Future Bible Heroes: Partygoing (2013)

(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

You can and should forgive your heroes their indulgences. Stephin Merritt would owe me nothing even if it'd just been 13 love songs -- but since he went for more than five times that, I've smiled and rolled my eyes only a little at his subsequent itch to become the Irving Berlin of novelty songs. With rhymes about "sarcastic sharks" and actively aggressive stabs at Christmas music, the last two Magnetic Fields albums were as fun as they sound -- but also a little shrill, and more than a little impersonal, as though Merritt's long-term mockery of the pop music field that fascinates him had blossomed into an alienating cynicism. If Realism and Love at the Bottom of the Sea sometimes felt like intellectual exercises more than enthusiastically presented music, it probably wasn't by accident. Merritt didn't seem to have much need or desire to return to whatever well provided us with "The Book of Love" and "I Think I Need a New Heart," songs whose self-deprecating jokes and platitudes betrayed their ache.

He did not, however, lose his capability, as proven by his latest record and his best since Distortion, very possibly earlier than that, I wouldn't want to say how much earlier. There are distinctions behind the scenes between Merritt's various musical projects, mostly tied to the collaborators used and the nature of the collaboration -- in the case of Future Bible Heroes, the keyboards are programmed and played by Chris Ewen, and Claudia Gonson sings a little more than Merritt does (though given how much of Bottom of the Sea is belted out by Gonson or Shirley Simms, that seems a less surefire designation now). But for you, the listener, the differences between the Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, the 6ths and plain old Stephin Merritt are mostly academic. But Merritt's mood is vastly different on this outing than it was just last year.

Maybe it's something to do with getting older, anxieties about which were already audible on the collective's previous record Eternal Youth; in that sense, the music only backs up the wistful glancing backward. It's no longer, as during the period when the Fields hit their artistic peak, a "statement" to evoke straight Construction Time Again-vintage Alan Wilder arrangements or to long for "a dance floor where no one says maybe" while throwing back to radio pop and hi-NRG in equal measure. Merritt's pop interests are now suggestive of a very distinctly different time, and his fascination with the architecture of "the hit" is twenty years or more behind; the same could be said of Robert Schneider from the Apples in Stereo. Despite their vastly incompatible dispositions, the two men both exercise in a form of expression that they carried from their youth, from a time when ELO and ABBA's presence on the radio was not seen as a freak accident. And as much as Schneider cheerleads and projects rampant positivity, Merritt can only sense the way that this occasions melancholy and despair -- but with a slight wink, as always.

So Partygoing is dance music, although not in any modern sense -- even by the standards of an indieverse very much consumed by the sound of 1980s, its club constructions are both convincing and defiantly unhip. The hopeful sprightliness of "A New Kind of Town" is merrier than a toothpaste commercial, and despite Gonson's deadpan, the flamboyant "Living, Loving, Partygoing" is more reverent than subversive, not just because it longs for nights of dancing until 4 but because you can't come up with that "LIVING [whisper] living / LOVING [whisper] loving" chorus without a lot of adoration of a bygone art. Ewen's ebullient arrangements cast Gonson and Merritt's vocals in a new light, sure, but the two of them also are singing more expressively than in recent years. Gonson gets liberally manipulated, going on creepily about how deep our love was, on "Let's Go to Sleep," but without the aid of outside transformation manages a Nico level of alienation on "How Very Strange," which comes on like something from the incredibly eccentric back third of 69 Love Songs. Merritt, meanwhile, belts "Love Is A Luxury I Can No Longer Afford" like it's 19-whenever he recorded The Charm of the Highway Strip, on which he probably would have conjured up a better couplet than "for your sake / I would bake wedding cake," but that's forgivable.

Scary, apocalyptic, and emotionally honest -- that sort of sums up Merritt's career in general, but he's letting us in a little more than usual on this year's episode. Practically the only major trait this shares with Bottom of the Sea is its brevity -- 34:11 isn't enough time to cover even a third of 69, and he seems to like it that way. Make no mistake: he hasn't lost his black humor or the frivolity of many of his lyrics. "Digging My Own Grave," a great Yaz and/or PSB imitation, succeeds despite the silly lyric that means the title quite literally. "A Drink Is Just the Thing" casts Claudia in a film noir but still suggests a reading at a cutesy poetry recital. And "Keep Your Children in a Coma" nearly could be a latter-day Fields track, but it's bouncier and less stoic thanks to Ewen, and no one said these songs weren't funny -- "they have to program everything" is almost David Byrne circa Fear of Music-worthy.

But while there are mild suggestions that Merritt's found a medium between his obligations to awkward rhyming poetry and the sheer joyous eccentricity (and red-eyed melancholy) that marked his best work, what's really happening on Partygoing was best described by my friend Andrew: it's a return to sincerity. Of course, you don't have to travel far to find Merritt cultists who will yell at you for suggesting that he was ever sincere -- but even if he was always bullshitting, the stories of "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" and "Born on a Train" always felt lived-in and true because they spoke to genuine universal feelings, something all the best storytellers and, uh, pop music composers can do on a good day. This is, to put it mildly, a good day. Four reasons: First, "Sadder Than the Moon," on which Merritt's pain returns within his most assured vocal since Distortion, his most convincing ballad since god knows when, adventurous arrhythmic trickery, and a weird arrangement with holow choral murmuring in the background that plays as a long-lost outtake from Get Lost. Even the title sounds like something from Get Lost. Second, "Satan, Your Way Is a Hard One" is probably a joke, but its low-key delivery is so free of gimmickry that I can't help feeling that it would have significantly changed the tone of everything else that made it to the last Fields LP. Thirdly, "Drink Nothing But Champagne" tackles Merritt's adoration of the musical traditionalism of the Great American Songbook as more than a hollow exercise in imitation -- here, it's a game and winning evocation, a sophisticated singalong with a surprising melody and a tight lyric. In an allusion to Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song," Merritt conjures up and delightfully connects the dots from Jesus to Bowie to Hitler to Churchill to Aleister Crowley (!) with the common denominator of guess what.

