You let me in your house: April 2015 albums

A short one this month, which I'm not too happy about; the next post, ready a little over two weeks from now by current estimate, will include a lot of the major-hitter stuff you were hoping would be long since taken on by now. I'm having an unusually hard time determining what I think lately -- luckily, as of the last month or so I've heard some new things I genuinely love, and when I'm ready to articulate my thoughts you'll be hearing from me. In the meantime, all three new records here actually got downgraded during the process of putting this together, and many other things were clumped off for next time. (The big gaping hole in my confused brain is Kendrick Lamar; I still feel I'm missing something on that record, and maybe by the middle of the month I'll have it figured out.) As ever, trust that hours upon hours of work went into this disappointingly brief post; I wish there were more to show for it, but we'll start to see payoff shortly.

***

THEESatisfaction: EarthEE (Sub Pop)
This Seattle R&B duo has hearts in the right place -- unmistakably progressive and intelligent, but ever since the earliest promo materials were issued for their first album they've struck me as pleasantly bland in the worst way. EarthEE is a marginal improvement because it has more shape than their older stuff and is less reliant on the cliches of "alternative" hip hop consciousness. It's strongly produced -- listen to the Nile Rodgersisms of "No GMO" -- and they have a solid identity, but the songs still aren't quite there and it just drones with little consequence. "Planet for Sale" is the most engaging sound they come up with, a Stevie Wonder-like bed of sound with good vocal blend floating above, but the preachiness, however righteous, is pervasive. When I listen to this I feel like I'm being covertly educated, as in a SchoolHouse Rock video, and lord knows I have plenty of gaps, but I prefer my learning to come with a tad more subtlety.

Levon Vincent (Novel Sound)
Overpraised electronica (more like pure ambient, save various annoying and long-winded moments) from Berlin by way of NYC is OK but lifeless, despite the artist's own lofty claims for it: "If you are a member of the rat race, climbing around a dumpster with the other rats vying for power, you may of course listen, but know - this is not music for you. This is action against you." White people are so fucking hilarious. Revolution generally varies the tempo a bit more, btw.

Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire: Oh! The Grandeur (Rykodisc 1999) [r]
Andrew Bird is an immense talent who, like the Asylum Street Spankers, was enterprising enough to ride on the coattails of a late-'90s vintage music revival: big band and electricity-free bluegrass were moneymaking, mainstream product again for a blip. Like ASS, his craft and range soon eclipsed the limitations of the movement that made him bankable; unlike them, he was a greater success in the aftermath. Oh! The Grandeur is his first really charming performance on record, but as with Thrills it is steeped in now-dated concepts of gimmicky authenticity. It's mostly a hodgepodge of pre-WWII swing and vocal records, but it's undeniably impressive that its songs, all of them originals, sound for all the world like covers. "Candy Shop" is his first fully realized song; the rest is pleasant, mostly costuming. He isn't nearly the confident writer he'd later become, concentrating heavily on aping established styles and finding little transcendence beyond those borders, but he is already an extraordinary singer -- see "Wait". It's fascinating to compare this record to the sublime looseness he displays on 2012's outstanding Hands of Glory, which operates in a similarly backward-looking (though more rural) mode. It's astounding what happens to some of us when we have nobody left we need to impress.

Marc Almond: The Velvet Trail (Cherry Red)
Marc Almond was half of Soft Cell a lifetime ago and they still tour; I was somehow unaware of this but he also has a voluminous number of solo albums from a career that's chugged along now for three decades. There's some solid glam that fuses past and present nicely, like "Bad to Me," though none of the songs feel complete, not even the disappointing duet with Beth Ditto, whose potential disco queen status already seems nixed. Like a lot of serviceable pop musicians his age, Almond can't resist forcing the scattered decent material on this overlong record to mesh with his penchant for schmaltzy, self-absorbed balladry. But the guy seems to know his audience.

******

I don't usually do this but coming up in the next two capsule posts: Kendrick (might be a long review), Madonna, Twin Shadow, Heems, Courtney Barnett, more.

The Velvet Underground: Loaded (1970)

(Cotillon [orig] / Rhino [reissue])

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Given its convoluted origins, this has the initial impression of a major disappointment; lots of popular literature out there about the Velvet Underground characterizes their fourth record as an overly conventional comedown, useful mostly as an introduction. Actually, it's a supreme album, wonderful all the way through to anyone seduced by the lyricism and performative bliss of Lou Reed, which makes it even sadder that it broke up the band. The original release of Loaded on Cotillon butchers three of the songs, but it's not likely to bother you until you've heard the full-length versions. I'll beg you to pick up Rhino's deluxe version of the album instead of Warner's budget-line release, but any way you can get your hands on this marvellous album is really the right way.

Loaded doesn't really operate in the same way as any of its predecessors, but it doesn't matter since they all existed in their own realms anyway. Lou Reed moves toward a mainstream sound, and the songs are excellent, but it was to no avail as mainstream success was to pass the band by completely. His rock & roll purity is more intense than ever, his poetry more incisive. "Cool It Down" has him still searching for mysterious people, here with slick guitars and double-tracked vocals. "Head Held High" is tweaked to perfection, and Reed sings like we've never heard him before, in a throaty abandon that would seem irresistible to the FM crowd. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" expertly tackles country in a fascinating tribute to William Burroughs. And the last song on the album, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" is a flawless widescreen expansion of his pity for the underdog, with ferocious guitar solos that don't pad out the (seven-minute) song. There is absolutely nothing in these songs to stop the band from becoming huge, and they are all a huge pleasure to listen to; it's extremely frustrating that fortune did not smile on these immensely talented people, no matter how hard they tried.

