Mikal Cronin: MCII (2013)

(Merge)

There's nothing wrong with what Mikal Cronin is doing. The singer-songwriter knows his way around a hook and maximizes his use of each and every one of them. He's power pop in the latter-day vein of Matthew Sweet or (don't let anyone hear you say this) Gin Blossoms, when the gaze turned inward and the casual abuse of the other halves of the boys' (seemingly always boys') relationships calmed down. Cronin is twenty-five years old, not much younger than Sweet was circa Girlfriend, but something weird has happened in the intervening generation: a barely palpable, barely tangible fear. Cronin doesn't lash out, doesn't protest, doesn't even really signal much heartbreak or ill health to speak of. Everything is all too calm on MCII, which is its undoing. To put it another way: there's nothing wrong with it.

The polish has its benefits. The driving, snowy "Weight" that opens the record -- like a wistful, sensitive Smith Westerns -- is justifiably pushed to its gorgeous limits and is one of the best guitar pop songs, actually popular or not, to come down the pike this year. Much like Real Estate, Cronin seems almost like the Frankensteinian creation of those Youtube commenters who talk about how they love it when Yo La Tengo is "mellow"; "Shout It Out" is built on what sounds like a leftover Ira Kaplan riff, "Don't Let Me Go" drops the pretense and just cops the one from "The Summer" (itself an Only Ones lift, so we're not judging), and "Peace of Mind" is practically a full rewrite of "Did I Tell You." That's all fine. But bite makes sweetness special. The Byrds and Turtles knew that when they were inventing the busy verses and strange drumlines now revised on "Shout It Out" and "Change."

Like a lot of songs here, those are tempered by Cronin's other fixation: FM modern rock radio of the mid-'90s, which seems to be the primary frame of reference for his songs' peaks and choruses. "Am I Wrong," for instance, is already permanently in your head halfway through the first minute; unfortunately, Cronin sees little point in writing an actual song around the hook, instead just letting it sort of shapelessly support itself like a lot of mainstream bands (Collective Soul; Stone Temple Pilots) spent that entire decade doing. Their songs often blasted out with enthusiasm and went nowhere, like "Peace of Mind" and "Am I Wrong" here. But Cronin was born in 1987, so this is in his DNA and he's quite entitled. One song, "See It My Way," is practically a dictionary fusion of his two interests, reconfiguring "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with calm hippie folk rock to tirelessly amusing effect.

The sound of MCII is towering and slick and immediately appealing, like a latter-day R.E.M. album, or like any Tom Petty album. But as with either of those frames of reference, the closer you look at the thing, the hazier and emptier it seems. I lost patience earlier and earlier each time I listened to the entire LP, and that's with having a natural attraction to the kinds of noises Cronin likes and the way he lays them out. It's all songwriting, finally. Even the feedback and electric power turn on "Change" is as much throwback as a Yuck song, and starts falling down the "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" rabbit hole before it can really charm on its disaffected, superficial catchiness.

One can't object to the concept of basic, unfettered guitar pop with an edge; think of the Shins' first three albums, vividly recalled more than once here, especially on "Don't Let Me Go." But the Shins' James Mercer had a boldness of composition and a sense of passion in those days that Cronin's affable politeness and fatal love of the radio-pandering familiar cannot match. His songs soar and envelop, but only in the most obvious ways, formats, structures, places. There's nothing surprising or personal, certainly not intimate or idiosyncratic about them. His sole note of individuality is a slight tendency toward the prog-"epic" that gives these songs a potentially transportive, cloudy feeling that somehow stays rock-grounded. The thing is lean and fun enough for background music, but it gets tired fast. In one last throwback, the record even provides an additional '70s nod, to the old album-closing power ballad move. Title? "Piano Mantra."

Charli XCX: True Romance (2013)

(Atlantic)

"How can I fix what I fucked up?" is the mantra of True Romance, a surprisingly raw and bleeding examination of wrecked relationships, bad nights and occasional bliss that marks the full-length debut of Charli XCX, a glittery pop-disco queen who could better be described simply as a singer-songwriter; these songs revolve around direct unadorned emotional expression and, as with the concurrent Heartthrob by Tegan and Sara, the synthpop throwback sound and insistent beat is really incidental to the singing and lyrics, which are routinely inspired.

