Johnny Cash: With His Hot and Blue Guitar (1957)

(Sun)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a crossroads of two great legacies. It is the first LP not just of Johnny Cash and his most distinctive and unusual backing band, the Tennessee Two, but of Sun Records and therefore Sam Phillips, one of the two or three people most individually responsible for the existence of rock & roll. Cash never fit quite perfectly as a rock & roller, nor do the country or rockabilly labels seem entirely appropriate. For the majority of his career and certainly in his brief period at Sun, during which he cut what would arguably remain his best and most unblemished studio recordings, he'd strike the same curious tone he does on this album -- a murder balladeer expressing sympathy for the blackest hearts, a novelty performer of sly and eccentric humor, a gospel singer, a dark and heavy romantic, and a menacing, sneering badass. He's among the most unique individuals ever to wander into a studio, and he was from the beginning.

With His Hot and Blue Guitar is as much a hodgepodge of material as its art deco cover, its songs mostly the A- and B-sides of singles in addition to some recorded haphazardly in the interest of eventually generating a full album. Some of Cash's best material for Sun -- including the stunning "Hey Porter" and the rockabilly classic "Get Rhythm" -- never made it to a longplayer until after he left for Columbia, and a few songs that are here seem comparatively weak. Yet the record feels like a singular, perfectly shaped piece because of the intriguing starkness of the Tennessee Two. So labeled by Phillips, they consisted solely of bassist Marshall Grant and guitarist Luther Perkins, the latter of whom altered the future of country music with his odd, leap-frog playing style, backing Cash, whose history was something he carried unapologetically. A religious singer by trade, he only reluctantly made the switch to secular music at Phillips' insistence that he wanted something more commercial. He'd never fully embrace the change. He frankly doesn't even do so here -- on the godly "I Was There When It Happened," he fires up with a play and enthusiasm that makes Burt Lancaster's Elmer Gantry seem staid and pallid.

Nor is this rockabilly in the sense of other Sun artists like Elvis Presley -- who hopped, galloped and grinned more in those days -- Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, not one of whom was well-versed enough in backroad American traditionalism to have spent time in the '50s on folkie throwbacks like "Wreck of the Old 97" and "Rock Island Line," which opens the record in a burst of oblique energy. Cash settles in to tell a story and aligns himself perfectly with the release of tension and increase of speed inherent to his narrative, and all the while Perkins and Grant make a noise so minimal and rhythmic it's hard to compare it to much of anything -- but for certain, it bears few marks of any mainstream vision of country music then or now, and has the effect of making Cash's work from this period sound distant, almost hazy.

His voice, of course, plays the central role -- still with the ragged anxiousness and hunger of youth here, he nevertheless already is possessed of a baritone designed to make you sit up and listen. As much as his work can break your heart or even charm you, part of its appeal is how much it commands your respect. On just the succession of four cuts that opens this album, you can hear a versatility that might be easy to miss at a surface glimpse. "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle" puts a rough, masculine spin on the broken Hank Williams, "Country Boy" is downright sensual in its purr and holler, and "If the Good Lord's Willing" has a grit and playfulness that seems inaccessible to most rock or country vocalists. Perkins, Presley and Lewis were all great performers, but none of them could quite put across the range of emotions and tricks in Cash's repertoire.

The songs here that are fully Cash's are largely autobiographical. Though he would grow more assured as a curator of his own material and to a lesser extent as a singer, he was from the earliest moments of his public life an extraordinary songwriter. Significantly, all four of the big hits included here were his own work, gathered up from the difficulty of maintaining a relationship in amidst a life on the road, from his former life in the Service, from aches and pains and wanderings. Not only was he instantly one of the great storytellers in rock & roll, he was one of the most gut-splittingly personal. It says something that the four most surprisingly intimate, confessional songs he'd written by now (and included here) were all major singles.

"So Doggone Lonesome" is witty, self-deprecating and defeatist in the obvious mold of Hank Williams, covered elsewhere on the record. But the breakthrough hit "Cry! Cry! Cry" suggests more about what Cash would achieve in very little time. Adorned by an almost inaudible clopping along from the Two, Cash lays into a lover who's spurned him and engages in catharsis upon what's obviously meant to be the immediate aftermath of a breakup -- a guy saying things when he's not thinking. His grievances are rationalized: she only lives to see the lights uptown with her lecherous Sugar Daddies, it's happened again and again, and when she comes back he'll be gone. The important verse is the last one, in which Cash engages in a human fantasy, a lie on top of a lie; the premise is already that she, not he, is being rejected, and now he thrillingly indulges in the hell-to-pay moment, when the nameless woman comes crawling back and finds nothing except a cold "bye, bye, bye." It's an angry song, but there's a smile in it, a recognition of the adolescent or adult miseries so familiar to most of us in our worst dejected moments. It's crucial both that the song is not explicitly teenage and that it's readymade for a cover version by either gender; it's not about being trashed by a woman, it's about being trashed.

