Bilal: A Love Surreal (2013)

(eOne)

2013 has been, as we'll see in the coming weeks, a banner year for R&B. At no other recent time that I'm aware of has one popular genre so completely eclipsed all others in both innovation and universal appeal. Yet that does not erase the Male Problem of soul music, which is less egregious that rock's Male Problem but equally frustrating -- that is the sense that the presently empowered generation has produced few male voices of note that fall neither into the trap of misogyny and nastiness either pervasive or oblivious (see Robin Thicke; The-Dream) or a complete blandness and absence of identity (see John Legend). In between the two extremes lie brilliant performers like Miguel and Frank Ocean whose problems are more earthy and technical: they simply haven't yet mastered the quality control part of their careers, which gives the eager busyness of their output an air of unprofessionalism.

Bilal is a professional. Only slightly more prolific than the legendarily scarce D'Angelo, he has typically until now made his name as a mildly eccentric progenitor of "alternative" soul, a niche eagerly co-opted by several major labels in the early 2000s that nevertheless went basically nowhere, despite some success for potentially major stars like Angie Stone, Macy Gray and Jill Scott. This was itself an outgrowth of the neo-soul of the '80s, and Bilal's early records were nearly indistinguishable from that format despite a sonic upgrade informed by the blockbuster work of Sade and Janet Jackson in the intervening years.

Bilal strives for the same female-dominated audience as these performers -- which isn't a meaningful distinction except that it speaks somewhat to Bilal's stylistic interests: his machismo is strictly erotic, his records groove rather than grind, and he is not invested in the rapey crassness or stony ambiance of someone like the Weeknd. Good on him, to that extent, but it would be nice if his albums had at least some of the distinguished strangeness and arid, out-of-time storminess of the Weeknd's. There was a time when so many male soul singers were sex-obsessed and musically restless but still managed to show respect for the partners they sang about, who were on equal footing in terms of both desirability and capacity for desire.

A Love Surreal -- fifteen demerits for any musician who puts him- or herself in that hallowed category, by the way -- falls short of its influences because Bilal has no driving personality. He is a good songwriter and an excellent singer, although his upper register is a little husky and weak, but as much as he has audibly studied the innovative spurts and staggers of Prince (whose voice he occasionally imitates impressively) and Quincy Jones, his work seems to only find time for a real sense of adventure and invention as an afterthought. It all seems like such formal, respectful funk, more in the vein of Prince's excessively relaxed early-'00s work than his relentlessly stunning peak material. At least one song, "The Flow," comes on like Prince decided to write a jingle for a JCPenny back to school sale in 1995. Maybe that's a compliment, though.

The arrangements here are splendidly disorienting, which is a good match for the romantic content of the songs, articulated by much business about how much he loves your shoes ("West Side Girl") or a good bit of pensive dirty talk ("Longing and Waiting") that refreshingly celebrates the sexiness of consent. Not much here about getting women drunk to drag them home against their will, and plenty of intelligent and sly lyrics instead, but it's unfortunate that the tradeoff seems to be lite-jazz rambles (which are sometimes tempered, at least, by stilted and weird beats like that of the catchy "Back to Love") and the preponderance of slow slow sloooooooow jams. Those are by no means bad, but the frames of reference called to mind are surprisingly dull and, well, unsexy: Bon Iver on the weird fantasy/sci-fi soundscape "Right at the Core," Steely Dan on the majorly hooky "Astray," and... John Denver, of all people, or maybe (let's be generous) the Commodores on the melodic folk-rock AM radio schmaltz of "Lost for Now."

The most confident of the slow ones is the aforementioned "Longing and Waiting," and it implies a better direction with its slight variance and disarming use of murmured come-on dialogue, fused with hard guitar and a falsetto closer to Bilal's earlier work. That sensuality-dripping voice also appears on "Astray" and it seems to be Bilal's greatest technical asset, the mood around which his jazz-friendly pipes wrap most readily. But an entire album like the bass-heavy Quiet Storm piece "Winning Hand" could be nice too; despite the catchphrase-heavy lyrics, it scratches the kind of itch you tend to imagine was the idea in the beginning, and its baroque harp and synth trills bring in the proper measure of weirdness befitting the record's title. Generally, though, "surreal" in this context means playing to the same stoned audience enjoyed by the likes of the Weeknd and AraabMuzik; "Climbing" -- one of the few cuts here not at least partially produced by Bilal -- does go all the way with its circular groove, but its cloudy griminess already sounds dated, and it just isn't what this particular artist is best at.