Unfortunately, whereas Heartthrob augments its tension and despair with genuinely graceful melodies and throttling hooks, much of True Romance simply whips in and out of the room inconspicuously. The songs are well-written but often slower, it seems, than they should be. The record opens and closes at its strongest; "Nuclear Sessions" is a wildly eccentric bow, and "Lock You Up" marries the generally dour mood with a towering, angsty body-music glory that most easily calls back to the O.M.D. and Siouxie and the Banshees numbers that likely inspired the album as a whole. There are fun moments scattered here and there, like the bouncy hip hop-flavored "Cloud Aura," but it's most effective on those rare occasions when Charli seems to be having a blast, which happens less often with her perfectly assured vocals than those moments when she lapses into spoken-word murmurs, the breathy confessions of a confusion we all know in which feeling bad is almost as necessary as feeling good.

There's not a bad cut here, and nothing overstays its welcome. The entire album is intriguing, even brilliant at times, and this is clearly a smart and resourceful artist -- but in general, it just seems too polite to hit as hard as we'd like.

Phil Spector: A Christmas Gift for You (1963)

(Philles [original] / Apple [reissue] / Abkco [compact disc])

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It's October now, but as you well know if you work retail, Christmas is just around the yeah yeah. You can already hear it lurking around, some unseen thread of invisible colored lights propping itself up from underground like the tripods in War of the Worlds -- that now-whispered furor of forthcoming stresses and dreads and everything frantic and terrifying about spending the holidays with your family, or with a parade of perpetually dissatisfied members of the public each with their own mortally freaky back story. But underneath all this, there is Something About the holiday season that even a nonreligious person can find some way to get a sense of once in a while. It's not limited to just goodwill and angelic pleasures -- who doesn't like getting presents? -- and it's not even limited to things you celebrate privately in your own way. There is (or can be) something kind of lovely about the sensation of urgency you get out in the thick of it surrounded by the busy and overworked populace.

That world looks better with the Ronettes' "Sleigh Ride" floating through it. It's an arrangement that makes the most of its melody's giddy exuberance far beyond the trappings of its lite-classical origins, smartly excising the momentum-killing "giddy-up" bridge in favor of that unforgettable ringalingalinga dingdongding after each line. Ronnie Spector's sumptuous treatment of the song makes it something much more than a decorative supplement to chaos. It alters the architecture of the season, infuses it with an enchantingly furious romance. To put it more simply, it makes rock & roll out of the most arid and secular of humdrum traditions. Exploding with overfilled brass and bells and drums, it's so much alive as to become an escape, something that implies both a universal celebration and the ability to carve our own space in it. The Ronettes' communication, singing songs that we've heard so many hundreds of times, seems strangely personal. And so it goes for Phil Spector's entire Christmas album, a piece of lovably cluttered beauty and unabashed (almost weird) sincerity that does so much more and works so much harder than it has to.

That wasn't typically the case with the few full-length albums Spector released on his Philles label in the '60s; this is by far the most significant LP he produced until he worked on the Beatles' Let It Be in 1970, and it would remain his best for longer than that. Spector's team of session musicians, singers, writers and arrangers seem to have been waiting their entire lives for this. They probably hadn't, they might not even have cared that much deep down, but they certainly make it seem like the most important thing that's ever been recorded for the duration, in an era when even non-seasonal rock & roll and pop albums were still generally cash-ins. Though he trips up the magic a few times with probably too many songs about Santa Claus that can't really be anything but kiddie distractions and one too many intrusions from dark-horse stablemates Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, Spector does something here with Christmas music that seems to exist nowhere else and seems to capture something intrinsic to the nature of the American celebration: he makes it vital.

From the first melancholy, driving notes of Darlene Love's belted-out "White Christmas" -- one of the best recordings ever of that brilliant, haunting song -- the sense of power, yearning and loneliness seems to infuse nearly every moment of A Christmas Gift for You. Love was and remains one of the most commanding singers in American popular music, and when she stops the presses to announce that "there's never been such a day in old L.A.," the intoxication is complete, which is something considering that she is merely setting up the payoff to come on Side Two. The Crystals, great as ever, must inevitably sit in the shadow of Love and Ronnie Spector. More than their peers, the Crystals seem saddled with the toy-drum part of our production, the part that seems -- adoringly enough -- to bask in frivolity. But these too are powerful performances, even of so slight a creation as "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," or one so tired as "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." It's just that the Ronettes do more than faithfully enhance their songs, they conquer them; that includes "Frosty the Snowman," deconstructed into something like perverse eroticism (this is Phil Spector, after all) with nothing more than Ronnie's read of the words "button nose." Her delivery of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is mindbending for similar reasons.