There are hints all through the album that Reed was growing disillusioned. On the teasing, insane wall of guitar "Train Round the Bend" he expresses supreme displacement. The unbelievably beautiful "New Age" sees him contemplating the fame that has narrowly evaded him and the inescapable demons of his past and everyone's. The listener may find solace in the oceanic "Hey Jude"-derived chrous that closes "New Age," but Reed is still audibly unsatisfied.

He reaches for -- and manages -- unbridled pop bliss on his opening trilogy. "Who Loves the Sun" could easily be classic Beach Boys. "Rock & Roll" is virtually Reed's autobiography, and possibly yours. Even if the end of the band would be a bitter one, this is a lasting testament to what they meant and how they would come to touch so many after their demise. "Rock & Roll" is an anthem for anyone who, like Jenny, felt lost until finding a new world on the lively radio dial and everything all of a sudden seemed to mean something.

"Sweet Jane" serves the same purpose. It is undeniably Reed's truest standard, and with its coda properly restored, his masterpiece. He wails with revelation about the people he sees and the happiness they find, and ends up making some sublime statements about life itself -- celebration from a man to whom joy so frequently seemed hard-won. Musically it's a work of his usual effortless beauty, but every note of the performance is infused with friction, and it is a song made for driving around with the top down. When it plays you feel alive and in the open air, even sitting alone in a room with headphones resting on your skull. There is nothing else like it.

My personal favorite song on Loaded, and it's filled with fabulous ones, is "I Found a Reason," a sequel of sorts to "I'm Set Free" which brings us a selfless love song from a man who admits to having just come from the brink. He tells a million stories at once, and the doo-wop textures render it proof that he is not ironic, that he believes wholeheartedly in rock & roll as communication and art and life. He is the same man who wrote "White Light/White Heat" and "Sister Ray." The only possible conclusion is that he is a genius of his craft.

And after this, he left. The band slowly fell apart thereafter, first losing Sterling Morrison then Moe Tucker. Finally they kept rolling along for a few extra years with no original members in tow, just Doug Yule and some forgotten friends. Lou Reed went on to become an elder statesman of rock & roll, and died younger than he should have... a sad ending. But no matter. The music the Velvets left behind them is of more value than nearly any other legacy of their time. They have the capability not of transporting you to another place but realizing the beauty and wonder of the place in which you already sit. If this is the closest they came to an archetypal classic rock album, it immediately jumped to the top of that particular heap, and there it remains.

[Originally written and posted in 2003. I was 19 or 20, so you'll have to excuse the fannish tone, but it's all meant sincerely.]

Alex Chilton: Like Flies on Sherbert (1980)

(Peabody/Aura)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It's been opined often by various blowhards that Alex Chilton somehow wasted his talent. This he supposedly did despite living two complete lives in the pop hemisphere -- as atypically sincere teen idol then best-kept-secret pop savant -- before spending his last three decades making artistic choices that were wholly his own and frequently made no sense to others. In other words, aside from never achieving the comfortable wealth he deserved, he essentially did everything right, tried it their way and his way, and died a happy man. That this somehow translates to an abortion of promise simply indicates that most of us have no deep understanding of an artist's relationship to their own work.

Like Flies on Sherbert, technically but not strictly Chilton's first solo album (earlier material he'd made on his own ended up seeing release much later, in the '90s), is a good example of how little Chilton cared for adhering to the strict regimens others would have him observe, and how completely justified his own instincts usually were even (especially) at their most unorthodox. A singular, strange creation that often resembles a private joke or compulsive psychodrama more than an album of rock music, it follows along fairly neatly from the progression of the most crucial music Chilton had made early in the '70s. His three albums with Big Star are an amputation in three acts, with each successive record shedding a member and more possibility of absorption into any commercial marketplace. Though Chilton himself was never satisfied with Third, perhaps because it came from a tumultuous time in his life and undoubtedly in part because it was released without his consent, it's a fair bet that if you are attuned to the subtle beauty in the grooves of that now far more famous album, Like Flies is likely very much up your alley. It's the next logical step in that complete extended breakdown. (It's a whole album of "Downs," "Dream Lover" or "Kanga Roo" though perhaps without so much of their ethereal sweep.)

That's breakdown solely in a musical sense, because if anything Chilton sounds exuberantly cheery or at least bemused on this release. Everything about the record is sloppy, including the spelling of the title, the typeface on the front, its release history (multiple pressings with different track listings), and of course unquestionably the music. Songs are tracked complete with false starts and frequently keep going despite breakdowns in performance, missed cues and notes; often they're a complete shambles within a matter of seconds. Like Third before it, such flagrant disregard of Power Pop listener-friendliness was met with stern glares and finger-wagging from the rock crit establishment. A waste of talent! The worst album ever recorded! Unlistenable! One can only be reminded of the similar treatment once afforded the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile, obviously one of the most deliriously beautiful albums in the rock canon. Chilton's album has a warmth not even found in the likes of Skip Spence's Oar, because it's a record that celebrates its own deficiencies -- it's a fuck-all, not a fuck-you, and its weirdness is blissful.

Let's dispense immediately with the idea that anyone could make music like this, that it's some DIY-aesthete misfire recorded by musicians who couldn't play. (Chilton's joined and produced here by Jim Dickinson, so let's not pretend to unprofessionalism.) In much the same way that only someone with a great and wide-ranging talent for drawing legitimately well can be a good cartoonist -- in the way that you must know how to do something well to do it truly off-the-cuff and badly, as opposed to incompetently -- Chilton pulls this recording off masterfully because he obviously has such considerable chops as a singer, writer and (especially evident here) guitarist. The record's accidents are deliberate; it's all a question of attitude, of performance style.