A Love Surreal can't be counted as a failure, but it inherits a problem familiar to the ambient and neo-soul influences it flaunts, and not at all the luminaries Bilal himself has always striven to emulate: heard in the background, it's pleasant and agreeable. Up close, it's boring. Overprofessional and excessively polished, it's a noble and respectable record that could be so much more, but as it stands it just doesn't stay in the mind for very long.

The Rolling Stones: 12 x 5 (1964)

(London)

RECOMMENDED

The Rolling Stones' U.S. discography is messy and haphazard but -- I think -- more fun and familiar to most Americans; they've never quite managed the canon-replacement tactic that the Beatles and the Kinks pulled off. That having been said, we will eventually examine the band's canonical UK discography, but for now: there's no "equivalent" to 12 x 5 in England. It's a bewildering construction that consists of two singles and their b-sides, a few scattered tunes from the band's second UK album, and the contents of an EP called Five by Five. Despite its chronologically confusing nature, it serves as a frenetic snapshot of the Stones in mid-1964, already progressing beyond the tepid and tentative R&B of England's Newest Hit Makers.

This is where the band begins to really sing, to attain confidence and to come across as a less juvenile outlet -- the beginnings of an intimidating force. The Chuck Berry cover "Around and Around" and the exploratory rooting around in blues origins typified by Jay McShann's "Confessin' the Blues" and their own composition "Good Times, Bad Times" show off some hint of a maturity and even sensuality that's hard to detect on the band's earlier, overly eager stumblings. "Around and Around," while it's no match for Berry's searing cut, even carries a bit of stuntwork in its arrangement and production -- the echoes of a distantly rollicking piano subsume all else until the song becomes a rumbling, restless wall of noise, the first evidence of an icon: the "bigness" of this band's sound.

Not that the tentative falterings are all gone; the Stones never had much of a way with rockabilly, so it's little surprise that their take on Dale Hawkins' "Susie Q" just sits there. The great comedic moment, though, is an adorably bad "Under the Boardwalk" which indicates little of lasting consequence beyond proving for future generations that Mick Jagger is not a crooner, and not a singer who can ever put across the life-dependent grace of a Johnny Moore, who famously and masterfully performed the Drifters' original under every imaginable kind of emotional duress. This is not really a criticism of the Stones, any more than it's a criticism of the Kinks that they couldn't pull off "Dancing in the Street." Less than two years into their career (context note: by the time the Stones became a functioning band, the Beatles had been one for over half a decade), they simply did not yet know their strengths.

Completely by accident, 12 x 5 captures more than one vital discovery to their development. The band's own composition "Empty Heart" -- that's like an empty life, in case you're wondering how closely the boys were listening to those blues records -- offers the most pronounced emphasis yet on rhythm guitar, which would finally be the Stones' sonic legacy. On "Congratulations" and a roaring revision of Wilson Pickett's "If You Need Me," they expose for the first time the depth of their way with a ballad. And if Jagger and Richards aren't exactly masterful tunesmiths just yet, let's give them the delightful shoutalong of "Grown Up Wrong," a perfect and flagrantly dishonest statement of purpose.

For American fans, the operative legacy of 12 x 5 is its introduction of two major moments, neither written by the band. "Time Is on My Side" presumably needs no introduction, but this record includes its superior and unfortunately sidelined organ-driven variant, which boasts not only a better arrangement but a stronger band and vocal performance, again an early investigation of Jagger's limited but expressive sensitivity as a singer. But "It's All Over Now" is the peak here by nearly every standard. Bobby Womack's lyric and composition are brilliant and unassailable, but the Stones do indeed make it their own, with a dusty, busy and aggressive blues-rock deconstruction that's more assured than anything prior, peaking with Keith Richards' manic, utterly peerless guitar solo. This is the moment when the Rolling Stones pulled out in front. It still sounds as strong as ever -- sneering, apathetic, dismissive, glorious. Rock & roll.