But for those who were gravely disappointed that nothing on Love at the Bottom of the Sea was melodically or lyrically worthy of its priceless single "Andrew in Drag," I give you "All I Care About Is You," which is one of the man's best cuts of this century. With "Drag" it shares a towering melody and skating rink production, and a verse and chorus both full of hooks; with a luminous body of work it shares pain and humor; with no one else in the pop idiom it shares lines like "suddenly I don't wish I were dead anymore." And if you haven't cared in years, it'll make you.

The thirteen songs here collectively serve to make a wholly different impression than any of Merritt's last several releases, and unlike all of them it displays no serious conceptual gimmick, which may be one key to its excellence. Putting aside Ewen's engaging stylistics for just a moment, in terms of vocal performance and songwriting, Merritt properly reins in his impulses for both melodrama and novelty. Partygoing is just new songs in the same old idiom; it treads no new ground but it's him. That weird investment in Hollywood fused with mournful "As Tears Go By" lament on "When Evening Falls in Tinseltwon" -- it couldn't be more idiosyncratic, or more appealing to those for whom these particular idiosyncrasies have been a hallmark for over twenty years now. I'm putting this in Merritt and, hell, the Magnetic Fields' column as a resounding success because it's the first time since I've been a fan that I can point to a new release under any name from the Merritt camp and say "this is why I love this man's work."

Vampire Weekend (2008)

(XL)

RECOMMENDED

Admit this much. no matter how much you love this band: you're asking for trouble if you're a bloghype band on the cover of Spin before your first album release, which contains songs about Cape Cod and, uh, "college." Admit this no matter how much you hate them: catchy and exuberant transcend privilege. For heaven's sake, aren't we all sick of the authenticity conversation by now? It's so damn old-fashioned, and does anyone even remember the point when people sincerely believed that from-the-roots grittiness was the prime qualification for Rocking Out? Vampire Weekend weren't a terribly original fixture when they earwormed their way into the community's consciousness after opening for the Shins and issuing an obnoxious pogoing pseudo-oi! piece called "A-Punk." Their chops weren't faultless (Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard playing is rudimentary at best, even if his production is more assured, and it's unfair how he and Ezra Koenig overshadow the band's more technically proficient rhythm section) and you can see how their Wings-like jam-band-with-pop-songs cutesiness could wear thin on a world of seasoned eye-rollers. But there's a reason that, for all their faults, I think the Shins are one of the best rock bands of the millennium, and I'm now applying the same logic to Vampend Weekire: (a) it's the songs, obviously; (b) those songs are an instantly appealing as any that have come down the guitar-music pike in this decade or the last, and hence the band is vital and immediate and a joy to listen to.

Vampire Weekend is the least of the group's three albums so far, but the one that's exerted the most influence, enough so that talking about it seems almost redundant now, like any treatise on So or The Joshua Tree or Thriller must've seemed when everyone in the nation was wearing their grooves into nubs. Short of perhaps the Postal Service's Give Up (anyone who's been in a semi-trendy restaurant or sports bar the last ten years will hear me) no indie-rock record is more ubiquitous than this one. I heard "A-Punk" approximately forty-seven times before I had any clue what it was. It never did charm me, but it made its way into my brain. Its pogoing rhythm and sparkly-jangly-abrasive riffing are like Wire, if they were both friendlier and more arrogant, if that makes sense -- and if their songs were about thrice as long. Plus it has flutes and generally feels like the fratty punk (not the good kind) stuff they rushed quickly afterward to shed.

That's not a ringing endorsement, obviously -- I'd love to tell you that I have warmer feelings toward "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Mansard Roof" but no, not by much. This is one record on which I vastly prefer the less famous cuts. I don't know what was a "single" officially here and what wasn't, but I know that the first four cuts are to this day those most readily identified with Vampire Weekend, and probably the reason I didn't choose to spend much time thinking about them or forming much of an opinion on them when they were being referenced in Sally Forth in 2008, a time when I was more receptive to new music than I had been in years. The once-ubiquitous "Oxford Comma" does work a little better for me now, its propulsion and Koenig's delivery both inspired, though its self-conscious lyrical ironies are tired English major stuff, and that includes the repeated use of the phrase "who gives a fuck."

All four of these opening songs have aged, though, in a way that Contra hasn't. The cartoon soundtrack that is "Mansard Roof" is vital to give context to everything that flowered thereafter, but indeed "Cape Cod" does play into some of the more vicious stereotypes that would greet the band, and I don't mean class-related ones. I mean that it's the laziest kind of chillout island-rock shit. 2008 wasn't very long ago but already these seem like missives from a time of naivete, which underline how they seem like the sort of music that sounds great to you in college (cannot verify) or in the car (can). All of Vampire Weekend's music is readymade for summer, but the forceful stamp their entrance puts on this feature limits the grace of these recordings.

The album improves significantly after that, but only one song hints in any serious way at what's to come, by which I mean that word again: "grace." The dancing enormity of "Walcott" attains fleetingly the lived-in but majestic lilt that would become more apparent over the next five years. The song's remarkable sense of space, even laid against the band's clipped and quickened grooves here and everywhere, is a "whoa, wait a second" moment when something conceptually and contextually surprising starts to happen. To pick back up on the Beatles analogy from a few days ago, suppose it's the intensity of John's vocal on "There's a Place," for instance. Vampire Weekend mean to give pleasure and make a quick impression and distract you a lot on their debut, but this is your official hint that something of quite a bit more intelligence and ambition than you might first suspect is going on back there.

As for the oft-cited African influences, they're not insulting cause they're barely even there, at least no more than as an addition of mild keyboard and guitar flavor to sprightly little pop tunes. The superficially exotic "One" is surf-rock fused with Tom Tom Club and is kind of annoying, though charming enough; "Campus," which is about guess what, sounds like B. Bumble and the Stingers, and "M76" -- the best song on the record -- is defiantly European and defiantly lowbrow, its mild suggestion of classical music suggestive more of the piped-in orchestrations at a Discovery Channel Store than an evening at the symphony. Beyond that, the strongest evidence I get of the outside world is the clear Funeral debt on "I Stand Corrected," which itself tempers its propulsion with minimalist goofiness and the effect is, yeah, a little silly. The band doesn't get much tighter than on the tricky sprawled-out rhythm of "Bryn," and the songs don't get more accomplished than "The Kids Don't Stand the Catch," a subtly infectious and unusually confident way to end the record.

