War is over (if you want it): October 2018 music diary

If you were one of those people who wished it could be (1968 again) and didn't care to look in on new music at all but wanted just to dwell on the past, you'd nevertheless certainly have no shortage of exploring to do this autumn with massive archive dumps from the Kinks, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and of course the Beatles. I'm not even touching the Lennon, Dylan and Kinks stuff yet but lifelong passion couldn't keep me from carving out time for the new collection of White Album outtakes and they are indeed lovely, putting forward a whole new narrative about that era of the band and about what happens to be my favorite of their LPs. It's also wonderful to have perhaps the best Beatles bootleg item of all, the Esher demos, finally out in the world in complete form officially. A full-fledged review of the super deluxe boxed set will have to wait -- it's in the Beatles queue, as it were, and I'm still debating whether I need a physical copy of my own; I skipped the Pepper set except electronically and haven't regretted it yet -- and I haven't even listened to Giles Martin's new remix as of this moment, but you can expect a dissertation on the matter in due time. That long blues-dirge "Helter Skelter," the Elvis cover and the instrumental proto-new wave version of "Me and My Monkey" are giving me all kinds of much-needed life, though. For now, it's back to modern-day obligations, and we seem to be winding down a bit, or maybe I'm the one who's doing that...

Jlin: Autobiography (Planet Mu) [r]
Pretty much a Jlin demo reel, a groovy package embodying her whole bag of tricks to date with the usual immersive sonic challenges and restless, furious sampling and creativity. It doesn't reveal anything new, but there's a reason: rather than a conventional studio album it's a soundtrack of sorts for a Royal Ballet dance suite, so it amounts to something like Jean Vigo's Taris, a great artist working on commission and using it as an opportunity to experiment while delivering for her own brand and portfolio. As such, it's a must for those who loved Black Origami and/or Dark Energy but we'll have to wait a bit longer to learn where she's going to take us next. This does make me want to see the Wayne McGregor piece it's meant to accompany, though.

Tim Hecker: Konoyo (Kranky) [r]
The first Hecker release I've heard that I found more than just tolerable; that may not speak well of my taste in adventure, as it's clearly his least ambitious and most conventional work, with a laid-back and almost soft rock-evocative sound despite its wordless, often unmusical ambiance, as if someone took away all the singing and instrumentation on a Chris Isaak album and left only the vibes.

Phosphorescent: C'est La Vie (Dead Oceans)
I really hate Matthew Houck's appearance (fair game because his damn face is plastered across the front of this), persona, vibe, lazily button-pushing derivative sound, so it frustrates me to the extreme that this is basically competent alterna-mood music with textures that capture the hopeless late night feeling of the stuff that made me feel comforted in my echo chamber of depression as a teen, though specifically it calls to mind the masterfully miserable one-shot with the long title I don't feel like looking up by Primitive Radio Gods. I never heard that album but I was told it was garbage and completely avoided living up to the sound of the radio song. Well, I guess now we get to hear a whole full-length record of it, and divorced from major label marketing to boot, so if this is your scene I'm not going to yell at you about it. "New Birth in New England" is perfectly lovely junk, '70s adult contemporary AM filtered through the Postal Service.

Fucked Up: Dose Your Dreams (Merge) [r]
This sprawling, sonically varied punk rock paean is the easiest time I've had with a Fucked Up release so far, whatever that means. Abraham's vocals continue to grate, but he isn't always the one singing, and when he is it's often the not-entirely-unappealing sound of somebody screaming over Owen Pallett's string arrangements. The mixture of voices helps a lot, not just the MVP backup singing but lead spots like Jennifer Castle's country rock interlude "Came Down Wrong." Like Titus Andronicus (newly labelmates), the group offers as dynamic a sound as we get from punk rock, much less from hardcore; like Titus Andronicus, at their best they are triumphant and defiant in their pain ("Joy Stops Time"). With touches of new wave ("Normal People"), shoegaze (the complicated, beautiful "How to Die Happy") and the occasional Medieval-sounding guitar lick ("Tell Me What You See"), plus a title track that sounds like Hall & Oates reimagined Pretty Hate Machine, there's something here for everyone, which is a good excuse for how ridiculously long it is; the entire album has a cumulative and welcome vibe of rejuvenation. It's never going to be a part of my day to day life, but still, well done.

Twenty One Pilots: Trench (Atlantic)
Won a Grammy before I'd so much as heard of them, and I wasn't alone -- that particular event prompted Ann Powers to tweet about how the number of people making similar remarks were very clearly betraying the absence of young teenagers in their lives. It wasn't any more off-the-wall, in its fashion, than Arcade Fire winning, when a lot of us rejoiced and pointlessly mocked the people who were wholly clueless about what had just happened and why. Twenty One Pilots, meantime, are no more brainless and dunderheaded than the lazier end of what passed for modern rock when I was in high school -- the waning days of mall punk, the very early days of emo -- and there's no point chattering about being "too old" when, in fact, I remember feeling completely baffled when I first walked into a Hot Topic in 2001, at age 17, and had heard of almost nothing being played or peddled. Presumably, if you're older or younger than me and are a music nerd now, you could tell the same basic story. In other words, very little has changed, and this safely bland, fake-socially conscious duo from Columbus are more or less just a stopgap between the craftier pop world and whatever mature interests and eventual nostalgia they will set off themselves in their audience. I listened to this, found the vocals annoying, the music competently catchy, the production antiseptic, and the whole thing devoid of any kind of appeal I'm going to remember, but that's because I'm not who it's trying to capture, and I don't have the basic interest in mainstream rock past or present to warrant any intellectual or emotional attachment like I might have with bubblegum or R&B targeted to kids. My response is the same as it is for Justin Bieber or Backstreet Boys (who had great songs) or Panic! At the Disco or the fucking Archies (who didn't), just thank god it's not whatever mean-spirited dullards are analogous to Limp Bizkit, the Knack, or the Eagles who are capturing the hearts and minds of the young.

Elvis Costello: Look Now (Concord)
I like Costello but I'm not part of his cult; however, I'm part of others and so I understand how this works -- those who worship him at his best will find plenty of note here, while the more casual followers will stick their noses in, recognize that he's still at work and still recognizably Elvis Costello, and move on. From my distance the one thing that sticks out at all is "Suspect My Tears," and that's because it sounds convincingly like bottom-of-the-barrel AM sleaze circa 1978, the ubiquity of which seems to be precisely what "Radio Radio" was decrying.

Daniel Avery: Diminuendo (Phantasy Sound EP) [r]
Not sure how effective the sneak-attack release strategy is when you're not on Beyoncé's level, but this is a nice and immersive supplement release, the second short-form set this year from the prolific DJ; it's scarier, more assaultive than his excellent album Songs for Alpha and clearly aims for a livelier setting despite its often brooding textures. It's '90s rave with 2010s drugs.

Sheck Wes: MUDBOY (Interscope) [c]
This 20 year-old Harlem rapper's debut, riding in on an inept top-ten hit from last year, is aimed specifically enough at naughty high schoolers that it would never have been on my radar if not for an outrageous rave in Pitchfork recently; it's beyond insipid in its rote, amateurish "hard" chanting and the lazy muck of its dank, bleak Soundcloud beats (see "WESPN"), and lacks the wit of fellow acquired-taste weirdos like Young Thug and Lil B. I don't think hip hop is dead or in trouble but people talk about the indulgent, stagnant, circling-the-drain feeling of rap ten years ago and then praise this? Then again I wasn't much for trap in the first place -- never even liked Future, who was nothing if not a nightmarish minimalist whose stuff could have all sorts of sociological claptrap positive and negative read into it -- and who am I to say "Mo Bamba" is a laughable dirge if I'm listening to it while sitting in my office drinking Diet Pepsi with a cat in my lap? Sheck Wes isn't selling this crud for just any setting, he wants to pump you up, and for what it's worth I can't think of any form of rock music designed to pump me up so thoughtlessly and primordially that I don't hate. (Remember Fang Island? Remember "We Will Rock You"?) Fortunately, our guy has a built-in explanation for the monosyllabic pap that's supposed to be a whole lot of nothing, say the defenders, that's occasionally interrupted by the serious self-regarding "commentary" plugged by the other defenders: "Why I say bitch so much? Let me explain it. It's the only word... where I can feel and hear all my anger. It don't got nothin' to do with like bitches. It's just, bitch! Bitch!" Naughty by Nature's etymology digressions at least rhymed, and Ice-T's "bitch" tirade was at least funny. But I'm so old I don't know who 21 Pilots are.

Neneh Cherry: Broken Politics (Smalltown Supersound) [r]
"Broken" is the right word for this shambolic series of wavering vocal rants, weird production choices and half-songs that spin their wheels on invisible chords and often go full minutes without anything resembling a hook. It's daunting and addictive at its best; when she does go pop, like on "Natural Skin Deep," she overruns the track with so many intrusive sound effects (your ride's here) and mocking tricks it seems to dare you to enjoy yourself. It's the opposite of Tierra Whack's album, which gave you so many ideas and refused to run with any of them; this expounds at great length on its most unappealing tangents, punishing instead of just challenging. It's not avant garde exactly -- too exacting in its message, too thrilling in its delight at its execution; too much Sly Stone, baby -- but an artist dismissed in the mainstream as a one-shot going off like this is certainly braver by orders of magnitude than whatever, hmm, Nada Surf is up to (if anything).

Yoko Ono: Warzone (Chimera) [r]
I don't know if this will be Ono's last studio album. I hope it isn't, because the original material on her last two had such vitality that I don't want her to cap off a brilliant musical career spanning six decades with a revision of old music, similar to past remix and cover-oriented projects but in this case with actual re-recordings and rearrangements. Nevertheless, there are far worse ways for her to send us away than with a breathtaking version of her late husband's signature song "Imagine," in a performance of grace and stark hesitation that brings out all of the complications and yearnings that Phil Spector drowns out on the original recording. This track isn't just a bookend to Imagine, John Lennon's 1971 album that was reissued in a lavish deluxe package this fall; nor is it just a bookend to Ono's uncomfortably public entrance into household-name status that began fifty years ago with her whispering into a tape recorder at Abbey Road, as also suggested on a lavish deluxe package out this fall, and capturing the meaningless ire of a racist, misogynist, possessive public that that had already spent five years turning a gifted band into dogs rolling over for them (an almost inevitable consequence of just how gifted) -- I haven't checked online to see who is outraged by this new "Imagine" and how much, but I'm sure it's quite delicious. No, this is a bookend to a united front, a story, a message that goes back even further, back before Ono's experimental films and art and performances and back even beyond the '60s, to Lennon sixty years ago on a stage belting out "Puttin' on the Style" and living-emitting the first traces of a philosophy of performance, liberation and abandon that no lyrics, hackneyed or precise, could ever wholly capture -- no longer alive to impart that message, he implicitly trusts his wife with it, and she carries it on into the darkness, and whatever you think of both of these people, that fucking means something. I don't mean the lyrics, I mean the absolute conviction of what was behind them in the specific moment they were being delivered by first one vessel and now another, and how any great song affords such rich opportunities for true artists like these to surrender, command, and live inside a song; she makes it so much her own, without ever discounting the ghost in the room, she could be some alternate-universe Billie Holiday, or Angelique Kidjo fusing the abstractions of "Crosseyed and Painless" with experience: lost my shape, indeed.