In the same way that "Bye Bye Love" and "Heartbreak Hotel" would speak to almost universal, earth-shaking truths, "Cry! Cry! Cry!" made Cash a star because it is so adaptable and simple, and its reveling in depression is perversely fun. Cash's most enduring pair of songs from this period, however, are far more serious -- and are essentially perfect. "Folsom Prison Blues" would eventually become the definition of Cash's entire aesthetic, of the complicated sympathies arising from a realism about evil and strife tempered by a general belief in humanity and decency, even in its most unforgiving corners. It's essentially a murder ballad, replete with an unusually complex third act about wishing to avoid being reminded of the world outside while acknowledging the reasons for one's imprisonment, remembered by many -- Cash himself included -- as a sort of revision of gun-toting blues braggadio and anticipation of the most violent moments in early '90s gangsta rap, largely for its heartlessly vile but curiously perceptive "I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die" line. Cash takes John Wayne violence to its obvious conclusion here and recognizes its ugliness, but he also doesn't flinch before the other side: the misspent youth of a bored, wrongheaded moment, the permanent alteration of a life by a single instant of bad judgment, and the fact that even in the villain there beats some sort of a heart. In reality, it's not a celebration of violence, though Cash wouldn't be immune to writing such a thing; it's a profoundly compassionate examination of what it means to do wrong and to then live the agonizing consequences.

As massive and world-expanding as such subjects may be, and as much as it may seem an obvious and even boring statement, it's difficult to make a strong case that "I Walk the Line" is not the greatest song Cash ever wrote. The performance is one thing -- dramatic, calm, reflective, perfectly restrained and almost devastatingly emotional without ever once tipping its hand into sap or pausing for a moment to allow us to truly ponder what it's saying, it is one of the most beautiful recordings of the early rock & roll period. But the lyric bears much responsibility for the song's place in the world. Its complexity is almost unheard of in chart-hit pop love songs of the period, a constantly self-doubting pledge of devotion to a lover, almost explicitly a direct message from the continually touring Cash to his wife Vivian. He chronicles the struggle of fidelity, the wanting to be faithful, the temptation everywhere, and after opening the song at perhaps the highest register he could muster, he's descended by the end of the record to a low, tentative moan even as he sings the same words: "Because you're mine, I walk the line."

Along with the Kinks' "Strangers," it's one of the most realistic and unsentimental songs about marriage ever written -- dark, confused but winning and devoted, more about the romance inherent to that idealistic devotion than by the strict practice thereof. Its wavering, the difficulty of a long history, is included in the words and the performance. On top of being tirelessly romantic and moving, it's just tough -- effortlessly so. Cash would spend the next decades defining himself as an artist of integrity, humor and toughness, but in some ways it could be argued that he had long made his point in a primitive studio on Union Avenue in Memphis, with fire in his eyes, paper behind the strings of his guitar and a dedication he never thought could fall away. Maybe that's pure rock & roll after all, and maybe Phillips -- who was aware he couldn't keep a lid on all this for long -- knew before we did.

Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba: I Speak Fula (2010)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I'm still relatively new to Malian music, but Bassekou Kouyaté and his band Ngoni Ba's 2013 record Jama Ko rocked me to my core sufficiently that I have gone back to explore their earlier crossover effort I Speak Fula, a sufficiently accessible album that it ended up being licensed for release on Sub Pop. Though a hot, atmospheric album in its own right, it doesn't do it many favors to cast it in some comparative light against its follow-up. Jama Ko was recorded in the midst of considerable strife, a factor obviously reflected in its intensity and anger. Kouyaté is more openly bidding on this earlier effort for an international audience, and there's a case to be made (as it has been, by Robert Christgau among others) that he and the group slide into mere background pleasantness for much of this record.

The closer one listens, though, the more I Speak Fula's own kind of grace becomes clear, or maybe I just have a taste for these calmer, more florid grooves. What's surprising is that it gradually reveals itself as a much more solemn album, which says a great deal about Kouyaté's sensibility as a bandleader and arranger -- his response to injustice is a cutting, focused but feverishly emotional outpouring that snarls and snipes at its targets, but given time he adds the finesse of a true craftsman to the bleakness. If Jama Ko is punk rock, to use a perhaps gauche western analogy, this is traditionalist rock, but in some ways no less hard or idiosyncratic. With more contemplation and rehearsal likely in play here, the arrangements seem more complete and, unexpectedly, weirder. The songs are typically slower, the drama more protracted and careful, right from the rhythmic but flowery opening cut, which comes on like a red-carpet entrance.

With more time to think and less of a determination to capture a specific, violent and important moment, the band tends to come across as sadder, more troubled, more complicated. The restrained groove and beauty of "Jamana be Diya," for instance, is more melodic than most of the short bursts of vocal anxiety on Jama Ko, but even if its traded vocals are more carefully composed, the final impact is similar -- the musicianship in Ngoni Ba is uniformly impressive, especially Kouyaté's remarkable solos on the ngoni (listen for his show-stopping climax on "Torin Torin"), but they also believe in a subservience to songcraft like any great rock band. Each cut has its own distinct feeling, and each has considerable merit. Again, calling them a rock band sounds facetious and insulting, but this is indeed constructed like a classic American or European pop record -- and several songs are directly evocative, in particular the airtight, locked-in slow-burn of "Falani," which vaguely suggests the Young Rascals' "Groovin'" as much as any other West African record you can name.