Mostly the album is a quick and precise introduction that now feels like just a prelude to two others, but served its purpose to what now seems like a completely different audience. It's remarkable how linear this all seems already: this is purity and the last vestiges of a certain childishness, Contra is full of doubt and self-reflection, and Modern Vampires of the City is full-on adulthood, a record made by people who appreciate the size of a world that was seen through a limited prism just half a decade ago. You couldn't craft a homemade compilation without being able to detect the gap in skill and craft from the oldest songs to the newest. I don't love this album, but I love the story it accidentally tells.

[SEE ALSO:]
Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

(XL)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

He tapped ash on the floor. "This is a dump. This is unbelievable. But the kid don't know how to live even when she's got the dough." His speech had a jokey metallic rhythm, like a teletype. "So," he said, "what do you think: is she or ain't she?"

"Ain't she what?"

"A phony."

"I wouldn't have thought so."

"You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it. I've tried with tears running down my cheeks."
~ Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote

"Pop" is such a condescending word, right? Unless you believe in it, in which case it suggests the most sublime and feverish things that can emit from our headphones. Pop wouldn't be pop without a bite of banality -- its essence of aim for the jugular requires an absence of literary construct. We can allow wit, we can allow the occasional poet to make his or her way onto the legislative floor, but immediacy is always everything. It's no wonder we have skepticism when guys who look just a little too comfortable with all this show up on stage. Oh, Vampire Weekend take themselves plenty seriously -- with a whole crop of indie rock bands that emerged in the last decade, they're real thoughtful bastards. They read the right books, went to the right schools, have the right pedigree, listened apparently to the right music growing up. They look they're enjoying themselves, which is a big plus in a world of neo-shoegaze, but that's never been the key to anything; people who hate all this frathole posturing have legitimate reasons for doing so. Appropriation? Maybe, but more likely that case of the cutes they've got -- their album covers carefully designed for maximum Futura eyesoring, the cheerfully asexual DMB-like broadness of their, uh, "vibe," and the prep in the room: the essence of their music is that it's about itself.

Nearly four decades after David Byrne barged onto stage in conservative garb and announced that he was violently opposed to compassion, love and oxygen, the conversation about whether he was joking or joking-but-serious or jokingly serious about not joking has yet to end even after three or four Ages of Irony, we've lost count. The old histrionics about the Clash's diplomatic son and the Rolling Stones' image-mongering futzing of their prep school background are a dimming light that explodes anew each time a new generation gets caught up in the permanently recycling rock & roll narrative. And after Talking Heads were accused of co-opting black music forms, after Graceland was accompanied by not just charges of appropriation but plagiarism and failing to credit collaborators and playing Sun City, after tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus reenacted Mbuti chants into a preview version of ACID, we're still plenty uncomfortable with African music making headway into the mainstream strictly on the backs of four American white dudes (who aren't actually, but that's another matter). My own feeling is that Vampire Weekend rub people the wrong way in large part because they are sincerely coy about and aware of all these things, and that this blowback and backlash and instant adulation has made their third record what it is: an exciting, beautiful, affirming Great record -- the first Great record by a straight-on rock band of this decade, if you ask me.

Nobody's mind will be changed by Modern Vampires of the City, and let's not waste time grumbling that anyone's wrong about it per se, although it would every ounce of my energy to pretend I didn't fall in love with it within the first world-embracing seconds of "Obvious Bicycle," and thus my perspective is probably faulty. So let's take it back to the original point -- pop itself banal but in the best way, and maybe pop about pop banal in the worst... musical mythos, a berserk and heartfelt attachment to the very act of listening, is all Vampire Weekend are really here to tell us about, from the cologned hue and cry of "A-Punk" to the rock & roll aftermath of "Giving Up the Gun." To be sure, Vampire Weekend and Contra, neither nearly as yuppied up or Cape Codded as was often charged, danced on a wire between cleverness and passion, inspiration and affectation. But that was the point.

Not anymore -- not only is Modern Vampires of the City, the band's instantly immortal third album, their best and most ingratiating to date, it's their warmest and most genuine, which gives them a new kind of liberated free reign. Vampire Weekend don't have much in common with the Beatles musically or artistically, but the newfound directness in their songwriting, and the renewed pleasure rather than obsessive-compulsive busyness in their committed precision is the same kind of leap forward that A Hard Day's Night was after With the Beatles. They're not "loose" or spontaneous and they never will be -- every note of music here feels obsessed over and arrived at -- but they've learned to wring immense catharsis out of their music. It's always clear and restrained but never, ever stiff.

The wit we talked about earlier is in the music and performance, not the lyrics. Not that there's anything wrong with Koenig's pop culture-doctorate wordplay, but it only seldom comes to mean much to me in and of itself: in the disarmed storytelling of "Giving Up the Gun" and "Diplomat's Son," sure, or in "maybe she's gone and I can't resurrect her / truth is, she doesn't need me to protect her." But generally, what I come back for is a spark that's enhanced but not defined by Koenig's verbiage. His delivery is a different matter, but we'll come to that. By musical wit, I really mean that the songs are so consistently surprising and filled with detail and tossed-off beauty that becomes clearer and more resonant with time. The most intricate of the new songs, "Step," moseys around on top of delicately pretty keyboard and harpsichord but hits hard with sly lyrical asides and skewed-up vocals; it's midtempo but fills its sporadic beats with such bounce that it feels like dance music.