As for the rest, only four tracks are revisions of songs that come from stronger albums: "Now or Never" from Approximately Infinite Universe, "Woman Power" from Feeling the Space, "Why" from Plastic Ono Band and "I'm Alive" from Between My Head and the Sky; these also tend to be the highlights, with the interesting exception of the title track which opens the record in a moment of discord and chaos and was originally recorded for the multimedia New York Rock project. The rest focuses heavily on the mostly forgotten 1985 Reagan protest album Starpeace, and while these versions sympathetically given a skeletal modern twist by Ono (coproducing with Thomas Bartlett, who also contributes piano and progamming) improve on the originals in this case, they're not among her best work, but it's understandable that she focuses on them because of their politics, antiwar messaging and optimism. Like the sloganeering and aforementioned, fearless performance-of-self she initiated with Lennon, it's all inarticulate and messy but it couldn't possibly be more timely to the world we now live in, and because her vocal power is undiminished -- has, if anything, gotten stronger and harder to shake or escape in her eighties -- she is right in front with playfulness and confidence that breathe new life into the songs, even if no moment resonates quite like the new, chillingly urgent meaning the line "I hope someday you'll join us" now has. Because if they don't join us, where does that leave us?

ALSO RECOMMENDED:
- Tunng: Songs You Make at Night (Full Time Hobby) [the beta band]
- Interpol: Marauder (Matador) [the definition of Interpol is "doing the same thing over and over again and wanting the same result"]
- Sauna Youth: Deaths (Upset the Rhythm) [punk is so nice and neighborly these days]
- Paul McCartney: Egypt Station (Capitol) [sings like his life depends on it, writes with imagination but little resonance, but his sheer nonchalant functionality remains a miracle when laid against almost any other '60s rocker, excluding Yoko but including Dylan, whose growl through "Things We Said Today" of a few years back delivers an accidental revelation in this regard; "Hunt You Down-Naked-C Link"/"Happy with You"/"Fuh You"]
- Kandace Springs: Indigo (Blue Note) [these foolish things remind me of you; "Unsophisticated"/"Piece of Me"/"People Make the World Go Round"]
- Lonnie Holley: MITH (Jagjaguwar) [found-art folk artist records weirdest blues album I ever remember hearing, making Willis Earl Beal sound like Ben Vaughn]
- Denzel Curry: TA13OO (Loma Vista) [aggression in search of a target, eventually found but it takes three (brief) discs; "SIRENS | Z1RENZ"]
- Adult.: This Behavior (Dais) [hard house and synthpop melded with aggressive chant-singing, with the occasional twisted and beautiful moment and a song that cops its bassline from Vince Clarke by way of the Kinks -- pure entertainment; "Violent Shakes"/"Silent Exchange"/"This Behavior"]

ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES:
- Oliver Coates: Shelly's on Zenn-La (RVNG Intl.)
- Chilly Gonzales: Solo Piano III (Gente Threat)
- Ital Tek: Bodied (Planet Mu) [intensify your routine]
- Sarah Davachi: Gave in Rest (Ba Da Bing!) [all gloom all the time]
- The Field: Infinite Moment (Kompakt)
- Haiku Salut: There Is No Elsewhere (Prah) [feel good lost; "Occupy"/"Nettles"]

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Kristin Hersh: Possible Dust Clouds
* Cat Power: Wanderer
Exploded View: Obey
Mudhoney: Digital Garbage
Swearin': Fall into the Sun
St. Vincent: MassEducation
Graham Parker: Cloud Symbols
Colter Wall: Songs of the Plains
Matthew Dear: Bunny
Georgia Ann Muldrow: Overload
Empress Of: Us

REJECTS:
Menace Beach: Black Rainbow Sound
Eric Bachmann: No Recover
Cher: Dancing Queen
The Joy Formidable: AAARTH [NYIM]
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs: King of Cowards
Marissa Nadler: For My Crimes [NYIM]
Jose James: Lean on Me
Lady Gaga: A Star Is Born OST
Marie Davidson: Working Class Woman
Molly Burch: First Flower
Eric Church: Desperate Man
Adrianne Lenker: Abysskiss
John Grant: Love Is Magic
Tom Morello: The Atlas Underground
How to Dress Well: The Anteroom
Cloud Nothings: Last Building Burning
MØ: Forever Neverland [NYIM]
Maribou State: Kingdoms in Colour [NYIM]

ORPHAN TUNES
Maribou State ft. Holly Walker "Nervous Tics" [Kingdoms in Color] {note: this contains a synth sound I recognize from Depeche Mode's "Leave in Silence," thus bias may be in play}

The Beatles: Yellow Submarine (1969)

(Apple)

Delayed by a few months to avoid competition (?) with the White Album, this film soundtrack is much less a Beatles album than the corresponding packages for A Hard Day's Night and Help!... in England, at least. In the U.S., in order for Capitol to squeeze maximum sales potential out of each and every recorded Beatles track, the soundtracks removed all non-film numbers and padded out the running time with scoring and orchestral tidbits. Ken Thorne's score for Help! was mildly interesting, enough to get partial credit for introducing George Harrison to the sitar, but hardly constituted added value for Beatles fans, a bit like expecting Prince and getting Danny Elfman; on A Hard Day's Night, George Martin's lush instrumental rearrangements of Beatles tunes were the kind of half-baked Muzak that appeals only to sickos like me. (When I was a kid I preferred Martin's strung-out "And I Love Her" to the Beatles'.) But this obviously wasn't Beatles music and, by a lot of standards, was therefore something of a ripoff. Among the Beatles' American soundtracks to this point, only Magical Mystery Tour, issued strictly as an extended-play in England, was padded out with actual songs by the band -- the irony here being that the incidental music in that film was actually their own work but has never been properly issued.

The four new Beatles songs on the Yellow Submarine LP were initially to be given the same treatment; with the bonus of the then-unissued "Across the Universe," a 7" EP was even mastered and prepped for release but was cancelled at what seems to have been the last minute. This would have been a more logical home for these haphazard, relatively inconsequential scraps, which on the album itself are joined not by "Universe" but by the title song, originally from Revolver, and the single A-side "All You Need Is Love," which also figures in the film and, in fairness, had yet to appear on a British LP up to now. It's curious that the Beatles opted to sign off on an album that commits the same basic consumer fraud as the UA and Capitol records from overseas; only Side One is by the Beatles, whose name is plastered on the cover; the rest is George Martin's score for the animated film. It's even more curious that this odd package has retained its place in the Beatles' discography ever since, and officially Apple even considers it one of their studio albums, which is a rather laughable redefining of terms. Further irony -- or, perhaps, an explanation -- is provided by the perverse truth that Martin's half of the record is far stronger than the Beatles'.

It shouldn't have been surprising that just two months after putting out their no-holds-barred double album, the Beatles could only muster up a handful of new tracks, though the rules of quality-over-quantity certainly don't seem to apply to the thinnest, most wanting collection of music they ever released. Three of the four are outtakes from the Sgt. Pepper period and its immediate aftermath, with the upshot that they sound quite anachronistic when hearing the band's output in sequence. The producer of the film Yellow Submarine, Al Brodax, would later complain that he felt he was thrown the bones of rejected material just to be shut up, as the Beatles regarded the contractually-obligated animated feature as something of a nuisance; John Lennon's sole contribution "Hey Bulldog" comes from slightly later (but still pre-White Album, hence just as distant) and reflects a bit more care thanks to its Keith Richards riffage and driving piano, a bit of a silly "Day Tripper" knockoff. While not top-tier material, it's somewhere on a level with the songs they created for Magical Mystery Tour: charming, lighthearted fare with a newly rediscovered zeal -- dating from the tentatively stripped-back "Lady Madonna" period between the psychedelic days and the India trip -- for good old rock & roll. Submarine could have done well with a few morsels of tossed-off, humorous fun like this, maybe comparable to the band's typically strong b-sides from earlier on, but Brodax was right to complain: half the songs he received from the band are genuinely awful.

Paul's "All Together Now" manages to exhibit all of his worst tendencies; it's as bad as "Hello, Goodbye" but thankfully shorter; and the band does seem to be in a less enthused (probably more stoned) mindset for the session. Still, the Beatles fans who see this as more important or vital than "Let 'Em In" are fooling themselves. Being stupid is fine, but cute? Unbearable. Worse, "Only a Northern Song" -- though produced with some audible gusto by George Martin -- is absolutely the worst song George Harrison wrote until Dark Horse, and is in the running as the worst composition released by any of the Beatles in the '60s. The laziness of the songwriting is almost awe-inspiring, particularly the lyrics. "If you're listening to this song / You may think the chords are going wrong / But they're not / He just wrote it like that." "We just play it like that." Excuses, excuses. The melody is typical Harrison: descending notes and a whole lot of self-imposed misery.

Thankfully, Harrison -- this is the only instance when he offers more new material than either John or Paul -- also contributes a much better song, the feedback-filled and power chord-laden "It's All Too Much," a Beatles obscurity that's nevertheless a surprisingly joyous piece of true psychedelia boasting some of its composer's best guitar work on record. The filmmakers wisely used it at the film's exhilarating resolution; accompanied by the visuals, it's a triumphantly delightful artifact of its time that does what nothing else on the Beatles' side of this record manages: it makes you believe for a moment. In fact, while still artistically facile compared to most of the White Album, it's a good enough song that it's quite surprising it has managed to remain almost universally unheralded; the Yellow Submarine album is indeed one of the few effective hiding places left in this catalog. The only caveat, really, is that the released version fades after six minutes, at which point bootlegs allow us to hear that the band proceeds to jam at considerable length, elevating the song a hell of a lot, indulgent as it may be. The Beatles' moment has lasted a long time but they will always be a band of and defined by the '60s, and that's one reason this recording -- which unabashedly celebrates the atmosphere and strangeness of what, by the time it was actually released, was already starting to transform into a bygone time -- is so compelling. It's a pity that the record replaces this climax with the more cloying and obvious "All You Need Is Love," even if it is capable of reaching toward the same sort of curious longing for a brief moment almost none of us now listening ever got to experience.

