tUnE-yArDs began as far more identifiably a solo, non-band project, designed plainly as a cathartic outlet for Garbus' melodic and stylistic interests. These songs were recorded with the favored ukulele-and-sampler setup in Audacity; a veneer of rawness should ideally come from music more than medium, but here you get both. In quality of both performance and writing, Garbus is ever so slightly more frayed and fragile here. What this finally serves is to make the album feel more spontaneous, a less practiced gift that means passionately to connect, to give joy. It charms you more than it knocks you out -- most of the time, anyway.

Those aesthetics and attitudes aside, the two records are clearly of a piece. BiRd-BrAiNs gains traction from its messiness and slight sprawl, with the way it occasionally flies off into abrupt asides of music and archived sound, a cough here, a bit of joyous jamming there, a blueberry snack on "For You." When Garbus is concentrating and determined, though, she is already crafting some of the most pressing and undiluted American music of recent years. Your first thought on encountering the Mbuti chant opening "Hatari" is it doesn't make any claim to being pure but is nevertheless lived-in and guttural, not at all an empty affectation, and well, it isn't Paul Simon (or Vampire Weekend), is it? And there's nothing everyday, nothing at all, about anyone who can pop a Mahotella Queens bridge into a threateningly unstoppable banger (uke banger, at that!) like "News."

It isn't meant to be an insult to say that the sound of lo-fi is too small, too hazy and superficial, to be the definitive vessel for Garbus' work -- it's the same story for John Darnielle and, why not, the Beatles. What makes it appropriate here is her attitude toward it. Whereas on w h o k i l l she would be a fully empowered creature consumed by higher needs, back here she's willing to muse and dote on herself a bit more. What I'm trying to say, I think, is that to some extent these are love songs, quite literally because they themselves cry out to be loved and understood. Their full-bodied world-embrace is courageously romantic and sunny and desirous of some far-up-above fulfillment; that's more familiar than the sentiments populating something like "Doorstep" or "Gangsta," but it's also an act of sanity-assuring humanism. The sound on "Fiya" of racing toward the heavens and just being is in its fashion something as powerful as you can put in recorded music.

"Hatari" and "Fiya" alone are tastes of the unbridled Garbus, but her wicked humor and personable subservience to sound are most evident on the staggering "News." I'm not sure which of these three songs is the clear showpiece, but I know that "News" may be the song that explains everything wonderful and ingenious about tUnE-yArDs in a handily packaged three and a half minutes. It's sass, snarl, and hip hip, a loud and hard feminist triumph. A sampled beat that plops around with the wet-frog sound of "Instant Karma!" pumping along patiently while Garbus hammers her uke and lets her gentle, snakelike melody weave around. All the while she's giving vent to gloriously perverse sentiments about not needing any booze "to get it up in the morning" and most importantly, letting you know she won't take this shit anymore no matter what. The contradiction of her lilting phrases with the relentlessness in her words and music is the driving force of BiRd-BrAiNs, a necessary motif with its more relaxed vocal structure.

Contradictions, in general, light the fire under these songs, how "Hatari" can sound so open-aired and natural like something that sprang up from your body but is still constantly surprising, or how the yearning of "Sunlight" has the feel of something astonishingly controlled and assured. Slyly modest at first, the latter builds to an enormous climax until the wall of ukuleles sounds like it's going to snap your speakers in half. The grandest showcase of all, of course, for Garbus' impulses is her voice. The first dramatic reveal of its cathartic, alarming range is on "Lions," an intimate and mysterious but lovely circular piece that begins small, just an infectious beat, but then she cuts loose and begins to shout, howl, and grunt, all with unfailing confidence, in touch with vast abilities we can scarcely even imagine.

And if you didn't realize then the bottomless virtuosity of Garbus' singing, "Jamaican" will seal it -- this thing is a wonder: wicked-sinister cooing followed by abrasive, spitting smack talk that collides into a screaming rant, against the sound of a heavily sampled construction site. Not all the songs are so overloaded with ideas, but like every initially ordinary-seeming Beatles single, they all have some surreal touch: the weird synth and traffic sounds on "Jumping Jack," the killer riffage that drives and morphs "Little Tiger." Even her count-ins are awesome (see "Safety"), and the sense of gleeful pattern living in the construction of her songs gives a clue to the coming cacophony of w h o k i l l. That's handy, because as odd as it seems, Garbus seems so much more studied and calm here, and there's something wonderful and revealing about that... but experiencing her work backward, I tend to miss the aggression a little.