But then there are "Diane Young" and "Finger Back," pop songs so overstuffed with pleasure they come on like web-age Alex Chilton, only radio-smarter. (Ariel Rechtshaid's sparkling production helps.) Like most bands that learn to take immense pleasure in the possibilities of studio-based craft, there are any number of performance impossibilities on these songs. Koenig's vocals extend, speed up and overlap; the drums are overdubbed and echoed until they become oceanic, and the songs in general are delightfully hooky and strange constructions that have everything to do with harnessing a moment. I have no doubt Vampire Weekend can do great things live, but no band can work all this magic on stage. That's one but not the only mark of how they've changed since 2010. The other is audible in the sweetness of "Unbelievers," as comely and universal a straightforward rock song as I think can exist in 2013, and "Everlasting Arms," a ballad that brings the most regret allowed yet from the band's sunny playbook -- which only increases its sting. But even the slow ones like "Arms" and "Hannah Hunt" take left turns, boast unexpected instrumentation, and never cease with the rhythmically calculated shots of enthusiasm and grace. For a record that so constantly changes pace and style, it's incredibly consistent and unified.

Because Vampire Weekend have mostly (and deliberately) left behind the aural texture of their first two records, in favor of among much else a newfound Middle Eastern influence probably owed to both the band's new confidence and to the artistic renewal from Rostam Batmanglij's work outide the band, the commonality now is Koenig's tireless (if often uncannily similar to Paul Simon) voice. He's settled into himself enough now that even his tics and cries and wobbly spoken-word asides are revelatory, evocative of both Buddy Holly's nervous energy (a great fit with the burst of joy on "Diane Young" and the classicist '50s doo wop form on "Don't Lie") and Bobby Fuller's almost godly grandness. The latter is clearest on two expansive cuts that provide the album's climax: "Worship You" and particularly "Ya Hey" bite off a huge spiritual-emotional chunk quite fearlessly and prove the band to be intimidatingly expert at such rich pop fulfillment that towers, entices, bites like hallmark alt-rock predecessors from "Bastards of Young" to "Dreams" to "Bleeding Heart Show."

And they know it too, which will piss some folks off -- they'll read it as arrogance. But when greatness is a given, as it has been at various times for the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Neil Young, and now Kanye West, a comfort in the audience-listener relationship can overtake. As "Ya Hey" wrings out with a hook that should be Wings-level annoying but just feels like a shower of bliss, as "Worship You" enters that last chaotic chorus, and as "Obvious Bicycle" says fuck off to all preconceptions and both opens and reveals itself as slowly as it can get away with in 4:11, it's as if an admired friend is speaking to you again, giving you the latest warts-and-all message even if the goals have changed with the years. That's a classic rock & roll conceit that was dissolved in the MTV period and forgotten by the Internet age: shrouded in mystery, an artist comes out and says their piece and retreats again, and we're grateful for what they contribute. Art-punk phony hipsters, I don't give a fuck, man -- I wish more music made me feel like this does but it doesn't. I'm not even sure the rock idiom has room for a whole lot of music that makes me feel like this.

What makes this a probable classic, though? I don't think Vampire Weekend or Contra are masterpieces, but I'm pretty sure this is -- and I've struggled over the last few weeks to determine whether this impulse was deeply felt or just overexcited. It might be exciting and beautiful, but it nabs at something more soulful than such platitudes indicate. Let's look at the post-millennial records I'd call Great: Stankonia, The College Dropout, Donuts, Have One on Me, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and whokill are all individualistic and restless, devilishly inventive but emotionally felt albums with virtually no weak cuts between them, and each with an overwhelming enough number of highlights that naming my favorite cut is a constantly evolving struggle. All of those records challenge the time-tested idea of "the album" itself and served at various times to completely infiltrate all aspects of my life. When I'd wake up in the morning, tUnE-yArDs or OutKast would be playing in my head, teasing with the unexpected changes and eccentricities within and without the songs; and when I revisit those records, that starts to happen again. But one other thing those six LPs have in common is that they're not "rock" albums per se. Limit us to straight records by rock bands and my picks become more sporadic yet. Exclude Yo La Tengo and there's only three: In Rainbows, The Coast Is Never Clear, Wincing the Night Away. It's hard to elicit real imagination from guitar music these days. But those each became my world, and so has Modern Vampires of the City -- its march and saunter and slink through city streets lifts me right up... and then knocks me back down with that eerie closing run of "Hudson" and "Young Lion."

Let's liken the descent into bleakness on this finale to "A Day in the Life" or "The Overload," hailing both from albums that various critics have likened to this one. That should tell you what stakes we're dealing with here. And since the Beatles were playing a part on Sgt. Pepper and David Byrne was playing a part for four straight albums and Kanye West is upholding a persona and preconceptions attached on Yeezus, I can't say that I'm all that interested in whether anything about this is authentic or not. All I care about is it's brilliant and divine, and I'll feel it in my bones probably as long as I'm breathing. I bet it's more likely that you'll feel the same than it is that you won't, but if not, that's part of the experience really, and this is one band that makes that feel like an inherently joyous process.

Arcade Fire EP (2003)

(s/r)

I was something of a latecomer on Arcade Fire. It seems sort of weird now, but I heard Neon Bible about a year after its release and only got around to Funeral at the very end of the decade. I admire the band very much and love all three of their albums, but I'd be lying if I said I felt a really deep connection to them -- if my reaction to news of their pending fourth album was much more than "oh cool, I bet that will be good." I think they would have loomed larger for me as a younger man -- not that they're unsophisticated, but the bluster and urgency and all that mattered a bit more to me as an obsessive U2 fan in high school. At certain moments, though -- "Windowsill," "Haiti," "Intervention," "Sprawl II," and most of their live performances that I've seen on Youtube -- I feel a certain electricity and for a few fleeting seconds I completely get it, and in those brief moments all the intellectual stuff and critical faculties are gone and I just feel the fist-pumping glee and catharsis of it all. They are perhaps the only band capable of seeming periodically like The One and Only Band, if you know what I mean.