It's no longer relevant in the streaming era, but back in the CD years, $17 was an absurd amount to pay for four Beatles songs to round out their catalog, unavailable elsewhere until the 1999 release of a remixed soundtrack album with much more generous Beatles content. Everything about this package is a bit off-key and stupid, like the fact that the liner notes are just a perversely hyperbolic review of the White Album (comparing the band to Schubert, of all people); in this case the Americans were less cynical, offering a Tolkien-like explainer of Apple Bonkers and Blue Meanies and other creatures from the feature film. The wise consumer and casual fan is likely to understandably prefer Yellow Submarine Songtrack, gathering every Beatles song heard in the film in newly sparkly mixes, including even those only audible in fragments like "Think for Yourself."

Alas, that doesn't mean this album is devoid of value, even if its place in the "canon" is distinctly undeserved; its artistic virtues, however, have nothing to do with the Beatles. If you are a fan of the genuinely intoxicating feature film, a masterwork of surrealism, resourceful animation and imagination and a true feast for the senses -- so much so that the band was impressed and embarrassed when it turned out their own new songs weren't up to the quality standards of the film -- George Martin's evocative and beautiful score is a must. Skip the Beatles stuff entirely -- it really belongs with Past Masters anyway -- and prepare to be transported. I don't really grade film scores because my standards aren't very well-defined, but I'd rate Martin's work here as operating at the top level of the form; you decide if it's worth the dross, but certainly don't come here expecting the Greatest Rock Band to hold their end of the bargain.

***

[Heavily revised version of a review first posted in 2003.]

The Beatles: Purple Chick deluxe- White Album (1968)

(bootleg [12CD])

RECOMMENDED

I'm writing this at a great disadvantage, because at this moment -- late October of 2018 -- we're on the cusp of an influx: one of the biggest archival dumps in the entire history of the Beatles on record, which is no small event. The forthcoming White Album deluxe reissue contains not only a new remix of the album and the first official release of the complete Kinfauns demo tape (thus making the review you're reading a great deal shorter), but three full discs of studio outtakes dedicated to this specific LP, the most exhaustive such collection of material in their career to date and a major boon to fans and students of their work. The six discs of Anthology material were a slightly bigger deal, of course, but they did not have the time for such a deep-focused dive into any of their individual albums, and the incremental recording methods of Sgt. Pepper made its outtakes considerably less compelling. Throughout this discography, I've tried not to resort to any redundancy in going over bootlegged material; if something's been officially released, I talk about it when reviewing the project that saw it prepared and sold for the public. Obviously, since the new White Album discs are yet to be issued at the moment, I can't be sure I've mapped it all out perfectly, so if you're reading this in the future and I've not revised it, I apologize for any unintentional overlap. That said, close examinations of the tracklist indicate that Apple has mostly resisted plumbing the material we've already heard, choosing instead to offer performances and arrangements that never made it out to the black market; that means a whole lot of actual new Beatles are on the way, and let me tell you, I am psyched, not least because this is my favorite of their albums.

Purple Chick's release is itself a behemoth, a tantalizing twelve discs, though of course it like all of the PC releases is designed by and for completists, so there's a lot the average listener would perceive as redundant or boring. Twelve discs of White Album miscellany isn't, in other words, as amazing as it sounds... but it's still quite fucking cool, and again, it seems that most of it is poised to remain elusive to official release for the time being.

The first four discs are, as usual, the canon material, here covering twice as many discs because this is a double album. The "Hey Jude"/"Revolution" single, the first Apple release, is also included under this umbrella by the compilers. Discs one and two are stereo, three and four mono; famously, the Beatles and especially Paul had caught wind of the more obsessive contingent's tracking and pot-fueled discussion of differences and anomalies between mono and stereo mixes of their work, and on this last occasion (this was the final Beatles album with a dedicated mono mix, though Yellow Submarine saw the light of day as a fold-down and true mono mixes were made for an unissued EP; in America, the White Album only made it to stores in stereo) they evidently sought to have a bit of fun with this by making many of the tracks deliberately different, sometimes so radically so -- most notably in the case of "Helter Skelter" -- that they can barely be considered differing mixes as opposed to full-on alternate versions. The specific alterations are too numerous to lay out, but the general heavier bass and the many oddball exclusions (handclaps on "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?") or additions (watery effects on the solo in "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," an extra guitar in "Honey Pie") and full-on bizarre divergences like the goofing around with animal sounds on "Blackbird" and "Piggies" and the speed change on "Don't Pass Me By" make the mono version a fascinating and fun listen. It's quite difficult to prefer one over the other when they are so different. (One strange feature of the PC transfer of the mono album is that they do not replicate the one fold-down included, of "Revolution 9." Rumor has it that "Revolution 1" is also a fold, but that's faithfully reproduced.) Also, while not part of the album, "Revolution" is so clearly superior in its raucous mono single mix that even Lennon remarked on it in interviews when complaining that the Blue Album used the comparatively gutless stereo mix.

The two major outtakes from the White Album sessions, "Not Guilty" and "What's the New Mary Jane?" saw release on Anthology 3, but many fans considered those mixes -- prepared for the cancelled 1980s album Sessions -- bastardized, with modern echo effects and strange editing added. Bootlegs have preserved the original versions; in fact there are many versions and mixes of both songs on the collection, and while "Not Guilty" eventually wears out its welcome despite it being very nice to hear the complete version without Geoff Emerick's alterations, "What's the New Mary Jane?" is just bizarre and freeform enough to entertain in all its various iterations. Also presented as an "outtake" but not actually one is "Sour Milk Sea," a fine George Harrison rocker demoed during the Kinfauns gathering and eventually given to singer Jackie Lomax, whose record is a popping, crackling single that somehow went nowhere, but its major significance is that it features all four Beatles plus Eric Clapton and Nicky Hopkins. We'll talk more about that recording in another time and place but on this set, as has been popular practice on bootlegs for a while, we get faked out: Lomax's vocals have been mixed out and Harrison's from the demo awkwardly flown in. It's a bit superfluous but not entirely a bad listen.

A few modern mixes from Love and Anthology follow the first presentation of the album, the most intriguing being the 2007 orchestral version of George's gorgeous acoustic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" performance, which was already superior in every way to the canonical White Album version and is made even better by a new tasteful, enveloping string arrangement from George Martin -- his last official work before retirement, captured movingly on the documentary film All Together Now. That solo George version of the track is also offered in unedited mono, with his count-in and charmingly jarring coda "let's hear that back!". The only other major extra on the mono discs is a corrective to my only big criticism of the mono LP, the mono mix of "Don't Pass Me By" restored to its correct speed, and it sounds great.

In this spot you would originally have read a few paragraphs about the wonderful Esher demos that compose the totality of disc five, recorded at George's house after the India trip, a rough acoustic gathering of the songs that would later comprise this album plus a few from Abbey Road and even some future solo records, and a fascinating set of "unplugged" alternate versions that are often ridiculously lovely. It's the best lengthy collection of booted, unreleased Beatles music in existence, but as of a few weeks from when I'm writing this, that's poised to change with the entire tape about to find its way to record stores and streaming services the world over; as a result, I'll be talking about the Esher tape in its entirety as part of my review of the deluxe White Album collection when I get to that release. Just one comment, though, is that the demos are so good and engrossing they would've been a major release all on their own, and easily rate "highly recommended" status if taken in separately. (It does seem that the bootlegged demo tape, which was originally sourced from John Lennon's personal copy of the sessions, has a few unique items in comparison to the forthcoming official release, but most are of fairly marginal consequence, and in all cases the official versions appear to be superior and more significant.)

That said, discs six through eight offer an interesting alternative to the officially released session tapes, mostly consisting of material that won't be on Apple's new boxed set, and are both a more haphazard (because of the erratic song selection) and scholarly (because of the volume and extensiveness) lot of music. We start with an inferior version of perhaps the last "new" Beatles bootleg item to date -- manufactured "multitracks" excluded -- and one of the most intriguing, take 20 of "Revolution 1" -- which made it out into the world in much better quality around the time Beatles Rock Band was released, and at a point when even unofficial new material from the Beatles was major news of the world, particularly when it was of this caliber. Take 20 is lifted from the same source performance as the released version of the song but finally explains completely how the chaotic jam and breakdown of the song led directly to the creation of "Revolution 9," and suggests strongly that splitting the two tracks apart wasn't necessarily the best possible decision. (Note: this is the only time you will ever catch me saying even a slight word against "Revolution 9.")

It involves a great number of strange, disturbing overdubs that have a kitchen-sink surrealism but also reflect a level of seriousness, menace and depressive worldliness that reflect how much the Beatles had changed since their last big crop of material, Magical Mystery Tour -- though some of that project's cynicism certainly does continue here. As the music breaks down, chaos ensues and the noise and violence of revolution itself seem to overtake, a drama played out by the sounds and vocals of the Beatles and especially Lennon, to eventually be joined by the tape loops that would comprise the remainder of "9." The version that's currently on Youtube is at the wrong speed, but a little searching should turn the correct one up and you can patch it in to the PC disc, which still has the old bootleg hybrid of the take accidentally captured via playback by Yoko Ono ranting in her Dictaphone in the control room, so her voice overshadows the whole thing -- a specter that itself influenced the final recording. (Take 18, on the new box, is apparently quite similar to this but is missing several overdubs.) It's a remarkable recording, and among the most engrossing, singular and delightfully unhinged Beatles performances ever captured, somehow defining so much about their infinite ambition and capacity for surprise.

As usual we're at the mercy here of what seemingly random extracts have leaked out over the years, keeping in mind that -- judging from the official commentary about the new deluxe box -- even EMI didn't fully know or understand what existed in their vault. So a lot of songs are disproportionately represented, like "Blackbird"; it seems we have almost the entirety of that session, comprised of Paul busking with Ringo and John in close quarters, and an absolute heap of takes, false starts, rehearsals and dialogue, plus an otherwise nonexistent but seemingly sketched-out song called "Gone Tomorrow, Here Today"; for a glimpse inside Paul McCartney's head while hard at work, it's fascinating if repetitive, and at times charming and funny... but as with the later Get Back sessions, it needs to be stressed: these are people working hard at an actual job, and like most actual jobs when it gets down to their nuts and bolts, it's not built to entertain outsiders.