So much of BiRd-BrAiNs has such a touch of the deliberate, the careful distribution of Garbus' gifts, that it's like the lift of a cinematic curtain when she just throws it all out and goes crazy on "Fiya," a song that stands firmly apart from the entire remainder of her work -- filled with genuine yearning, vulnerability, it's powerful enough before you notice the deft wisdom in the words: "What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?" It's reassuring. We can't be Merrill Garbus. We could live a thousand years and work hard at whatever we do every day and never be that fucking smart and gifted... but we can still recognize in ourselves something she feels, and that's why we have and need art itself. This longer messier record is her first of two major gifts to us, with surely many more to come.

[SEE ALSO:]
w h o k i l l (2011)

The Alan Lomax Popular Songbook (1933-59)

(Rounder)

RECOMMENDED

The field recordings of the great and vital folklorist Alan Lomax are among the most important documents of the real America, the birth of the undercurrent of always-scattering culture you could catch wisps of all through the twentieth century. We can still detect it here and there, underneath all the noise. This compilation serves as a brief but intriguing explanation of how Lomax's field recordings and discoveries impacted the broader frame of recorded pop music. That's hardly the most compelling reason for these songs' existence, but there's no such thing as a bad reason to bear witness to Mississippi Fred McDowell's haunting "Motherless Children," the riveting Woody Guthrie performance of "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad," and the stunningly beautiful Cleveland Simmons "Sloop John B." You get a few recordings already quite famous on their own, too; Leadbelly's "Irene Goodnight" and Kely Pace's "Rock Island Line" are as stirring as ever, Macbeth the Great's "Man Smart, Woman Smarter" and Duke of Iron's "Ugly Woman" just as maddeningly stupid.

The only problem with this collection is the clear effect Moby's Play had on it, basing some of its song choices on the material used as the basis for several songs on that then-insanely popular record. One doubts that "John Lee's Rock" by Boy Blue and "Sometimes" by Bessie Jones would've made their way here without "Find My Baby" and "Honey" respectively, though they along with the great-in-any-context "Trouble So Hard" by Vera Hall Ward serve to prove how little Moby had to do in order to fashion these chestnuts into dance music.

At its best, Popular Songbook will fill you with the glee of discovery and make you long to hear more of Lomax's recordings. I'm experiencing that myself, and I have a feeling there are many pleasures richer yet to be found.

OutKast: Idlewild (2006)

(Jive)

RECOMMENDED

Good thing I don't impose a minimum word count on these reviews, because I've got no idea how to expound about Idlewild. During the new release drought of December and January, I try to tackle the last albums some of my favorite acts issued prior to my starting this blog, and for whatever reason when I think of "the last OutKast album" I invariably think of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and this novel semi-soundtrack thing completely slips my mind, until a hunt through my playlists and folders alerts me to its existence and I remember the two and a half times I listened to it many years ago.

It's a good enough record, but there's a reason it doesn't seem like a proper OutKast LP even though it is: the whole thing just sounds too damn easy for them. It's slightly off-kilter funk-hop with tinges of genre melt from all over the place, tackling the Depression, showtunes, jazz, hard rock sheer surrealism, etc. The songs are lovably weird, some of them irritatingly so with their repetitive sledghammer hooks, and Big Boi and Dre are as charming and funny as ever, but nothing really sticks, as much fun as the sprawling seventy-minute (too damn long, admittedly) disc is to listen to. In the end its primary contribution to the world may be its introduction of Janelle Monae, who sizzles on her pair of appearances, and while it's easily outlasted the film of the same name in the cultural memory, it smacks of side project pretension. But if you're tuned in to OutKast's general aesthetic, you'll undoubtedly find this a delightful if extremely slight romp, its backward-looking stylistic exercises not nearly as fascinating as their less guarded material but expert and easy to like all the same.

Little Richard: The Specialty Sessions (1954-60)

(Ace)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Richard Penniman is outrageous. The present tense, "is," matters there because as far as we know, he still is. He still plays live occasionally and probably shows his age when he goes out on stage, especially currently as he recovers from recent hip surgery. The things life has dragged rock & roll through now, right? Hip surgery! But there's no doubt his eyes are still wide and crazed, no doubt he's still a mess of contradictions and passions. We know because that's what he always was, even as a child, the boy whose rebellions against his strict parents (how cinematic) got him kicked out to join a medicine show and then finally form his life elsewhere, turn himself into Little Richard. Six decades hence, as he prepares to enter his eighties, he remains Little Richard.