Nevertheless, the highlights of this record are quite consistently Love's domain, enough that it's hard to imagine it would have suffered much as a complete album of her performances. "Winter Wonderland" is the truest Spector wall of sound to be heard here, though the Crystals' gloriously busy "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" is an ambitious near-miss. But Christmas Gift houses two of Love's greatest moments on record, and everything here sort of lives in their wake, not just on the LP but in all attempts since to record worthwhile popular Christmas music.

There are few moments more luminous in '60s pop than the introduction of Love's "Marshmallow World," likely the most obscure non-original song selected for inclusion here, which ends up mattering not even a little bit. Its wonderfully surreal, evocative lyric is instinctively captured and rendered by Love into a towering celebration of the snow, the ice, the paradise of cold, and again, the warmth of romantic awakenings. It's as if in treating a holiday occasion as an event of the same momentous largeness as the boy-girl relationships she and Spector usually tackle, she is implying something larger, something about the moment when the annual obligations of surrounding oneself with iconography and celebrating the icily familiar gives way to the ability to choose how we do what we do, to form our own families -- to burst out dancing and to notice that it's our own turn to decide what being grownup actually means, all of the frustrations and unrequited desires amounting in the end just to freedom. That's rock & roll, and that's "Marshmallow World" in its breakneck, unstoppable speed.

As ever, though, we cannot be permitted these freedoms without ache. All of A Christmas Gift for You builds to the moment of truth seven minutes before it amusingly ends with a suitably creepy message from Spector himself (later imitated with adorably stilted awkwardness by Dennis Wilson on the Beach Boys' "Auld Lang Syne") over the top of "Silent Night," the album's only directly religious song. There's something coyly perfect about the ghostly beauty of "Silent Night," with its stark Nativity image, ultimately seeming in this context less important than Darlene Love singing about a boy she misses. Or rather, Darlene Love giving every bit of herself, as if her every last shred of life absolutely depends on it, to the masterpiece of this album: the glorious "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)," a song of frankly indescribable grandness, in July or October or December.

Not for nothing is the song beautifully written -- by Spector with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich -- including its lyrics that capture the anguish of loneliness, especially in a time of celebrated union and family, as well as any non-holiday composition. Love carries it home, though, and seems to define with herculean glory the bittersweetness of memory and grief in the face of perpetual cheeriness. Jack Nitzsche's arrangement builds and builds, conscious of the mounting intensity in Love's performance, until the song reaches a "please! please! please! please!" climax so overwhelming it seems to almost lose its grip on itself. But Love's control is absolute; nearly unnoticed in 1963, issued on the day that John F. Kennedy was shot, here sits on tape one of the finest vocal performances ever captured -- one that resonates fifty years later to anyone who's ever longed for someone, anyone who's ever looked at tinsel and tidings and wanted desperately to be happier.

This all-time moment is just the shiniest of the jewels given to us by this noble and gorgeous album. There is no use for irony here, no way or cause to be dismissive or skeptical of it. A Christmas Gift for You is ubiquitous, played year after year until its mono grooves wear thin to the eardrum, but it can still captivate, charm and bomb you out with its sheer, irreducible emotional vastness. Trim your tree to nothing less.

[SEE ALSO:]
Back to Mono (1958-69)

Kaki King: Legs to Make Us Longer (2004)

(Epic)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

By her music's very nature, Kaki King tends to slip into the background, which is not a criticism -- so did Brian Eno, quite intentionally. But as with Eno, until you sit down and concentrate fully on one of her complete albums, you likely neglect to notice just how formidable and unique a talent she truly is. No one disputes at this point that she is one of the era's best guitarists, and she does more with this technical proficiency than almost anyone ever has. Her lyricism is in a class with the likes of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd from Television, but her application of those gifts reminds me of no one so much as Dick Dale -- the playfulness, the spirit, and the quiet but ruthless command of center stage with nothing but the wild and engaging and frequently breathtaking sounds she can wring from a guitar, most often (more remarkably yet) acoustically. It's exciting enough just to watch her play, almost to the point of distraction; listen to the records to discover how creative she really is.

King's second album, which makes compositional and technical leaps over her first while retaining its directness, adds a full band but still communicates largely in a whisper, except when King periodically feels more noise is warranted. That includes the beautifully busy, almost manic "Playing with Pink Noise," which in its way is just as intense as a concentrated hypnosis like "Can the Gwot Save Us?" -- however many elements King adds to her sound, intimacy is still paramount, far more than any fawning over her astounding high-level technique; unlike so many guitar heroes, she shirks anything that amounts to mere showboating and always serves the song or tone of the moment. The ideas can flash on and off like the opening two-minute slide "Frame" or can transform and build and vary wildly like the brilliant "Lies," which never rests for even a moment but also never sounds strung together or unstructured.