The sixth disc is rounded out with the non-Sessions mix of the alternate take 5 of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," cutting out a lot of the reverb added in the 1980s by Emerick; "Revolution" appears without its lead guitar overdub; and we get the famous-ish "Peter Sellers tape," a bunch of fragments given to the actor by Ringo and featuring various rough mixes of eventual White Album touchstones, with most of them missing certain elements or offering a subtly different experience, never in especially strong quality; "Blackbird," "Don't Pass Me By" and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" offer some intriguing moments but not enough to reward extremely close or repeated listening.

The next few discs delve further into marginalia, which in the case of this particular album is not exactly inappropriate. We've heard some of these bits and pieces officially, like Lennon cracking up at some of the "What's the New Mary Jane?" lyrics, and Harrison calling out George Martin for being "very negative" during the "Sexy Sadie" sessions -- this slipped out during the obligatory bit of the Anthology documentary about the tension during this period. Such tensions, by the way, are present here and there in certain moments, but by and large the band still seems to work rather well together apart from some understandable miscommunications and annoyances, most of which aren't easily audible; my thinking remains that the band took out their confusion and exhaustion in musical terms rather than blowing up at each other in the studio -- not to mention the fact that Paul and George both seem a bit too passive-aggressive, Ringo too passive period, to give vent casually to any problems rather than letting them fester and blow up, as evidently happened outside the confines of the studio, or slightly later in the band's history.

"Sexy Sadie" occasions a few weird, jammed-out sidelines, like something called "Fuck a Duckie" that sounds like a murderer flipping out, or like the Beach Boys' "Ding Dang," take your pick. Lennon sings the hell out of an improvisation labeled "Brian Epstein's Blues," which carries a note of tasteless bitterness since it comes so soon after the title figure's sudden death. We don't get to hear the original "Sadie" lyrics, when it was still "Maharishi, you fucking cunt," but John does interpolate the next line, "who the fuck do you think you are?", at one point. Obsessives might end up wanting to crank the dial way up to hear some of the conversations playing out over various monitor mixes. For the rest of us, there's a very dry mix of "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" that's missing a lot of vocal overdubs and tracking, and boasts some extra screams at the end that sound extra "Revolution 9"-ish, suggesting that the Beatles -- or at least Lennon -- wanted very much to preserve that particular burst of dreadful energy for the very end of the record. There's a discarded organ or harmonium fragment for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (take 1, the acoustic version) and lots and lots of goofing off during the "Hey Jude" sessions, captured as well on monitor mixes, including a short take on "St. Louis Blues" that apparently made it to the new box.

Some other intrigue abounds related to "Hey Jude." Many years ago, when I was about eight years old, my dad was friends with a bona fide Beatles collector who let me copy all of his BETAMAX tapes of various Beatles-related visual materials, which is how I saw the last three of their feature films, all of which were then (and one of which remains) out of circulation. Also in the mass were an episode of the godawful Beatles Saturday morning cartoon (the one with "Slow Down," which Ringo (!) sings to a runaway donkey) and, oddly, the then-unreleased Rolling Stones film Charlie Is My Darling, and then a washed-out, tantalizingly inexplicable fragment of what appeared to be the recording session for "Hey Jude." As it turned out, this was a bootleg of a BBC documentary whose cameras in fact captured much of a full day of Abbey Road rehearsals -- on July 30, 1968 -- of the song (which was ultimately recorded at Trident Studios), and all I really had was a small extract. Twenty full minutes eventually made their way to Youtube. But for years I thought I had something really special and unique; you can hear all the musical parts of the video here.

There's a short burlesque of the song labeled "Las Vegas Tune"; a take that has some vocal mugging from John and George's infamous answering guitar line, subject of a huge rift between him and Paul that may have led to him sitting around chatting during the film clips instead of actually participating in the rehearsals. John and Paul try to break the tension in their usual fashion with facetious arguing and joking; for all their problems down through the years, John seems to be the only person who really knows how to "handle" Paul in his most coldhearted asshole mode, and in turn is the one person who seems able to snap Paul out of it. Across all the session material we have, we rarely come across a situation when John is ornery or unreasonable, his attitude always is to dissipate or break tension with silliness or joking. This probably just means he too had a passive-aggressive streak, as inclined as he often was to speak his mind unfiltered; because in later years he'd always complain that Paul got what he wanted in the studio more often than he did, which baffled George Martin -- undoubtedly because John never fought for the records the way his partner did.

The rest of the actual outtakes are more scattered across the expanse of the eventual two-record set, and even outside of it. We get to hear how George's "Not Guilty," which probably belonged on the album more than "Piggies" and would eventually be rerecorded on one of his own records, the Beatles' version released in truncated form on Anthology 3, dissolves into an impressively hard jam. As if to prove it wasn't just Lennon who could stare into the void with his increasingly unmoored singing, there's a truly hellish vocal fragment of Paul working up his fury for "Helter Skelter," followed by an unedited master of that song missing a few overdubs. Remember the non-song "Can You Take Me Back" buried between "Cry, Baby, Cry" and "Revolution 9"? You can hear the whole thing here, in apparently longer form than on the official deluxe set that's coming, along with some attendant diversions: the kissoff joke "Down in Havana," the released jam "Los Paranoias" that here goes on forever, and "The Way You Look Tonight" refashioned with "I Will" lyrics. We get a fragment of "I'm So Tired," take 14, that's much harder than the released performance, or at least seems so; and while I'm usually not much for monitor mixes, this one is kind of cool, with a crazy guitar-organ opening that sounds amazing and an extra guitar toward the end. The six-disc set out in November includes two takes of "I'm So Tired"; hopefully we'll be getting some of these elements in more audible form.

Such substantial morsels are the exception, but the smaller treasures aren't without appeal. For those of us to whom "Dear Prudence" is -- along with "Long, Long, Long" -- the most sublime moment of the Beatles' finest album, even such tiny revelations as a backing vocal fragment, and a bit of chatter after the fade, or extra vocals on alternate mix (and a lot more processing on John's lead on another early mix) are a joy to hear even if not as much as real outtakes. Other behind the scenes tidbits are a little more superficial but still fun: some weird organ rehearsals, George flubbing his "Piggies" lines ("in the sties with all their baking... fuck") and an unused creepy-laugh overdub for that song, an even creepier organ overdub for "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" with some other additional instruments that render it a bit too busy; and Paul's charming coda to "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?": "Do you think I could do it better?" There are a few rough mixes preserved, including an early "Mother Nature's Son" on which we can hear some Paul laughter and more of the horns. Finally, there's an early stereo mix of "Hey Jude" with a soulful, bluesy McCartney vocal all in the left channel, and a much cleaner, more tinkly-sounding piano; because of the awkward separation of instruments, the sound is overall less robust.

This portion of the set ends with something called the "Postcard Sessions"; what is this? This is the 1968 Beatles, on their very best behavior, chilling with Donovan and playing acoustically for a while, that's what. It's charming but its appeal is probably limited to whatever overlap still exists between big fans of both artists. I like Donovan okay but everybody sounds a little tired and phony here.

Purple Chick gives the last four discs, or two groups of discs each, their own subtitles. Nine and ten are assigned the irresistible label The Beatles Go Too Far, and is primarily concerned with audio evidence of the more avant garde portions of the White Album sessions. While very little of the finished record qualifies as any more avant garde than, say, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the moments that do reflect those impulses on the part of three of the four Beatles certainly color most widespread memories of the album, and obviously played a huge role in its cultural legacy, in both good and (live shot of Spahn Ranch) bad ways. Nearly the entirety of the ninth disc is taken up with the sessions for take 20 of "Revolution 1" -- the first full track undertaken for the record -- the performances and playbacks of which are captured, it seems incidentally, by Yoko Ono's tape recorder as she dictates her personal diary or various random private thoughts, some of which ("you become naked," etc.) would find their way to the album. While the ethics of hearing this are somewhat questionable, and while most fans will bow out very quickly because there's so much Ono and you have to strain a bit to hear what's interesting about it -- largely a glorified, very very long series of monitor mixes -- to Beatle-heads, for me personally the cumulative effect is unforgettable. Somehow, this random act of rambling while a band plays in the background manages to become nearly as strange, remarkable and oddly admirable a piece of avant garde rock & roll as "Revolution 9" or Two Virgins. It's a completely unintentional (probably) piece of "found art," really, but for this listener it's perhaps the most enjoyable disc in the entire set, next to the now-redundant Esher demos, and of course this is hardly something that's ever likely to see the light of day in an official sense (if Apple even still has access to the raw materials).

What it also offers is a stunningly intimate look at a certain moment in the personal histories of the Beatles, specifically John, and Yoko Ono; she's rather bracing in her frankness, discussing the couple's habits during ejaculation at considerable length and rather condescendingly labeling Paul her "little brother" (I love Yoko to death, in fact I'm a massive fan of her music and think she's seemingly a very cool person, and she and John obviously brought a lot of good out of each other, but you do sort of get why her presence often annoyed the piss out of the other Beatles, right?), and sometimes coming off as refreshingly observant in the way only an outsider can be: "There's definitely something very strong," she says with admiration, "between John and Paul." There's a lot of anxiety about getting the other Beatles' approval, a ship that probably sailed before she ever had much of a chance thanks to John's bullish insistence on her occupation at Abbey Road, but most fascinatingly -- and a bit chillingly -- a lot of fear about the other shoe that had yet to drop in the matter of John's marriage. "I'm nervous right now because I'm always trying to find out when Cyn is coming back," she all but whispers. She spends lots of the time talking directly to John as if he's in the room with her rather than on the studio floor, and occasionally she does interact with him when he drops in the room for a playback -- at one point he takes over the recording for a moment for a slightly patronizing, annoyed-sounding reassurance that he misses her too and can't wait to be done for the day. We have plenty of evidence that John never figured out how to be in a relationship while he was a Beatle, and as amusing as this is, it just furthers that impression. Not that it's all any of our business.

What is our business is "Revolution 9," which filtered and compressed all this into a finished recording that remains one of the most audience-friendly pieces of musique concrete ever released, and one of the most impressively audacious things a mainstream rock band has ever put on an album. And for those of us who love the track -- and if you don't like it, no offense but why are you so boring? -- Go Too Far offers something truly special, an actual "alternate mix" that will really fascinate you if you've wasted as much mental space inadvertently committing the thing to memory as I have, for the many differences in the fidelity, placement and length of the various loops is quite absorbing, and suggests that multiple passes were taken at a good number of elements within the piece.