And not in name only, and regardless of the absence of creative output since he was a young man. The point of a figure like Penniman is that he exists on a continuum; he doesn't craft new material because he doesn't have to, because when he gradually revealed his massive, world-altering style to the world, it was just a laying down on tape of a base impulse, a force of liveliness deep inside him that he'd been struggling his whole life to know what to do with. He learned it and documented it, and everything since has just been celebration, well-deserved at that. We know all this because Anthony Burgess was wrong; Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange were never really destined to change, their destructive and awful forces always brewing underneath as much as you and I might always be good-hearted or complacent or just centrally strange. Penniman's acts of violence, his gleeful, giggling lashes out against all notions of order within the world, weren't meant to hurt anyone, and they didn't, but that doesn't mean they weren't explosive. They were all on record, in his vocal tics and bops and hoots and snarls on "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly." The gurgling fury and fire within him that emitted these things is a force so frightening, so persuasive, so wild that it's no wonder Penniman's confusion about his possession of it -- and love-hate relationship with the person it, this thing, created -- caused him to derail his career more than once for sacred concerns.

And only too appropriate, given that Little Richard's records at his peak, all of which were recorded for and released on Specialty Records, call so vividly to mind the hopping exuberance of a Sunday morning revival -- the steady but complete loss of grip on everything, the surrender that is at the core of both religion and rock & roll. As in the souls of so many other performers, this diabolical disparity and similarity between the carnal and the sacred has defined everything for Little Richard: his attitude, his losses, the path of his life. In the beginning, it was just the devilish impulse in him that turned a bawdy old joke into the most frenetic and nightmarishly hammerheaded 45 recorded up to that point, "Tutti Frutti." From there, the intensity of his hits over the precious few years to follow never flagged, and never failed to provide everything you could want from two minutes of outrageously steamy rock & roll music. There was no time for tension on Little Richard's records -- maybe "Lucille" had a little, but not much -- because everything was constantly breaking, bursting. There was no time to breathe.

That's how Little Richard wanted it; initially it was just because he was and is the liveliest of wires. But later, you sense a wicked craft in play. The key to all of the essential Little Richard classics -- "Rip It Up," "Ready Teddy," "The Girl Can't Help It," "Long Tall Sally," "Slippin' and Slidin'" -- is that they cannot fall victim to any kind of reductionism or recontextualization. What year it is doesn't matter, these songs command the room if they're playing, and provided they're loud enough they're more than capable of exuding the same sexuality and Pied Piper voodoo control as they ever did. These records are a documentary of a force, and they will always endure as an enthralling and powerful glimpse and touch of something we can't feel anywhere else. The total joy of these recordings shrouds and owns us. They're still just about as good as music -- or anything, really -- gets.

An early peak of the CD era (issued in 1989), The Speciality Sessions is one of the greatest boxed sets ever released and one of a handful of two or three that can be described as essential. It isn't a good way to get acquainted with Little Richard if you're not already, but if you're not, why are you reading music blogs!? I kid, but get thee promptly to Youtube or Spotify or whatever and find a Little Richard greatest hits package with the original Specialty material; it seems incredibly unlikely (and sad) to me that anyone could be raised in America without some awareness of Penniman's music. I don't actually have a single-disc collection of his work anywhere, but I understand The Georgia Peach is the one to beat.

Assuming you're already pretty aware of the basic facets of Little Richard's music and career, you'll find this box a worthwhile investment. It's available in two versions: the full-fledged six-disc set that encompasses every note of music Penniman put down for Specialty, and a condensed three-disc version with the highlights. Both are pretty exhaustive, embodying all of the hits but a fair number of obscurities and a wealth of alternate takes and other curiosities. Both boxes are out of print now but used copies of the three-discer are relatively affordable. If you can find it, I recommend picking up the larger box, which is known in some parts of the world as The Specialty Box Set. The reason is that while the six discs may seem a bit much and they are certainly comprehensive to the point of clearly being designed for the hardcore fan, Little Richard deserves some pretty intensive scholarship sooner or later; you can program the redundant stuff out for now and just hear the highlights, but he's too damn brilliant for there not to be some point in your life when you want to hear everything he did, and the white-hot moment is clearly the 1955-57 period captured here. The larger set is a keen purchase because it allows you to enjoy the recordings at your own pace, with lots of options available. I mean, if you're going to hoard and analyze anyone's whole body of work, this is the man to choose.