So what makes an exceptionally bizarre and challenging original like "Hook or Crook" or "My Rival" so compelling is that we don't only hear the Sister Lovers guy drunkenly losing his shit in real time, we hear the #1 Record architect of hook-perfect deep cuts, somewhere in there even the tender singer of "Soul Deep." Chilton's own songs here are relentless in their catchiness and could have been user-friendly classics with "proper" treatment, but he had no use for that notion of this material. He wanted to make it strange and sad and glorious, with wisps of devastating beauty amid what sounds like a session of noodling that falls only periodically and briefly into shape.

Chilton was probably conflicted about his life and career at this point, and you can hear this clearly in the unexpectedly magnificent "Hey! Little Child" -- a dirty-old-bluesman leering session at a Catholic schoolgirl that he somehow lends the most resigned, passionate vocal against a persistent non-riff that sounds both like a boorish regional garage-trash hit circa 1965 and like it burst out of the climax of "Marquee Moon." It's a mixture of Chilton's most and least ambitious ideas but it's all approached with the same brusque nonchalance. And this makes it powerful.

The primitive covers have the feel of private memory, dredged up simultaneously as jokes and as longing clasps at Chilton's most beloved music. The Carter Family's "No More the Moon Shines on Lorena" and Ernest Tubb's "Waltz Across Texas" get approached with unprofessional, irreverent sarcasm but also bottomless levels of enthusiasm and respect. Nowhere is this more evident than on the revision of K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "Boogie Shoes," already one of the greatest pop singles of the period and a record deeply admired by Chilton. But his own version is nearly as good for the opposite reason -- it almost fails to make any kind of melodic or rhythmic sense and is in the end a massive send-up doubling back on itself. In a sense it's more punk rock than any thrashy revision of some MOR hit; it destroys the song, but also uncovers the broken-down sublime underneath its disco sheen. (And Chilton can't help but duplicate the funky guitar solo with wryly surprising faithfulness.)

These deconstructions and original mutterings won't speak to everyone, but the more one falls in love with it the more hard it becomes to imagine not noticing its elegiac sweetness and comical impatience. Is it that he's too lazy to polish anything or that he's too interested in the next weird moment he's out to capture? Either way, one wonders what kind of rock & roll life we'd have without shambolic messes like this, and if that results in suspicion of anyone who'd doubt Chilton's sincerity or brilliance when confronted with this, perhaps that's well justified. If you hate Like Flies on Sherbert, you hate rock & roll and you are its enemy.

The album's startling clarity and elegance of vision peaks with its title cut, an upside-down doo wop that sounds unfinished, insane, completely falling apart, and to this listener as gloriously personal and beautiful and inexplicable as recorded music gets. It's a mass punk insult. It's an ugly, distorted mess. It hums and moans and makes an awful, cathartic racket. It is melodic and strange and terrifying. It is Alex Chilton. Sometimes I think it's the best song ever recorded.

What to do for pleasure: March 2015 albums

Gaz Coombes: Matador (Caroline)
Coombes is formerly leader of the Oxford hellions Supergrass. I only faintly remember some of Supergrass' hits from the '90s -- their radio presence was lesser over here -- but what I do know implies fans won't be displeased with his second solo record. He seems keen to attract new fans with his clash of '90s melodicism and very un-'90s punkish sincerity. It's pleasant in that delicate Britpop manner and sounds designed to please a broad contingent but will still probably only connect strongly with his cult.

Gang of Four: Entertainment! (Warner Bros. 1979) [A+]
The towering crown jewel of tortuous, cathartic college rock and post-punk; the legendary, influential (largely in bad ways), surly Leeds quartet fused political cynicism and rhythmic, funked-out thudding with a cunning wit and abstraction less obvious and immediate than their predecessors. Wire came close but lacked the provocative interpolations of black music; Mission of Burma had the thematics and the headbanging but couldn't be nearly so engagingly cold and harsh. Entertainment! is questionably the Gang's best -- hard, dark, twisted, metallic (indeed, redefining what metal means in a musical context), yet it's body music -- confrontational yet exuberant. And like all the best British albums of the late '70s, it's halfway to a greatest-hits: the hypnotic "Anthrax," joyfully vile "Natural's Not in It," the insistently teasing "At Home He's a Tourist." This echoes forever afterward in alternative rock, and its hard-won sneer remains timeless, even faintly scary in its absence of compromise. This kind of clipped, tight, elegant ruthlessness blesses us only rarely.

Natalie Prass (Columbia) [r]
Wispy major-label singer-songwriter from Virginia's debut has picked up considerable buzz since its release this winter. Strongly informed by the Joni Mitchell - Van Morrison school of aural theater, it features wondrous orchestrations but doesn't ever quite match the emotional power of its sadly brassy opening cut "My Baby Don't Understand Me" or the Dusty in Memphis desperation of "Your Fool". And Prass' vocals unfortunately lack personality, though that will probably change with time. At worst, the harshest thing you can say about her is she's a bit precious ("Christi" and "Is It You") but the intimacy makes up for it, even if the delicacy and theatricality do seem like a bit much over the half-hour span.

Jessica Pratt: On Your Own Love Again (Drag City)
L.A. folkie likes Tim Buckley, CSNY, etc. The perfect Mother's or Father's Day gift probably, sorry we're late.