Despite not being particularly good, the band's debut EP -- which I've just heard this month for the first time -- is actually another of those moments, but for a completely different reason. Hearing it has led me to want to reconsider carefully my reasons for not being absolutely agog over their work in general, because this flawed, slightly goofy and tentative EP gives the lie if nothing else to any question that Arcade Fire do not fully believe in all the Spectorian pyrotechnics and blissful overrangements that characterize the work on their albums. Even if it sounds alternately like U2's barely-finished October and an atypically macho Flying Nun release, Arcade Fire leaves little doubt on one point: this band's music is "big" by design. With full instrumentation -- typically eccentric: banjos, accordions, yelling, chanting, things to slap and strike as in the overzealous pow wow in some elementary school music class -- and fuller enthusiasm but barest production, this seven-track EP melts the band's dynamic down to its essence.

To some ears, it'll remain the best thing ever attached to them; their virtues emerge fully formed with but two exceptions -- Win Butler's voice, never exactly an instrument of unfaltering grace, is weak and untested here; and we must remember that Funeral and Neon Bible felt immediate because hi-fidelity, full-blown production is so naturally suited to the group's songs. But those songs are already driving and earnest, if derivative, and demanding of constant attention. The sad lullaby that opens the record and the bad twang ("your... father was... a perrrr-vert") that end it are its sole notes of mild ambivalence. As for the rest, its compressed but unrestrained attachment to grandiosity quickly calls the early Replacements to mind. Except, you know, they didn't have a Björk soundalike, a nice rolling piano, or a bassline like the one that lifts up the ground on "I'm Sleeping in a Submarine."

Always wide-eyed and impulsive, the band's core form here is a revealing thing indeed. They were already business-savvy grownups in 2003, but they were seriously releasing songs called "The Woodland National Anthem" and coming off like adorably communal fantasy geeks hanging in the living room, Mom just behind the door with lemonade and marshmallow squares. There's even emo! Belted out with aplomb, of course. The ground-level honesty and optimism here is actually a mark of directness that, especially on a confessional like "My Heart Is an Apple" (god, these song titles), signify the most emotionally fragile material the band would emit until 2010's The Suburbs (itself forecasted here by a line in "Vampire / Forest Fire" about living there). And as if to prove the point that this group needed only distribution and a nice glittery studio to blow up properly, we get an early take on "No Cars Go" that comes off like a strange hybrid of OMD and Spandau Ballet, attempting but not really achieving the march-to-the-capitol power of the Neon Bible version. For some that'll make it worse, for others better, but no one except the most hardened cynic about this remarkable band will dispute that it's at least interesting. If you like their subsequent work at all, you should really hear this record if you haven't already.

[SEE ALSO:]
Neon Bible (2007)
The Suburbs (2010)

Deerhunter: Monomania (2013)

(4AD)

!! CAUTION !!

It probably wouldn't displease Bradford Cox, were he able to muster up the energy to care, to know that there are an awful lot of people who are very conflicted about him -- from a certain perspective, which could be indie-rock generational or just taste or history with his various projects, undoubtedly Monomania is what someone's been waiting for ever since they heard a certain twist or lift in his voice. It bears noting that Cox's voice is divisive enough by itself -- a sort of ashen croon that easily recalls both Paul Westerberg and John Lennon, just as unmistakable as either but used far less resourcefully -- without the lurching back and forth of the music he helps write and perform for Deerhunter, or crafts on his own under the name Atlas Sound.

A contrast can quickly be drawn to Damon Albarn, whose work with Blur is recognizably distinct from the material he creates with Gorillaz or the Good, the Bad and the Queen, but his personality, hidden or explicit, is incredibly consistent. The difference is that Albarn has a media empire at his disposal and isn't controlled by emotional whims; Cox is a troubled, often seemingly irrational personality and his reflection of self in his music one week, intimate and decisive as it may seem, can easily bear little resemblance to the persona he seems to be driving at by the time he has breakfast the next morning. The current Deerhunter album, for better or worse, finds him in self-absorbed abrasive raving mode -- and worse yet, with a band giving him all the space he needs to indulge.

Some of us were finally sold on Deerhunter after many years of resisting their slightly prog angle on traditional alt-rock because of Halcyon Digest, a record so confident, beautiful and arresting that it seemed it could not possibly be a fluke. If Deerhunter's earlier music was tentative and uninvolving, Atlas Sound's first several years after inception were downright drab and monotonous, but that pseudonym's 2011 record Parallax was one of the most stunning recordings of that year and seemed to verify that Cox was only hitting his creative stride, perhaps enabled by the more-than-niche popularity of his less polished work. Though recording style is one of the most serious obstacles to enjoying Monomania, the difference in Cox's last two albums had little to do with such surface-level matters and everything to do with his newfound ability to temper his expressions of loss, grief and very occasional elation. There was never any doubt that Parallax was an exorcising of demons, but it was also the work of an obvious showman: it gave pleasure, it gave catharsis, and it did both simultaneously and then did it again.

Aesthetically, Monomania heads back to the garage -- but without the idealism and spirit that prompts young bands to retreat there to begin with. Landing far afield from Halcyon, the band's performances here are obligatory, speed-fevered and markedly joyless. But the band is scarcely the story here. With only one tune written and sung by guitarist Lockett Pundt (who now puts out his meandering own solo records under the name Lotus Plaza), not coincidentally one of the two here that almost works, this is as much a Cox showcase as an Atlas Sound album, at least in terms of its exposure of his present mood and mindset. Despite its odd, sudden fixation with dive-bar southern-fried classic rock, which it has neither the audacity nor the recording quality to convincingly imitate, Monomania sounds like the operational, defiant non-catharsis of a depressed person going through the motions: samey, uninteresting, workmanlike.

If you loved Deerhunter before Halcyon Digest, it's hard to say how you might feel about this, as it represents a broad change in tactic that starts to seem broader yet with each repeated listen. Unmistakably though, everything you loved about Halcyon is gone here; the songs are, if anything, equally melodic -- but Ariel Pink has taught us how little that finally means when meshed with muddy, hollow apathy. The songs are what Thom Yorke used to call "fridge buzz," only they're not on the radio, which means they might offer something in a different context ("Neon Junkyard" could be a Pavement b-side, if Pavement had ever so completely lacked grace and intelligence); together, they're deathly dull. Even Pundt's song, the jangle-pop "The Missing" (which unsurprisingly sounds like Lotus Plaza) is essentially a laundry-list of indie rock tropes that don't receive the muscle or sincerity that a lifer band like the Bats or Superchunk can give them when they trot out such beaten-horse things.