The other main attraction of Go Too Far is "What's the New Mary Jane?", a delightfully weird creation of John and Yoko's that John at one point wanted to release as a single, one of his more batshit ideas that nevertheless has a certain twisted logic to it if you consider that "Strawberry Fields Forever," in its fashion, was just as weird and was a worldwide smash. The alternate mixes of "Jane" here offer plenty of good times if you're on the song's peculiar, tossed-off wavelength -- another Beatles song it somewhat resembles is "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)," but it's much more threatening -- and are able to hear it more as a Plastic Ono Band experiment. There's a lot of messing about with it in the alternate mixes, including free-jazz overdubs, some bloodcurdling screaming, a great bit of Yoko vocalizing, and some other eccentric behavior justifying John's Anthology 3-preserved chide "Let's hear it, before we get taken away!" It's all great but the one problem is John laughs too damn much throughout the entire recording and mixing process; it's harder to get caught up in the thing's menacing or totally beyond-the-pale qualities when he thinks it's so innocently hilarious, though conversely one thing many people miss about Ono's art and music is the consierable humor in it, so maybe it's a good thing.

Disc ten closes out with fragments and repeats -- including even more monitor mixes of "I'm So Tired," with another rough vocal track and lots of wavering, seemingly a tape or transfer flaw. "Not Guilty" appears again somewhere around here too. For a song that was trashed after 102 takes, there sure was a lot of business around "Not Guilty."

The last two discs, subtitled Whitecasts, are the most disappointing offered by Purple Chick, probably, and you get the feeling there was some sort of reason they wanted to stretch the thing to a whopping twelve CDs, because none of this stuff really belongs. We get the versions of "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" from the songs' music videos (or, in the parlance of the time, "promo films") which were done in conjunction with a mimed performance on The David Frost Show; they're not really live takes, apart from parts of the vocals (it's very cool, however, to hear the "shoo-be-doo-wop" backing from "Revolution 1" on the fast single version), so they don't honestly need to be here, especially with every single slight variance in their transmissions preserved. You get to hear the Beatles play Frost's theme song, but you can hear and see that on the fine Beatles 1+ DVD and Blu-ray, or hell, on Youtube. Of all the boring and repetitive stuff completists foist upon us in these bootlegs, I might find all this the most mystifying. Five barely different versions of "Hey Jude" and it's not even really a live performance in the first place? I love the song, but that's 35 pointless minutes. (The video is wonderful, but even the two versions of it on the DVD set are kind of a stretch.)

Less repetitive but equally ponderous is the full audio, it seems, of Ringo Starr's 1968 appearance on Cilla Black's variety show; Cilla was a Beatles-associated discovery. She used to be the hat check girl at the Cavern in Liverpool, the band's onetime home base. She was taken under Brian Epstein's wing and became a big star in England, not so much overseas, and her intricate associations with the Beatles continued pretty much permanently. Ringo mugs, chats, reads viewer mail, and sings, and no matter how much you love the old dork, it's all insufferable. Purple Chick doesn't preserve other TV appearances like this in these deluxe sets (there's a second set of semi-associated bootlegs, called "Lazy Tortoise," that's supposed to gather all that loose ephemera), so why this one?

I'm somewhat more understanding of the other big inclusion here, the raw materials from the long-unreleased concert film Rock 'n' Roll Circus commissioned by the Rolling Stones. This has a fine performance of "Yer Blues" by John with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell (from the Jimi Hendrix Experience); it's not really Beatles content, but hey, it's a Beatles song, and it is a good rendition, with John obviously thrilled to sing on an actual stage again, though being the aforementioned Yoko diehard I prefer the throwaway "Her Blues" which features her jamming on typically confrontational vocals with the same supergroup to a pretty enthusiastic reception. Ahead of their time, it seems. The problem is all this repeats multiple times with slight mix variations, and I -- and most of you, I can promise -- simply don't care.

Again without much context or explanation, we also get an interview with John by British broadcaster Kenny Everett, practically a baby at the time, and this is actually fun, though it too is repeated for incomprehensible reasons. John torments Kenny to great comedic effect and drops almost no worthwhile information at all -- probably intentionally -- except that "Don't Pass Me By" is currently being recorded. Lennon is as hilarious as ever, strumming a fretless and singing aimless "theme songs" for Everett. It's maddening and weird and funny and slightly mean, like this bootleg... and hey, like the White Album itself.

The Beatles (1968)

(Apple)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The bare white is a mask for the chaos waiting within the jacket, the combustion and electricity of the discs hidden by neutrality. Blistering, expansive, confounding and unsympathetic to explanation, it's a record of brilliantly uncontained impulse. The package's nonchalance seems well prepared for the controversies it would ignite and had already greeted, from serial killers to wives to fuming band members and producers. The final result is one that stands apart from anything else the Beatles released, particularly in their later period. The guard that tends to stand so solemnly between band and audience is absent, the rigorous control of output along with it, so that the album, deliriously eclectic and seeming -- on the first few listens -- maddeningly disorganzied, seems like maybe the truest document of these four men ever put on record.

"Four men" and not a band because, in most respects, this isn't a Beatles album as the term was previously understood. That they chose to title it with their own name almost seems to indicate a recognition of irony. It's not simply due to the fact that each member steps up to the microphone and the others -- often only one or two or even none of them -- function as a backing band, because let's not forget that the Beatles were really John Lennon's band early in their career. What it amounts to is the shock of the degree to which the synchronicity and energy that once seemed to be second nature to the entire band, functioning as a single unit, has faded. They sprawl in at least three different directions. The songs don't even grapple with the same themes anymore, and for certain the tracks on this sprawling double album aren't as directly personal as the early Beatles. In the complications it embraces, however, lies something even deeper.

Each Beatle's indulgences are stressed here, but fortunately they were all in a creatively fertile state of mind. George's songs are preachy but funny, John's are anthemic and naive but moving, Paul's are silly but cutting, and Ringo is Ringo but he's also Ringo. The worst tendencies of each Beatle aren't here because they hadn't yet succumbed to them, but every quirk of Lennon's seemed to irk McCartney and vice versa, while both got on George's nerves and all three bitched enough to make Ringo walk out for a few days. Yoko having a bed in the studio somehow didn't even things out, and the increasingly vocal George Martin was beginning to have reservations about the band's material. The songs were mostly a result of an extended hiatus in India after Brian Epstein's death, and there were tons of them, the list stretching to a Brill Building-sized catalog in itself. The only solution for these four territorial men was to create a massive two-record set encompassing everyone's work but, of course, mostly John and Paul's. Martin was adamantly opposed to the idea of a double album and was convinced several selections should have been left off entirely. He had never been so wrong about anything before.

The White Album, as it's known, was something no member of the band was entirely happy with, but it's perfect in a sense they couldn't possibly discern because it exists away from their standards. It's the sort of music they'd never made before and had perhaps no interest in making. The production retains an experimental edge but takes a back seat to the songs, which are neither typical songwriterly fare or the pseudo-poetic surrealism the Beatles had popularized of late. Many of them possess a sharp, (marvelously) mean-spirited satirical edge that make the Kinks' most vindictive songs seem trivial and overwrought. Of course, other tracks on the album are nonsensical rockers, some are ethereal ballads, some seem like practical jokes. There's nothing tying them all together except the random, tangential connections they suggest. The tracks don't consistently segue, but they ebb and flow, winding along in links that seem almost organic, haphazardly thrown around but growing along one another like twisting vines. The tapestry gives the ninety-minute album a unique sense of journey. This extra touch is precisely what an album with thirty songs desperately needs.

Paul has the most consistently entertaining material, opening the record with the audacious Beach Boys-Chuck Berry parody "Back in the U.S.S.R." He's never been funnier than on this album, his mocking edge at its sharpest. It's difficult to discern if some of his songs are send-ups or not: the sliding riff rocker "Birthday," the over-the-top bubblegum of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," the brief failed experiment "Wild Honey Pie," the antiquated but fun ballads "Martha My Dear" and "Honey Pie," and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," which is either a snoozing waste of space or a missile launcher directed against the Rolling Stones and other cock-rock pioneers. McCartney's apathetic anything-goes stance could be a protest against years of fame and expectation, or it could just be his state of mind at the moment. The product of it is riveting either way.

"Rocky Raccoon" is obviously off-the-cuff -- and hilarious -- but it continues to show a man more willing to hide in the ridicule of clichés than to expose his own emotions. Even the quiet, moving "Blackbird" is a metaphorical, classically pretty song John Lennon would never write, from the same school as "Mother Nature's Son," scenic and melodic but again seeming to expose no more of its author than "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?". He's impenetrable... with two exceptions, and these are noteworthy because they mark a unique moment in Paul's career.

"I Will" and "Helter Skelter" couldn't be more different, but they are McCartney's best songs of the period. The former is a touching love song that hides behind nothing and, at less than two minutes, never contemplates wearing out its welcome. It doesn't even seem trite in retrospect following the next song, John's devastating "Julia." And "Helter Skelter" stands as one of the latter-day Beatles masterpieces, its guitars rolling and stuttering in a way both erotic and repellent, the lyrics consumed with desire and forgetting wholly about logic and coherence in the process. For four minutes or so, Paul almost sounds like a rock & roller, and the Beatles roll with it, culminating in the impossibly intense climax.

Ringo, the man who, at the close of "Helter Skelter," screams in pain, offers his first solo composition. "Don't Pass Me By" is sincere country in direct contrast to "Rocky Raccoon" but the sequence seems quite natural, and the song is surprisingly good, helped by wall-of-sound production that has Ringo at his best, ignoring drum conventions while singing his heart out. He does the latter again on the silly "Good Night," John's intentionally overproduced LP-ending track that does take on a degree of poignance after listening to the whole of the White Album, but infinite irony when laid up against its immediate predecessor, "Revolution 9."

Perhaps because of the length, George is more a presence here than on any other Beatles record. All four of his songs are good, even with "Piggies" a bit inconsequential -- the James Brown explosion "Savoy Truffle" is a stronger novelty -- and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" nearly crushed by ponderous arena-rock guitar theatrics from supreme showoff Eric Clapton. But the tense, barely audible, breathtakingly dynamic "Long, Long, Long" is a forward-looking masterpiece that nearly tops "Within You Without You" and "What is Life?" in the Harrison catalog and sounds like nothing else the Beatles ever laid down; it's one of the few times George really compels as a singer and as a writer completely in touch with his genuine emotions, soon to be joined by "Something."