[SEE ALSO:]
England's Newest Hit Makers (1964)

Terry Malts: Nobody Realizes This Is Nowhere (2013)

(Slumberland)

Though it's fair to say that Terry Malts were one of the very, very few guitar bands to come across my desk when I was a paid critic that I really believed in, I can't say I'm heartbroken or surprised that their follow-up to the splendid debut Killing Time is a bit pedestrian and joyless. The worst thing I can really say about it is that it sounds like a set of b-sides from the same recording sessions, and the best thing is that it sounds like the San Francisco semi-thrashers and punk traditionalists are at least open to trying new things in the studio; you couldn't mistake the labored apathy of this LP for the well-practiced whatever of that one. Unfortunately, that's not a high compliment.

I doubt it's the band's fault. The trio's curious interplay is still just as interesting and slightly off-kilter as it was on the first go-round: Phil Benson splits time between rumbling basslines and charmingly tossed-off, deadpan vocals in the unmistakable vein of Joey Ramone with a touch more self-aware arrogance. The ringing, distorted guitar of Corey Cunningham, who writes most of the music, is the real voice of the band, and it's no wonder that the cleverly titled Nobody Realizes This Is Nowhere (the album's second best joke behind the song title "Comfortably Dumb") emphasizes guitar so heavily. Unfortunately, that comes at the expense of songs this time, and maybe just because there weren't a lot of top-caliber new ones ready in time. Slumberland put out the band's sophomore record barely a year after their first; these are the economics of a rock band in 2013. You stop swimming and generating product for half a second and you drown.

In the process, though, a young band like this at such a crucial moment can lose sight of the elements that make them really distinctive. Beyond the Ramones, Diodes and Dickies comparisons, Killing Time had the brashness, abandon and joyous crassness of the Replacements. The riffs, only part of the story then, are now louder than ever but less clean and spontaneous, and the intelligently goofy lyrics and singing are either less intelligent and goofy or buried in an overly busy mix, or both. The initial hook for many discovering Killing Time last year was its periodic wandering into a sunny, lilting charm that maintained full-throttle pace, as on the instant classic "Tumble Down." We get wisps of that when "Two Faces" takes off on its ooooh bridge, but generally its vocals are muddy and distant, and sadly the signal to noise ratio is balanced no more persuasively elsewhere.

If Killing Time was a punk record with pop and new wave elements, this is certainly dead-square in the post-punk mold, but aside from announcing "death don't scare me," they don't really take to these stylistics. The band sounds tired and the songs are rote; Benson's digging his own grave when he sings about not being able to wake up on "Life's a Dream." Enthusiasm appears in strange places, like the half-baked "They're Feeding" and the extremely repetitive rocker "Walking Without You." Hooks are few and far between here, coming after a record overflowing with them. Of all the selections here, "Well Adjusted," Bangles riff and all, most closely resembles something from Killing Time, although "So Serious" is essentially a less clever rewrite of "No Good for You" and "No Tomorrow" puts a weird optimistic spin on the Malts' heretofore familiar style.

That's the strange thing. On a record split halfway between imitations of Killing Time and weak, half-finished attempts at moving in a new direction, the band doesn't really sound at home in either mode of communication. One assumes this is because they haven't really had time to fully develop these ideas yet, and that's a pity. I'd be perfectly happy with another record very similar to the last one, or with one that runs with the melodic sophistication of "I Was Not There," the shoegaze influence of "Comfortably Dumb" or the gentle charm of "Buy Buy Baby," but this mishmash just seems like a disappointing overextension. I hope a band with this much potential wit and imagination isn't already getting discouraged, though it's kind of hard to blame them.

[SEE ALSO:]
Killing Time (2012)

One-sentence reviews #10

Chance the Rapper
Acid Rap
(2013)
(s/r)

Iiiiiiiiiiit's wacky!

***

Calexico
The Black Light (1998)
(Quarterstick)

Since I like the Iron & Wine set so much, I desperately wanted to find this more interesting than it is -- my suspicion is that, as with Lambchop, I'm just not listening to the right stuff, because it's not hitting me very strongly and just seems to meander off into nowhere, at length.

***

Phosphorescent
Muchacho (2013)
(Dead Oceans)

!! CAUTION !! - Comically bland, like Dire Straits with keyboards, with at least one song ("Song for Zula") so plainly designed to be played over the credits of a teen drama that it already has been (The Spectacular Now).