Buddy Holly: Down the Line: Rarities (Universal 1949-59) [hr]
As comprehensive an official release of Holly's vault material as we're ever likely to get; the first major mark in its favor is that it's well-mastered and conquers the incessant overdubbing and doctoring a lot of this music has suffered over the years. It also assumes the listener is already a Holly fan, which is to its credit and detriment since the last half -- incorporating the legendary, unadorned, unbelievably beautiful apartment tapes -- contains some of the best work he ever laid down buried in all the hardcore-friendly stuff. This is probably the easiest and best way to hear those demos, which include such future classics as "Crying, Waiting, Hoping," "Love's Made a Fool of You" and "Peggy Sue Got Married" that he'd never properly record as well as first-hand evidence of his taste for innovation via his radical, slowed-down, filthy reintrepretation of Little Richard's "Slippin' and Slidin'." And on some days I prefer his "Smoky Joe's Cafe" to the Coasters'. The rest of the material is good but only bigtime enthusiasts are likely to quiver at things like a three-minute conversation between Holly and his wife Maria Elena captured on tape (I did), early recordings of Holly led by Bob Montgomery, and a few barely-distinctive alternate takes. On the other hand, shivers go down the spine at Holly covering Hank Snow at age 13 before his voice has even changed, and it's wonderful to hear stuff like "Think It Over" and "Fool's Paradise" without the schmaltzy accompaniment. Holly is just about the most restless and gifted white artist in rock & roll, and he was cut down in his prime; this combined with the concurrent Memorial Collection will set you up as a lifelong acolyte, though if you're like me you'll want more. It's out there -- ten discs' worth of material that make these two seem measly, but that's also dependent on your taste for repetitive alternates, false starts and mistakes. But any two hours in Holly's light is time well spent.

Björk: Vulnicura (Megaforce) [r]
As the Buckinghams put it, kind of a drag, and she's been listening to Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow; it's the soundtrack of the gutted, but it does seem to have cleared out some of her unfocused-ness -- for sure it's her least cluttered album since Medulla. I don't care for the orchestrations and miss her less formal -brutality, but it doesn't mean I don't admire this.

The B-52's: Mesopotamia EP (Warner Bros. 1982) [r]
Quite the curio: at the height of his fame, David Byrne produces the B-52's for a hypothetical album that never happened, with middling results. As usual, when the Georgians fully engage with their own warm absurdity, they're at their best and the self-conscious artiness (they go for an Eno/Heads thing on "Deep Sleep"; it's swampy and unappealing) falters. Full of modern rock riffage and then-innovative beats, the record is sometimes an off-putting fusion of duelling sensibilities. The B-52's were meant to be flamboyantly funny and off-kilter, so the top moments are on "Cake," wherein Kate and Cindy have a Shangri-Las spoken word routine suggestively discussing what kind of dessert they want to make; or when Fred rants respectively about ancient history and how Byrne's trickery is making him "apprehensive" on the title cut and "Throw That Beat in the Garbage Can." (The latter seems like a nod to Ben E. King's "Don't Play That Song," more or less an answer to people who find stuff like "Rock Lobster" annoying.) Even at their most ordinary, you can't say their chops are inefficient (Kate Pierson's full-throated vocal on "Loveland" is breathtaking) but the outsider influence -- and pile-on of session players -- seems superfluous, which makes it ever stranger that they'd end up taking the same route later in the decade via Nile Rodgers and Don Was.

Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night (Columbia) [c]
Dylan was always funny in kind of a stupid way (there's that "I Shall Be Free" clutter that completely derails Another Side, for one thing) but this inexplicable joke LP of Sinatra covers is too much of an exercise in tiresome irony to become ha-ha funny, it's more like sad-funny.

Alexi Murdoch: Towards the Sun (Zero Summer 2009) [r]
Murdoch has a specific niche and he sticks to it, but the results are a wonderful listen. Breezier and obviously less sophisticated than Nick Drake, he makes mood music... but it's the sort of thing that hits the perfect medium of emotional catharsis and relaxed longing, frankly just what's required of certain mornings. The romantic intimacy of "At Your Door" and the lovely, Appalachian-tinged spiritualism of "Some Day Soon" render semi-moot the songs that wander off into dirge territory later.

Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop)
Honeybear, is it!? Musically this project from former drummer of icky folk-rock outfit Fleet Foxes is kinda like Joe Cocker I guess, vocally it's Ringo or Cale? Same pseudo-soul backdrop and weird ornamentations only there's like a Death of a Ladies Man-style romantic fatalism; Leonard Cohen and Loudon Wainwright III and other such benchmarks seemed more honestly pathetic in their desperations. Misty's got a little bit of swagger but the lyrics are fucking awful and the sleaze is annoying when it's ironic, soppy when it's sincere, overall indulgent and repugnant in that classic white boy singer-songwriter manner. So yeah, the '70s are back.

Stevie Wonder: Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974)

(Tamla)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Following the release of the masterful Innervisions, Stevie Wonder earned the right to rest on his laurels; to begin with, that album was brilliant enough to linger permanently as the definitive statement of a fully developed artist. But then came the day, just after its release, when Wonder sat dozing in the passenger seat of a car whizzing down I-85 when the driver smashed into a flatbed truck, impact focused squarely on Stevland Morris' forehead. Wonder was in a coma, had to be medicated, had to gradually gain back his faculties. The pop world's adoration of him was vocally affirmed as though it hadn't been already. He showed up to his first gig afterward pointing proudly at his scar and sending the enormous crowd into utter jubilation.

Did he slum it, then? Some have regarded Fulfillingness' First Finale as an indulgent, monochromatic affair. It's dominated by ballads and subtleties and explodes into action really only twice, both times with adult emotions -- sexual urge and political rage -- hard to imagine emanating from the 12 year-old genius or even as of Talking Book. Some also see it as a stopgap, sandwiched between two masterpieces, and of course it earns poignance from being part of a larger story and a longer run of superlative works. Yet the album's comparatively off-the-cuff nature and comfortably sparse production managed to seal it, for all its contemporary popularity, as a product ahead of its time. And as with Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, it bears noting that its supposed uncommercial nature is only by a matter of degrees -- it is Stevie Wonder, it is accessible and deeply moving and very plainly glorious.

