The Kinks: Face to Face (1966)

(Pye)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Mysteriously difficult to acquire in America for a number of years, this is one of the Kinks' essential records and deserves a place in the pantheon alongside Something Else, Village Green, and Arthur. Of course, I'm slightly biased in my cheerleading; an import of this was one of my early grown-up purchases and I listened to it all summer one particularly bright and elated year, so its songs jump out to me with promise and delight as much as the Beatles records that reigned supremely over the springs and summers of my childhood. But it isn't just me -- this is the album that determined what sort of the band the Kinks would be for the next several years, thus pointing forward to their most lasting and meaningful work.

Neither Rubber Soul nor Revolver have the operative Britishness of Face to Face, which is seeped thoroughly in mod culture without being either an empty exercise in style or a brash half-hour of sneering "attitude," hence it's fair to call this the seminal pop album of mid-'60s Britian. The cover art -- cooked up between recording and release to the band's objections -- is the most "of its time" the Kinks ever were in the '60s, but it's appropriate to the riffology and revelation in the music, which is quite consciously like nothing they'd done before but also fits firmly with both its period and its band's legacy.

The most pressing fact of the fourth Kinks album is composition -- as with the Beatles' third album two years earlier, it's the first to feature no outside compositions, in this case meaning that every song included is fully the work of Ray Davies. Because it's a transitional effort, caught halfway between the stomping blues-rock of the Kinks' first two years of recordings and Davies' erudite, sarcastic lyricism and sophisticated melodies of the late '60s, it has perhaps the broadest reach and appeal of any of their core LPs. One is struck yet again by, incredibly, how much more idiosyncratically the Kinks approached the incoming self-conscious seriousness of late '60s rock than nearly any other group, Beatles included. For now, the evolution remains coy: "Dandy," more famous as covered by Herman's Hermits, boasts a level of subversion and anger in Davies' vocal performance that's easy to ignore but harrowing if you listen carefully; and "Party Line" is a triumphant return in all its novelty and grossout humor but its secret political jabs are a riot.

The swinging-London satire is hardly all-encompassing, with "I'll Remember" too early an effort (actually recorded for The Kink Kontroversy) to be infected with any supposed concept, and "House in the Country" a classicist enough Stones-ish effort that the Pretty Things later covered it (discarding, as with "Dandy," a lot of its stark bitterness), but the songs are mostly of a piece with the outside-looking-in subtext of much of the more celebrated Something Else, and if anything they often have more kick and spark to them: the William Castle-like "Rainy Day in June" and class-teasing "Most Exclusive Residence for Sale" are angst and bluster enough even without the accompaniment of "Holiday in Waikiki."

Maybe you have to have spent a lot of time listening to oldies radio to appreciate the brilliance of "Holiday in Waikiki," which is in certain respects the perfect Ray Davies number, balancing his familiarity of pop music form with his scathing cynicism without falling into the ferocious negativity of something like "King Kong" or "Plastic Man." Davies' trip to Hawaii introduces two fixations -- a skepticism that some would label anti-Americanism but consistently leads to some of his most hilarious observtaions, and a love of saying the words "Coca Cola." These two, you'll note, are not unrelated matters, nor is Davies' intimate relationship with American blues records that would never cease but which stops being apparent on his records here.

No doubt this was a calculated change, as calculated as the ease with which the average listener fails initially to notice that "Holiday in Waikiki" is about how shitty a time our hero is having, tempered by the sound of waves and surf-rock drums and a delirious Dave Davies guitar. But its sharpness reigns over everything and turns the song into something nasty and feral and special like a great Ealing Studios comedy. Conversely: "Little Miss Queen of Darkness" could be a pleasant but flaccid little country or cabaret tune without its lyric, and "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home" is merely passable par for the British Invasion course if you subtract the giddy vocal performance and unusual rhyming structure, but in their current form both are remarkable songs. Ray Davies is the rare pop performer whose lyrics deserve to be considered with some gravity.

What wasn't planned, sadly, was the Kinks' falling out of favor in America, a turn of events that would have consequences for decades to come. (The unavailability of Face to Face on CD Stateside when I purchased it in 2003 being one of them.) Scapegoat after scapegoat would be trotted out through the years. The band's U.S. label, Reprise, was quite faithful to the group but couldn't sell their later records to save its life. The Kinks themselves got deported and were unable to tour. And the group's aversion to anything that could be labeled "hardness" left them out of the classic-rock grit of the turn of the decade. But the real reason seems to have been that they simply moved too fast for the American audience. The case in point is "Fancy."

"Fancy" remains one of the most sophisticated and brilliant songs released in a rock music context in the '60s. Laid against other Indian-infected recordings of the period, it crumbles them all (especially the Beatles' comparatively silly "Love You To") except possibly the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" and shares with that song the menace of revolution. Dark and stinging, its romantic arrogance is as enigmatic as it is sensual -- "my love is like a ruby," Davies announces, sounding then like a boy caught in some sort of a web, but soon enough he's asserted himself and you can almost feel the cold gae in his eyes with his prounouncement: "no one can penetrate me / they only see what's in their own fancy." Was this therapy for Ray Davies? As much as "Waterloo Sunset" was, this is more so -- its sparkling strangeness and intensity are some sort of a hallmark in this band's output, in the sense that they'd never exactly build on it -- it stands alone, even now.

