One-Sentence Reviews

I'm cranky music-wise lately, and feel my interest in modern "indie" rock depressingly fading -- its fault, not mine -- and I am not going to torture myself to come up with anything significant to say about the following. I reserve the right to add more to this over the next week or two.

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (2012)

(Warner Bros.)

There's nothing particularly offensive about this musically but at the moment the only thing I want to do less than talk about the Flaming Lips is talk about Chris Brown, Surfer Blood, and Ariel Pink; Wayne Coyne's cutesy aloofness isn't funny anymore.

***

Faith No More: Angel Dust (1992)

(Slash)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

It would be better for all of us if Mike Patton just... checked out.

***

Death Grips: The Money Store (2012)

(Epic)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Thanks, Jayson, but I'll take the skinned knee over this mumblehip bonehead shit that sounds like a room full of fratholes.

***

Actress: R.I.P. (2012)

(Honest Jon's)

Immersive.

***

Curren$y: The Stoned Immaculate (2012)

(Warner Bros.)

RECOMMENDED

You know the drill by now -- a worthy summer comedown/chillout, but I do wish there were something here as good as the one-off "Plot Music," on which he sounds, well, awake?

Annie: Anniemal (2004)

(679)

To a great degree, this record hangs on a tragedy: the death of this Norwegian pop singer's collaborator and boyfriend Tore Kroknes. The pair had begun recording as a lark in the late '90s; Annie finished the project in tribute to him. This explains why it ends up sounding like a capturing of fun, impulsive artistry stunted by a sense of labored obligation. Because as much as Annie has been embraced by the alternative press, her presentation of basic dancefloor ideas is only slightly off-kilter. And that's fine, we love this sort of music, but we can't ignore a certain absence of spontaneity here, a weak self-consciousness that stems, really, from its being a blatant grab bag of era-defiant dance music influences.

And for the passionate discophile or electro-pop aficionado, this can prove reductive, because we know that the Tom Tom Club boy-crazy romp "Chewing Gum" reaches out to us from a different universe from the early '90s hi-NRG drama of "Always Too Late," the catchy but superficial bubblegum of "Me Plus One," the nondescript gym music of the title cut, the made-for-The-Limited trip hop of "No Easy Love" (her best track), the generic Madonnaisms and party disco of "Greatest Hit," even the R&B slowjam that sets us off into the night on "My Best Friend." The collision of these things, none of them seeming terribly convicted and all rather off the cuff, is awkward.

The songwriting does little to mask these issues and often meanders dreadfully despite promising moments. Many of these hooks are from the Wings/ABBA universe of music that burrows its way into your skull as shamelessly as possible with a headache-inducing lack of substance. These already busy songs could do without diversions like that "oh no, oh no, you got it all wrong" on the too-long-and-facile "Chewing Gum," that Mike Love-like nursery rhyme chant "if there's ever a girl that can rock your world then that girl sure is me" on "Me Plus One," the mismatched baroque chorus of the improbably shiny Björk allusion "Helpless Fool for Love," and oh, that simply painful "My best friend, where are you? Tell me, where are you?"

Only rarely, however, is Annie's work here devoid of appeal. (The two complete misfires are the awful, badly sung "Happy Without You" and the endless 1986-vintage 12" single soundalike "Come Together") The weaker cuts still might boast rousing beats or splendid towers of vocals, and "No Easy Love" is a surprisingly stylish wonder. But except for "Greatest Hit," the melodies seem lazy; the instrumentation is often better or more interesting than the songs or the singing, and this just isn't the type of carefree party it passionately wishes to be. You've heard of record-collector rock? This is record-collector dance music, something I didn't even know was possible.

Gossip: A Joyful Noise (2012)

(Columbia)

!! CAUTION !!

Read my Metro Times review.

To be fair, the cover art's worse than the music.

Buddy Holly (1958)

(Coral)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There are twelve songs on Buddy Holly's second album and only officially credited solo LP. Exactly half of them qualify as landmarks, those weighed heavily on the back half, the opposite of the Brunswick collection The "Chirping" Crickets. Of the remaining six cuts, there are three outright duds, covers of Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley (Leiber-Stoller) tunes to which Holly's unique, fascinating voice is ill-suited. One of the three remaining cuts, all cowritten by Holly, is a pleasant diversion ("Little Baby"). But the two songs that reveal most are the filler toward the beginning: the melodic oddity "Look at Me" and the yet more eccentric folky guitar piece "Listen to Me" don't sit neatly with any of Holly's most famous music. But what's interesting about both is that they sound at least seven years ahead of the pack sonically, emotionally, aesthetically. Hearing "Listen to Me" today it's impossible not be shocked that one isn't hearing a forgotten outtake from Beatles for Sale or Help!.