If there's less momentum, if the ballads are subtler and more troubled than usual, it's merely because Fulfillingness is an unblinking representation of Wonder's mind in the months after his by all accounts life-changing accident. Wonder has never before exhibited so much frank sorrow or cynicism; the genius grows up. "Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away" argues with but also struggles over its title's implication; hook-filled as ever but mournful, it comes about its moving climax bit by bit, as though a catharsis like that of the prior record's religious anthem "Higher Ground" can now only come with hard work, uncompromised faith and pleading.

Wonder's musical preoccupations evolve less on Fulfillingness than on any of his past three albums or the next one; this is much more an exploration of established methods, an attempt as though in real time to determine if all of the artist's gifts remain, and then how far he can go with his own expertise at harnessing our bodies, hearts carefully, quietly (hell, "Bird of Beauty" is really just a seductive, surrendered variant on "Too High"). The only other mainstream soul record of the '70s that achieves so much under such dark, careful, unflashy circumstances is Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear. Yet Wonder never presents anything that resembles a dirge; the closest he comes is the classical piano-inspired, mournful and frightened "They Won't Go When I Go," as stark and hopeless a creation as Big Star's "Holocaust," but even it can't stay wallowed in the mire for its duration -- bursting finally and redeemed.

The record offers no "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," no "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," certainly no "For Once in My Life," yet it immediately envelops us in its uniquely reluctant spirit and mood. In short, Wonder is troubled, and not troubled in the conscious but swaggering manner of Talking Book and Innervisions at their darkest. Even the latter's saddest moment, "All Is Fair in Love," was suffused with sheepish wit. Wonder's accident-related revelation doesn't lead him all that far from his prior concerns or personality. Nixon terrifies him just like racism toremented him on "Living for the City"; the result is the outrageously funky, ferocious clavinet-driven "You Haven't Done Nothin'," boasting the great man's best-ever lyric and the propulsive vocal contributions of the Jackson Five, who visited Wonder in the North Carolina hospital where he lay nearly dying and now fight alongside him.

Indeed, one is reminded of Frank Capra, who once alleged that after the release of It Happened One Night he was struck by a godly revelation of sorts -- that his duty was to let the people who saw his films know that he loved them. Capra's work thereafter was deeply populist and humane... but so was nearly everything he had already made up to that point. Perhaps his focus was simply tightened. It's by this line of reasoning that FFF opens softly, assuredly, warm-heartedly with "Smile Please" -- a jazzy and casual saunter of catchy optimism only mildly tempered by its chorus' slight desperation. It's a giving, caring setting of the stage for what's to follow, yet it also withholds -- what it builds to isn't quite a peak, only a vague allowance of joy that's more or less brought to fruition by the even more complex "Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away."

Herein lies the major artistic evolution of this LP, its most famous payoff to come two years later. Probably very few people would make an argument that Innervisions is an inferior record to this one; many of us find them nearly equal, but there's little question that the prior album is the signature achievement and very possibly Wonder's finest moment on record. But each song of Innervisions was a world unto itself; they may have complemented one another beautifully, but they did not necessitate one another. In a shattered, newly awake world and outlook like Wonder's circa 1974, it suddenly must have seemed obvious that the tempered sweetness of "Smile Please" necessitated the worshipful paean and questioning of "Heaven...", that therefore the tentative, virginal, slide guitar-ridden "Too Shy to Say" required the pure sex of "Boogie On Reggae Woman," that both needed the romantic dread and superstition of "Creepin'." Without exception, all of the fine songs here are stronger when heard together in proper sequence; the album furthers, enlivens itself and its sometimes morose, lost sensibility. It's partly because no sentiment here is simple, childlike, innocent.

"Boogie On Reggae Woman" is accomplishment enough to require some digression, and a speedy comparison to the romances of Talking Book or My Cherie Amour casts into stark light just how much Wonder's albums of the '60s and '70s are a narrative of boyhood fading into physical and emotional maturity -- more eloquently and musically than the output of any other teen idol. Masculine sexual identity in rock & roll has historically been turgid and superficial, a result both of gender roles and of the bounds of the form. But even if Stevie Wonder is a modern American hero on a level with few, he as a musical entity is hardly traditional. Somehow, his hot-sex song is different -- and hotter -- not only because of the stark vulnerability in his voice but also the passive androgyny of the lyric. The song cannot be denied musically, driving along with cosmic force in one of the rawest grooves of Wonder's career. As engaging as it is, it's still the composition and -- especially -- the vocal performance that makes the song so potent, even today in a pop music world swimming in innuendo. This is the real thing, with genuine feeling, genuine primal lust.

Like Brian Wilson's legendary take on the far less (but not entirely a-) sexual "Don't Worry Baby," Stevie's vocal here makes its mark with orgasmic mystery, with his teasing groans and the bashful secrecy of "I like to do it to you 'till you holler for more," the submissive thrill of "I like to make love to you 'till you make me scream." The song is an admission of sex not just in one of the three pop interpretive traditions -- as pornographic bliss or an expression of love or a political metaphor, all of which have some truth -- but as a function of the flesh and a feeling that marks true humanity. The line that grips every time is the one that reveals the most about Wonder and the beauty of sexual relationships in general -- "I like to reggae with you, but you dance too fast for me." There's no song better suited than this for such delightful interpersonal revelation.

Yet again, however, that split second of dancing bliss requires counterpoint, and therefore side one ends with the gorgeous but meacing "Creepin'"; his voice never better or truer, Wonder wraps it around a blackened tale of obsession and lust, no ordinary love song, more evocative and conflicted than even Gaye's work of the period. It's a strange, counterintuitively calming track that belies its secret heart on a record that very often isn't what it seems to be. Songs that begin as whispers routinely evolve into full-blown gospel revival.