The most remarkable song on I Speak Fula (a title highly suggestive of the implied universalism here), is "Musow," which exemplifies (like the later "Ladon") the increasing sophistication of vocalist Amy Sacko (Kouyaté's wife) while clarifying the entire band's allegiances to both Malian traditionalism and the roots rock and folk music of the West. It revolves around a mysterious, almost Middle Eastern hook that immediately edges the performance toward the transcendent, its many rhythmic changes gradually building to a crazed solo that is hard not to describe as some relative of '70s funk, though the chanted "HEYYY" that gives the song its arena-ready climax is tied less to any music than to human community itself. Other songs here are equally addictive and powerful, but none is so surprising. Only "Torin Torin," with its wild stop/start dynamic trading the bare and the beautiful, comes close -- and its harmonic vocals are almost soothing in the end, something that could never describe "Musow" or Jama Ko.

Kouyaté's work has opened a door for me, as I now find myself determined to become more aware of the nuance and power in modern African music, and it also emphasizes the continued grandness and necessity of physical media. I don't normally digress about this here, but it seems necessary: when I wrote the review of Jama Ko linked below this past winter, I was working with a stream on Spotify, a press release and a lot of other people's research and criticism online. As soon as I had the money, I bought the LP, imported from Belgium. It's one of the more expensive pieces of vinyl I've bought in the last few years, but unpacking it revealed just why it was worth the trouble, and why music like this demands to be touched, felt as much as heard. The liner notes explaining the depths of and thought process behind each cut and the gigantic photographs of the band recording the album enhance the experience sufficiently that it feels nearly like a different record, like something cinematic. The picture grows more complete. My thoughts on the record posted here seemed suddenly pale and superficial because of not having yet had this experience, and I suspect the same may be true of I Speak Fula -- which is a less vital record, but no less enjoyable and impressive. I'm going with my gut, but I'm going to argue that if you sample this music and like it at all, that you purchase it in some format wherein the notes and supplemental materials are available to you. It makes a difference, a big one, and genuine renegade art deserves all the support you can give it, now as ever.

[SEE ALSO:]
Jama Ko (2013)

Daft Punk: Discovery (2000)

(Virgin)

RECOMMENDED

Daft Punk's 1997 debut Homework exhausted many listeners, including this one, but its impact -- especially given its relatively late entry into the dance music platform that had been in place by then for over two decades -- was beyond measure. It also exhausted house music, at least from the perspective of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo -- they did everything they could think of. Discovery entered the world eagerly at a time of considerable before-the-storm hedonism, a shot of unapologetic joy that's pointedly unopposed to being stupid. It doesn't feature songs any more than its predecessor so much as just bare, unadorned hooks distilled to their illogically orgasmic essence. It's all cream filling, and thus just as grating as the prior record, just as artistically intriguing, and depending on the moment, just as inspiring of bump-and-grind dancefloor pyrotechnics.

The first two Daft Punk records were both received lukewarmly upon release, but they each gradually grew into significant albums, slowly finding their audiences until they had a decade's worth of moments. That's despite each of them having sizable hits, in this case "One More Time," a curious single indeed. The track marks an immediate reversal from the stark relentlessness of Homework; not merely less beat driven but spending much of its time in a pregnant pause absent of percussion, it consists of what sounds like a distantly sampled introductory splash from a long-forgotten disco record, followed by just a fragment of its chorus. It's the essence of something, deliberately robbed of whatever meaning it may have had, as alien in its fashion as an early Beatles record just making its way Stateside -- but rather than presenting an unsettling, unexpected, unforced pleasure, its sensations seem implanted, almost grotesquely. In an era when pop music was so frequently accused of being overly engineered, Daft Punk went further; "One More Time" is notebook pop, a radio single concocted by HAL 9000.

Its relentless cheeriness does betray a surprisingly broken-feeling nostalgia, something that folks stuck working in the lobby at AMC where it played on a loop for a whole summer or trying to concentrate on their game of checkers at the Tipsy Teapot likely ignored or couldn't even sense. But it nags at you; the autotuned robovoice is as capable as HAL of saying things it doesn't mean: "music's got me feelin' so free," indeed. By and large, Daft Punk's longing to capture a midnight-summertime flood of unjudged bliss translates to something that, considering it's mostly nonverbal, is surprisingly on-the-nose. The entire first half of Discovery is, in a word, annoying.

It's not that the record lacks ideas or is overly bare at any point, an accusation that the simpler, more evenly breathing Random Access Memories would one day face. Like Homework, it comes flooding out with evidence of the personality and fixations of the band, from the "Mother" intro and fussy classical hook of "Aerodynamic" to the obvious Stevie Wonder lift on "Night Vision." Like a lot of cut-and-paste musicians and producers, Daft Punk see the virtue in everything they process and seem to be influenced by everything in all corners of pop culture, which can make them seem alternately offbeat or individualistic and, far more often, an unfiltered mess of junk. There's no mistaking that Discovery is a wavering record, less confident than Homework, which leads in part to its kitchen sink tragedy -- but it loves its kitsch, and as much as it glares backward toward disco liberation, the experience of listening to it resembles some perverse marriage of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" to the 1910 Fruitgum Co. more than the actual music of Chic, Gloria Gaynor or K.C. & the Sunshine Band (much less their descendants).