But they would build on an equally radical selection. "Sunny Afternoon" preceded Face to Face by some margin in both recording and release, and if any single track marks the transformation of Ray Davies' songwriting to the wounded sensitive character studies and dejected, alienated rants of his band's subsequent albums, it's this one, the moment when everything changed. Along with contemporary tracks and singles like "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," "Dead End Street," "Big Black Smoke," and the cathartically romantic "This Is Where I Belong" (all of which are included on most contemporary CD releases of Face to Face), this is the Kinks' "Dylan goes electric" moment. It's still surprising to hear "Sunny Afternoon" on mainstream oldies stations now -- it was a major hit in the U.S. as well -- with not just its belligerent attack on a proto-Yuppie with a yacht and a "life of luxury" who's cruel to his girlfriend but one written from his perspective, so that we're actually meant to laugh at the foolishness of the part Davies chooses to play. It's a surprisingly smart and fully-formed piece of mockery for a three-minute pop song, and musically its slow-burn calmness and broken-down big band march somewhat suggest Otis Redding's later "Dock of the Bay" turned angrily upside-down.

That the Kinks managed a massive hit with such an idiosyncractic number was a miracle in its time, and by many accounts allowed Davies and the band to pursue their increasingly eccentric instincts on Something Else and Village Green, a change in tack that would culminate in Pete Quaife's departure from the band -- he wanted to play rock music and had little interest in Anglo-centric pseudo-showtunes. But Face to Face demonstrates that the change wasn't so sudden or out-of-nowhere; it's just sounded that way in the U.S. for all these years. Sadly, the Americans wouldn't follow the band much further down this path, and indeed they would remain a cult band in most of the world for the rest of the '60s.

As it still stands, Face to Face captures something special that still seems alive and new in even the well-trodden context of the Beatles' contemporary records, which are relevant because the two bands accidentally evolved similarly, not just because Dave Davies' voice occasionally sounds just like Paul's (see "Party Line," one of his two leads here). The Beatles were a better rock band than the Kinks; they had to be. But despite exceptions like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," which boast a once-in-a-lifetime emotional closeness that "psychedelic rock" generally cannot hold, the Kinks were stronger at integrating a real fire-breathing human personality into their late-'60s album-length musical-theater experiments. Perhaps it's because one band consisted of dueling pop geniuses and the Kinks were always pretty much just Ray with the occasional assist. Face to Face does have a couple of slow spots -- the pleasant "Too Much on My Mind," the total filler "Session Man," and "You're Looking Fine," which is most notable for Nicky Hopkins' lovely piano work -- but Revolver has "Doctor Robert," "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "Love You To" and doesn't have "Holiday in Waikiki" or "Fancy." Both are great records but let's be honest -- these days, Face to Face probably has more to teach us.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Kinks (1964)
Kinda Kinks (1965)
The Kink Kontroversy (1965)

My Bloody Valentine: MBV (2013)

(Pickpocket)

RECOMMENDED

Mythologies are leaving us rapidly. Since we departed the Twentieth Century, it's my Andy Rooneyesque opinion that far too many dangling rock & roll threads have been tied up. Smile shouldn't have been released, nor whatever that Guns 'N Roses thing was called, and I'm not too comfortable with all these reunion tours, or with Jeff Mangum playing shows to hushed choral-cute singalongs, or with this or that post-punk titan burying the hatchet. And now Kevin Shields, the kind of guy who probably lets a dozen-deep line form behind him at Starbucks before he even decides if he wants a double shot, has done the unthinkable: he has followed up My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. He has done so without the aid of Island, or Creation, and with the aid of his actual real, not just in-name-only band. Colm Ó Cíosóig, Debbie Googe, Bilinda Butcher, everyone you can even think of save the mysterious "Tina" (no longer a mystery now, her name was Tina Durkin; another disappointment!) and everyone's favorite pseudo-Nick Cave, Dave Conway... with those exceptions, they're back!

I don't take this lightly -- this is one of my favorite bands of the relevant period, and Loveless, their magnum opus, remains for me probably the best rock album released by anyone since the '70s. (At the very least, it's down to Loveless and Remain in Light, real talk.) As you well know, the hype over the theoretical New Record by My Bloody Valentine began shortly after their prior release, which occasioned the group leaving a damaged-by-them Creation and leaping over to Island, building a studio and racking up time and money and a number of rock & roll horror stories about bloated budgets and outsized egos, and more than anything, Shields' ruthless perfectionism. Shields' errant sightings in the last two decades have been comically haphazard -- a Primal Scream record, a Yo La Tengo remix, the Marie Antoinette soundtrack -- and peppered with stories of frantic nerves over his aversion to deadlines. I'm not sure when I finally just sort of accepted that Shields was a brilliant bum but it was probably around the time that reissues of his band's two proper full-length albums (I still say they had four albums, but we're just counting here the two that no one disputes) were delayed by a year and change because of dissatisfaction with the "artwork."