If "Creepin'" alone doesn't make the case, if the melody and ache of something like "It Ain't No Use" can't render this as vital and grand as any of the outstanding achievements in Wonder's catalog, if its thematic sophistication does nothing for you, maybe it's wise to stick to something simple: Fulfillingness' First Finale features the artist's best, most nuanced singing ever, full of character, charm, sensuality like at no point in his career before this and honestly not often thereafter. Beyond just his own singing, it's the versatile use of the human voice he displays in his productions: the harmonic lushness, openness, the intimacy of the way he is himself recorded.

This might really be a finale of sorts; it's the definitive moment of Stevie Wonder as the artist he set out to become at the end of the '60s when he acquired control of his output. Conceptually it's virtually perfect, almost seemingly effortless, and consistently rewarding and revealing. But when he lets the facade break just a bit and starts to suggest a bit of joy and passion looking ahead on "Please Don't Go," it's the first evidence of the earth-shaking universal classic he would unearth just a few years hence. Fulfillingness can't help but sit in the shadow of two great records it sits next to on the shelf of every music collector with an ounce of taste in this country and many others, but it's a great record in its own right specifically because of what it slowly begins to imply: more than a decade after "Fingertips," the reality of growing up and becoming an individual is beginning to require the full force of Wonder's creativity and intellect. He'd grown up before our eyes, and now we would really see in full the man he had become.

***

[A small portion of this essay incorporates material from a previously published piece about "Boogie On Reggae Woman," posted in 2004.]

The Beach Boys: Surfin' U.S.A. (1963)

(Capitol)

They weren't much of a surf group. The best genuine surf music is instrumental and has little to do with the Beach Boys' entirely separate if not incompatible skill set; rock instrumentals were for a time an explosive subgenre that achieved occasional transcendence with miracles like Dick Dale's tricky, evocative guitar heroics. Such music just as frequently emanated from minor bands or studio musicians who'd unroll one crucial, vibrant single, maybe two, then disappear. Surf music didn't have much commercial or cultural presence for long, and as the subculture itself grew it was apparent that the music of genuine surfers was neither "Pipeline" nor "Surfin' Safari" but harder-edged R&B. So the irony is the Hollywood guys who in all but one case had never surfed in their lives have this gorgeous album cover on which it is proclaimed that they are "the no. 1 surfing group in the country."

The Beach Boys were undoubtedly "bigger" by the time this album rode up the charts than any other popularly identified progenitors of surf music. But not better, at least on the evidence of the whopping five instrumentals that fill out the tracklist on their second album. Three of them are covers, one dull but enthusiastic ("Misirlou"), one competent but uninspired (Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk"), one that drains all the life out of the original, indicating the harsh limits of youthful enthusiasm (Dick Dale's "Let's Go Trippin'," in its original version probably the best surf 45). Of the originals, "Surf Jam" is scrappy and fast but forgettable and "Stoked" is exactly the same, only it contains the band obnoxiously repeating the title.

Then the Beach Boys, it seems, are no more a surfing group than Loudon Wainwright is a calypso singer. Their true innovations lie someplace else entirely, exemplified by the title track here, an exhilarating and real moment hampered only by the lifting of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen." (The song was supposed to be credited to Berry as cowriter but Capitol botched it on the single.) The song has little to do with the conventions of surf music, everything to do with pure rock & roll and the sheer aural rush of its strong, forceful sound and escapist lyric. Like Berry, the Beach Boys lyrically are literate and wordy, instrumentally raw and therefore infinitely expressive. In mono, at least, I could put "Surfin' U.S.A." on a par with any rock & roll recording; it's utterly explosive and has a power over any listener that remains potent to this day, maybe because there's not a human alive who can't relate to the opening line -- "If everybody had an ocean..." -- including those with no interest in water or surfing. It's one of the greatest statements of purpose in all rock music.

The b-side signals that all isn't right. The popular but oddly listless car song "Shut Down," built from one of Roger Christian's oddly romanticized, jargon-filled car poems, feels contrived compared to its coupling and both sides of the first Capitol single. Insincere formulas invariably wear thin quickly, after all, which may explain, on the album, the prevalence of ballads above all else, surely something that seems to stand in a kind of contradiction to the teenage utopia symbolically depicted on the front of the package.

"Lana" is simplistic to the point that it barely exists, but it plays to the band's strengths because it seems that Brian, taking one of his first leads, actually cares about what's being sung. Indeed, he'd stumbled at last on the ideal subject, as had so many before him. Just as, with "409" and "Shut Down," he'd discovered cars to be twice as universal as surfing, girls had tenfold or more on both of them. The two other knockout tracks here, "Lonely Sea" and "Farmer's Daughter," both have Brian slipping into lovelorn balladeer mode. Written mostly by Gary Usher, "Lonely Sea" is an early classic, astonishingly enough lifted from the band's Murry Wilson-produced demo tape for Capitol, the same one that brought us "Surfin' Safari" and "409." However, the beloved "Farmer's Daughter," famously covered by Fleetwood Mac, remains the loveliest song here, its depth of emotion -- surely as wrought and considered as on the mournful "Lonely Sea" -- is suggested rather than explicitly stated, thus drawing a direct line to the next album and the Beach Boys' work thereafter. The minimalist lyrics carry a kind of hopeful sadness that takes its time to hit you, and then suddenly "Surfin' U.S.A." seems like a song not about beach party fun but about how everybody wants to be where they can't, by the ocean or next to the farmer's daughter.

Thus, it's not hard to link these tastefully restrained but still exuberant love songs to the bright "Noble Surfer," full of delicious bass vocals from Mike Love, concerned with admiration of a hero from a distance and equipped with an atypically clever lyric and an unexpected celeste solo. The ideology is enough to weigh you down, but that's why we have the Frankie Valli-like "Finders Keepers," because beach party fun is still damned important too. Either of these eclipse "Shut Down," though that song's celebrated breeziness make it easy enough to forgive. The five solid originals plus both sides of the single comprise half of a solid, though not brilliant, sophomore album, but the record's pacing is so fouled up by the constant instrumental interjections that it's best heard piecemeal and, despite higher peaks, is a far less consistent record than Surfin' Safari. Modern non-obsessives are likely to lose patience digging for the gems, a problem that anticipates similar issues with Shut Down, Vol. 2 a year later.

