All Saints: All Hits (1997-2001)

(London)

RECOMMENDED

Not trying to be funny here -- this is a hugely enjoyable collection. All Saints got tagged in the U.S. as just another Europop phenom riding on the Spice Girls' coattails, but in fact they'd existed in some form since 1993 and made their debut almost simultaneously with their peers, and their music existed on a fascinating threshold between adult contemporary-leaning dance-pop and traditional bubblegum. That's what makes this such a fun and bizarre time capsule: there is seriously no two-year window that could have fostered this music except the 1997-98 limbo between Spice and the full-on teen pop explosion.

Group leader Shaznay Lewis spent much of the group's brief career at loggerheads with cofounder Melanie Blatt, and singers, management, writers (Lewis included), and label never seem to have found a careerist tactic that really gelled, even briefly like the Spice Girls. That's the only reason I can think of for the preponderance of baffling covers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (a turgid "Under the Bridge") and Labelle (a "Lady Marmalade" that predates the Moulin Rouge! deconstruction by several years).

Drop those and you're not left with many actual tunes, but the ones here are an intriguing snapshot of a moment in time, a decent nostalgia trip, and generally just a bit of silly fun. Check out the trip-hop inflection of "Pure Shores," the TV commercial insistence of "I Know Where It's At," the stupid-delightful bounciness on "Bootie Call." Inevitably, the cut that shows real depth and longevity is the massive crossover hit, the extraordinarily melodramatic breakup ballad "Never Ever," a brilliant single that borrows equally from "Amazing Grace" and the Shangri-Las; this is a language we all can understand.

Lewis herself, who composed most of "Never Ever" in response to a messy relationship, seems to have been the foremost talent of the group (a solo cut she did with Artful Dodger makes the cut here, and sounds pretty much at home with everything else, perhaps more because of the era than anything), and she and Blatt are also apparently hilarious, if we're to trust Wikipedia's harrowing documentation of their various falling-outs:

Shaznay Lewis later explained that the catalyst for the break-up was a disagreement over who would wear a certain jacket for a photoshoot: "I would never in a million years have put money on the group ending over a jacket incident. But when that incident happened, it fired up so strong, it had to be over. And the way I was then, the state we'd got into then, there was no way she was getting that stupid jacket."

In August 2009, Melanie Blatt told the London Lite: "All Saints are never getting back together again. I never want to sing again. I recently did the Brits with Nic and we just went round chatting to people and then got drunk. That's my goal—to get paid for chatting to people and getting drunk!"

Do you ever suddenly get this feeling that nothing about pop culture will ever be as fun to you as it was when you were a teenager? I dunno... just wondering.

Atlas Sound: Logos (2009)

(4AD)

RECOMMENDED

Yow, that Bradford Cox sure is a cheery bloke, isn't he? I was a Cox skeptic -- not being all that enamored of the hybrid of proggy guitar meandering and jangle-pop that started to overtake indie rock in the late 2000s -- until Halcyon Digest changed my mind completely. I wasn't the only one; that masterfully emotive and accessible record is the sort of thing that, in the somewhat myopic world of "alternative" blogs and news sites, can be termed a game changer. For my money, though, Cox's project of the following year, his third album as Atlas Sound (Parallax), was better still, one of the most genuinely gripping and immersive collections of songs I've heard in a long time, with the artistic energy and restlessness of the best pop songwriters. Parallax inevitably made me want all the more to check back on Cox's earlier work to see what I maybe had missed.

One thing very noticeable about that record, however, was the crippling melancholy running underneath it. Going back to the Atlas Sound music I'd skipped before, I'm mostly just so glad that he discovered songs after this. The addiction to pure "sound" on the celebrated but deadly-serious Logos provides an unfortunate analogy to this year's much-hyped Deerhunter side project, Lockett Pundt's Lotus Plaza. Unlike his My Bloody Valentine-after-too-many-beers Spooky Action at a Distance, I'm willing to call Logos a good record -- but one I don't see myself returning to often. As in the worst bedroom pop music, the apathy and bleakness are just too much to take. Cox's artistry and musicianship are undeniable, but it's hard to listen to Logos, despite the ample beauty contained therein, without feeling pretty troubled.