These canned Casio hooks, sporadic beats, fun times at grownup Chuck E. Cheese and extended commercials for the ABC Saturday Night Movie have their contrived charm; "Digital Love" is exactly the song its title suggests, and "Harder Better Faster Stronger" is a tricky enough act of goose-stepping manipulation, locating soul in its eerie fascism, that it's little wonder it was destined to become more famous than itself. (Given how much Daft Punk are attached to friendly flourish, it's even more ironic to hear this side by side with Kanye West's masterpiece Yeezus, on which they aided West in upgrading blues braggadio to late last night with uncomfortable, unadorned charisma and menace against blown-out void.) At worst, though, this is either irritating exercise music ("Superheroes") that yearns to be turned off or Sega Genesis scoring ("Crescendolls") than yearns to be turned off or repurposed as the cheap soundtrack to your camcorder-shot vacation tape.

Like so many dance or electronica records, Discovery comes around at last past generic tangents like "High Life" and prog silliness like "Veridis Quo" when it drops the winking self-awareness, the AREN'T WE HAVING A GREAT TIME EVERYBODY??? vibe of fun crammed down one's throat. A record this haphazardly sequenced makes little to no effort to set a mood; it crashes down on the table in the middle of the party then gradually burns out. What's odd is, that's the good part. The turning point is the slow groove "Something About Us," a genuinely crafty ballad in the vein of Sade. This is followed by actual R&B on the tremendous "Face to Face," without question the group's best song up to this point. They're aided here by house producer and vocalist Todd Edwards whose tasteful but exuberant efforts take the cut past its lopped-off "Billie Jean" intro into an emotional realm heretofore unexplored by Daft Punk's often hollow-by-instinct club music.

That's just one facet of the record's refreshingly melancholy back half. "Face to Face" would become a major hit in U.S. clubs, and it's one of three cuts here that suggest how much potential Daft Punk really had. While the doo wop flameout "Too Long" actually justfies (title notwithstanding) its sprawling ten-minute length with a hard beat and arm-waving climax, "Short Circuit" toys much more conservatively with a simple Bernie Worrell / Tom Tom Club meltdown that transforms rapidly from vice to drone in an organic yet completely unexpected manner -- it feels like a piece of music that resolves the conflicts of Daft Punk's divergent pop sensibilitues: their obligation to innovate versus their obligation toward dancing versus their love of great, listenable pop recordings. All Daft Punk's records toy with the weirdness and unceasing revision of identity -- at its best, Discovery is about realizing just how limitless the concept can be.

[SEE ALSO:]
Homework (1997)
Random Access Memories (2013)

Deerhunter: Microcastle (2008)

(4AD)

RECOMMENDED

Bradford Cox is a sadsack, but sometimes we need that. For years I've thought of Halcyon Digest, an album by Deerhunter that I love with all my heart, as something of a fluke. It's almost as confusing to keep up with Cox's various projects and personas as it is with John Darnielle and Stephin Merritt, even if Cox is a bit more of a natural collaborator, so I placed the Atlas Sound record Logos and this infamously leaked New York pseudo-shoegaze album on a sort of continuum. They've always blended together to me, and generally despite putting it on a number of times over the past several years with varying degrees of concentration, it's only in the last few weeks that Microcastle has started to move me. Is it a question of attention span? Mood? The context of Deerhunter eventually putting out an album I actively disliked (Monomania)? Whatever the case, I hear wisps of both the intricate moodiness of Halcyon and the galvanizing beauty of Atlas Sound's Parallax in this, like steps along an evolutionary path. Cox's music always rewards repeated attention, but it's hard to heartily recommend a record so elusive that it literally took me half a decade to appreciate it. All the same, here we are.

Microcastle may or may not be a drug album -- it certainly rewards the same sort of zone-out trance as zoomhead classics like Oar, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Sister Lovers and any number of early Brian Eno touchstones. Shambolic, beautiful, slapdash, it aspires to the buzzing and metallic sheen of old Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine records -- but Cox is too outsized a personality to make that a convincing analogy. Even in his subtlest, softest gestures he is a figure of full-on melodrama, gesturing theatrically. So Microcastle starts like you'd expect it to end: a hungover encore, a party gone too long.

And then the cooing starts but not from Cox, some combination of come for me comfort me cover me, sweet and broken. Lockett Pundt might evoke Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel on "Agoraphobia" but the band has other ideas. It's a tired comparison any band attracted to the sound of jangle has struggled with, much as the prior generation incessantly dodged Byrds analogies, but R.E.M. is inescapable here. It's a good aspiration for Deerhunter to try and craft an album that subsumes the listener completely, that reveals secrets gradually the way their famed fellow Georgians once did. Like Murmur or New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Microcastle turns out not only to craftily hide its hooks, melodic peaks and cathartic moments, it teases just enough to encourage continued exposure.

It's hard to define why it's therefore less rewarding than the band's next record, except maybe just that the songs aren't as strong or thematically potent. Each individual song, major and minor, is a microcosm of the whole album: pretty and vague, with a hard, dreamlike edge. What it seldom is, with scattered exceptions like the subtly graceful stop-start rhythmic "Little Kids," is playful. At moments you could drown yourself in the desolation of it all, in a manner not dissimilar to the Antlers' oppressive Hospice from a few months down the line. But then, again, there are the secrets: like Big Star's "Daisy Glaze," the title track begins as a barely-there dirge full of late-night angst and a yearning whine from beyond, then suddenly hops into action.