Consumers turned Surfin' U.S.A. into the first rock & roll album to sell in mass quantities in the era of the LP as a vehicle primarily intended for classical, opera, jazz, and bloated film soundtracks. It success would be parlayed into much greater artistic control for the Beach Boys -- namely, the ability to record wherever they wanted and to credit one of their own, Brian Wilson, as producer. (Brian had all but officially produced this album but, as was then customary, A&R man Nik Venet received the sleeve recognition.) Credit the band's bizarre appeal to nearly everyone, the universal spontaneity that seemed so simple then and was slightly less simple for the Beatles and became an impossibility by the time of the Stones and the Who. In some terms, it actually is a step backwards for the group, but a closer look reveals that it's scarcely related in any fashion to the first album, a different beast entirely. Dodge the stereo mix and approach it with historical distance, plus a promise for a few lost jewels. And for what it's worth: in his autobiography, David Marks reports a fan running up to him in the late '90s with a copy of this LP bearing the three Wilson brothers and Mike Love's signatures, asking Marks to complete the set. That fan: none other than Dick Dale.

***

[Originally posted elsewhere in 2003. Subsequently fact-checked and revised to align with a larger Beach Boys-related project in 2016.]

Back to the way it was: February 2015 albums

I've had this written for you-don't-wanna-know-how-long, and kept putting off gathering the album covers from the Net, then this morning I started wondering why I even do that; the links end up being broken eventually anyway, it seems. You don't need album covers to enjoy or be somewhat informed by these writeups, right? Good, good, let's keep moving then.

K. Michelle: Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart? (Atlantic)
"Drake would love me," yeah, probably. Despite a few early moments of sparkling, synth-heavy production, this is schmaltzy, shrill R&B that doesn't harness Michelle's appealingly nuanced, raspy, Mary Wells-like voice the way it potentially could, nor the momentum of the decent single "Love 'Em All." The parts about weed are best.

Kaki King: Junior (Rounder 2010)
I have come increasingly to feel that King is one of the all-time great guitarists, and one of the very few capable of filling out an entertaining album with nothing but her own noodling and improvisations. This is therefore easily the oddest specimen in her catalog by virtue of its being atypically conventional, a weird, breathy Cold War concept album with songs about Russian spies, Pasternak references and musical thematics lifted from various espionage movies of the '60s. There is a gorgeous, classic KK instrumental ("Sloan Shore"), and yet the remainder gleans so little depth from its relatively far-ranging influences and ideas that it ends up blending even more than usual with the "musical wallpaper" notion associated with what was once called Beautiful Music. King is to be applauded for stretching, but her gifts -- and gifts for consistency -- lie elsewhere.

D'Angelo: Black Messiah (RCA) [A+ (originally hr)]
This stunning, sprawling heap of hardened, difficult R&B is intricate, detailed, subtle, addictive, even inscrutable, and absolutely brilliant. (My favorite Marvin Gaye record is Here, My Dear, in case you're wondering which you weren't after that sentence.) Every listen seems to push one further into its paranoid, troubling murk and redemptive sensuality. It's worthy of James Brown, George Clinton or Prince at peak, and its racial and social consciousness -- its feeling of an important act that is happening right now -- gives you some whiff of what it might have been like to live and work in the real age of those titans. This is an album of the ominous, chaotic moment, maybe the only one. Not one of its songs is as satisfying as the entire package, but not one of its songs is incomplete or weak; the package simply ebbs, flows, intensifies as a whole. The funk album of the century.

Avey Tare: Down There (Paw Tracks) [c]
The Animal Collective phenomenon already seems silly enough with hindsight to make onetime deriders somewhat more sympathetic to their cause, but my low tolerance for QUIRKY VOCALZZ keeps me from hearing anything in this.

Mark Ronson: Uptown Special (Columbia) [c]
"White Gold," eh? Sounds like a DJ who spins nothing but various volumes of Now! That's What I Call Music.

John Coltrane: Africa/Brass (Impulse! 1961) [A+]
Coltrane's first album on his famously lucrative contract with the then-fledgling Impulse! is, perhaps more than any of the other LPs issued in his lifetime, the palpable sound of sustainable artistic freedom. Its centerpiece is an otherworldly but wonderfully familiar take on "Greensleeves," demonstrating how -- with one of the loveliest melodies ever written at his disposal -- the master was so adept at toying infinitely with simple chords and melodies, working and twisting out into the sublime. But the two originals are propulsive and alight with fire, chaos and beauty -- and beauty perverted -- all at once. This featured Coltrane's largest band and some of the most unusual instrumentation featured on a jazz record of this period, including Garvin Bushell's woodwinds and Bill Barger's splendidly incongruous tuba; the orchestrations by Eric Dolphy, adapted from McCoy Tyner, are dissonant, evocative, wholly immersive. The secret weapon here is drummer Elvin Jones, however, who brings these lofty sounds back to an earthy bliss. The record's still-potent liveliness is astounding.

Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (RCA) [r]
Solid, varied R&B record with stern attitude and unique voice. An auspicious return to a still-fraught, intense scene.

J.B. Hutto and His Hawks: Hawk Squat! (Delmark 1968) [r]
Danceable electric blues from South Carolina by way of the Chicago '50s scene is certainly a reflection of the brief mainstream popularity of electric blues, and there's no mistaking its populist appeal. Hutto has a bite of eccentricity, something that keeps him from blending in to the 12-bar wallpaper, and this comeback session is a solid, engaging evening with a rowdy monster.