There are no weak moments to be found on this record, but it's a goldmine of atmospheres that can change the color of a room and can even lull you into a gazing, tranced-out peace. Boredom never comes; there's too much warmth, mystery and romance in even a creation as deliberate as "Doing the Wrong Thing" -- which puts weight behind every note and equal weight behind the silences -- for it not to charge and challenge, even if subtly. There are boring technical reasons for why this record feels even stronger than its fine predecessor, and many of King's subsequent efforts -- the tracks are individually distinctive but cohere very smoothly into one another, and each seems reflective of careful enough planning that a lesser artist might find them constraining; the ambient production and arrangements are tasteful and use their extra palette of sounds sparingly -- but this sort of weighty, driving beauty comes from the soul and from King following her obviously restless but deeply giving instincts.

She vocalizes a bit on "My Insect Life," near the end, but even then this is a record of nothing but pure melody and texture washing over you. It might give you pause on, say, the midsections of "Magazine" and "Lies" to have it occur to you just how incredible King is at what she does, but mostly this record is a gift of drifting and receding. Its pleasures are difficult to articulate, but they are -- sincerely -- almost innumerable, and usually breathtaking.

[SEE ALSO:]
Everybody Loves You (2003)

The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (2013)

(Rabid)

Listening to the Knife is akin to willfully subjecting yourself to something that isn't really fun but you feel sort of an obligation to go through with it, maybe for the satisfaction you'll feel afterward -- like the hardest level in a video game, or a first date. The Dreijer siblings' political leanings are a little heady for me and sit beyond my dim understanding of the outside world (only a slight exaggeration, people) but their hearts seem to be in the right place, and their stance on the melding of corporate conglomeration and pop music is certainly righteous. Spending time with their music just proves how little ideology can finally matter in appreciation of a band. They could be fascist stand-up comedians for all that it matters for our purposes here in actually reviewing this goofy, vastly overlong record. It's full of ideas and dense, but I can't find a proper way into the musical portion of this satirical media empire (one that made its fortune by, no sense of irony here, lending a song to a Sony ad).

"A Tooth for an Eye" and "Full of Fire," our two opening cuts, are chaos of the right sort, evocative of the Rapture or Crystal Castles with a filthy, relentless pulsating undercurrent. You may or may not appreciate the education film vibe of the watery little synth trills and flute tones, and the entire record that follows is nothing if not playful. But even at its bounciest, it's the dance music of guilt and frequently undercuts its own appeal, more than likely on purpose. Sometimes I love that sort of thing, sometimes I don't; when I ask why, the answers can take very lonnnng but it's probably a question of how interesting the self-imposed bumps and fuckups are, and kinda stupid voice effects fall into the category of "unjustifiably irritating." And for nine minutes, fuck that. "Full of Fire" is the sneak preview of how most of the sequence here is going to run, bumping up slightly with outside influences on "Without You My Life Would Be Boring," a sort of Kelly Clarkson-fronting-Art of Noise art installation with a stronger chorus and whinier sounds, but at its worst it suggests the Bee Gees covering something from Vespertine.

Most of the Knife's songs are too long. Maybe that's intended as a sort of fuck-off maneuver, but with Justin Timberlake well on the way to redefining "epic" dance music in his own image, they have to lump up and kill their potentially crafty mood record with a lot of semi-ambient meanderings, one of which is entitled "Fracking Fluid Injection" because of course it is. They can't be tender without being menacing, they can't annoy us without also putting us to sleep with the basically silent sprawl of the nineteen-minute "Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized," pretty much a reenactment of the soundtrack of 2001 with music and dialogue both removed, thus about as dull a time as I've ever had listening to recorded music (and I sat through it twice and was not paid).

Mood albums are fine, by the way, but they typically need a few songs on the back half to sustain properly. Each cut here can be reduced so easily to a quick idea: here's paranoid disco Ben E. King, here's some jittery tomfoolery, good grief here's more yet. None of the compositions or... arid little "grooves" can sustain for as long as their authors seem to think. But Shaking the Habitual is just a platform for the stuff these two really care about, and if some people have the patience for it, they will enjoy the souvenir. If (like me) your patience is tried not just by The 20/20 Experience but This Is Happening, best to wait for the movie, the TV special, the interactive CD-ROM.

Art of Noise: Best Of (1983-92)

(Polydor)

!! CAUTION !!