***

Marnie Stern
The Chronicles of Marnia (2013)
(Kill Rock Stars)

"Proof of Life" is great, "You Don't Turn Down" is nearly, but this is just too repetitive, a near-miss from a great talent.

The Ultimate Arthur Alexander (1961-75)

(Razor & Tie)

!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!

If you're like the person writing this a month ago, your knowledge of Arthur Alexander extends exclusively to a rich legacy of cover versions by everyone from the Rolling Stones to Dean Martin to the Hollies to Johnny Rivers to Pearl Jam, but above all else by the Beatles. John Lennon was a major, passionate champion of Alexander's work and he was nearly as palpably influenced by him as he was by Buddy Holly -- everyone knows "Anna" from Please Please Me but harder core Beatles fans will remember the BBC renditions of "A Shot of Rhythm & Blues" and "Soldier of Love" as well as their barely audible but audibly brilliant version of "Where Have You Been (All My Life)" recorded on their last night in Hamburg. If that's all you know of Alexander, well, you must hear this as soon as possible, and you are in for a breathtaking treat.

Lennon's preoccupation with Alexander was, it turns out, fully justified. It's now clear that he was an unsung giant of early '60s soul music; particularly interesting is his innovative hybrid of R&B and country music of the period, which is analogous to -- but far less slick than -- Ray Charles' fusions of the same era. The twanging "I Hang My Head and Cry" is a prime example, while the beautiful "Go Home Girl" scarcely even qualifies as hybrid anything: it's straight country, with a gentle and crooning voice well suited for it. Indeed, Alexander, who continued performing until his death in 1993, was an ambitious stylist much like Charles but strongly informed by the more romantic impulses of Sam Cooke and Jerry Butler.

Unfortunately, like far too many luminaries of his era, Alexander was never fully appreciated despite scoring several hits and permanently winning the heart of a legend like Lennon. He spent a lot of his last few decades as a bus driver; periodic returns to a music career were generally spurred on by renewed interest that grew out of the Beatles connection. When a heart attack felled him, he had just scored a deal with Nonesuch and released a comeback record. Even then, it seems that his greatness was still a well-kept secret.

Some of Alexander's clout was regional. Not surprisingly given the Stax-anticipating sound of the plucky and enthusiastic 1963 cut "Keep Her Guessing," he fit snugly into the southern-soul fabric and helped to put the Alabama studio Fame on the map as a generator of hot R&B singles. The majority of the songs collected on this lovingly mastered disc were initially released as singles on Dot. With the exception of the major hit "You Better Move On," most of them never went much of anywhere, the irony being that now the idea of finding a 45 with "Soldier of Love" on one side and "Where Have You Been" on the other is too thrilling for even a casual collector to imagine.

"You Better Move On" deserves its top-40 legend, although given its scope of influence one is surprised to learn it charted no higher than #24. With a maxed-out sound and relaxed, rumbling arrangement, it's taken to dizzy heights by Alexander's wounded voice and melody, which owes a bit to the massive Leiber-Stoller hit "Save the Last Dance for Me" recorded by the Drifters a year earlier but arguably betters it with its more convincing pain, and would itself be unmistakably rewritten by the Kinks as "Something Better Beginning" and covered memorably by the Stones. A comparison to the brilliant but far more restrained Drifters single underlines Alexander's gifts as a singer and writer; he proves himself one of the best singers of resignation. Although this has little evidence of his country & western leanings, there are elements of that aching sadness and, crucially, a curious acceptance of failure, a theme repeated again and again on his singles: listen to the way he encourages his former wife-to-be to walk away and join her new lover on "Anna," or his begging his best friend's lover not to fall in love with him on the exhilaratingly old-world Nashville chorus of "Call Me Lonesome." There is a begrudging poetry to all of this sadness.

Like a lot of these songs, "Call Me Lonesome" was written by Alexander himself and is an interesting document of his evolution after the Beatles picked up on his craft and likely generated a few hefty paychecks for him (or at least -- let's be realistic -- for his publishers). The song's acoustic arrangement, all intimacy and precision, betrays a bit of a Beatles influence, in fact, a delightful instance of reinventors passing a torch back and forth. Thoughts will most often turn to the Beatles at a less opportune moment, sadly; Alexander's own original version of "Anna" is actually one of the weaker cuts here, less impassioned and despairing than Lennon's take, hardly an unusual situation for early Beatles cover material. It must be remembered, however, that Alexander entirely wrote the song and thus was responsible for its impressively nuanced psychological tightrope of self-defeat and reluctant romantic cuckolding. Like so many of his own compositions, it's quite a hell of a song, with not just a lovely melody and arrangement but an exceptionally good lyric.