This, too, is a micro-replica of what the album itself does; its midsection is wholly occupied by a beautiful but minimalistic suite of songs that sound like discordant lost demos, troubling in their rambling despair; by the under-two-minutes "Activa," with its eerie swirl of kalimba and tortured vocals, it seems to be lulling us to sleep. Then: at long last rock. The deservedly famous "Nothing Ever Happened," written by the band's rhythm section, is the emotional peak here; its feeling of triumph feels almost quaint against the emotional claustrophobia elsewhere, yet it makes sense. The band would position it in the future as their signature anthem, their "You Made Me Realise," and it's easy to understand why.

"Nothing Ever Happened" also recasts everything that comes afterward; it's here that Deerhunter first hint at the eclecticism that would make Digest such a pleasure. Cox's "Saved by Old Times" and "Twilight at Carbon Lake" bring back Stax memories, with funked-out stutter on the former, last-dance-at-prom romance on the latter. And Pundt's other contribution "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" sounds like someone's arm's-length idea of what this project was initially intended to do: it's a worthy and convincing shoegaze imitation, with even a bit of Pixies. Even if it has none of the sophistication of Cox's songs or even Pundt's own other contributions, it dares to be fun. Hence Microcastle now feels in retrospect like a split of the difference between the best work of Deerhunter, Atlas Sound and Pundt's side project Lotus Plaza. It's satisfying, detailed, intriguing, but it's an unfinished story -- for better and for worse, depending on your headspace right now.

[SEE ALSO:]
Halcyon Digest (2010)
Monomania (2013)

Archers of Loaf: Icky Mettle (1993)

(Alias)

Almost no band looms larger in the Triangle rock scene (and the general Chapel Hill, NC mythos) than Archers of Loaf, who reigned througout the '90s despite endless record company problems as a sort of southern answer to Pavement much as Antietam were the South's Yo La Tengo. Produced like Mitch Easter mush with a metallic grind, catchy and grandiose if you listen closely enough, and strongly reflective of a time when the fabled grit of L7 and Pixies were inescapable, the classic debut album Icky Mettle doesn't make the comparisons hard to understand. Leader Eric Bachmann projects more rock-star confidence than Stephen Malkmus, albeit with a slight croak in his voice (and is a bit less self-aware), but he has the same snarl, verbosity and buried sweetness. The Archers come on with subtlety as a recording unit -- you have to crank the record up high to get a sense of the anger and passion of their stage performances -- but even with such practiced coolness and detachment, it's obvious at even a glance that there's something mildly contrived about this raucousness.

The dual guitar attack of Bachmann and Eric Johnson is the best element of the unit at this point, somewhat glossing over the fairly standard songwriting by boasting better technical strength than most cult bands of the post-grunge years. Some of the solos have a beauty and bright edge to them suggestive of Television (especially Richard Lloyd's contributions) and the Flamin' Groovies. That latter point seems pertinent on the initial single "Wrong," a hook-filled time capsule of 1992 modern rock radio that could be power pop if it were a little hotter on the treble. At 3:41, it's an appreciably crafty construction with the brash rock quiet-loud move during a broken-down bridge straight off a Who or Boston record. The whole song seems like an endless chorus, approached with gusto. Bachmann's lyrical psychodrama gives it an edge and tension but really the object is straight-ahead obnoxious rock & roll. When the power chords casually slip in on other songs, like "Web in Front," it's an almost naked expression of attitude in the classical sense -- the band might never have aspired to major-label stardom but the radio was always on their minds.

"Web in Front" is also the prime reason Icky Mettle got everyone talking about Pavement, already somewhat legendary at the time despite having released just one full-length record; the slapdash ferocity, ringing guitar and the chanted "ALL I EVER WANTED" over a cloud of sludge and snarl are all red herrings to offset the song's sheer earnestly uncool strength and grandness. "Last Word," the cut that sits between these two small landmarks, even has a conventional big metal chorus; the screaming is dull, but the constant chatter keeps things unusual.

Mettle is deliberately produced with a flat enough sound that even the big transformative climaxes here and there take a while to catch on with you. The intimate bass-only quiet of the first minute of "You and Me" helps communicate its drama; not just lyrically (note the "Angie"-like accusation / lament "I been so down lately, you been so low lately, nothing seems to work out for you and me"), it's sophisticated enough to suggest a complete story we can't fully detect. Then the mandolin exotica of "Hate Paste," a wild outlier with the usual business slathered all over it -- versatility fused with apathy, a punk ethic drawn back to the Replacements and earlier.

When we talk about the angst being contrived, we mean "Fat," which feels readymade for the Butch Vig remix with its big bitter "WHAT DO YOU FUCKINNN," and "Plump Line," the verbose and reflective boorishness of which throws in a witty rejoinder like "you got a collection of things cause that's the best you can do" but jinxes it with the oddly smug sketch of an indie rocker, rhymed with "nothing's gonna stop her." We mean the fuzzed-out drama "Learo, You're a Hole" which sounds like a commercial summarizing the concept of "alternative" rock as of this moment. It's surprising it wasn't all over the radio in 1994 until you get to the chorus, which nevertheless seems a pure put-on Frank Black lift. Even when Bachmann is unhinged, it's a programmatic unhinged. Emotion is audible beneath the booming riffage on "Slow Worm." But where else?