Maybe it's just that the great @horse_ebooks letdown has me cranky this week, but there's really something irksome and phony about "performance art" in general, right? Not talking about the kind that has some sense of wit about it but mostly those confused examples of weirdness for its own self-important sake. Witness the juvenile behavior we're currently witnessing of those who now assign what seemed strange and surreal and genuinely offbeat with, uh, Meaning. The most interesting thing about Art of Noise now, divorced from the time when their 12" singles made massive waves in the electronic music marketplace, is that there was an acrimonious divide at the center of the story.

The problem comes because both before and after said divide, the Noise wasn't much good and the Art was worse. Prior to the split, which separated '80s aural architect Trevor Horn and rockcrit Paul Morley from their pointy-DJ buddies, the group as operated in quintet-ish form (though it would always be disputed how much Horn and Morley really did) was a mishmash of dandy sampling and massive beats -- adept, to be sure, but just as easily found elsewhere -- with an oblique passion for pseudo-anonymity that likely had some impact on Daft Punk years later. But the songs are so arid and detached, it seems as if they are not really designed to be enjoyed, or to prompt something so gauche as dancing. The vocal pile-on "Opus 4" is at least playful, even if kind of impossible to listen to. "Beatbox (Diversion One)" and "Moments in Love," both legendary for their impact on a wide world of Fairlight synthpop and club music (especially in the UK), now sound like the terminally insecure twiddlings of very embarrassed sound engineers -- which is pretty much the reality. Like a lot of awful things that have variously been labeled "intelligent dance music," it's dance music for people who hate both the dance part and the music part. Doesn't mean there isn't historical interest, but that's the limit.

Still, everyone is correct that what came after Horn and Morley's departure is far, far worse and a depressing portrait of the losing battle between "Art" and commerce in the Thatchereagan 1980s. Here's a song with everpopular voice of the people Max Headroom, subject of lots of commercials and a dismal sci-fi series. Here's an entirely unsavory recording of Tom Jones schmoozing over a Prince song that deserves no such obscenity, to which AoN add... kind of a beat, I guess. Here's a straightforward cover of Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme, with Duane Eddy's twangy guitar boning for some reward money. Here's a fucking song from the fucking '80s remake of Dragnet, which features samples of the dialogue from the film; that is a thing that someone put on an album that you are expected to actually listen to. Taken in full, it's a dreadful career rundown indeed, missing only a Pepsi jingle or two, but one doubts there's much else to deeply and enjoyably investigate. Why not scrape the barrel, then?

So the one genuine score is the kooky, stylish and slightly menacing "Close (To the Edit)," a tricky layering of car sounds, mysterious vocal noises, very Trevor Horn synth hits and highly digitized "funk"... and even it is as much an artifact of its time as such highly commercial techno artifacts as M/A/R/R/S' "Pump Up the Volume" and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit." At best, this compilation is a quaint experience. At worst, it's a chance to hear Tom Jones change "women, not girls" to "women and girls" on an antiseptic, toothpaste-commercial cover of "Kiss" and depressingly realize that neither he nor the group is in on the joke. And the modern equivalent of Art of Noise sit in an installation answering phones with "businessy" phrases, and it's supposed to be... something. Art indeed. This is shit.

One-sentence reviews #9

Wire
Change Becomes Us (2013)
(Pink Flag)

Post-punk football chants and jingles, the vices of a veteran act with the freedom and cachet to dick around inanely, albeit more cheerily than usual.

***

DJ Koze
Amygdala (2013)
(Pampa)

The parts that sound like methamphetamined Everything But the Girl circa Temperamental are a nostalgic rush that makes me want to go shopping for clothes in a 1999 mall, but the absence of hooks (save some contributed by well-chosen samples) shatters the illusion.

***

The Haxan Cloak
Excavation (2013)
(TriAngle)

!! CAUTION !! - Dirgecraft Through the Ages, undoubtedly to be accompanied by complimentary Rothko coffee table book.

***

Arab Strap
Monday at the Hug & Pint (2003)
(Chemikal Underground)

!! CAUTION !! - All of the things about the early-2000s indie boom that griped the hell out of me at the time (and caused me to stay away from modern alt-rock for several years) in one package: snide, witless, empty, rote in performance and emotion -- but perhaps not as bad as I'm predisposed to hear it.

***

Cake
Comfort Eagle (2001)
(Columbia)

"Short Skirt / Long Jacket" still charming and funny, the rest more melodic and spirited than usual but still easy to describe in full as "minor" just as much as this perpetually growth-stunted band's whole discography; now-concluded experiment in trying to decipher my long-ago enthusiasm for them an utter failure.