In retrospect, bumming around had little to do with all this. Delaying and/or failing altogether to follow up Loveless was in fact a brilliant tactical maneuver, and a signal of Shields' self-awareness. Here for a change was someone who recognized that they'd captured lightning on a CD in a perfect storm of freakish opportunity: Shields was ahead of the pack in every sense in 1991, his songcraft was at peak form, his band was playing together brilliantly, and they were forging a sound that both captured the essence of its time and was remarkably forward-looking. Simple and pleasurable but confoundingly layered and intricate, the album was a masterpiece because it subtly challenged and expanded the way we listen to guitar music. Of course it stood on plenty of shoulders, from the Jesus & Mary Chain to (gasp, don't tell anyone I said this) U2, but it synthesized its ideas into an economical format and lent itself to an incredible degree of sensory pleasure and emotional investment.

But we're not here to review Loveless, are we? Long story short: My Bloody Valentine's intriguingly bare-minimum odyssey from 1992 to their mid-'00s reunion amounted to an acceptance that to attempt to duplicate such a conflation of perfect contexts and forces as Loveless will serve only to dilute the initial achievement. Sure, lots of great bands issue masterful albums and follow them up with little difficulty -- but Loveless is a special case, a permanent but highly specific moment etched in time, and its legend, in turn the band's mysterious disappearance, aids its enigma, adds to its appeal. Musical perfection or not, it's a piece of a larger drama and that made it more popular. It's only human.

The actual narrative of Loveless as hushed-tones masterpiece of a slowly dying form -- let's say, the great novel about its existence and place in the world -- really ended on the morning of February 2nd, when in one last all-too-appropriate gasp of the tantalizing unavailability of new My Bloody Valentine music, speculated over and discussed endlessly for over twenty years, the band's website crashed when they attempted to self-release their new album. It was the last moment of frustration, before anyone heard the first note of "She Found Now," the dying throes of that world in which a strange band gathered up a ball of energy, issued a record that changed some small part of a lot of lives, and then flew away in a cloud of dust. Once the world coped, it corrected itself, and Shields is a respectable man, he probably even wears a hat now; and the good news is that Loveless sits unchanged, but now there's this new actual music to deal with, an Active Recording Unit even, and remember that mysticism and cleverly skittish interview answers aren't what it's really about. It's about the music, man. Yeah.

Here's where we stop dead, and this is why this isn't part of the same book, or is nothing more than a contrived happily-ever-after epilogue if so: the record's a disappointment. But that's only stating the obvious -- it would have to be, right? That's the most explicit reason for the delay, one assumes, and one that must have become more crucial a part of its development as the years passed and Loveless snowballed from a cult item into an artifact widely regarded as massively important. Suddenly the mystery of Shields' psychology shatters -- he is still astonishingly savvy; he waited until precisely the right moment to release the lazily named MBV (or is it M B V or mbv, says the guy who refused to label his favorite record of the last five years w h o k i l l instead of whokill)... timing it so that most fans would be so happy to have the band back and sounding mostly the same as before that no one would think to expect much more.

Indeed, that's the best effect MBV really has on me: not that I ever felt like Shields et al. were my pals, but it is a bit like revisiting an old hangout and being bittersweetly relieved that the old gang is still kicking and chugging along. It's nothing like that ecstatic rush of recognition and heartfelt joy I felt when hearing Neil Tennant's voice for the first time in too long on Release because this isn't that kind of group -- but it's in the same category of sort of not realizing how much you missed something. But in the month I've been messing around with it, doing my best to delve into it and analyze it as much as Jesus Christ, the fucking new My Bloody Valentine album, for heaven's sake deserves, all I can really tell you is that I feel its primary utility in the long run will likely be "oh here are a few songs to tack onto the end of a My Bloody Valentine playlist" or "hey let's shuffle my entire collection of My Bloody Valentine MP3s, oh yeah, this one is kinda pleasant, this is from that reunion-ish thing they did" or, most of all, "this would make a good So Tough-style bonus disc for Loveless."

In this case, the disappointment is not one I'm bitter about -- the songs are nice, they're well-recorded, they're just nothing (to my mind) extremely special. As a person who once felt hungry to acquire and hear every note of music My Bloody Valentine ever released and is still thrilled to have all their minutiae in the collection, shouldn't I welcome new things to add to the pile, the first new things to add to it (bootlegs aside) since I became a fan? Of course, and I do! But artistically, I don't feel this is anything much more than a "hey, we can still do this!" assertion, and it doesn't necessarily need to be and I'm glad it's here, but that doesn't make it a Great Record. I'm thrilled people are happy with it... but I can't share the intensity of their happiness, maybe because the pull of nostalgia toward this sound for me has never been so strong as just an attachment to the many aspects of the music itself. You can't take me back to Loveless with merely a sound; Loveless worked because everything came together, and it was more than the sum of those things, and it was a moment of peak-level creative energy and everything just "worked" as it so supernaturally does sometimes.