These were adults, and the Archers have a following of seasoned popular guitar music lovers -- and yet the music somehow or another feels excessively familiar, excessively worked over. How much of this is merely a result of its being a product of an offbeat, unexpected attitude change that would even more unexpectedly overtake the industry for a time over the next few years? Icky Mettle is an impressively clever record, but it's awfully slight. The Archers are too afraid to imitate Dean Wareham so instead they lightly parody him (on "Toast"). Politics interest them but only enough for the barbed bon mots of "Wrong." And they dig towering riffs and switched-on pop, as who doesn't, but they're determined to bury it. This record is invaluable as a way to escape into those times and a moment when this could all seem new again. But it's also a distant, unfeeling record determined to offset much of its own appeal. The result is it's interesting, but it's hard to feel anything for it. I'm just being honest, it's the least I could do.

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours (2008)

(Interscope)

RECOMMENDED

I missed this at the time. Naturally I knew of the Australian collective Cut Copy but did not listen to a full album until I was assigned to review Zonoscope in 2011. That was a lovely Monday morning indeed -- Modular sent me a promo CD and I took it on my then-unusually long commute with me; the heat in my car wasn't working, but soon enough I couldn't even tell anymore. I was smitten with that album and, as I generally tried to, I took a listen to the band's prior work before I sent in my piece, but neither of their previous albums made nearly such a big impression on me. I've enjoyed In Ghost Colours off and on since then but my hunch was always that it was a dry run despite its reputation -- just to ensure I wasn't bullshitting, I've spent time lately also with Zonoscope and the bizarrely ignored Free Your Mind and yes, they've improved enormously since then.

Some of this is down to a question of mood -- the band's, that is, not ours. The two Cut Copy albums from our present decade are moodier, druggier, more tempered in even messages and longings that are probably jokes (no one says "free your mind" in 2013 and means it, right?), while In Ghost Colours is so blatantly sweet and cheery it could give you a toothache. One of the things I like about Cut Copy is their earnestness -- not only do they seem warm and approachable, in contrast to even good bands operating in a similar vein (like Hot Chip or WhoMadeWho) they do not seem particularly self-aware. Dan Whitford sings his heart out, and as composers and producers (here with James Murphy associate Tim Goldsworthy) they're refreshingly direct in both their laying bare of influences and their unguarded emotion, less psychodrama than all-embracing bliss.

That brings us to the other thing that appeals to me most about the group: with each chapter in their narrative, they have edged closer to dispensing with every outside notion of what band they're supposed to be, having been billed in their brief time with Interscope in the U.S. as a breezy hybrid of the dance club and the rock show. By Free Your Mind, the guitars are basically gone. Colours, though, captures them in a transitional moment. For long stretches, you almost can't even make any disco dreams of this. It's really quite a straightforward group of anthemic pop songs, sometimes resembling (of all things) Ian Broudie's Lightning Seeds thanks largely to Whitford's incessant good mood.

"Feel the Love" -- another readily adopted hippie buzzphrase -- feels as fresh as a jump out into mountain air, and while it's afraid to shed its rawk orientation, this is one of two cuts that suggests the way forward for the band and wouldn't sound terribly out of place on their subsequent albums. The roller-rink synthpop peaks with a vocoder hook on the bridge, but it's not so much an electronic detour as an homage to early '80s power pop like the Cars. "Hearts on Fire," one of the album's signature cuts, bears the most explicit resemblance to the writing and production ideas on Zonoscope but is less potent, and winds down into a rather weak chorus.

Candy-O didn't have anything like "Out There on the Ice," which hits an odd and intriguing dichotomy of Whitford and the band's psychedelic doo wop vocal arrangement and what amounts to a strong, classic house beat circa 1989 or so. The band can't get its head around how to make this work quite yet, and the result feels too deadpan -- it's fun but it never lifts off into unforced hedonistic joy, which if you know this band is what you expect. A lot of the most pleasing moments afterward are fleeting, like the keyboard breakdown on "So Haunted," pure pop with just a little touch of windswept techno flourish. The most they ever really cut loose for a full song is on the band's biggest hit thus far, "Lights & Music," the Cut Copy song I most clearly remember hearing around the time of its release. It's a great piece of fast-paced, synth-filled joy but it's still not quite dance music. Notice the way that, on the bridge, everything drops out except the guitar, as though it's '97 and we're listening to alternative rock radio again.

Most of In Ghost Colours settles into kind of a holding pattern with this stuff: happy, indistinct, straight rock with big peaks and some little stabs of keyboard, usually hitting a half-chorus followed by a dramatic dropout then big, bass-heavy explosive return. "Unforgettable Season" sets the pattern, strongly suggesting the Alarm or even Midnight Oil, and what's strange is it's not even really in Whitford's vocal range.

We keep harping on dance music because Cut Copy are great at making addictive, explosive and ecstatic dance-pop with massive beats and unforgettable melodies, like a much more domestically placid Depeche Mode, and eventually they would become one of the more fearless rock bands from their time in regard to wholly shedding the rock part. In Ghost Colours is an enjoyable record and might have worked best for me had I discovered it in its moment.