There are professional moments that snap into focus, of course; the bouncy Panda Bear cameo "Walkabout" continues the trend of Noah Lennox being far more compelling on other people's records than his own; the beautiful "Criminals" continues the good vibes and gives some hint to the showmanship Cox would begin to develop the following year; the eight-minute "Quick Canal," with vocals by Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab, threatens to descend into a dirge but never does; and best of all, "Sheila" is a wakeup call, a pop song with manic energy that sheds much of Cox's bummed-out listlessness. Unfortunately, these bright spots serve to emphasize the drabness of cuts like "The Light That Failed," which manages to throw all sorts of noise out without achieving any kind of resonance.

You end up picking up on pleasing sounds and lyrical flourishes, but the sameness is paralyzing; Logos sticks to its strongly held ambiance so well that you can't find a way in. By the end, all the despair is exhausting, not least because it's so amicably yet abstractly expressed. I finish Parallax wanting to give Cox a hug; I listen to this and want to stay away from him, because he's ruined my day with one of the bleakest albums I've ever heard. In all seriousness, this is a fine record despite some vapid mood-music rabbit holes it falls down, but proceed with care, and do not for a moment expect something as winning as "Terra Incognita" or "Basement Scene," which may not be any more colorful but are certainly less resistant to ingratiating themselves with you, becoming a part of your own world rather than a vessel for accidentally beautiful boredom.

[SEE ALSO:]
Parallax (2011)

Stevie Wonder: Innervisions (1973)

(Tamla)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Innervisions, the best long-playing record by very nearly the best recording artist ever to live, is frequently deconstructed as Stevie Wonder's "accident" record, the undiluted celebration of a recovery from a serious brush with death. But of course, its recording and release precede that life-altering event and if the car crash merits a place in a contextual treatment of his music, that place is with Fulfillingness' First Finale and, to a lesser extent, Songs in the Key of Life. Those are Wonder's most mature accomplishments; Innervisions is the moment of fire and will, the furious coming together of everything to form the person, the artist, the cultural titan.

The context it requires has merely to do with the decade of music preceding it: you needn't know where Wonder came from or what Wonder did in the '60s and in Music of My Mind and Talking Book to enjoy and love Innervisions -- but its impact certainly owes something to that advance knowledge, of growing up in real-time under the spotlight. Because Stevie Wonder had recorded brilliant music before, had already asserted himself as a great and nuanced performer of blistering emotion and intelligence as far back as "Castles in the Sand" or earlier -- and there would have been absolutely no reason to think that anyone might feel much need to prove oneself or top oneself after radio classics like "Uptight" and "My Cherie Amour" and "I Was Made to Love Her" that reverberate with red-hot tension and joy even now. He did this on his exceptional LPs of the early '70s, but the two aforementioned might well have begged the same question. There aren't words, then, for what a landmark of individualism and creative transcendence Innervisions would turn out to be. It's without precedent, without peer, without subsequent duplication; the confidence is absolute, the level of artistry still startling.

We must flash forward for a moment, to the third cut on Innervisions, to define the meaning of this specific moment and where it lands. It's not as if the jazz-soul collision of "Too High" or the gloriously sustained "Visions" repeat well-trodden ground for Wonder or anyone else; if anything, they mark the equally pronounced establishment of a distinctive sound only slightly suggested before, manifested in the former's playfully atonal doo-doo-doos as much as the methodical sadness of the latter. But the trajectory of Stevie Wonder's entire career from this point is mapped out in a matter of ten seconds as "Visions" trails off and "Living for the City" picks up. The opening notes dramatically struck on the TONTO synth would be enough for the way they compress the sprawling, dreamlike brood of "Visions" into a sudden kicking in of momentum and rhythm that presses forward, outward, all like a door widening out into the open. But the vocal begins then, and across every song he'd ever laid down, he had never, ever sung like this before.

"A boy is born," he announces, empathy and rage dripping from his voice, "in hard-time Mississippi / Surrounded by a world that ain't so pretty." He's leading us into more than the assured triumph of a true artist and master of pop music; he is lifting the curtain on a ballad of America, a Civil Rights anthem, a keening in the face of darkness. The hot, full-bodied funk that follows features not a single note or sound that isn't played by Wonder himself. He seems to find himself in it, first bursting out vocally like never before and then, after a biting spoken-word vignette about racism and fear in New York, he sings even harder somehow, ragged and loose and violently angry. Across the seven minutes of this stunning single, he finds liberation in directness at last. He finds the same as we segue into the completely different world of "Golden Lady." The aesthetic rules don't correspond here but Wonder ignores that, devoting himself wholly to the gradual build of pure romance in the ballad, as free and in-control as before; his sophisticated, ingeniously modulated vocal achieves the illusion of spontaneity and real, human presence in a sense never achieved by the choirboy recitals in something like "My Cherie Amour," brilliant though he was on it. He has become another figure entirely now; in control of career and music both, he is no Motown idol here.