There are hints of greatness here. No one who ever loved Shields' work can come away entirely unaffected by that intimate throbbing on "She Found Now," and familiarity is sometimes a warm and intoxicating thing indeed -- the only thing "new" to the band here is that crystalline guitar at center stage, and it eases us into things we probably recognize subconsciously, and Shields knows it. And I wish the whole record were as much of a revelation as "New You," which actually suggests an unexpected sort of evolution -- it condenses the band's signature sound, which they never really had until after the fact, into a propulsive and radio-ready modern rock number. Had they fussed around more with this bubblegum shoegaze, this could perhaps have been as interesting as Television's 1992 reunion record. But the Television record alienated many fans because it strayed too far from the group's established nature, so economically I understand why MBV feels more than anything like Good Grief, More Loveless (Only Friendlier).

It would've been possible for Shields and the gang to craft a really enjoyable album, though probably not a capital-G Great one, by riffing on previous sounds and tricks that are no longer so cutting edge and vital. The foremost reason they can't get that far, why this is the least of their albums aside from the unholy 1985 Birthday Party-Cure hybrid This Is Your Bloody Valentine, is, well, songs. And specifically, melody. With words buried and noise paramount, every previous effort of this incarnation of the band staked everything on melody, on an ethereal and immediate kind of songwriting that simultaneously relished weirdness and unapologetically embraced conventional notions of "beauty," arriving at them by the most surreal means then imaginable within the post-punk or "college rock" framework.

Not only do these recordings not seem terribly challenging, to them or to us, they don't carry a lot of innate appeal and often seem half-formed. The melody lines that were so full and expressive all the way back to Ecstasy and Wine are stunted here, something that never used to happen even on the band's b-sides and throwaways. "Only Tomorrow," for one, is like stopping halfway into "To Here Knows When" and giving up, "Sugarcube" guitar and supersonic-space "Telstar" Shields buffoonery and all. Even worse, the frantic silliness of "Wonder 2" again tantalizes with what sounds like a swooning and twist that could lead somewhere but then is distracted, dumped; you may as well listen to a recording of Katrina & the Waves attempting to practice and being escorted out of the building by a crusty landlord.

The songs aren't exactly weak, just a little underwhelming and one-dimensional; they seem more like fragments, like maybe a bridge or a chorus stretched out, which is hard to accept when there are only nine cuts. I wouldn't expect mere production craft to rescue a situation like this, because that'd make the album a pure gimmick, but with the long lead time and famously obsessive preparation I would have hoped for something more unusual and idiosyncratic than this: the broadest left turns we get from this once-cutting edge band are a barely-there track ("Is This and Yes") that gets points for maybe inventing the idea of a sparkly dirge; a pounding "If I Am" that's, okay, agreeably minimal; and the just-plain-goddamn-annoying "Nothing Is," which is, uh, a cute title. Kind of. Maybe. Not really.

Conversely, those are the biggest sour notes; no MBV fan will likely object to these songs loudly, they just don't seem to travel anywhere really new, and this does come across to me as a Loveless retread with both less interesting sounds and less beautiful and tricky songs. The repetition is most obvious on the aforementioned "Only Tomorrow" and the mostly passable throwback "Who Sees You," a blatant near-clone of "Come in Alone." Though it's been suggested in many quarters that MBV follows through more on the promise of Isn't Anything than Loveless, I only hear the former on the atonal roar of "In Another Way" and I'm not sure it's a great translation of what was making waves in 1988. The band's never sounded so out-of-time (in the wrong direction), copping "When Doves Cry" guitars and a mountainous high-drama synth line that probably gave Justin Vernon the jollies... but give it up: they've also never been this loose and "fun" before, at least not since they were cranking out adorably silly stuff like "Lovelee Sweet Darlene" and "Forever and Again."

It's some sort of evolution for Shields to take himself less seriously, at least as far as we know; frankly, what do we really know about him, his band, or his working methods even now? How much of this record really dates from anytime recently and how much of it is the outgrowth of legendary recording sessions for Island in the mid-'90s? Perhaps the band is right about everything and time will vindicate this. But I'm no longer sure I believe the delay was solely a result of ego, or perfectionism, or just working really slowly. We know Shields to be a maverick and an innovator, and perhaps it frustrated him that the advances and uniqueness of Isn't Anything were overshadowed by an album that came out just three years later. Only in the last few years, in the wake of a world of shrines to the subsequent record, has Isn't Anything -- which is a bold recording and really deserved its own spectacular moment -- begun to receive any level of real open attachment and championship. It's entirely possible that one day I will try MBV again and the world will open up to me and I will completely understand what they're getting at and why this expands on, reacts to Loveless rather than simply awkwardly extending it. For now: thanks for the music, guys, but I still say there was something to the notion of leaving well enough alone.

Galaxie 500: This Is Our Music (1990)

(Rough Trade)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

In retrospect, it's only too recognizable that this is the sound of a band falling apart -- really, more than that, the sound of a band that's already fallen apart doing their best to save face. Damon Krukowski would claim years later that the writing was on the wall for Galaxie 500 before Today, their debut, was even released. Their discography thus now takes a narrative track of inevitability, and the eagerness of an unusual young group gives way to something more ethereal, harder to grasp. The band's third and final album is their best, but its alterations to the extant groundwork are mostly subtle, as though Today and On Fire were merely earlier passes at these same goals, of stripping away everything except a raw, unguarded expressiveness that makes no apologies for its reverence toward pure aural pleasure. Cloudier, more tuned-in and hypnotic than even the Velvet Underground records that inspired them (the older band was too restless to sustain a mood like this), Galaxie 500 grab wisps of songs here, wisps like "Spook," and render electric serenades. Dean Wareham never sounded lovelier, or more resigned and haunted. When he apologizes for everything, the weather included, you know he really is sorry.