He remains a minor character compared to Paul and John, though, and indeed John on this album is still recovering from a severely aloof phase and no longer has the power or presence to be identifiable as the band leader or even its main creative force. Not one of his songs is even slightly weak, however. Only twice does he take Paul's all-a-big-joke veneer, on the wicked self-parody "Glass Onion" and grandly colorful "Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill." Otherwise, he populates his compositions with himself more than on any LP since Rubber Soul. The gentle, triumphant, ever so slightly ominous "Dear Prudence," the album's finest song, cannot be denied as one of his most uplifting works ever, while the delicate "Julia" may be the most personal song he ever wrote, so much so that it can be a harrowing, difficult listen. Even the lighthearted "Happiness is a Warm Gun," a lavishly fragmented piece that was later imitated by Paul on "You Never Give Me Your Money," is in sonic terms a close match for the lurching, painterly "Strawberry Fields Forever." Even in the backseat, Lennon was a consistently demanding and rewarding performer.

When he wants to bruise, he scars. "I'm So Tired" is a brief cut of magnetic, horrifying power, "Sexy Sadie" a character assault in the Dylan vein, infuriating and electrifying in its casual slaughter. Dylan is namechecked in the White Album's most addictive cut, "Yer Blues," a mammoth rocker with boiling rage that's a close match for "Helter Skelter" if it's not superior and features some of Lennon's greatest, most aggressive guitar playing outside of Yoko Ono's "Why." He can have fun, too; the twisted fable of "Cry Baby Cry" carries one of his best setups, and the ringing, furious "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" is the Beatles' most exciting pure rock & roll performance on record since perhaps the Hard Day's Night era.

John's, and the album's, most memorable and fascinating cut is the one everyone else including the producer wanted cut from the running. The sound collage "Revolution 9" is long, frightening, funny, and truly briliant, showing a band that, in the end, was not unwilling to leap into a grand risk and came out of it with a piece of work unique in their genre. Those who regard "9" as an abortion or a black mark on the Beatles' record would do well to listen with their ears instead of their precedents. Supremely ahead of its time and -- unlike most avant garde pieces -- worth hearing again and again, it documents and magnifies a world of chaos in a still-striking manner that can become almost therapeutic.

Even if all four Beatles never stood by this album, even if its very slapdash presentation seems to represent an instant rebuke of its own excesses (recalling Epstein's terrified request for brown bags to put over the front of Sgt. Pepper), it presents parts of them that we would never see again amid the familiarity of a returning favorite, and for that reason it's invaluable both on its own and as insight into a group that made such a difference in its time. But there's more to the White Album than historical document; more than anything else they released, it's alive. Too varied to ever grow tired, too unresolved and strange to ever stop at least partially confounding us, it's somehow unified in its lack of unity. Like so many of the greatest rock albums, it couches genuine eccentricity in the universal rhetoric of pop, and the cumulative impact of its messiness speaks loudly and uniquely; even if it's not really the same band that recorded Rubber Soul, it's a culmination of the same narrative, and to me at least, the greatest long-form achievement within that narrative.

***

[Expanded a bit from a review first posted in 2003.]

Our midnight world, just me and you: September 2018 music diary

Blood Orange: Negro Swan (Domino)
Massively disappointing, the exact opposite trajectory for this artist from what the last two records would've led you to hope. It's a bland, faceless neo-soul record very occasionally interrupted by a jam (the Miguel-like "Chewing Gum," the droning "Charcoal Baby," plus respectable misses like "Minetta Creek," the sound of R&B faintly heard from across the street), more often interrupted by the most annoying current trend in R&B, the sanctimonious and contrived-sounding recordings of faux-spontaneous, like, "inspirational" chatter from various people, filled with buzzwords that, however helpful they may be in the presnt moment ("spaces" is the one that gets my goat for some reason), will sound as bizarre and cultish as Est in twenty years. Not to sound like a conservative commentator, and I'm sure I will to some of you. This is partly the influence of A Seat at the Table, but those interludes were brilliant, cleverly interpolated and had reason to be on that record. Here they are distracting, pointless, and ill-matched with middle-ground songs about waiting for the headache to go away. You'd almost give anything for the old days of the obnoxious rap skit; those usually sucked but they had a tiny bit more entertainment value if no more re-listenability. The music isn't bad, simultaneously taking cues from quiet storm and the lushest '90s soul, and it all fades into an agreeable busk at the end, but where's the fire? I understand not feeling up to having fun at the moment but this dude doesn't have the chops or the mystery to be goddamn D'Angelo.

White Denim: Performance (City Slang) [r]
Eclectic classic rock jammers, hailing from Austin and industry vets now (they've backed Leon Bridges), seem at first glance too annoying to take seriously with, on this goround, their Ty Segall-like pseudo-blooze and psychedelia, and the often pompous, irritating vocals. The enjoyably showy guitar playing is agreeable enough to distract for a time, indeed just enough time for the songs and production to fully seduce you. Songs like "Double Death," "Moves On" and "It Might Get Dark" (which sounds uncannily like some lost early solo George Harrison cut) are insanely convincing as pastiche, like they're beamed in from alternate-history AOR stations, and there's no denying that they're pretty great pop music on the whole. "Good News" even has a sweet John Sebastian lilt about it. It greatly confuses me how much I enjoy this.

Troye Sivan: Bloom (Capitol) [c]
Youtube star -- the album cover is a very strong "am I supposed to know who this is?" trigger -- based in L.A. (of course), has been on Ellen and Fallon a few times, flirts with late-nite EDM on the two most accomplished songs here (the admittedly infectious "My My My!" and its marginally less adolescent clone "Lucky Strike"), which won't prepare you for the nauseating familiarity of everything else on offer from Sivan's stable of song-factory composers and producers, and his singing is all over the map on top of that. I don't believe the articles about younger generations not having sex but finding out that this is considered erotic music by the poptimism knuckleheads sure makes me wonder.

Anna Calvi: Hunter (Domino) [r]
As brutal as it looks on the outside -- like a non-ironic Andrew WK -- but ever so tightly controlled, the third album by this formal but confrontational British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has virtuoso, starkly recorded guitar and numerous PJ Harvey echoes, plus provocative lyrics delivered nicely by her room-filling, operatic voice and much giddy wrestling with identity, gender, sexuality. From track the first she sings of "walking and talking as a man" and later commands "don't beat the girl out of my boy"; look, we all love Bowie, but not all of us can make something this engaging out of it. The music draws from unexpected sources later on, like disco and jazz, but never loses its addiction to the hypnotic urgency of the clean classic rock that gives Calvi's work its sense of largeness.

Idles: Joy as an Act of Resistance (Partisan) [r]
Second record from unapologetic barroom Bristol punks comes out of the gate sounding as muddy and unfinished as Protomartyr, as rude and indulgent as Sleaford Mods, and singer Joe Talbot sounds occasionally like Paul Weller trying to tap into the hardcore market. It's all very British and very throwback -- fuckin' 'ell it's Fred Titmus and all that. Underneath the stultifying (if sometimes amusing) self-seriousness, though, along with the sense that they're not nearly as young and badass as they want to sound (the contrived finale has Talbot repeatedly chiding "keep going! keep fucking going! smash it! ruin it!" but we're so used to his sarcasm that it just sounds like someone winning at bingo), there are shots of politically sound wit confronting and rejecting the inevitable skinhead contingent. The catchy, thrashy "I'm Scum" offers the instantly immortal "I don't care about the next James Bond / he kills for country, queen and God / We don't need another murderous toff." Only a little less perfect is "whitey wants his country back / fifty-inch screen in his cul-de-sac." "Danny Nedelko" narrates the worldwide refugee crisis less artfully than Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever but no less compassionately, and with relentless bass and a Pavement reference besides. Worldly lads, they cover Solomon Burke -- quite well -- and riff on Hemingway too. They come down hard on toxic masculinity with the one-two punch of "this is why you never see your father cry" and "I kissed a boy and I liked it." So these are responsible punks, sliding sometimes into Cowboy Mouth-like motivational speaking, other times allowing a short enough break from attacking bourgeois complacency, racism and homophobia to give vent to something as funny as "Love Song"; without hearing the way Talbot sings it you can in no way comprehend how funny "look at the card I bought / it says I love you" is. It all gets a bit old and ordinary when you're not completely in the throes of the moment they're making, but it's all respectable and probably necessary, the kind of reclaiming of aggressive but good-hearted maleness we know from Killer Mike, Joe Strummer, etc.

Spiritualized: And Nothing Hurt (Fat Possum) [c]
Is this what audio dorks mean when they talk about "listener fatigue"? No longer "space rock" by any comprehensible measure, Jason Pierce's ragtag unit soldiers on with album the eighth, one with nary an original thought in its goddamned head. It's the Lovin' Spiritualized, for the most part. Actually it's just Wilco. Or maybe, here and there, bad Oasis. The uncharacteristic blast of melodic George Harrison guitar lines on "I'm Your Man" is an outlier against music that's almost uniformly slow and insipid. Pierce's voice has become exhausting in its whiny preciousness. The two least irritating cuts, "On the Sunshine" and "Morning After," are both barely disguised clones of his best latter-day tune "Hey Jane," only adding "European Son" bass and a cool free jazz interlude in the latter case, but every repeat listen reveals that there's even less on these songs, or on the rest of the record, to actually hear. It's all just copies of copies of copies.

Yves Tumor: Safe in the Hands of Love (Warp) [c]
If not for the vocals, this session from a hot Italy-based electronic producer might be nice for a casually urgent Saturday night party in the city, but apart from the not-bad, Panda Bear-derived "Noid," the more the sound of the human voice gets centered here, the less tolerable it all becomes. The tracks resemble '90s trance at best (think Paul Oakenfold or Faithless), rap-rock at worst, but they're almost all pretty dumb and silly, and oddly aggressive, in the end.

Joey Purp: QUARTERTHING (s/r) [r]
Joey Purp sounds angrier than he used to, as is the case for probably all of us. The few times he gives vent to the old mumbling goofiness it's on clones of his best song to date, "Girls @"; and he still sounds beholden to trends that might now be a step ahead of him, even though you have to admire him for the way he pulls for himself. Often the best stuff here is from guests. The '90s excess of "Look at My Wrist" -- he has DVDs, baby! -- boasts an odd, engaging guest verse from Cdot Honcho. And the finest track included, "Fessional/Diamonds Dancing" frontlines both Purp's best and most eccentric rapping here and a great, victorious contribution from Queen Key. "Lebron James" sounds like the Tales from the Crypt theme but delivers on none of the promise of its title. Ultimately it's a grab bag, like a lot of modern rap albums and tapes.