And what is sung is what matters to him, from the rocks under the feet of the children in "Living for the City," whose pride and sorrow he captures with the wisdom and unfussy reportage of a great journalist -- "her clothes are old, but never are they dirty" -- to the spiritual missive hidden in the outrageous funk "Higher Ground" or the choral, celebratory tones of the absolutely fierce "Jesus Children of America." His lyrics have never been stronger, either; he's at his wittiest, slyest, saddest on "All in Love Is Fair," his most introspective and poetic on "Visions," adding to the sense that what we have here is really simply one of the most extraordinary instances of the last century of a great popular work being a great personal work.

His control gets to you, too; that calm overlording of everything on the catchy sparkle-and-fade "He's Misstra Know It All" but especially "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," which I'm 90% sure is the greatest song ever each time it comes on, his hapless Woody Allen routine at the outset making it certainly the funniest and most charming. And so much, again, of this is him, purely. He is every note of "Worry" except some of the percussion, and everything including percussion on "Higher Ground," "Jesus Children," "Too High." Does it even register that all of these songs sprang from the same sessions? Is there any doubt that this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded? There is permitted to be slight doubt that it's Wonder's peak, as his next two records would present a formidable challenge, but for consistency I don't feel there's anything close in or out of his catalog. Every cut is a deserved classic, yet you somehow feel compelled to plug them and make people love them more.

If we're talking peaks, though, I somehow keep being sent back to that brief little trill that opens "Living for the City" -- maybe because it signals what's to come (which is certainly why I get goosebumps when "Golden Lady" starts), but I think because it gathers up every impulse of Wonder's prior career and hauls them all to a central, focused point and begins to run. And run he would for years to come.

[SEE ALSO:]
Music of My Mind (1972)
Talking Book (1972)

Ariel Pink: Worn Copy (2005)

(Rhystop [orig] / Paw Tracks [reissue])

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

There's nothing about this that isn't annoying. Since Ariel Pink released Before Today, a record I stand by as excellent, he's set about working full-time on proving it was a fluke with odd behaviors and the general stepping away from the slightly more universal appeal he was beginning to reach. Despite this skepticism, I was curious enough to step into the past and dig into some of Pink's old lo-fi bedroom chillwave. I wish I had not done this. It's not even that it's particularly bad for what it is, just that "what it is" is something I have no ability to hear the virtues in. It's really a good thing I'm not hearing this until now because if I had, I doubt very much I ever would have given Before Today a stab.

[SEE ALSO:]
Before Today (2010)

Cake: Motorcade of Generosity (1994)

(s/r [later Capricorn])

Breaking: junior high school nostalgia trip hits brick wall.

Things I still like about the first and easily best album by a band whose sardonics now rub me completely the wrong way: the joyous (and significantly, wordless) bridge of "Comanche"; Vince di Fiore's trumpet licks on "Up So Close" -- also the attempted rhyme of the title with "microscope"; the melodrama of "You Part the Waters," which was in a David O. Russell movie I think; all of "Jesus Wrote a Blank Check," a minor but infectious rockabilly creation; not the smug, contemptuous "Rock N Roll Lifestyle" itself but happy memories of the Daria (talk of peaking early...) episode in which it appeared; the actually somewhat ambitious and philosophical if overlong "Mr. Mastodon Farm," which I think was probably my father's least favorite song I owned when I was a teenager.

And... well... I don't like the condescension that drips over everything. I can't deal with that sort of shit anymore. It's little wonder that John McCrea would later collaborate with Ben Folds, whose band appealed to me for similar reasons and is now similarly useless to me. When I was a kid I hated the classicist teen angst bands like Nirvana and Green Day (and still do, fyi); I perceived groups like Cake and Ben Folds Five as being more to my liking because they delivered what I now understand to be the same angst in a dreamcoat of wit and the all-important teen trope of sarcasm. But this isn't wit, it's clever boys who know they're clever, and it's incredibly tiresome. In fairness, Cake would get worse in this department then improve immensely on the much more user-friendly Prolonging the Magic and would even occasionally be genuinely funny (from Comfort Eagle's "Short Skirt... Long Jacket," "At Citibank we will meet accidentally / We'll start to talk when she borrows my pen" still makes me laugh) but by that time they would have sacrificed the gritty country-rock minimalism that gave their music its appeal in the first place.