It's important to note, still, that much like Lennon, Alexander was often at his best as an interpreter of others' material. That he didn't write "You Don't Care" is genuinely surprising; that it did not burn up the pop charts is mind-blowing. A ridiculously soulful vocal line, with one of those shots of blues and a shattering subservience to melody that somehow doesn't dilute its spontaneous display of emotion, comes across as merely one element of a genuinely perfect pop production: sheer grit on the verses, towering bliss on the chorus. The ferocious electric guitar work by George Tomsco strongly recalls Lowman Pauling's searing work on sides like "Don't Let It Be in Vain" -- indeed, the entire song could easily have been a lost recording by Pauling's great group the "5" Royales, impossibly high praise to anyone who's heard their King singles. "You Don't Care" is close to the peak of Alexander's work as heard here, but it miraculously has some competition.

That's strictly because it doesn't cover a substantial part of what really drove Alexander's best efforts. Despite his aforementioned anticipation of the Stax sound, he is not a singer like Otis Redding or James Brown whose focus is upon finding opportunities to cut loose. But nor is he stilted or flat; he's florid like Sam Cooke, and his finest material attains a genuine poignance and beauty. The spiritual "Detroit City (I Wanna Go Home)" is the sort of song that seems always to have existed, waiting to be discovered. Completely unpretentious and direct, stunningly moving and ethereal, it has the time-stopping quality of Cooke's album Night Beat. There's a moment when his voice cracks. If by that point on this compilation you have not been convinced that Alexander is one of the greatest singers of the '60s, you will then likely lose your remaining defenses.

The more obvious examples of this grace and beauty are "Soldier of Love (Lay Down Your Arms)" and "Where Have You Been (All My Life)," about which, well, what do you even say? Alexander was the original performer of both songs but wrote neither, yet for all the utility and firepower of both, it's immediately hard to imagine anyone else ever doing them justice. The oft-covered "Soldier of Love" was certainly never better than here, with an almost supernatural power to its arrangement and the way it swings and lilts; it is the sort of rock & roll song for which "glorious" does not seem like too strong or lofty a phrase, and the sort that seems to invite all sorts of imaginative thoughts about the evenings it can and should light up and embellish. We must not ignore the lyrics, which sound so stupid theoretically but become a sensual plea for understanding in Alexander's interpretation and thus the basis for an unassailable love song.

"Where Have You Been," the b-side of "Soldier," may be Alexander's best recording, and from the first time one hears it, it becomes hard to conceive of how it has managed to escape wider attention. It opens with a goofy piano trill before Alexander overtakes the proceedings with a gently sung, charismatic take on Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill's splendidly literate but direct rundown of a romantic history that has built and built and now reaches higher and higher. The way that Alexander interprets the title line, it seems not like an empty proposition of puppy love but as a head-spinning chronicle of real amazement at the never-before-realized possibilities of a great romance. That this song isn't the first dance at every wedding in the world is some sort of crime, and that's before you even reach the piano solo and the way it all climbs back in and somehow goes bigger. Like "Detroit City" or "You Better Move On," it's a perfect recording of everything that's right and lovely about pop music, and soul music in particular; it opens as a small miracle and only grows more engrossing, more ecstatic.

Quite apart from the general excellence of the material -- no weak cuts here -- and the commendable way it renders one anxious to hear as much of Alexander's output as possible, Ultimate goes the extra mile to become a truly great collection, for a few reasons. The sound quality is top-caliber thanks to the mastering job by Phill Brown and Bill Inglot, no surprise from this label; the only way you can make these songs sound better is by seeking out pristine copies of the original singles, not likely to happen affordably. The compilers have also concentrated heavily on Alexander's strengths, mostly focusing on ballads, while giving some indication of his range, solving the problem inherent to a lot of attempts to put, say, Otis Redding's "hits" on a single disc.