It might have seemed there was no way for this extraordinary group to become more aggressively minimalistic. The trick, simple enough, is that the stripping down is mostly in the songwriting; if the group disintegrates, it's only into beauty and -- more than anything -- sensuality, a laconic swinging that neither of the prior records delivered to this extent. The space between the notes, the lift and lilt in each affected, fleeting moment, are where this drama lives. The wavering, weak, despairing, glorious "Hearing Voices" is probably their best song, a creation so stirringly delicate it's as though you can hear the trio all individually surrendering control of the performance and somehow coming out better for it. "Voices" lyrically echoes "Goodnight Irene," a song that predates rock & roll itself, and that's a perfect line to draw, for despite its immense debt to the rock narrative, this is music that seems to spew forth from an indeterminate, almost supernaturally distant past. It's as unfettered and uncluttered in its fashion as Mickey & Sylvia's highly relevant "Love Is Strange."

The easier (but no less salient) comparison, of course, is to the third album by another band whose entire body of work was a tracking of their slow-motion dismantling: Big Star's Sister Lovers. Indeed, much of Alex Chilton's early solo work is spiritually connected to This Is Our Music, but the evocative chaos of "Kanga Roo" seems directly reprised by a song like "Summertime" -- press your ear to its achingly beautiful melody, its intense guitars sinking into a never-assaultive sea of noise, and vague, surreal lyrics like "Goin' to the movies / I found a shelter from the sun." As much as the chords and arrangements remain unmistakably familiar from Galaxie 500's stock in trade, their library of riffs still tiny, these songs break apart and sway and each feverishly captures an emotional freeze-frame, as much for the listener as for the band. Time seems to stop for a bit, or at least moves at a decelerated, drugged pace.

In an appropriate analogy to the strings on Sister Lovers, This Is Our Music boasts a new sonic fearlessness on Galaxie 500's part, with musical flourishes that indicate a willingness to evolve, and a skepticism about the drawbacks that lie in prog and post-rock's usual trappings. The peaceful sweetness of "Way Up High" is adorably delivered by a simple flute (yes, flute) performance that backs up and pushes back against Wareham, and that doesn't even linger in the memory after the Renaissance festival ending of "King of Spain, Part Two." There's even a touch of swinging funk, a Roger McGuinn-ish solo, and an ending directly from "A Day in the Life" in "Melt Away," Wareham reveling in all of the above.

Still, if the driving, quietly drunken madness of "Hearing Voices" wasn't enough to summarize this brief career, two cuts indicate just how far afield Galaxie 500 landed from their earliest work -- not far at all, yet worlds away in terms of a willingness to be playful, the final obstacle to really sinking into their more dour debut and sophomore efforts. Opener and single "Fourth of July," oblique lyrics about dog biscuits and all, is downright cheery! It forecasts Luna with a refrain about feeling "all right when you smile" and engagingly brings us Dean Wareham going on and on like Moulty, but the cumulative effect is pure exhilaration. And as accomplished as the band had already proven themselves with prior cover songs, their version of Yoko Ono's lullaby "Listen, the Snow Is Falling!" is enough to leave you pinned and awestruck even after you've heard it dozens of times. Naomi Yang's voice travels over and underneath the initially buoyant and sparkling arrangement that eventually bursts into sonically exuberant mayhem -- all the while perfectly suggesting the desolate winter Ono's song seeks to bring to life. (Our only regret is that the equally brilliant VU cover "Here She Comes Now," a shoegaze triumph that actually betters the original, wasn't able to make the LP cut, though it's included as a bonus track on most CD versions.)

No doubt dreariness has its benefits; "Hearing Voices" isn't exactly much more a slice of pop bliss than was "Tugboat," after all. But what makes This Is Our Music such a masterpiece of its form is that, however much the band has split into two factions, it merits a personal and deep connection to its songs, to the individual band members, and mostly to an emotional cycle -- a carefully structured one like that of Pet Sounds, not so much the mad tea party of Sister Lovers. Even more than in the case of Today, I find myself yearning to hear this record when I'm in a certain mode of isolation and reflection -- which sounds awfully moony, but pop music is designed to serve various personal utilities, and this is a record that functions in a manner thoroughly exclusive to its art, pulling apart and investigating and toying with an established band's sound to give them the market on a feeling. This Is Our Music finds a way to do something that only a full-length album can do; it's the warmest of all alternative rock recordings of its era, and sets the table for Loveless the following year. Hearing either record in the right moment can give the sensation of floating, or something similarly transportive. Very few records can do that at all, much less sustain it properly with good songs and performances -- and even fewer can call back to that special instance of being completely taken in and seduced, time after time, each time you hear them. It's a pity that the sun now set on Galaxie 500, but I doubt they could ever have improved on this.

[SEE ALSO:]
Today (1988)
On Fire (1989)

One-sentence reviews #6

Grouper
The Man Who Died in His Boat
(Kranky)

Do you ever wonder why the water doesn't just... fly off into the sky?