But assume for a second that there's nothing you really need in the lesser half of this album. You're wrong, of course, but let's favor that argument. Theoretically, that's a rather poor batting average, not one we'd easily forgive on a modern record. There's little doubt in my mind that the number of people who've ever pinpointed this as a starting or defining point for Holly newbies is trivial. Yet if an artist issued original songs on the order of "Everyday," "Words of Love," and "Rave On!" on the same slab of vinyl in 2012, it's my firmly held belief that -- no matter how the quality of the other selections averaged out -- the world would basically implode.

The two full-length albums Holly released in his lifetime are surprisingly separate in tone and stylistics -- The "Chirping" Crickets had been all explosions, bursts of energy. On Buddy Holly, only "Rave On!" savors this over sustaining a mood. Still, the distinction both halves of this tiny body of work share is that while their character and strength are suggested in any context, their life comes out when they're played as loudly as possible. How else to experience the real rumbling that undercuts the carnal desires in "Peggy Sue," the intensity of the drums on "Rave On," the cluck-cluck swagger in the breathtakingly intense vocal of "I'm Gonna Love You Too"? "It's gonna happen someday," he joyously, soulfully sneers.

Holly was an innovator more than a showman; "Peggy Sue" is the subtlest of all early rock & roll hits, admittedly watered down a bit by overexposure through the years. You can't gauge its impact from a tinny telecine or an iPhone speaker; what you really need is the 45 with its deep grooves rattling up from beneath. But frankly, as much as I love Holly, what gets me excited is the heavenly run of "Everyday" -- "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" -- "Words of Love."

Neutered a couple of decades later by James Taylor, "Everyday" is one of the greatest capturings of young love in Western art; delicately hopeful, sexually charged, whispering and tense, it envelops everything about the early stages of a relationship lyrically, vocally, and musically, and it's one of Holly's true masterpieces. Crucially, unlike even the boldly dramatic stop-start of the Crickets ballad "Not Fade Away," it never releases its tension, a task left to "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" on which you can hear the earliest evidence of Holly attaining the wistful desperation that would become his last recorded legacy with the apartment demos laid down shortly before his death. Those recordings are more obviously anticipated by the playful surrealism of "Listen to Me," but "Mailman" presents such a harsh, cathartic vocal performance -- the song itself almost overcome with regret and dread -- that it seems in many ways the most artistically advanced moment of this often breathtakingly sophisticated album.

"Words of Love" presents yet another side of Holly that would subsequently be explored in more depth: the grand, sheepish romantic. Up to now, most of Holly's relationship songs had been either angry, like "That'll Be the Day," or seeped in eroticism, like "Not Fade Away." This cut, though, is positioned as a response to one of Holly's most beloved records (and, not to make this about me, but mine too): Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange," a song that predicts everything from funk and soul to shoegaze, a positively nasty guitar lick held together by incongruously ugly, agonized vocals that embody the title masterfully. I believe it's one of the ten best rock & roll records of all, and I think Holly agreed. But whereas that song means to swipe and provoke, Holly's response in "Words of Love" is a cooing ocean-breeze of sweetness and open-armed adulation, a song as pleasing to the ear as any one can imagine, its guitars ringing out with the clean simplicity of Hank Williams, the vocals a gently brooding low-intoned hum of springtime reverence. It's Holly's only ascendence into a belief in magic, rather than mere generating of it.

The Holly story is unfinished after this. It never will be finished, and it's foolish to think we have some inkling of where it was headed. Buddy Holly, the album, is just one element in a larger legacy of this master who never had the chance to prove the degree of his mastery -- but because that larger legacy isn't large enough, this is important: for history, for memory, for pleasure.

[SEE ALSO:]
The "Chirping" Crickets (1957)
Greatest Hits (1957-59)

El-P: Cancer 4 Cure (2012)

(Fat Possum)

This is dramatic shit -- though engaging, it's a mountain of impulses and kind of a task to get through. Four full listens, several halfway, and I don't really know what I think of it and I'm not terribly excited to hear it again. It's true that El-P's off-kilter, spittingly dense delivery has never been for all tastes; I've never really warmed to it myself. This seems alternately the most and least "El-P" effort to date, mostly because it's so ambitious. You can sift through his wordplay and find some jewels like "Walk in the zone or get less, wake in the fog of fright night / Eat where the sifters sell trash, sleep where the orphan's hell hatched" and bear witness to the extreme storytelling mastery of something like the bystanding accomplice anthem "For My Upstairs Neighbors (Mum's the Word)." But outside of magnificently fun guest spots from Danny Brown and Killer Mike, your overriding impression is that this the work of a pretty tortured dude. It's all very serious, and I don't necessarily mean to put that up as a negative.