Like all Cake albums, this one is repetitive and dry, the performances uninspired to the point of being insipid -- the band's only distinctive personalities are their winning trumpeter Vince di Fiore and their utterly obnoxious singer John McCrea, whose deadpan snotty delivery immediately reveals the reason this band's music speaks primarily to teenagers. If by some slim chance there are portions of the lyrics meant to be read sincerely ("Right then she knew there must be something more" on "Jolene" or "I am thinking of you wondering what I should do" on "Haze of Love," both delivered like the dude's going over his taxes with an accountant) he single-handedly sabotages them. It's easy to see what this anti-amibitious crew was aiming for, though, and it comes together in fits and starts: "Ruby Sees All" is still a great song, and the lyrics aren't stupid. "Jolene" is an excellent song, but its entire last minute is wasted real estate. I spent late nights my whole ninth grade year jamming to "Jolene" and brooding and wishing to get the hell out of where I was, like pretty much everyone does -- think I succeeded but it's awfully easy to bring those feelings back when these canned-sounding guitar tracks pop up. And now I can't escape the sense that I was being manipulated.

Really, the songwriting is generally solid -- I compared this record to Brill Building pop a lot and I see what I meant, but not in totality: "Haze of Love" sounds like about a third of a Goffin-King composition, but there's no way in hell those two would have allowed three full minutes of meandering and riffing on the same basic melodic theme over and over with just one slight variation.

The CD I'm listening to is unusually well-mastered for a '90s album. Apparently the record was later "refurbished" to become louder, ha. Of course. Fun fact: I originally owned this on cassette. Wonder where that is.

If John McCrea says "aw" one more time I will spit my Froot Loops all over this lapt

Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012)

(Italians Do It Better)

RECOMMENDED

Few bands have more to answer for, at least in the context of indie pop, than this one -- though initially released with little fanfare, their 2007 album Night Drive turned them radically away from their lo-fi origins into a then-otherworldly delving into '80s AM radio, fused with the hazy mystery of the Cocteau Twins. In bloggery circles, 2007 was an eternity ago and Night Drive is seen as a classic that foretold the advent of chillwave and correctly predicted the shifting of the tide in indie circles to a fetish for synth textures and, gulp, soft rock. Then there was the film Drive, of course, which despite being an abysmal, hate-filled movie certainly captured the musical moment decently enough in its iconography of a blank-faced Ryan Gosling traversing the streets in his shiny car, the airy, lightweight, moody textures of the Chromatics drifting dreamily from his cracked windows. Mood music, you say, and you're right -- mood music raised to some sort of agonized art.

But this is a more interesting group than all that accidental trend-mongering suggests, certainly more compelling than the majority of the bands who've made it their mission in the last five years to conjure up memories of Mr. Mister, occasionally riding the idea to an armload of Grammy nominations. The major difference, emphasized heavily by long-awaited sequel (and grandly titled) Kill for Love, is that the quartet doesn't value perfection, nor is an artificial "sheen" their simple means to an end. Their addiction is on sound, and in this respect they belong far more to the shoegaze and Eno quadrant of alternative rock than to the Bon Iver / Fleet Foxes guild of glazed-eye boredom. That's not to say Kill for Love is an exciting and explosive record -- it almost painstakingly avoids saying or doing anything terribly distinctive beyond its cumulative effect, the provision of an impulsive, hypnotic state that perversely recalls some of the sleazier corners of '60s psychedelia, the C.A. Quintet and the 13th Floor Elevators in particular.

What excuses all of the stylish excesses of this record? The vocals, plainly. Singer Ruth Radelet takes most of the duties, and her warmth and strange, sullen nonchalance transforms the music and lends it an air of joy and enthusiasm, because it sidesteps the technical crooning favored by both the chillwave and EZ listening indie bands as well as the pop giants they seek to imitate. She sings in a manner that somewhat recalls Maureen Tucker, or the women who guest on Owen Ashworth's material and always sound like they're having a bit of a laugh and a great day but are utterly heartfelt. The injection of sincerity Radelet provides is so disarming when compared even to relatively mainstream-leaning chillwavers like Ariel Pink that it has little trouble making the first half hour or so of Kill for Love something that almost seems inadvertent -- a shattering and professionally blissful synth-rock record.