Whatever version you end up with, you'll find the sound quality stunning: the sharpness of the vocals and music bring home another key point about these singles. Little Richard had already developed his vocal style on the pre-"Tutti Frutti" material that's more or less generic jump blues. Even on those songs, which sound like everything else that was coming out of the south at the time, he's mesmerizing; he makes even the nth outtake of "Baby" interesting." To hear these performances sparkle like they do here, with none of the maxed-out EQ bullshit you'd get on a modern release, makes for an enormously compelling headphones or dance-party experience. Something else that separates this from a lot of "sessions" boxes, incidentally, is its listenability. Today we listened to something like five versions of "Good Golly Miss Molly," all right in a row, and it didn't get old. Not in the least. It never will. To boot, Penniman, like Buddy Holly, loved to experiment and play around with his compositions, and he had a good ear for which offered the most intriguing opportunities for alternation, tweaking, contrast. As it turns out, Penniman and Holly both were fascinated by the former's composition "Slippin' and Slidin'," one of the most immaculately written rock & roll songs. On each of the alternate takes of the song provided here, the instrumentation changes; there's a version with pounding drums, one with brushes, a perverse bongo variation, and the ridiculously hot 45 mix. Each is a top-caliber recording that could surely have been a hit; you're getting a lot more than you think with this session material.

Inevitably, the boxed set malaise applies here, which is one reason that unless you're engaging in some serious study of Little Richard's artistry, you'll want to make heavy use of the "program" function (as I'm sure early-period CD advisers would tell you) or take the whole thing in small doses. The midsection, disc two on the compressed set and discs three and four on the extensive one, is appallingly addictive and batshit fun and worth hearing in complete form again and again. The rougher going bits are the slow buildup, finally cresting and breaking out with "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally," and the slide back down into decline as we approach the epiphany that led to Little Richard's retirement from the industry to find God and righteousness. The final discs culminate in some entertainingly bizarre moments like a Royal Crown hairdressing ad and a giggly, half-assed run through "Hound Dog" that simply must have been a joke. Of course this dilutes the overall impact a bit, but that's the nature of the beat, and you're also treated to such loveliness as Richard's tackling of "Well, Alright" and the wonderful low-rent "Good Golly Miss Molly" variant "Bama Lama Bama Loo," which nearly surpasses the hit in its subliminal energy.

That just adds to my conviction of how much you really get with this set. You can use it to make a sweet and simple Little Richard greatest hits set, which would easily rate A+ on my scale, or you can craft a shorter but still revealing cross section of his evolution in those two and a half magical and frightening years when the world was in his hands thanks to what amounted to an entirely new form of communication -- one which I believe has lost not one iota of its brightness, vitality, sheer beauty.

The Roots: undun (2012)

(Def Jam)

RECOMMENDED

There’s no better measure of the increasingly broad influence of college rock than its presence on the last couple of Roots albums. 2010’s How I Got Over included guest spots from Joanna Newsom and Monsters of Folk, while this low-key new release is purportedly inspired by Sufjan Stevens’ “Redford,” a pretty cut buried on Michigan. The other trend in recent Roots projects, though, completely overwhelms all else: a fascination with stark ‘70s soul. The pounding pianos and downbeat What’s Going On arrangements ebb and flow underneath Black Thought’s usual brilliant verses, plus such fine guests as Big KRIT, Bilal, and Stevens himself on piano.

There’s always a caveat on recent Roots LPs; in this case it’s the socially charged “concept album” formula, another byproduct of the ‘70s. The time devoted to the Redford “character,” a troubled, unlucky everyman we meet upon his death Sunset Blvd style, is just another distraction from the consistent musical greatness of the Roots and especially Black Thought, one of America’s most articulate and underrated MCs. There’s nothing wrong with being artful, but the Roots are best when they drop the costume drama and let loose.

[Note: Though this is a 2011 release technically, it showed up so late that I'd already compiled my end-of-year lists; it'll be in consideration for at least the "liked" list at the end of 2012. The year in the title is off by one for cataloging purposes. FYI.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Rising Down (2008)