If the previous Deerhunter record was a celebration of the past as filtered through individual lives and through music, Monmania's chief evocation is of playing a bad record serviceable enough that you can't be bothered to stop cooking dinner and turn it off; given full attention, the skip button is so tempting that one nearly has to slap one's hand to keep it away (and I don't think I've made it all the way through "Dream Captain" yet, in half a dozen attempts, unless I was driving or cooking). "There's nothing much left of me," indeed. Maybe that's why Deerhunter seem to have designed Monomania as a road album; it sure as hell isn't a headphones album, another excuse uncertain rock bands often make. "Pensacola" fits slightly with this idea -- it's a Replacements-derived night-drive song of sorts, if your night drive gets stymied at the first stoplight immediately after you start to pump yourself up. That's the real theme here, if anything: short-lived enthusiasm hitting a wall -- witness the way the barely-there title track positions itself as a showpiece then rapidly falls apart, and where's that skip button again? Or better yet, the strongest song on the album, "Blue Agent," plays up the John Lennon and Beatles comparisons with its infectious melody and Chuck E. Cheese riff, but its initially exciting throwback feeling gets increasingly shapeless and bottoms out.

For his part, Cox has a certain studied dedication to all this, in the sense that he sounds like he really wants to get the vocals done so he can leave and go play Call of Duty or something -- the modern equivalent of Kurt Cobain rushing through the In Utero sessions so he could have more time to shoot up. Cox's vocals get amplified and distorted and panned to one side and pumped all the way up in the mix until they're in your face or all the way down until you can barely make them out, but none of the trickery can mask the inadequacy and disinterest here, or the dichotomy between the music's targets and his performance. He's neither passionate nor sexual enough to be a glam rocker... and that isn't meant as a knock, it simply lends itself to the overriding feeling that his time would be better spent outside of the barroom-emptiness atmosphere. (You can almost hear the darts being thrown, the people feeling miserable.) His wailing in the dark here simply can't match the confessional grace of Parallax -- or certainly, of songs like "Helicopter" on Halcyon Digest that were almost painfully thorny and moving, something emphasized by the way a self-conscious drama like "Nitebike" thuds to the ground.

Cox and Deerhunter are to be commended for leaving safety, which has been a recurring theme in their work; it's useless and even insulting to suggest that they run for cover, time after time, and so far no two records they've released are remotely alike, which is nearly always a good sign. But there's something surprisingly disappointing about how what seemed like the slow search for a decisive voice is now being knocked out in favor of tortured distortion, songs and recordings up their own asses with fake machismo and faker grit -- classic rock that doesn't care. It's already inherently unpleasurable and incredibly annoying by track two, screaming down a rabbit hole that feels gross and tiresome.

With a sort of tip of the hat to fellow modernist liberal rockers Titus Andronicus, a New Jersey band whose music more convincingly evokes southern rock (but then, weren't two of the hallmark bands of that movement from California and Canada anyway?), we close out on a piece of... ideology? "Punk" is more distinctive than the other songs but still muddy. It hasn't really earned its own triumph anyway, if it were to go for it. But "for a drunk, I was young" sums up Cox in a certain slapdash, tossed off way. He's always been a stream-of-consciousness lyricist, like his great predecessor Michael Stipe, but that only underlines the way that both his mental state and his desire to musically bury it correlate so strongly with how good or bad his music turns out to be. As the band slides dutifully in behind their leader, they never assert themselves or achieve any serious magic. Though clearly strong and equipped to do more than they can with this material, they bring us only power pop with no power. There's nothing wrong with being unambitious, but this much apathy about the final sound and effect of a record is toxic. It's never been clearer that Cox's impulses and whims are Deerhunter, which is both admirable and unnerving -- and does not speak very well to the continued exuberance or significance of their recordings.

Still, a mysterious and brilliant album like Halcyon Digest deserves a lot of prolonged goodwill, and there's every reason to believe that a certain distaste for the type of music being constructed here has to be blamed for my feelings about it, as with Kurt Vile's albums. In other words, my biases play a part here and have perhaps no relevance to anyone else's emotional attachment or detachment from Monomania. All the same, to me this sounds like a sleazeball bartender singing in a locker room for 45 minutes. It makes me feel uncomfortable and unhappy. But maybe I'm the one with demons here.

[SEE ALSO:]
Halcyon Digest (2010)

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles: Make It Happen (1967)

(Tamla)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Plain-jane guitar music just doesn't seem to be commanding my attention much so far this summer, and no, it's not really summer yet, but when we reach the upper nineties outside and you tell me it's still springtime, that's when I etc etc. A fine time to let go of some of that oppressive heat with the shedding of some old-fashioned conventional wisdom. Let it be warned that what you're seeing here is a theory in progress -- but you know that thing you've read in every rock & roll reference book about how '60s Motown LPs are skippable because they're utterly full of filler, thus excusing the tendency of most scholars to judge the label's seminal output of that seminal decade solely on the basis (admittedly strong) of all those seminal singles and radio hits? Starting to think that maybe there's some element of writerly research laziness that led to such a conclusion.

For now, we're just dealing with one exhibit in our argument here but more will follow. Make It Happen is an interesting and unusual record historically, having been released under two separate names for commercially savvy reasons. This is a lovely, consistent half hour of music, and I have trouble imagining that it alone among the wall of attractive soul records lining the shelves at Gravity here in town is the big holy-grail assembly-line Motown record that's actually Good and Consistent. We've long been at the mercy of compilers over at Universal who seem to think that what we care about is the chance to hear, I dunno, the Marvelettes singing Gershwin. Whatever. No way -- the albums that I've heard so far from this period emphasize the speaker-blowing power of the hits but also operate and elaborate on the idioms established by those hits. There are a lot of obscure songs by the Supremes that are just as well-crafted and instantly appealing as their singles. And do you really think that a savvy if bullish capitalist like Berry Gordy would expect to sustain in the marketplace putting out shit artwork in the decade of the Beatles and Beach Boys? Hell, the Rivieras put out great albums in the '60s, you best believe luminaries like those under Gordy's abusive regime did the same.