So to show Alexander's rollicking side, we get the undeservedly obscure "A Shot of Rhythm & Blues," wherein he gets the can't-help-its and he can't sit down, and the Isley Brothers-like "Pretty Girls Everywhere." His playful blues persuasions are explored on the fine "Black Night," and he takes an atypically upbeat tack on the grinding piano soul of "Whole Lot of Trouble." Perhaps most interestingly, R&T include two cuts from the '70s: "Every Day I Have to Cry Some" (melancholy sweet stuff in the Bill Withers mold) and "In the Middle of It All," which show how he adapted his crescendo-building and flawlessly sweet voice to changing styles rather effectively. And with only sixteen songs in forty-five minutes, the album covers all of the bases without overwhelming a newcomer. The Ultimate Arthur Alexander is exemplary in every respect, and is honestly one of the best discoveries I have made since starting this blog. I urge you to check it out; you'll want to carry it with you everywhere.

Savages: Silence Yourself (2013)

(Matador)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Given how much indie rock of the 2000s owed to a small cachet of post-punk bands from twenty years prior, Wire and Gang of Four in particular, it's startling when a new band effortlessly, self-consciously appropriates that same dark, compressed and sustained grit and manages to sound like a unique fixture in a glutted marketplace. Maybe it's because London's Savages choose to draw from a wider range of material, Joy Division at one end but Siouxsie and the Banshees and Pere Ubu at the other, but it's more likely because their debut Silence Yourself is an act of passion. In all its forceful, apocalyptic chaos it sounds so convincingly like a record drawn from the age of Public Image Ltd. and Patti Smith Group (singer Jehnny Beth sounds quite similar to both Smith and Tom Verlaine at times), like a direct outgrowth of the Damned's "New Rose" rather than a multigenerational resurgence -- but this is why it's fresh. Its laundry list of influences is nearly incidental when its impressively direct, unfussy approach amounts to just four people playing music they love, speaking words to the blind. It is to Joy Division as Slanted and Enchanted was to the Velvets. Like Pavement, Savages work hard to conceal their pop songcraft under distortion and muddiness, but this only adds to their energetic mystery.

It's unfair to cast any one member of Savages as more key than any other, but Silence Yourself very simply wouldn't work without the steely, searing focus of Gemma Thompson's rumbling, crunching guitar sound. It can be seductive (amplified, of course, by Ayse Hassan and Fay Milton's excellent garage-band rhythm section), harrowing, graceful, deceptively clean, but most of the time it's in attack mode. For much of the first half of the record, peaking with the maniacal "City's Full," she lays the groundwork for a dead-end punk nuclear blast on top of which Beth can lose her marbles beautifully. Savages are magnetic because they're so fatalistic and serious, like so many great bands of the relevant period, which makes it all the weirder that their record is in the end so delightful, but this music in all its tension and fever is really nothing more or less than great, intense rock & roll -- fun even when it's not "fun."

That makes it sound as if Silence Yourself is a dour affair, but that's not the case at all; it's simply ambitious in its minimalism and devotedly free of flourish. For some of us, this is the motivational workout record of the year. Put it on and you can't help but want to do something, clean your living room or brush the cat or paint the walls or run laps around the property, but it's not sitting-still music. What it really demands is pogoing or sitting entranced at the base of a stage, watching these great musicians perform and screaming along to "YOU HAVE... NO FACE" or the Spectorian "I'm ready I'm ready / when you hit me I'm READY." If the instant classic "Husbands" didn't already generate the feeling of being in a smoky club during the Thatcher era, the complete album will blaze away any doubts.

Savages may be pure threat musically, but their songs also come with a sense of triumph -- and a sly humor and Rolling Stones-vintage attitude problem (what could be purer?) suggested immediately by the willfully bizarre sampling of a Cassavetes movie. The threat and dread come loudest and clearest: while the songs are generally bashed out with abandon and then discarded, the band is quick to shrug off any questions about versatility with variations like "Strife," slowing down to a deliberate pregnant plod and doing things with you that you will never tell your mum; "Waiting for a Sign" takes this further to a sad, menacing guitar mourn -- the guitar rather than voice taking the emotional lead, brilliant as the vocal is -- and proceeds to thrust with a quiet-loud pacing that somehow manages never to allow its tension to break. But is there joy in all this? Absolutely; turn it up louder. You could argue that even the creation of music this defined by throwback yet wholly inventive and crafty is in itself an act of stubborn joy, and one of the most assured and powerful rock-band moments of recent vintage.