***

The Flaming Lips
The Terror
(Warner Bros.)

Melodic, sputtering meander gives off a deadening, intoxicated dread -- something to which this band's been headed for a while -- and it both intrigues and bores me.

***

Sorry for only two this time but nothing else in the pipeline, even several things I'm neutral about like these, can be pared down to so few words. More expansive stuff in the next couple days.

Antony and the Johnsons: I Am a Bird Now (2005)

(Secretly Canadian)

I first saw Antony Hegarty in the hot-and-cold Leonard Cohen tribute concert film I'm Your Man and initially was thrown in the best way by his delicately wavering voice and then, when he reached the emotional climax of "If It Be Your Will" and approached it with the high drama of a grand spiritual, dredging something up from the absolute depths of himself, I was sold -- if nothing else, then on his skill as a performer, a sort of hybrid between Aretha Franklin and Bryan Ferry. On finally, years and years later, giving my full attention to his band's signature album, I'm happy to discover plenty more of that same full-bodied singing, which is unmistakably committed and pretty immediately affecting, but unfortunately interrupted a little too often for my tastes.

"Soul" is not the most frequent association we make with modern indie rock; its layers of irony and detachment more often than not prevent such a reading, and when an artist comes across something like sincerity it's seldom in an aesthetic manner comparable to the nearly-indisputably higher, more universal performance art in R&B. Hegarty can't stand up to the giants in the older field but it's truly admirable to hear him try -- and he has an operatic, expressive voice that for a certain contingent of listeners is bound to recall Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat and the Communards, high praise indeed. He fits best with something like the romantic hopelessness of hushed, intimate opener "Hope There's Someone," a song that sounds as though it's existed for centuries and is merely being interpreted -- underlined by the urgency of Hegarty's transcendentally lovely piano solo. That dramatic closeness is stronger yet on "My Lady Story," a sort of Gregorian chant as reimagined by Aaron Neville -- a remarkable song, brilliantly arranged, but held together by his tremendous voice.

After that, Hegarty unfortunately often lets guests take center stage, and he's got a slew of them: Boy George sings one cut, Devandra Banhart another, and these are his heroes and it's moving to hear him put words and music in their mouths. But it feels as if Hegarty is best when it's just him and the band and little clutter beyond, especially when his thematic fixations of gender identity are so crucial to his lyrics; only Rufus Wainwright really sounds at home on one of Hegarty's songs, believably channeling Sarah Vaughan on the melancholic "What Can I Do?". Without Hegarty's focused and wrapped-around-the-heart voice, you're somewhat overwhelmed by the florid pretensions of his compositions -- which are sometimes great and sometimes dull and always better when he's selling them directly to us, but even at that, the endless parade of lyrical trickery that follows "one day I'll grow up / I'll be a beautiful woman" with the same line only "beautiful girl" and then concludes "for today I am a boy" and some time later, adds "bird girls can fly" grows... tiresome, all fitted to such nebulous song titles as "Man Is the Baby" and "You Are My Sister." You feel at times as if you're meant more to analyze and nod your head at this music than enjoy it.

All that ends up meaning, though, is that the record is extremely frontloaded, with its great joys limited largely to the first two cuts and the climax, "Fistful of Love," which features an awkward Lou Reed introduction then slides into a gloriously minimalistic slowjam not dissimilar to Reed chestnuts like "Coney Island Baby" and "Temporary Thing" but all the more nakedly emotive; Reed's one of our most brilliant singers, but he couldn't have put across anything like the gradual build to the moment when Hegarty seems to be transmitting his lost mind and lifted spirit into the wires of his microphone. As he slips away, as the horns go with him, so do we -- and you can't blame the record for failing to live up to that afterward. There are yet to come the Freddy Mercuryisms of "Find the Rhythm of Your Love" which will delight many, but as soon as the record's over I went back and listened to "Fistful of Love" twice more. And as soon as I post this, I will go and listen to it again. That, for now, is Hegarty's legacy for me.

Tegan and Sara: Heartthrob (2013)

(Warner Bros.)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Let's hear it for new wave, and its surprisingly apt straight line to the best and most economically expressive of modern top-40 radio. Having never put on a record by Tegan & Sara before, I find myself immediately moony and wild over the skating-rink Blondie / Vince Clarke memories infused in these ten tightly constructed tunes that could sound easily at home among the most vivacious radio hits of the summer of your choice. The subject is the bullshit of love, of course, but the trick is how its sorrows move your feet along the hardwood floors in your kitchen. Heartthrob, cheeky title and all, makes nothing much of its affinity toward the baseline appeal of the massive hook and the juggernaut chorus; it's pop scholarship sans snobbery, which I guess amounts to... pop?

Take "Goodbye, Goodbye," which cribs Macca's wrenching dissection of that word but the creation in full is like you tuned into some lost Roxette single but it's all somehow new, infused with excitement. Even a crafty modernist explosion like "I'm Not Your Hero" echoes a Bangles drum hook behind its totally unfiltered assertion of independence. The outdated reference points are backgrounded, so what matters about the girl group mannerisms on "I Couldn't Be Your Friend" (so fucking harsh and apt, that title) is that they disguise pain and genuine fraying in the vocals, the way they were once designed to in the elaborate and beautiful constructions that now serves to bring this alive, ticklish groove never faltering. That moment of left-turn self-encouragement on "that would be good for me," I can't seem to stop fixating on it. It towers over me like something I should've always known.