The Mountain Goats: Hex of Infinite Binding (Merge EP)
Insubstantial stopgap release is John Darnielle's only real studio offering for 2018; it's not without merit but definitely exemplifies something other than my favorite variety of Goats material, though it will generate some warmth for marking the return of his guitar after Goths -- the electric picking on the opening cut "Song for Ted Sallis" is excellent. This is followed by the starker "Almost Every Door" with a great hushed vocal and a Chumabwamba reference, but the two songs on the back half are pretty forgettable. (Amber commented that one of them sounded like current-decade Decemberists.) But that's really why we have releases like this, isn't it?

Aphex Twin: Collapse (Warp EP) [r]
I suspect this young man, "Richard James," is primed to go far in his field -- this twenty-minute session is filled to the brim with the sort of delightful tweaks, blips and beats so currently popular with the younger set, and dealers can buy the disc with confidence that it will land high on the popularity charts.

The Goon Sax: We're Not Talking (Wichita) [r]
At a half-awake glance this sounded to me like what I expected Car Seat Headrest was when I'd just heard the name, which is an improvement on the real thing but just as naive. Something about the simultaneous pettiness and honesty of the words, though, kept my attention: "Lookin' at my bank account and I'm feelin' lonely cause I've got no money and my TV's not working and I've got no patience cause I don't speak German and now I'm back home and no one's calling but I'm not pickin' up the phone." (And you thought this blog's sentences ran on.) It's standard Twitter mumbling but captures the attendant angst with unusual directness, and further research turned up the fact that this Brisbane trio is led by Louis Forster, son of Robert; if we're going to have a poet laureate of the social media years, it's hard to imagine a better lineage. Still, these are brand new high school graduates and the shots of beyond-years maturity on "Sleep EZ" and the verging-on-brilliant "We Can't Win" are the exceptions, but that's kind of a relief too... especially when Forster and his bandmates James Harrison and Riley Jones evoke the clean, nervous sound of Buddy Holly and the Crickets updated with sensitive striped-sunlight gentleness as much as their (considerably older) peers like Twerps and Courtney Barnett.

Richard Thompson: 13 Rivers (New West) [r]
Thompson's best work in years doubles down on his familiar eccentricity without apology, while also refusing to simply bask in past glories like so many other veteran performers. He doesn't have the gift for the kind of endless invention exhibited by fellow surviving '60s vets Dylan, Ono or (until recently) Cohen; the songs do mostly sound similar, moodly sea shanties and old-world ballads with sharp guitar lines and debts to European folk. What's undiminished are his natural gifts as a singer and guitarist; if he's not the writer and lyricist he once was -- and sometimes he can still jolt you, like when "I wanna make cupcakes with you" is commissioned as a come-on -- his convictions as a performer are wholly intact, which closes much of the gap. The songs are either foreboding and insistent ("Storm Won't Come") or sweet yet aggressive ("O Cinderella," "Do All These Tears Belong to You?"), and share a commonality: an unwillingness to surrender, which may finally be Thompson's greatest weapon in old age, along with his willingness to try and fail. Appropriately enough, "Trying" is a case in point: a slinky bass and terrific chords set a scene that falls apart in a weak chorus that just incessantly repeats the title. Just as often, a well-turned hook or vocal line redeems something relatively poor like the riff-driven "Tears." On top of the pure enjoyment on offer here, he does manage to conjure up a few new classics. Most engagingly weird is the Shoot Out the Lights-like "You Can't Reach Me," which comes on like John Cale covering .38 Special; and the loveliest Thompson tune in more than a decade, the intricately picked "No Matter," which calls up the hard-won optimism of his Fairport years and even comes with real inspiration on tap: "I'm living on fantasy, real life's too good for me / let me disappear from here, and be no one."

Low: Double Negative (Sub Pop) [r]
Prolific midwestern dream pop trio returns with their twelfth album, sixth on Sub Pop, which has garnered their best, highest-profile reviews of this decade so far. Their sound remains a distinctive blend of sophisticated harmonies and a blown-out, maxed-out feeling akin to shoegaze; with one foot in metallic, garish doom and the other in the ecstatic ether, it's a bit like viewing a gorgeous skyline from a drab office building, but as mood music or ambiance it's truly sublime, especially the highlights that find a groove and double down on it: "Always Up" and "Disarray," the latter of which reminds me a little of the Beach Boys' "Til I Die."

Paul Weller: True Meanings (Warner Bros.)
Weller has been prolific in recent years, this being his sixth LP in just over a decade. Having never warmed at all to the smug and dim complacency of his solo records, I'm quite surprised by the eclecticism on display here, though it's rather baldly something he achieves by sheer costuming. The opener "The Soul Searchers" fuses Leslie Feist with Steely Dan and manages to grow quite haunting, and "Mayfly" is classic needy Weller despite its calm and bluesy vibe. But after that, it's a game of Guess the Veteran Singer-Songwriter Being Imitated -- in order, by my count: Randy Newman, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Richard Thompson, probably Paul Weller somewhere or other, and there's a pretty decent song called "Bowie." The production is lazy and slick in typical classic-rocker fashion, sappy Hollywood strings making an unwelcome entrance eventually, but he really does sing on this record, exercising a throaty conviction almost unrecognizable from his punk years -- and if anything, selling the argument from numerous '70s critics that he was never much of a punk in the first place. The same winning melancholy you hear on later records by the lampooned idols permeates here, especially on "Moving On" and "Wild Horses," and the sobering thought you have is that despite the gulf between their ages, defining eras and experiences, these really are all peers now, aren't they?

noname: Room 25 (s/r) [hr]
Highly distinctive Chicago rapper made waves back in 2016 with her mixtape Telefone; her debut album calls back to early Tribe and Digable Planets in its attentiveness toward jazz and mid-1990s soul music, her attack of evocative words mixed low against an inviting pillow of quiet, groove-based R&B and a touch of '70s Beautiful Music. The unbroken conversational feeling of her rapping is like the hip hop equivalent to Ruth Radelet's undaunted, emotional but never showy vocals for Chromatics; in both cases, it feels like something private we're only reluctantly given permission to hear. The narrative is upheaval, and it's also highly personal, humorous and extremely specific to her own experiences, which are strange, sexy, goofy, intense, and I hope the gawking press attention doesn't make her regret opening up so much. "I know you never loved me but I fucked you anyway" is tossed off like a gag but it's weighted down with pain, curiosity, maybe regret and maybe not, and ends up coming off as devastating. "My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism" is witty, surreal, but it's also a political statement, and in these times an incendiary one. The layers of intention and meaning come fast and hard everywhere, always without so much as blinking -- "the secret is I'm actually broken," she announces, before placing her own pain in musical context: "Somebody hit D'Angelo, I think I need him on this one." The intensity of an internal conflict born of actual life lived, it isn't self-indulgent, it sounds hard as fuck to put down and deliver, especially with such unerring eloquence and distance, and all while serving up tracks as delicious as "Window" and "Montego Bay" and (in terms of the verses) the MVP "Part of Me." The moment when you feel the world changing under you, though, on "Ace," is when Noname, Smino and Saba work together to push back on mainstream rap (the charting superstars "sound like they wearin' adult diapers"), ticket prices, Republicans, Morgan Freeman, and, well, just let her tell it: "Globalization's scary and fuckin' is fantastic." To quote a much less interesting and inspired artist, I guess this is growing up.

Christine and the Queens: Chris (Universal)
Garish French pop celebrated for no-nonsense, outre identity. Quite apart from such commendable elements, it sounds pretty watered-down to me. The French-language version is a lot more fun than the English, but either way the songs are forgettable.

Advance Base: Animal Companionship (Run for Cover) [r]
The new moniker isn't really new anymore; CFTPA hasn't recorded in nearly ten years now. And Owen Ashworth has settled into a perfectly reliable, oppressively sad groove with each successive record more meticulously depressive and monochromatic than the last. This is a concept album about pets, but really it's about -- as usual -- relationships, typically broken ones. The songs that tower in their fashion, like "True Love Death Dream," are terribly slow; the melancholia is often unbearable, or cathartic if you need it to be, on the likes of "Dolores & Kimberly," "Christmas in Nightmare City" and the slightly countrified "Rabbits." It all sounds like falling snow, with the same hungover dark-night hopelessness as an old Peanuts special, and the same boundless faith in animals, persuasive enough to have him actually barking. Ashworth's arrangements remain deeply evocative, more so than his lyrics that often seem to dip into a depressive chiding that resists poetry ("you could have a real house if you just left New York"), and his continued pulling of old keyboards out of the woodwork remains an engaging subplot. Is that a Rhodes on "Your Dog" and "Bark Bar" or just a fine simulation? Out of nowhere in the middle of all this, he covers the Magnetic Fields' swimmingly blissful "You and Me and the Moon." It comes off well but is such an immaculately composed song that it does point up the limitations of the rest of this material, though no matter, it's still a fine cycle of tunes even if it leads you down a bit of a spiral.

Lyla Foy: Bigger Brighter (s/r)
Foy's debut from 2014 was one of the most underrated albums of recent years; it was so completely ignored that she seems to have been dropped from the Sub Pop roster and is only now following up. What made her work so much stronger than many of the minimalist and far less interesting singer-songwriters who've found success in the years since Mirrors the Sky was the thrilling craftiness of her writing, songs overflowing with hooks and a powerful pop sensibility despite their hung-back, unadorned recording style and her straightforward but evocative vocals, which made up for any shortage of lyrical ideas. On the second record she's still fixated on pop, with traces of R&B appearing on the piano and beat-driven "Bring Flowers," soft rock on "Ice Bar," but the songs are much weaker, preoccupied with circular melodies and structures that fail to offer sufficient variance from track to track. The title cut, lush and sensual and strangely rushed-sounding, is quintessential; and nothing here is bad, but there's usually some caveat: the rather poor Jonathan Donahue guest vocal on the otherwise propulsive "Far Behind You," or the close similarity of "Try My Heart" to earlier material. Several songs sound like clones of latter-day Feist, perhaps because Foy's voice is similar, but it's worth noting that this is not something I ever noticed when listening to Mirrors. "Ice Bar" is the big winner, though; still less intimate than her best songs to date, but boasting a fine refrain and the moody chill of a midnight winter drive.