This is illustrative of a tendency to more seriously consider white music than black in longform; I think Make It Happen has just as much to offer as Pet Sounds or Revolver and is certainly in the same wheelhouse of song-cycle variance and brooding meditation. One important distinction: the Miracles record sounds a thousand times better in stereo than the two touchstones. In fact, it's such a revelation to hear these songs with such a wide, expansive frame that you fully believe it's a newer recording than it is, so cleanly and lushly and flawlessly produced is it.

But that's all technical shit really, isn't it? What matters is the top-caliber writing and performance, just out of the gate on the prototypical groove of "The Soulful Shack," halfway between psychedelia and quiet storm. You can sense the Motown stylistics adapting to Smokey Robinson's peculiarities, and the Funk Brothers were always masters at adaptation -- "My Love for You" compares favorably to "Just My Imagination," still four years ahead. They never stop working within the so-called "Motown sound," but they can sound like so much more, including a thorny garage band on "Dancing's Alright," a sort of arthouse "Wooly Bully." The cover of Little Anthony's "I'm on the Outside" is done up like a jazz standard, and the Miracles' propensity for pure body music rolls back around on "It's a Good Feeling," nearly as good as (and much looser than) "Going to a Go Go." The point being: leader, singers, writers, producers, band, label are by no means resting on laurels here. There's heart and effort to spare in this.

This is undoubtedly on the upper echelon of Motown LPs, but it explains a basic element of the label's strategy. Go beyond the singles, and Smokey and the group use the keymarks to establish and sink into a mood -- one that you will find intensely complementary if you're a fan of the hits; that's good strategy both commercially and artistically, and there's a sense of hands being held to enter more adventurous, uncertain territory. "More Love" is a more personal and raw and delicately structured tune than ever reached the radio from Robinson's pen, and its bass and piano-saturated bottom-heaviness carries through from the dramatic "Don't Think It's Me," which boasts a compressed intensity and thumping menace that give the midsection of the record a surprisingly unsettling quality, not far from the Impressions' work of this same period -- or Marvin Gaye's more carefully produced records in the early '70s. Freed from the constraints of the 45, constraints which normally lent him his definitive context, Smokey is able to explore the sensuality in his voice and lyrics on a song like the romantically demanding "After You Put Back the Pieces." You may get confused by the songs' titles (which include a tune called "More Love," one called "You Must Be Love," one called "My Love for You," and one called "My Love Is Your Love") but you won't forget any of them.

Still, the singles do burst out the same way they do on, say, a Wilson Pickett or a Cars record, and that's not a bad thing. "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage" is still, for me, one of the peaks of the Miracles' output, a fascinating inverse of the sinister, controlled fury in a production like Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," wherein the only output is darkest, tormented pain put across by Robinson's stirring, stunning performance. But of course "Tears of a Clown," an accidental-of-sorts collaboration with Stevie Wonder, is the monument here. Correctly placed at the end of the record because (as any DJ knows) virtually nothing can follow it without a radical change of mood and breaking of spell, it features the most powerful playing in the Motown catalog outside of "I Want You Back"... and at the time of the LP's release, it wasn't a single.

Which proves something. It was so unmistakably a classic that AOR stations gradually picked it up, as did a few Northern Soul jockeys in the UK, and Motown felt no choice but to let it into the marketplace, where it became Robinson's biggest-ever hit. How it was missed the first time around is one of those baffling questions we can never answer. With a profound urgency, witty and erudite and desperately sad lyrics, and a tricky, Eastern-inflected yet entirely unique production and melody, it's as perfect an expression of lonely defeat as "Tracks of My Tears" and yet unlike that song, it discovers triumph and transcendence in its sense of loss; no one but Robinson could ever get so much swing out of the way he sings the title at the close of each chorus and then, without taking a breath, slyly add "when there's no one around" and lead us directly into the next drum fill to another part of a song that, much in the vein of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride," simply never flags. It just keeps building and building on top of itself and it would simply burst if it did not fade out.

But let's reiterate: only a hit three years after the album was released. A gem buried on one of those supposedly filler-squashed Motown LPs. But here we are. So close to a scenario in which it was never discovered and I might only uncover it upon exploring this album for the first time a few years ago, and I could say "this song is incredible, an absolute masterwork," and would you believe me? No. Because it's on a Motown album, man, a '60s soul album, a collection of black music from the '60s. Those guys didn't have Total Artistic Control of their discographies then, y'all, didja know that? Didja know? (Though Smokey probably wielded a fair bit of power -- bottom line, it's irrelevant.)

We've expressed a theory in this space before that all popular music as we know it is a process of reeling and coping with the consequences of what was laid on tape in the '60s; by the end of that decade, nearly every basic idea and concept that could exist as an outgrowth of pop music form had been at least approached if not fully defined. Secondarily, we must remember that conventional wisdom can be very dangerous, and in fact usually is; it wasn't so long ago that we truly believed Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded and immaculately planned every frame of his films and did nothing but rote committing to film on his sets, and barely a decade ago it was still believed that the Beach Boys seldom played on their own '60s records. Quite apart from that -- take others' views, this blog included if you care enough to read it regularly, as a roadmap but still with a healthy grain of salt. Your own exploration will by definition reveal far more to you. Ignore any facet -- any facet -- of Motown in the '60s at your own risk. This record is sumptuous and pleasurable from beginning to end, it shall endure the storms of time, and there's not a chance in hell that it's alone.