Now I keep wanting to hear the later records, and indeed, there are more hooks and better sustained ones in just the first few minutes of "Need You Now" than on most of this entire album, and the flair for drama has improved (that particular song sustains its tension for an incredibly long time without trying patience), the rampant sunny positivity seems more carefully earned, and not that it's hugely important but the lyrics are much stronger. The same for how "Free Your Mind" gurgles its way in two albums later. It's not that the group have just shed elements to become somebody else, they've honed their craft and found their ideal niche. The pure bliss on the bridge of "Corner of the Sky," that irresistible otherworldly melody on "Dark Corners & Mountain Tops," or the blissed-out red-light rampage of "Sun God" all have their origins here. Maybe the highest compliment for this breakthrough record is that it's hard to let it pass into quiet without replacing it on the speakers with one of the two sequels.

[SEE ALSO]
Zonoscope (2011)
Free Your Mind (2013)

Patti Smith: Horses (1975)

(Arista)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The dispute over how much of rock & roll is image and how much is music lingered long before and after Horses was released, but there may never have been such a perfect case study in the utopian notion that it's equal parts of both: gaze for a time at that iconic cover image and you realize that here, it's all true. Maybe more than any other album cover ever shot or designed, it seems like if you never had any idea who or what Patti Smith was, that image would be reason enough to buy or listen to the record. Smith is a fully uncompromised nonconformist, whose gaze outward from a sun-dappled corner in lord knows what nowhere invites us in but only on her own terms. Her "Group" does not appear, for her own neuroses and the complete reality of her character are the subject and the complete world of this music. So along with the bold balance of talent and impression, we have the perfect contradiction: an image-conscious, unremettingly original portrait of a woman inviting us to be seduced by the cool, steely purpose of a damn good and damn hip experience only to then be drawn into, yeah, a damn good and damn hip exploration of the darkest edges of popular music by a person who is hiding nothing. Smith is there on the front because the record is all her, fully bared, and free of excuses or tempered fear. You're either coming along for this or you aren't, and more's the pity for your own life and enrichment if you aren't.

Describing Smith's music to one who hasn't heard it seems almost inevitably reductive. Smith is a writer, a rock & roller, a poet, all of the above. She relights a flame that had been blown out somewhere around 1970 when the Velvet Underground ended their association with Lou Reed. You can draw a straight line from Reed to this, detouring a bit with the first two records by the New York Dolls, but that association is more instinctive. In general this is raw rock & roll but it's literary, like Reed, like Chuck Berry; it's no more personal than an Al Green or LaBelle album of the same period. No smarter or rawer than Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club. But it speaks that language in Smith's firmly, singularly analytical fashion. Her major trait is she adores rock & roll. It is her lifeblood. And the lifeblood of this music is New York, the crumb-infested stage of CBGBs, the liberating grunge outside. The seamy, slimy New York of the '70s flows through it in all of its glorious blood, gore and sleaze.

But who was Patti Smith? Who is Patti Smith now is another matter. In 1975, Smith had already wandered in and out of Sam Shepard, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Blue Oyster Cult's orbit, and she embodied an almost perfect ideal of both the New York art and rock & roll lifestyles. She wrote music criticism for Creem, as did her friend and guitarist Lenny Kaye, and played far-out, artful, oddball, semi-spoken word shows at CBGB and the Mudd Club. Her muse was the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who snapped the cover photo of Horses. Smith and Kaye formed the nucleus of what would become the Patti Smith Group and issued the instantly game-changing single "Piss Factory" b/w "Hey Joe," inspired by the liberation of poetry -- specifically nineteenth century, vampiric proto-punker Rimbaud -- and rock & roll wrought upon the working stiff Smith had become to pay her rent. The rest of the band consisted of bassist Ivan Kral, the late pianist Richard Sohl and the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. This was the Group signed by Clive Davis to record for Arista in 1975.

But Horses -- produced under fraught circumstances by John Cale, idol, legend, rock genius poet and at one time the co-leader of the Velvet Underground -- remains Smith's statement above all. It's a culmination of a twisting, some would say a queering, that had lurked in the rock subculture since before the '60s burned out. Smith was and remains a child of the most idealistic properties of '60s counterculture, and Horses more than perhaps any other punk album means to pick up with the passionate liberalism and artful sense of progress that was briefly so integral to even mainstream popular music. Smith is no flower child, but she understands the earnest yearning of the flower child. She understands more than anything, as demonstrated in her brilliant live b-side cover of "My Generation," the outrage at the center of the rock odyssey, and does so some years ahead of Johnny Rotten. She is no passive receiver of the baggage of being misunderstood. She intends to allow us to make no mistake about who she is, what she believes, where she stands, whose world we are entering.

And so it goes: "Jesus died for somebody's sins / But not mine." This is emitted from her ashen throat after a stark tolling of the piano not much less naked or grim than the first moments of John Lennon's "Mother." It's the introduction to one of the key moments in punk rock, but that needn't be the extent of it. "Gloria" is a phenomenal peak of emotional rock music. Ostensibly a cover of Them's garage classic, it undercuts, comments upon and joyously expands it but not with the irony-overload of so many punk deconstructions of classic rock. (Check, for instance, the recorded output of Devo and the Diodes.) "Gloria" doesn't swallow itself up with reverence for its source but it does respect it, and the point is that in this dramatic, tense exploration of a raw, sexual groove Smith finds an absolute, bloody liberation. She and her band raise the stakes as highly as they can and teeter on some sort of mad precipice. At the right bits, they plunge downward but only for a moment. And through it all, Smith's singing guides us, introduces us with profound, unadulterated pleasure to the one walkin' down the street and this crazy feeling that she's gonna uh-uh make her mine.