Viet Cong (Jagjaguwar) [c]
"Alternative" "rock".

Ayub Ogada: En Mana Kuoyo (Real World 1993) [hr]
Stunningly beautiful, instantly appealing folk music from Kenyan singer-songwriter Ogada, whose vocals more than mildly resemble Nick Drake; at the very least, he's second to Alexi Murdoch in the Drake soundalike contest. The vibe is accessible (the record comes from Peter Gabriel's label) and low-key and it's hardly a monument of innovation, rather of the universal appeal of restraint: it's mostly just Ogada's voice and the nyatiti, which offers a lovely combination of the warm and the unique. The mood, occasional injections of variance via layered vocals and woodwinds, and subtle tones of lyrical unrest make it universal. I don't like to be one of the constant advocates of the slicker, quieter, less abrasive side of East Africn music, but good is good.

Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) [r]
Songs are only here and there but it's fun to hear them play them. Were it anyone else, it might not seem so weighty.

The Decemberists: What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (Capitol) [c]
A band whose work was once so full of wit seems to have slowly shed it piece by piece; the warning sign was probably when so many of the richest, most satisfying and singular songs from the Crane Wife cycle were left off that release. Still, The King Is Dead suggested maturity and a future for Colin Meloy as a Nashville factory songwriter. This new record, though, is a strange leap into the adult contemporary abyss that seems hard to justify as the follow-up to a commercial breakthrough (but then, so did the Avett Brothers' last few albums; so does the work of just about every band that switches to a major label), and my best guess is that a hiatus due to Jenny Conlee's cancer treatments dimmed their focus. Cleverness, however self-conscious it sometimes was, has been replaced with cutesiness and syrup that call to mind Wild Life-era Wings. Meloy reveals how easy it is for even a dynamic, distinctive frontman to become a total nuisance. The Decemberists' audience might skew slightly mid-forties hipster at this point, but they seem to be bidding for office Muzak mostly, a curious fate for several other '00s folk-rockers like Iron & Wine and Band of Horses as well. The moments that stand out only do so in their wrongheadedness; annoying jaunty backing vocals, songs that sound routinely as stupid as barrel-scraping R.E.M. numbers like "Wanderlust" and "Shiny Happy People," and on the cut that provides the album's title, a surprisingly crass sentiment from someone so allegedly sensitive as Meloy. He wrote it in the days after the Sandy Hook massacre; it's about the contrast between the grief being felt by the parents of the dead children then with Meloy's own placid happiness as a father. In other words, it's essentially a humble brag about one's child being alive, undoubtedly well-intentioned but just another sign of how aloof a very popular band can quickly become, and how fast my generation's indie rock as a whole has faded hopelessly out of touch as it ascends to messy middle age.

The Damned: Damned Damned Damned (Stiff 1977) [hr]
Cited frequently as the first-ever UK punk band, a statistic that becomes harder to define and more meaningless with each passing year, the Damned have never had quite the international audience or legendary cachet of the Clash, the Sex Pistols or even Australian counterpart the Saints. But the claim Damned Damned Damned can lay down that's nearly unique in its era is that, beyond its association with any particular movement, it's a truly brazen piece of timeless rock & roll fuck-all, fast and furious in the vein of the Stooges -- whose "1970" is memorably covered herein -- but with ample devilish wit to match. It's an absolute shot of pulp joy that hasn't grown old with time, and its two signature singles "Neat Neat Neat" and "New Rose" (with its glorious opening echo of the Shangri-Las) can still pump up and blow apart a middling evening. But in contrast to Never Mind the Bollocks, the rest of it lives up to its peaks; the cascading, furious "I Fall" might be their very best song, and "So Messed Up" is Ramones-worthy. Taken together it's all so clear and full and complete, when punk was serious in its irreverence, focused and deeply inventive.

Belle & Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (Matador)
Having conquered seemingly two disparate career paths for the same band, Stuart Murdoch's current endeavor takes them to the dance floor, sort of. And yet, as on Write About Love, he's best when he plays to / remembers his strengths. Aside from the songs that really extrapolate into miniature but extensive dramas, the work here largely seems too cute and lacking in tangible emotion. Much like Stephin Merritt's later work, what we're hearing is the career twilight of someone for whom this has simply become too easy. Murdoch could write most of this with one eye open, his band could play it with both shut, and the stylistic toying is just costume jewelry. We're less bored than he is, but we can tell he's bored and it's tragic.

Al Green: I'm Still in Love with You (Hi 1972) [hr]
This is one hell of a subtle record; having long loved Green's singles I've only just in the last couple of years started to process his albums in order, which has been an excellent experience I wish I'd taken on with more artists (and probably will down the line). Pretending this was a new release, thus ignoring the inescapable fame and power of its several hits, I was initially disappointed that the album seemed dialed back, painstakingly smooth, even soppy at times. But each revisit reveals the tension and power lurking in songs that never make their sensual longings as initially explicit as they finally are. Thinking at first that it was the least of his first three Hi albums, I now would say it's the best. And the "Oh! Pretty Woman" cover is Wilson Pickett-worthy. But of course the singles leap triumphantly over all. Is the best of the bunch the ubiquitous title cut, which revises but amplifies "Let's Stay Together"? The teasing "Look What You Done for Me"? No way. The champion is the strangest, most hardline and brutal of the bunch -- the hard, pleading, possibly mildly sarcastic "Love and Happiness." That the album retains the vibe of its most beloved inclusions without ever growing repetitive or dull is just one of the treasured revelations it's hiding.

Pond: Man It Feels Like Space Again (Caroline)
Annoying Grizzly Bear-lite stuff.