Brooklyn courses through the veins of this record; the live tracks that encompass keyboards by Ikey Owens, bass from James McNew, and guitar from Jaleel Bunton capture these times as well as anything. El-P has called this an album about wanting to live, and in its apocalyptic tenor, the busy difficulty of it all, it seems shadowed by death, "darkness" in the author's phrase. So this might not be much of a party record and it's frankly too overwhelming to sink into, but it's certainly fascinating.

Sam Cooke: Portrait of a Legend (1951-64)

(ABKCO)

!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!

i have been thinking a great deal about love lately. love as a cultural force and an act of protest. perhaps it's my mood this summer, perhaps it's changes i don't necessarily want to be dealing with and i'm hanging on hard to what stands like a beacon among the dross, hanging on to words and pictures and emotions as if attempting to store them away for future use. perhaps it's this dark weekend full of dark thoughts and dark news, the point really being that i have lately felt this need to strip things away and find what's important to me. existence itself, i guess, privileged or not, is predicated on the constant peeling away of "business" that distracts us from our absolute nature and our absolute loves. i'm 28 and maybe i don't know what i'm talking about -- i can't even bother to use the shift key right now, apparently -- but gradually i've come to believe we are all, every one of us, too aware of ourselves to harness our deepest whims and stay true to them in any but the most achingly, lovingly fleeting moments. it's like something that we steal here and there. and i find myself looking everywhere in the art i digest for that action, that sudden -- for lack of a better, less chopra-ian term -- oneness with being loose and capable of surprise and joy. there's a moment in the film the lavender hill mob that's like this, when two men are running down the eiffel tower getting dizzy and their hats fall off. it's exhilarating, but even that is busy and cluttered compared to the music of sam cooke.

portrait of a legend, a sam cooke cd i bought in 2004, is maybe the best hour of music i know to exist. i'm not convinced it isn't the apex of everything i love about popular music; in fact, i'm almost positive it is. this is one of many reasons (chuck berry's the great twenty-eight and pet shop boys' discography are two others) why i roll my eyes all the way back behind my brain when some rockist informs me that albums, lps, whatever are the prime medium for all this stuff. this cooke collection is cobbled together from singles, b-sides, and rarities spanning much of the great artist, singer and soul innovator's career and there is simply no question that it's better than any album that could ever exist. indeed, there are two lengthy stretches on it that are rapturous like something immaculate or cosmic and i don't know of anything else like it, but the compilers at abkco were brilliant to do it like this: how the devastating "sad mood" spins out into "cupid" into "wonderful world" into "summertime," how "twistin' the night away" swells up into "shake" which sighs into "tennessee waltz" into "another saturday night" and into the peerless "good times." they also arranged two explicit climaxes in the hardened, cathartic "bring it on home to me" and the ghostly, almost unlistenably emotional "a change is gonna come." yeah, the tracklist is great and the pacing is crafty and all that. but this really all sam cooke -- he did the hard work. you never ache for him to have had the chance to do more of it like you will after spending 70-odd minutes with this unbelievably perfect, pure-heaven collection of songs.

the voice is everything -- what i mean is how he will operate on the basis of singing astonishingly well, technically: "you send me," his big breakthrough, is carefully phrased and sweet; he wraps around standards like "for sentimental reasons" and reinvents doo wop as this crazy large thing on "just for you"... but then he completely throws you off with this sudden interlude of absolute purity like the stunningly felt "i'm coming home one of these days" bridge on "chain gang" or the "la-tatatatata-tatata"s on "wonderful world," and there are variations on this everywhere. what sam cooke is doing when he is singing about how good the good times are and how happy he is and how he doesn't know if he'll feel this good again is not just giving vent to something unexpectedly guttural within himself but validating our own emotions, those we hear in the song itself and those spurred by the nuance in his angelic but tough singing, which goes so much beyond what could be explained merely as "smooth" or "soulful." words are inherently reductive when dealing with it; there is no way to contend with what cooke could do other than to listen and respond inwardly or bodily. to return to real life after hearing him is the strangest and harshest of transformations.

yet real life is what he enlivened. those aforementioned validated emotions, well, even in an innocuous thing like "cha cha cha" he's achieving pure release and joy to give comfort in the deepest hopes, sexual and emotional and every other way in the listener -- that's the reason he's often defined as having "invented" soul, which who knows if he did but it hardly matters. he's such an overpowering force, on originals and outside compositions both, rendering us barely able to notice how inventive the cha-cha-cha proto-'60s strum on a cut like "win your love for me" is when we're so fixated on how he so magically phrases that completely undiluted, relentless "whooaooaaa little girl, how happy i would be"... and all this is magnified, inevitably, on the songs that struggle mightily with loss and desire and need, "chain gang" to "cupid" to "another saturday night." but all the same, the consistency of his work as showcased here is remarkable. there's not a single weak cut. there are some you've never heard, some you haven't heard in a while, but he is compelling across all of it, making you feel like you're at home whether you know the tune or not. it's revealing to hear a shred of his sacred material like "hem of his garment" and "jesus gave me water," correcting the tendency of so many cooke compilations to ignore that early phase, and it speaks to how much his lilting phrases and wordless flights of ecstasy can mean anywhere. "lovable," the sad reflective hop "only sixteen," the archetypal chamber pop "you were made for me," the quiet "i'll come running back to you" are all songs that might be pleasant but utterly benign in some other context, but thanks to cooke's nuanced delivery, they feel like classics. the stomping "sugar dumpling," rhythmically diverse "good news," and wicked horn-filled "meet me at mary's place" deserve the status anyway, and the illusion of spontaneity he always presents is manifested impressively in the impressive blues "little red rooster."