[SEE ALSO:]
Ooo Baby Baby: The Anthology (1961-72)

L7: Bricks Are Heavy (1992)

(Slash)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This remains a transcendent record. If you're already an advocate for the riot grrl movement, a brief but shining period when women-in-rock could be characterized as an unreductive "trend" that did not wholly involve the leering eyes-from-above of A&R patriarchy, then this seems obvious to me as its keystone. Suppose you're not, though. It really isn't relevant to anything here because this has nothing to do with any movement or any time period at all. Perhaps you think a song called "Diet Pill" could only be a missive from late-night infomercial hell of a specific period, but that would mean you haven't borne witness to its menace and swagger that fires up and over so much of what's defined as "grunge." Maybe you don't like Butch Vig's pervasive-at-the-time production style, which tends to flatten everything into a kind of stereo sludge (here and on Siamese Dream and Nevermind, and probably Garbage's records), though if his and the band's compression of joy, megaphone, and rolled R's on "Scrap" doesn't get you to lift yourelf up and pogo, you may be a total loss.

Maybe you didn't enjoy the '90s enough to think that the sound of the Beastie Boys boiling over -- complete with catchphrase: "break out the big guns!" -- on "Everglade" is a pleasant glide into the L7 universe. Or maybe you have metal and grunge problems; I sure as shit do. Like I said, this is sheer grit, sheer dirt, but it's beautiful -- my defenses go completely down for the schlock-shock riff that opens "Wargasm" and I'm convinced that if all these problems and prejudices don't evaporate for you when you actually hear this music, you just got pop music problems. Catchy as fuck problems.

One major element of this success is that the songs are consistently surprising, even if their production is just streamlined radio-friendly-unit-shifter cleaned-up rock mess (not much "fuzz" here, so to speak). "Slide" is a good example, rapidly exploring bottom-heavy angst, then getting bored or restless with that and moving on to Aerosmith slanging and then finally indie-rock muddiness, all with astounding versatility. The great theme of this band's career, thanks in large part to the snarling apathy in Donita Sparks' wondrous vocals (Suzi Gardner's too, but especially Sparks'), which are somehow hyped-up and apathetic at once, is the open contempt toward boredom itself, toward the entire stay-in-your-place, this-is-what's-expected-of-you mode of the world. "Don't preach to me!" Sparks demands -- she's not nasty, she's just direct, though she's quite capable of screaming and bending her voice to demand, but it's the band that does the duty of sinking us down into the murk and stabbing at us.

That might not make Bricks Are Heavy sound like a shot of utter pleasure, but it is. (And monkeys can fly.) It's bigger and bolder than its fine predecessor, Smell the Magic, in every sense -- and represents the all-time ideal of a commercial breakthrough, admittedly allowed in large part by the success of a lot of bands I don't like much, that's really uncompromised and bold. At under thirty-eight minutes, it's wonderfully quick and concise and races by before you know what's hit you. Moreover, it can boast the kind of classicist perfect sequencing that harks back to Brian Wilson's earliest explorations of what works in the LP form. I sadly don't own this on vinyl, but I can just imagine how great it would be when Side Two pumps up with the slow burn of "One More Thing," like coming back in after intermission.

And how brilliant that the melodic slow burn itself is so splendidly fierce. It may indeed be L7's finest cut overall, though there's a lot of competition; bassist Jennifer Finch, in one of her two lead vocals here, gets to explore the caverns in her hugely full-bodied singing and walks out with a benchmark of supreme passion undiluted by any of the moments competing for your attention here. In two lines -- "Politics messing with my rights / There's nothing to do tonight" -- she defines beautifully what should have been the essence of rock & roll in the '90s, and what set this band apart: that they "got" it, so to speak, unlike most of the groups that populated the "alternative" boom. They weren't just socially conscious, they were hedonistic, they called out bullshit, they sought pleasure, they sought the stupid and the glossy teenage doom and gloom of the New York Dolls and Todd Rundgren and the Shangri-Las. They were "it," and all the facets of "it."

But if "One More Thing" was the apex, "Pretend We're Dead" is the quintessential moment -- seeking and finding ultimate pop perfection in the unhinged. "Shitlist" and "Monster" are equally strong statements of purpose (the latter is practically Cars or Bangles if they'd been allowed to respond to the full range of their impulses) but "Pretend We're Dead" is the revelation. Underneath the noise, it's all pure pop music of the Ramones or Tommy James variety: pure exuberance. The catchphrases again: what's up with what's going down? And what explodes is the confidence. Grunge was so much about navel-gazing or exposing a false vulnerability. L7 is about assertion, independence, delirious bluster. They're David Bowie. They're Dion, circa "The Wanderer." Okay, fine, they're a little Patti Smith too; and while it would be egregiously unnecessary, and not a little reductive, to claim that "gender" is at the forefront here, gender is an inescapable preoccupation. Because there are lots of people who wouldn't accept a band that doesn't attempt to meet an audience halfway on that audience's definition of femininity -- we wouldn't have let a female David Bowie become a millionaire because we find female expression of individuality gross. (See: every time Madonna ever did something the public felt was unladylike; every time she dares to exist as a non-neutered female public persona above 40 now.) On "Pretend We're Dead," Sparks doesn't scream, she doesn't coo, she doesn't lilt, she just belts -- dripping with the smart, the cynical, the confident, the sarcastic. It's not that she doesn't give a fuck; it's that she doesn't give a fuck if you realize she gives a fuck.

We as a culture find that quality attractive in male rock stars; we're allowed to see eroticism in their command. I've long felt that Bricks Are Heavy was a major and brilliant record. Revisiting it recently has edged me closer to believing it's close to a masterpiece, and may in fact be a masterpiece. The only caveat is that there should be untold hundreds of bands like L7. There are, in fact, but we haven't gotten to hear them; their success is one-in-a-million. I love the Bangles and the Go-Go's but both exercised in far more conventional, traditionally "female" pop song roles. I love Madonna and Janet Jackson but theirs was/is a definition of a specific idea of sexuality and femininity. It's sad that things have to be so reductive; it's sad that there even has to be a paragraph here about the fact that we have to be careful not to give L7 credit for empowering things that a zillion other bands we've never heard of have done and are doing. But that's the only, and I mean only, reason this isn't an A+. And the next time I listen to it, it may be.

[SEE ALSO:]
L7 (1988)
Smell the Magic (1990)