The exuberant arrangements arriving here from a disparate group of producers are heavy on EDM-infected electronics, but enjoy a certain looseness and vulnerability thanks to the brilliantly expressive compositions themselves for an effect not dissimilar to Robyn's recent records. In contrast to Robyn, the Quin sisters both employ a tightly wound, tense vocal style that brushes teasingly up against the backbeats -- hence the new wave comparison and the sense that, for all the ways in which this resembles a blustery late-teens night out musically, the permanence of youth and all that, its wounded lyrics and tentative if soulful and controlled vocals betray nothing so much as adult romantic longing, an appealingly thorny fit especially as the record edges closer to cloudy R&B than pure pop (see "I Was a Fool"). It's a stubborn record in the best way because it owns simultaneously its musical velocity and its conflicted, occasionally blackened attitudes. "How come You Don't Want Me" is a handy example, like the Beatles' "No Reply" filtered through Kylie Minogue or Carly Rae Jepsen, a cry out in dignified radio pain.

Not that these themes are or should be strictly the parlance of moms, young marrieds, and serial monogamists in the working world -- part of the thematic urgency of Heartthrob comes from the same place as a given Phil Spector or Shangri-Las record: the unerring relevance of romantic catharsis, here filtered through lyrics that more often than not feel eerily personal. It's here that I can't help contrasting a song like the blissful opening "Closer," all late-night FM neon, to a group like Goldfrapp who'd do a great job with it but who'd never resist an overriding sarcasm or abstraction. "Closer" doesn't just swipe and snarl with all that talk about treating you like you're oh-so-typical or wondering how to get you underneath me, it grits its teeth and feels it and rattles you like a lightning bolt. How come you don't want me, indeed -- she sees you talking with a different girl, one who's got "nothing to show you," and the most trite of broken hearts is all subline and pure again as those regrets are written in the glittery purple of communal pop-art, teenage symphonies about don't-they-know-it's-the-end-of-the-world because check it out -- and here's the absolute kicker -- we're in our thirties now and it still feels like the bloody end of the world. She's really got nothing to show you, why can't you see? How blind can you be? (The Hi-NRG and teen pop "Now I'm All Messed Up," worthy of the best and most impassioned instances of either, features this lovely moment when the insistence that you go away is matched far in the distance by a begging "please stay," and ain't that love.)

We're big fans of top-40 pop here and not big fans of demeaning it as teen music, or in turn demeaning teen music or teen culture itself; virtually all of our biggest fixations came into prominence as supposed adolescent gruel decried by the establishment. That's an important caveat for the following point: there is something very different within the communal experience of loving a song all of your friends love, and loving something that in a certain contextual way is all yours. Like Big Star's records or any of those power-pop chestnuts that fill your nearest $1 bin, a song like T&S's "Drove Me Wild" manages to sound like it hobnobs cheek to cheek with the music that belongs to everyone, yet somehow it's yours, demanding high volume in the car cursed with solitude or in the limited time awaiting a loved one, maybe who will also want to make memories to the tune of this album, for which it's ripe.

Heartthrob is beholden exclusively to neither its sense of history nor its keen awareness of its own meeting halfway of the mainstream. Let's say for sake of argument that it's as backward looking a record in its manner as one of Camera Obscura's. That's a band I really love and have loved a pretty long time -- but in the hands of Camera Obscura, a more specific range of pop music never makes any attempt to become modernist or universal; it knows to whom it speaks. It will always be "old music" in their hands. I have no prior context for Tegan & Sara here, but on Heartthrob at least, no long-forgotten trend they investigate fails to sound new, unearthed, fresh, exploding with mirrorball frenzy. The sole exceptions are "Love They Say," a '90s alt-rock stadium production that's still a fine song but impresses less than the others, and my personal favorite track, the roaring closer "Shock to the System," which wanders on a space-walk far afield of the familiar. It sort of resembles Talking Heads, I suppose, but in this and other ways is such an outlier it seems to come from a different LP altogether -- slick, strange, and seductive, it really brings out the unadorned pop glories of the rest of these productions by liberating the song, musically, vocally, and lyrically: it relaxes, let's say, despite its enormity of sound. And its advice that we rely on love once in a while... well, that's poetry, like only pop music can be.

The Everly Brothers: Songs Our Daddy Taught Us (1958)

(Cadence)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In this space we have dissected the evolving career of the Everly Brothers, their move from Cadence to Warner Bros. and their gradual shift from vital if incongruous young pop stars to institutional statesmen, guest stars in their own career. Surely we'll discuss that much more in the future, for this is one of the bands that, all told, means the most to me across the years. But that brings up the equally interesting matter of how the group's first decade of music has morphed with the years, fitting and refitting to changing times and trends. In the same manner as the Beatles, whose progression has been reinterpreted with each decade since they imploded, the utility of the Everlys has changed dramatically by now. Indeed, it's to such an extent that their hits now seem unlikely and incredibly noncommercial, while their riskiest and most eccentric album now seems like it could've come along yesterday.