but what courses through all this in its most inimitably powerful sequences is memory. you're a fucking master if you can manage "sad mood" without at least feeling
like shedding a tear or two, in part because cooke never wallows in his desperation -- he always sounds like he's just feeling it all and pulling his way through. same for "chain gang," which you know well of course but which you might not remember is absolutely heartbreaking and a moment of total release for singer and audience both. the voice is really so loud, calling out and yearning and echoing down through the years. i remember my dad turning the radio up when "cupid" inevitably came on the radio as he drove me to town, and it seemed present then as now as ever -- "wonderful world" was a mainstay too. you put it on and people dance, slow-dance usually. that's what the song's about. or someone asks you to dance and you say no and then wish you had said yes, and you stand alone for the rest of the song... and that's what it's about too. it's even about how i really did try to impress my best friend i had a crush on in high school by getting straight a's one semester. it didn't really work but it helped my gpa, and it adds to my trust of cooke, who never seems to try to elevate any of what he's saying. just meets it on its own level heroically, without talking down.

gershwin's "summertime" is here too. only sam cooke ever made it sound so vital, so far from a staid staple of a different era. every era is his. i remember SHOUTING along to "bring it on home to me" in a bar with my friend eric and not just believing but feeling every trace of the sentiment, smiling and thrilling at the sleazy drunkenness of the moment but also participating in the things cooke meant to illustrate. you might do the same thing with "another saturday night," do you realize what he's saying and how painful it is? he's got nobody... and there isn't a person alive who doesn't get it, who doesn't connect immediately with that and how directly and free of abstraction we find it expressed here. there's an infinite solace in that open expression of sorrow. there's time for joy too -- we don't talk enough about the pure dancing happiness in "twistin' the night away" and "shake," and those are masterpieces too.

but there's a way in which solitude is what i feel is really being celebrated on these records, a sense i don't get from as much rock & roll as i used to want to. on "tennessee waltz" -- the definitive version of what can be an either great or terrible song (see patti page for an instance of the latter) -- he sings about his brokenness and loss of his lover to his best friend with an almost admiring, resigned tone, as if he knows that such pratfalls are an essential element of romantic being: that loss and happiness only really compound one another. by the same token, it seems almost like "i'm havin' such a good time" is expressed with some regret on "having a party" -- as if he knows it can't last, a fear he directly contends with on the wondrous, overwhelming "good times" (covered equally beautifully by the rolling stones later). next to ben e. king's "stand by me," this might have the greatest lyric in pop music -- the temporary but rich lifting of a head above depression has never been so eloquently articulated anywhere:

the evening sun is sinking low
the clock on the wall says it's time to go
i got my plans, i don't know about you
i'll tell you exactly what i'm gonna do

get in the groove and let the good times roll
i'm gonna stay here till i soothe my soul
if it takes all night long

it might be 1:00 and it might be 3
time don't mean that much to me
i ain't felt this good since i don't know when
i might not feel this good again

the baseness of that, the simplicity of it. it means everything already, but even more so the way he sings it. again, it's indescribable, really. it's the loneliest kind of romance, the kind most helpful in a dark time.

and why does "a change is gonna come" sound like the song of a man who knew he would die soon? why did he die when there was so much left to give? his mark is rich, deep, wide, there is no one else in his category. only buddy holly was as innovative, no one would ever be quite as emotionally rich, and no one would seem to understand people and specifically the people who love rock & roll with such intimacy and care. there is still an instantaneousness to his appeal when one discovers him, a shockwave of recognition, comfort, and joy when his music is heard every time thereafter. these are feelings we need and they are here for us. we will always, always need sam cooke, because no artist in these annals can be pared down so simply and easily to just the word, the emotion, the need "love."

[SEE ALSO:]
The Man Who Invented Soul (1957-61)

Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light (2012)

(Fat Possum)

RECOMMENDED

Read my Metro Times review.

Set a record for me on biggest turnaround of opinion from first listen to second. I was in some sort of amazing mood the first time I went through this and failed to notice how much time Jason Pierce has begun to spend time repeating himself. Still, the Britpoppiness of it all is a delight, and "Hey Jane" is an incredible song.