Easy as it is to single out Thompson's guitar or Beth's singing -- and it's all too tempting -- what makes Savages already such a treasure of a band is their interplay and precision. Post-punk bands like Gang of Four and Wire were always built on this, but Savages are more interested in carefully sustained chaos; the beautiful paranoia of their intriguingly expressive sound is already impressively assured. For every breathless climax ("SHE WILL SHE WILL SHE WILL SHE WILL SHE WILL SHE WILL") there is a stunning movement like "Marshal Dear," which more than anything else here suggests the incredible rage of an antecedent like Love Is All or X-Ray Spex, and not merely because of its saxophone solo. This is a song with genuine anger and bottom-heavy desperation, a song that doesn't seem to be a mere act of wish-fulfillment navel gaze when Beth calmly announces "I hope you're breathing your last breath." I have no idea whether they Mean It or whatever because that's irrelevant anyway; what matters to me is that they enjoy sounding like they Mean It, as though even in this commodified age there can still be some act of rebellion so long as it's the culmination of something personal. That's as moving as, well, punk rock.

Leonard Cohen: Songs from a Room (1969)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

One of the more egregious examples of an expectation-defying followup, Leonard Cohen's sophomore album couldn't be more different from its polished, transcendent predecessor Songs of Leonard Cohen -- it's rather hard to imagine any other singer-songwriter displaying such a blatant change of approach so quickly. A big part of this violent turnaround is the quick and determined drive away from producer John Simon, who gave Cohen's debut so much of its chamber-pop glitter and helped make its cyclical collection of gorgeous lyrics and melodies such an out-of-nowhere masterwork. Songs from a Room brings collaborator Bob Johnston aboard, and it's quickly evident that Johnston hasn't much interest in woodwinds, choirs, baroque slickness or -- to be perfectly frank -- widespread appeal.

Room looks and feels homemade, starting with its slapdash cover art and extending to Johnston's almost comically minimalistic miking up and accompaniment of Cohen, which amounts to just the man and his guitar -- the approach he wanted to begin with -- and some awkwardly inserted jew's harp, with a blast of organ here and there. Precisely one song has an elaborate enough arrangement to have fit in on Songs of Leonard Cohen: "The Partisan," the one he had no hand in writing but here does include some accordion and some singing children. Elsewhere, Cohen is ragged and direct, almost relishing the thinness of his voice, the sudden absence of any label-mandated obstacles between his words and music and his audience.

The approach is probably more ideal for Cohen in the long run, but it's little surprise initially that this marks a disproportionate drop in popularity from his debut, and honestly one doubts there are many people who would attempt to claim that this record is nearly as good as that one -- that comes down to a lapse in songs and poetry, more than anything. Simon's sessions had no faltering, tentative moments like "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" or anything so gleefully on-the-nose as the heroin verse on "The Butcher" ("it did some good / it did some harm" does kind of sum it all up, though). What Songs from a Room does have in spades is honesty, an unsophisticated nakedness that may incorporate more from Cohen's own life than any of his other records.

Cohen's world here feels boxed-in, almost hopeless; the record of two years prior suggested a sense of journey and wanderlust, but the very title of Songs from a Room implies a claustrophobia maintained by the stark, plain artwork, with lines like "I choose the rooms I live in with care / the windows are small and the walls almost bare" almost certainly coming from the barbed, sometimes slightly humorous perspective of a deeply depressed person. Nowhere is Cohen's state of mind clearer than on "Seems So Long Go, Nancy," a fiercely unsentimental tribute to a friend of his who had committed suicide. He both holds her at a distance and sees himself in her. Much more than latter romantic ballads of death like "Chelsea Hotel," this cut removes any distance between the singer and his subject -- he might be the desperate friend on the phone crying out that he loves Nancy, but he is also the wizened, weakened troubador who knows such platitudes can finally make little difference.