That album is their second, the ethereal and minimalistic Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, a defiantly backward-looking production that stands in complete contrast to every conceivable notion of rock & roll in the '50s, within or without the Everlys' own twists upon the genre. Containing no singles and no upbeat selections, it is exactly what its homey title suggests: a flashback to the boys' childhood, of music emanating from their father Ike's guitar and ringing off the walls for years on end. You can almost hear the clatter of those bygone times, the expanse of Kentucky all around -- it can't be stressed enough how far this strays from an LP in the standard pop idiom, how much it flexes its genuine Appalachian origins, and how remarkably prescient this album-length expression of individuality is. And in the era of the indie-folk revival brought forth by artists like Iron & Wine and Horse Feathers, the record seems eerily timeless -- far more so, for instance, than the Byrds' first two records or anything recorded by most of the '60s folk-rockers. The Everlys' great innovation here may be to leave their influences, their literal closest possible influence indeed, unadorned, to present and document like musical archivists. In this sense and in the sense of the pleasure in the beauty of the recording, the album is a major success, and indeed the best of their golden period. Years hence they'd explore these themes again in their finest full-length LP, Roots, but this album captures something simpler and in some ways more effective.

It's no accident that one's mind wanders more to Bill Monroe than to Elvis or Buddy Holly when Phil and Don carefully wander through "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet"; one reason this all is a godsend to the connoisseur of American folk music is its utterly unashamed directness, a clear genealogical bloodline to an earlier period that the band sees fit to leave be. They don't trump these songs up or alter them to fit their own style -- quite the opposite, which might at the time have seemed a disappointment to their many fans (this was the peak of their popularity) or an artistically lazy decision, but on the eve of their departure from Cadence they must clearly have seen this as a golden opportunity, perhaps the only opportunity, to acknowledge their true origins. It's fortunate for us that they did so, likely in defiance of all commercial concerns. Those with great love for the Everlys' discography will note that this is more of a piece with their general concerns than it may first appear -- "Oh So Many Years" has the calm, casual romance of something like "Let It Be Me" if fewer friendly flourishes, and "I'm Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail" is a sweetly weepy moment of "Take a Message to Mary" melodrama. But if these selections clue us in to what sparked these men to their genius in the beginning, it seems incidental compared to its purity as an act of love.

The songs are all traditional pieces, some better known than others, some dating back as far as the seventeenth century, nearly all staples of the early 20th century folk repertoire, but (with the exception of opening "Roving Gambler," at least, and the inexhaustible "Down in the Willow Garden") fading in general cultural presence and influence by 1958. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us likely did little to alter this course at the time, but it quietly planted seeds and its intentions would be echoed later by Bob Dylan and the Band in the late '60s when a return to simplicity and rootsiness would become the order of the day, cosigned by a small army of eager record companies. But no one might ever have rendered, while remaining true to their signature of close harmony and deliberately strummed acoustic guitar, so ghostly and delicate an artifact in the name of this scope of influences. The smoky simplicity of "Roving Gambler" has far less of its impact in the hands of more distant singers like Simon & Garfunkel, who later covered it, and for all the starkness, something happens to you when the voices soar over everything, and tradition becomes something inescapably present.

The same phenomenon of vocals rising, towering immeasurably over miniscule arrangements serve the Brothers well on "Long Time Gone" and "Barbara Allen," but on this record the carefully cultivated blend and complement in Phil and Don is more expressive than ever, as the age-old insights and emotions in these songs do something new to them, to our ears but not to theirs. They know these songs well, they're rattled to their core by them and feel every second of them, they fall in love with them and rebel against them, they hear their upbringing and their early lives in them, and they hear "young man, I think you're dying" in them. It's a remarkably sustained, haunting performance of unflagging intensity. "Haunting" is too trite a word, especially for the goosebump-inducing take on the deeply disturbing Appalachian (but with European origins) murder ballad "Down in the Willow Garden," the most singularly Gothic recording in the Everly archives and maybe the most gorgeous, which is saying a good deal.

"Directness" is the operative word for all this. Every song is a good one, logically arranged and passionately sung, and every word in the title is unmistakably true -- and then, so more than ever is every word of the band name. Big friendly block letters on the front cover tell us precisely who these two men are, and it was never more relevant. They are the sons of Ike Everly, who taught them these songs, and they are brothers, and that is significant because the family thematics in "Rockin' Alone (In an Old Rockin' Chair)" and "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" and even "Lightning Express" mean everything, in an impressively unsentimental and matter-of-fact manner. You can hear the history as much as you can hear the place, which is finally explicitly called out in "Kentucky" (though we should mention that only Don was born there, yet it seeps from every note): everything you'd want from purest and most meaningful Americana, a paean to "the dearest land outside of Heaven to me," and without any editorializing on their part except the kind that comes from a tic in the voice and a waver in a high harmony, the essence of a stunningly mature statement about growth, loss and memory from two men, one barely in his twenties and one not there yet.

[SEE ALSO:]
Cadence Classics: 20 Greatest Hits (1957-60)
The Everly Brothers (1958)
Walk Right Back: Warner Years (1960-69)