"Gloria" is merely a prelude to the more heart-stopping expansion of a rock & roll masterpiece later on the record, the nearly unrecognizable cover of "Land of 1000 Dances," but it acts conveniently as a massive, booming bookend. The shorter, calmer selections are no less powerful and absorbing. "Redondo Beach" might be Smith's best composition, an invigoratingly catchy reggae dilution that hides for the first several listens its harrowing subject matter -- of negligent motherhood, of a public drowning, of another swallowed-up plunge into darkness. "Free Money" is a reversal of sorts, cataloging with naked honesty the -- almost supernatural -- need to provide for a loved one. The nine-minute "Birdland" is a stark, freeform moment that thrives on subtle atmosphere as much as on Smith's magical performance tics and the eclectic virtuosity of her band. It may take longer to appreciate "Kimberly" and "Break It Up," but both are crucial, the latter for its forecasting of Television's Marquee Moon (it was cowritten with Tom Verlaine, who also features on the recording), the former for its strangely calming peace, warmth, pure beauty. On repeated exposure, nearly every moment of Horses is bound to find the listener rapt with attention, longing to be in front of the band, longing to dance with them, and imagining almost tangibly Smith staring right into them.

And then the other shoe drops. The ten-minute odyssey that is "Land" is scary, demented, dangerous, one of the most dramatic and furious recordings of rock music ever released. The band seems barely to have a hold on itself, as though the track threatens to leap off and fly away taking you with it. But Cale would readily tell you, as would Smith, that crafting this indelible illusion required nearly infinite patience and calculation. It is in fact a few performances being manipulated to create one, no more unnatural an act than what Les Paul and Mary Ford were already doing circa "Lover," but it is such a magnificent and singular experience you can get delirious enough to declare it maybe the reason we invented multitrack recording. There's just little description that can do it justice -- Smith opens by speaking in a normal tone of voice and the first-timer might think nothing is amiss. But for anyone who has gone down this road before, the mere words "Boy was in a hallway drinking a glass of tea" are enough to lead you to sit up straight, to pay attention, to go quiet and prepare yourself.

In part as a result of the intricate multi-tracking of her voice, Smith punches certain phrases with a ready, enticing fervor -- "the boy looked at Johnny"; "he merged perfectly... with the hallway" -- while others seem too passionate, too upset to be so firmly prefabricated: the repetition of "started smashin' his head against the locker" comes across as genuinely unhinged. There's a real scene unfolding here, a scene of rape and murder on one end, of sensuality and music on the other, merged eerily as one into a poetic, violent conflation of emotions that nevertheless comes to us under the most direct and unfettered purpose. Johnny Rotten would approach all this a few times on some of the Sex Pistols' singles, when he would lift the curtain behind his wild threat and reveal only more threat still. But Smith is twice as scary, twice as alluring because the more crazed she seems, the more real she gets to us. Her character Johnny gets it driven into him by an unchecked male force hard to define -- and as the drama increases, as the tension becomes so great we can hardly stand it, Johnny lifts himself up and tears off his leather jacket and answers the question of whether he can't give us nothin' but surrender. It's all sudden, everything that happens here. "Suddenly / Johnny..." and the band goes as manic as Smith -- as either of the two maybe three Smiths -- in the background, and you don't think it can get any more intense and unbearable and then it does, and what happens then?

What happens this is dancing -- absurd, glorious, every bit of progressive dross and singer-songwriterly wank washed away until all we're left with is rock & roll, a drumbeat elevated into the godlike stature it deserves. The pure, fuck-bomb filthy goddamn shit that made all of the pop culture worth caring about happen in the first fucking place. Don't care if Smith's poetry busies it up because all she's doing is aligning herself with it, and she's the show here. Do ya know how to pony / like boney maroney? Oh, it's beautiful, and how it swells into erotic oblivion then caresses its way back and back and folding back until, yeah, just a little drumbeat, just a dance... to a simple... rock & roll song. Oh, it's the kind of moment when whatever else is happening in the world is superfluous. Even "Elegie," the last song. I'm sure it's a lovely song. I've heard it a hundred times probably. Can't remember a thing about it. All I remember is my jaw still agape from the thousandth time through all thousand dances. All I can think to do is point to the previous track and say "we built it, let's take it over."

I have nothing firsthand to offer you with regard to how Horses changed anything. It's clearly a moment that bred much of what we now regard as punk and new wave, but it's harsher, less accessible than the Ramones or Blondie or Talking Heads or even, overseas, the Damned or the Clash. It feels like part of no real moment, like a moment unto itself, and it seems almost gauche to attach all of these outer events to it. One thing I can say personally is that of all the albums I owned when I was a teenager -- and it's one I bought chiefly because of the bands who named it as a great influence, so many thanks to them -- it is maybe the one that annoyed my parents the most. And it is here, even beyond Smith's sensitivity, her band's perfect assemblance of groove, punching precision and atmosphere, and the lyricism and grace of it all, that Horses still seems like a truly great achievement, one that does everything it meant to: leather jackets and simple beats and that odd, insistent, constant propulsion of New York in those days -- it is so god damn young, a pure rock & roll experience, one of the best we can have, and it is a thrill and a pleasure to live in a world in which it was once possible.