"Nancy" is one of Cohen's most shocking songs because it's one of his most direct, and is therefore the ideal match to Johnston's efforts to emphasize the elegant, quite raw simplicity of these arrangements. Elsewhere, Cohen offers up songs that could just as easily have found their home on Songs of Leonard Cohen -- equally good, but perhaps less suited to Johnston's sound than to Simon's. These are songs of God and love and war, all of the loftiest images floating through Cohen's head. "The Partisan," the beautiful anthem of the French resistance, is one thing -- an obvious showpiece that stands out almost rudely from the rest of this material. "The Old Revolution" is rather another, a brilliant song that would benefit from stronger and more distinctive production. The bitingly anti-war Biblical epic "Story of Isaac" is one of the scattered Cohen songs that is generally better in cover versions, less because of flaws in his performance than in the flat, hollow sound of the record itself.

"Isaac" is a deservedly celebrated example of Cohen's poetic mastery, though, and it's likely the second most famous selection here aside from "Bird on the Wire," a startling opener that has remained in some quarters Cohen's signature song, eclipsing even "Suzanne" and the later "Hallelujah." "Wire" is the quickest example to cite when making the case that this LP is Cohen at his most personal and unfettered. It opens as arm's-length philosophy ("I have tried in my way to be free") and gradually reveals that it's an act of atonement, making much of flaws that the singer-writer seems to feel can never be truly be forgiven: his freedom comes at a cost -- that he will inevitably be unkind, untrue. This is finally wrapped up in Cohen's anxieties about God himself and the often miserable world around him; on "You Know Who I Am," he takes for the first time a higher-up, omniscient perspective that would become increasingly important to his work in the years to follow, here within commentary upon sin and the punishment of women, sex and abortion taking on the mystical dread of heroin earlier on the record. It's a startling piece of work that calls ahead to Songs of Love and Hate -- convincingly scary, convincingly broken.

But Cohen is at his best here when he suggests something that can be heard almost nowhere else in his catalog: resignation, to grief and loss and aging. The wistful, fatalistically smiling voice on the last two songs frankly mean far more to me than "Bird on the Wire" ever really could. "Lady Midnight" features one of Cohen's most delicate and perfect lyrics (right from its economical, stirringly graceful opening couplet: "I came by myself to a very crowded place / I was looking for someone who had lines in her face"), of accepting need and lamenting a disconnect as he wanders among the cougars at a bar late at night and finds that even the one he most desires cannot and will not simply bend to his whims until he truly opens up without hesitation. The optimism here to be found in one of Cohen's sprightliest chord structures and most lovingly simple guitar performances is shattered both by its cutting humor and self-deprecation and by the heart-opening sadness of the finale.

"Tonight Will Be Fine" is identifiably the work of a young man; his voice is still witheringly thin, and his sexual politics are still those of a person who not long earlier had penned a novel, Beautiful Losers, that mostly consisted of finding about a thousand different ways of describing oral sex. But the song is honest, wounded, vulnerable and finally about as haunting as anything he's ever committed to tape. As on "Lady Midnight," the words feature not a single wasted word, and capture the lingering passion and heated regret of a collapsing relationship in its waning nights. It's a comfort to anyone who's rubbed up against the noted emotions not because it's cathartic or optimistic but because it simultaneously giggles in the face of its own despair and revels comfortably within it -- indeed, it details an almost crushing loneliness.

At the end of it all, Songs from a Room captures an extended feeling of melancholy that is unbroken for the duration. Even the bravura interlude "The Partisan" offers little respite from the deathliness and dread. But at the close of Side Two, Cohen reveals that he is most in his element when detailing not mythology or religious anxiety or even confessional regret but just the pratfalls and lonely solitude of romantic failure. At even its most optimistic, "Tonight Will Be Fine" must sarcastically undercut itself: "tonight will be fine," but only "for a while." The song lowers all of the flags and admits defeat -- he sees that he has caused his lady's grief, that he is lucky her step will appear on his stair one more time, that she has not forgiven him but is willing to be with him for one last night, that he must enjoy these final touches -- and yet somehow Cohen finds glory in hitting rock bottom. For one of the few times in his entire career, he falls hard enough for his melody that he spends the entire last minute sitting and humming it, as if he has attained some sort of nirvana in acknowledging this grief. He would attain such considerable heights from now onward and this is probably in the next-to-bottom tier of his discography, but this may perversely be his most triumphant moment. I know it's one I can never help but sing along to.

[SEE ALSO:]
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Dear Heather (2004)
Old Ideas (2012)