A recasting of Neil Young's "Into the Black" as depressive hymnal opens the LP; though it filters the song through the Night Drive machine, it ends up suggesting a fusion of Young's original with his own mournful CSNY cut "Helpless" -- it's a lament. That sadness is retained despite the skittering, enthusiastically bright synthpop tricks on "Back from the Grave" and "The Page," but the band lets loose on the title cut, a statement of purpose that manages (thanks largely to Radelet) to dig for something that isn't trite in its powerful central phrase. Radelet's real showcase is "Lady," a self-duet of sorts that reaches for radio-hook sorcery, and ends up reigning. It's rather shocking how this music that so recently would have been labeled kitschy and retro now sounds entirely, presciently cutting edge.

Those first five cuts would've made a dandy EP, but they're mostly the prologue to what is in the end an overlong series of variations on a droning, obsessive theme. Radelet recedes into the background after the exquisite eight-minute construction "These Streets Will Never Look the Same," and from then on the remaining hour or so functions as a complete, self-reflexive piece that weaves in and out of a straight line. It doesn't hinge on songs or on music, but on texture and wide-eyed focus. You're meant to drift off while it's on, and at times it's such vague and distant music -- despite its perverse attachment to the archaeology of long-ago "hits" -- it feels as if it could float away, right out of Ryan Gosling's window. Nevertheless, Kill for Love begins with a bang and is consistently listenable; Chromatics are talented enough to be doing much more, but they do excel at establishing and sustaining -- for an appalling amount of time, really -- this noise and mood to which they're so clearly attached.

The Animals: Animalism (1966)

(MGM)

RECOMMENDED

In a way this is comforting -- I sat down to review a record I loved and came away realizing that it isn't really very good at all. I'm not as stoic in my tastes as I sometimes fear, everyone! It's still "recommended" for now because it was a big deal to me when I discovered it a few years ago, and there's some goodwill left over, but I find myself more than a little uncomfortable with the wheezy blooze on here now. I dig the Animals generally; Eric Burdon himself I'm a little more suspicious of, and since the arrangements here are mostly lite and lazy (the major exception being the brooding variation on "Hit the Road Jack," which is quite lively), his vocals are the main thing I have an issue with.

White pop singers in the '60s were not strangers to a certain racial profiling when they approached black music; even my hero Alex Chilton is guilty of this in the "c'mere chillun" cry on "I Met Her in Church." But what Burdon does seems to me to go beyond a well-intentioned but ultimately problematic tribute and into the realm of juvenilia, just this side of prejudice. There's some of this on the Animals' hits, granted, but without the empty worship of garage rock and British Invasion I had when I approached this album initially and thought it a long-lost jewel, I'm put off by the affectation of a "black blues" sound to which, frankly, Burdon has no right. And before you crow about authenticity being a thoroughly socially-engineered concept, the whole issue here is that Burdon is coasting on that idea, he's singing with a costume, singing in blackface, if you will, because he wants to appear "legitimate" and "real." That's all the dumber when you consider how easy it is to hear Sam Cooke singing "Shake," Little Richard doing "Lucille," Howlin' Wolf doing "Smokestack Lightning." As with a lot of the early Rolling Stones covers, I find myself wondering what the point is except rocker posturing. If I can't excuse the Black Keys, I certainly don't see how I can excuse this.

Why single the Animals out, you ask, when all of the first wave of Brit Inv bands were known for famous and obscure blues and R&B covers? Easy. Compare the Kinks doing "Milk Cow Blues," John Lennon singing Arthur Alexander songs, the Stones doing "Good Times" to Burdon painfully grunting his way through B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby." The other bands use the original songs as a jumping off point within their own emotionally fertile and distinct idiom -- the Beatles especially. They don't attempt to replicate or replace the records they're reviving. I get the vibe here that Burdon is just getting off on himself. Honestly I can't say for sure what I was hearing back in 2008 when I went so far as to plug this record unstoppably to a dozen or more people. Maybe I'll hear it again someday.