ALSO RECOMMENDED
- Daniel Bachman: The Morning Star (Three Lobed Recordings) [stark guitar sound combined with intrusive, guttural, feisty atmospheres; "Sycamore City"]
- Israel Nash: Lifted (Desert Folklore) [oft-lovely Neil Young-style pop-folk suffused with romantic haze; "Looking Glass"/"Rolling On"/"Sweet Springs"]
- Ariana Grande: Sweetener (Republic) [millennial pop star seeks out an even balance between the commercial weird and the commercial pleasant dominated by Pharrell Williams' writing and production, never wears out her welcome but the most outrageous cut is the only outright victory -- super-disappointing Missy Elliott verse, too; "The Light Is Coming"]
- Odetta Hartman: Old Rockhounds Never Die (Memphis Industries) [you're extremely unlikely to hear a more likable eccentric in Twenty Eighteen; this is a full-voiced folkie and passionate weirdo, and her second record -- rife with banjos and beats -- is both personable and delightfully disorganized, evoking Ray Davies and Gillian Welch and, hell, Captain Beefheart; "You You"/"Misery"/"The Ocean"]

ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES
- Ross from Friends: Family Portrait (Brainfeeder) [and to think my ambient side project under the pseudonym "Schneider from One Day at a Time" never took off]
- Gabe Gurnsey: Physical (PIAS) [tripping in a brightly lit room; "New Kind"/"You Can"/"Heavy Rubber"]
- Felicita: hej! (PC Music)

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME
* Adult.: This Behavior
* Maribou State: Kingdoms in Colour
* Menace Beach: Black Rainbow Sound
Tunng: Songs You Make at Night
Interpol: Marauder
Sauna Youth: Deaths
Oliver Coates: Shelly's on Zenn-La
Chilly Gonzales: Solo Piano III
Ital Tek: Bodied
Eric Bachmann: No Recover
Paul McCartney: Egypt Station
Kandace Springs: Indigo
Haiku Salut: There Is No Elsewhere
Sarah Davachi: Gave in Rest
Lonnie Holley: MITH
Denzel Curry: TA13OO
The Field: Infinite Moment

REJECTS
Tony Molina: Kill the Lights
Kathryn Joseph: From When I Wake the Want Is [NYIM]
Gaika: Basic Volume
Our Girl: Stranger Today [NYIM]
Alexander Tucker: Don't Look Away
Nothing: Dance on the Blacktop [NYIM]
The Devil Makes Three: Chains Are Broken
BC Camplight: Deportation Blues
The Lemon Twigs: Go to School
Mark Lanegan: With Animals [NYIM]
Joey Dosik: Inside Voice [*whispers* fuck. off.]
Muncie Girls: Fixed Ideals [NYIM]
Thou: Magus
KEN mode: Loved
The Pineapple Thief: Dissolution
Wild Nothing: Indigo
St. Paul & the Broken Bones: Young Sick Camella [NYIM]
Clutch: Book of Bad Decisions
Mothers: Render Another Ugly Method
Emma Ruth Rundle: On Dark Horses [NYIM]
Guerilla Toss: Twisted Crystal
Wayne Shorter: Emanon [NYIM]
The Dirty Nil: Master Volume
Alejandro Escovedo: The Crossing
Dilly Dally: Heaven [NYIM]
Marc Ribot: Songs of Resistance [NYIM]
Joyce Manor: Million Dollars to Kill Me
Gazelle Twin: Pastoral
Villagers: The Art of Pretending to Swim
Suede: The Blue Hour

ORPHAN TUNES
Our Girl "I Wish It Was Sunday" [Stranger Today]

OLD RECORDS RATED/NOT REVIEWED THIS MONTH
Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One (Fontana 1965) [hr]
Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume Two (ESP-Disk 1965/1966) [hr]
Nina Simone: I Put a Spell on You (Philips 1965) [r]
Nina Simone: Pastel Blues (Philips 1965) [hr]

Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (2006)

(Matador)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

[Note: Below, with some hesitation, is my original review of this album from about a month after its release, so please keep in mind the context of the culture in 2006. Then and now, I consider the record a masterpiece, as I did from my very first listen -- something that almost never happens to me, and only has on three occasions since (whokill, Modern Vampires of the City, Yeezus). For me it told two simultaneous stories: one about effortlessness -- the band that can do anything they can think of, like Prince circa Sign o' the Times, or the Beatles circa White Album -- and one about the fierce passion required to create the illusion of effortlessness. That same passion, in retrospect, serves to indicate a well-read consciousness that, beneath the quirks and jokes and personal asides, the anxiety of the Bush era was impossible to avoid, was creeping in to all aspects of daily existence. It has since, of course, taken over, and while all four Yo La Tengo albums since 2006 have had plenty of merit, only their latest, There's a Riot Going On, makes any attempt to contend with the fallout, fear and desperation for hard-won peace in our day to day lives. Domestication in rock music is tricky. It can be treacly, or pedestrian, or even overly didactic. By never resorting to the grandiose or to pretension, an act that would be fatal for any number of other bands for whom ego and loud self-assertion are undeniably integral, Yo La Tengo document a story that seems small at first glance, but really is the ideal expression of the chaos that can occur within a state of relative normalcy, the biting of nails even as you know you are loved. The older I get, the more this seems incredibly profound to me, perhaps because it mirrors my own lifestyle -- which is, I recognize, an extreme degree of privilege -- but also because it reflects an interest and recognition in the value of the mundane that I associate just as strongly with Hollywood comedies of the Depression, the sensation that human experiences both good and bad belong to absolutely everyone.

Talking of growing older, I inevitably disagree with certain comments made in the paragraphs to follow, and I've also edited out a bit of fat. Actually, I've edited out a lot, but not all of it was fat. I originally structured this as both a review of Beat Your Ass and as a confession about some problems I'd been going through in my personal life that I'd been reticent about discussing with friends. Perhaps it's a testament to the record's greatness that I associate it with one of the worst times in my life, probably the worst time, yet I still can't get enough of it; as the song goes, "we were young" and it was nobody's fault, and now it's another lifetime and almost everything that could change long since has. I am not comfortable reproducing that material here, so this is a version I cut down and posted some time later; you can still read the original post at my personal blog if you dig for it, and it's alarming to me how different my outlook on relationships was then. Which I would imagine is why I singled out "Sometimes I Don't Get You," nice as it is, as one of my favorites. ("The Weakest Part" was and remains one of the most beautiful songs in pop music about staying in an untenable relationship.)

At any rate, I grew to like "Song for Mahila" after hearing it live and learning to live inside its sweetly probing guitar lines; and to love "The Race Is On Again" as its Byrds-isms and harmonies became gradually more affecting; and just this year I've started to appreciate "I Feel Like Going Home" at last, thanks in large part to Georgia's vocal. I clearly was already enamored with "The Story of Yo La Tango" in 2006 but I should have said much more about it; this is the kind of song -- not only because of the recording itself but because of performances at many of the nine subsequent YLT shows I've seen -- that has now taken on a real air of importance and history for me, and at this point the snowball effect has left it almost unbearably touching, and it's clearly intended by the band to be a monument of sorts: a slowly building cacophony that seems to be reflecting on the very fabric of the relationship among the people playing it, and maybe those of us listening, and always by the end it seems like a wave made to blissfully wash us away, like "Blue Line Swinger" a decade earlier. It's now almost certainly my favorite song on the album, and -- every time I put myself through it -- a thrilling, cathartic experience, but who am I kidding, so is the entire album.]

***

Quite a few people reading this have grown up at the same time that I have and are therefore presumably at the same state of (im?)maturity as me, so I have a general question for all of you: The older you get, do you find that you understand less what separates the commercial from the uncommercial? I'm just wondering if it's me, or what. When I pull out the new Yo La Tengo record, very unfortunately titled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (only their third worst album title ever), I find myself incapable of determining what makes this "indie" and what makes much of what's on the radio "popular." That's because a lot of those things are based on chance, obviously, but it just underlines how little quality or "commercialism" has to do with the distinction. There's a lot of top 40 stuff I like and an overwhelming amount of self-important reactionary "indie" stuff I hate, which is possibly because many of the younger bands have been raised on this notion that good music is somehow an exclusionary notion, that it separates the smart from the dumb or the cultured from the isolated. None of that is true. One of R.E.M.'s least commercial songs ever is their biggest hit. And Yo La Tengo, who may well be the most fulfilling and varied rock band to surface since the '60s, still aren't on the radio and still even have some sort of indie "stigma" that mischaracterizes their audience as a broad group of music store clerks and rock critics. Who invariably are fans, it seems, but that's because their music is hard to resist, to even the seasoned, hipper-than-thou crowd.

This album features what I believe is Yo La Tengo's first ever "anthem," "Black Flowers," a march of sorts with cheekily overbearing production and lyrics that is nevertheless given the ring of complete sincerity by bass player James McNew, who lately gets one song per album that generally stands distinctly apart from the material of his cohorts (he sang my favorite song on Summer Sun, the Pet Sounds tribute "Tiny Birds"). McNew's vocal performance makes this track soar, and it does this alone until Georgia joins him at the finale. "Black Flowers" would fit right in on modern rock radio today — McNew's vocal style is in vogue at the moment, something that will probably never happen with neo-Ira or Georgia, as the Velvet Underground have unfortunately proven by failing to ever break the Top 100 — amid many bands who are doing the exact same thing in far less interesting or revealing ways. Maybe "independence" means a lot less than individualism, and that's what makes Yo La Tengo great, what makes Madonna great despite the fact that she sells a lot of records and that's supposed to be bad, what made Brian Wilson great despite all the drugs, what makes Prince great despite the religion. Yo La Tengo almost seem at times to exist in a vacuum, as the Beatles once did. Each album seems a self-contained reaction to little more than the one that came before it. It wasn't always this way.

The ad Ira and Georgia placed in the Voice in 1984 called for guitar and bass players who were familiar with Love, Mission of Burma, and the Soft Boys. In order to be hired, former bassist Dave Rick had to give Love's original name over the phone (the Grass Roots, in case Ira and Georgia ever ask you to join). Yo La Tengo's first record, Ride the Tiger, is in the perpetual shadow of folk-rock and early '80s indie, is produced by Clint Conley of Burma, and features a Kinks cover so reverent as to be almost hilarious, along with Ira's distinctly angry and defensive vocal style, a Lou Reed drawl he developed with considerable ease and nuance on New Wave Hot Dogs (featuring "Lewis," which the Velvets would have slowed down to a crawl and which YLT mercifully doesn't), which nevertheless still has the mandatory Velvet Underground cover, albeit an obscure one beautifully sung. President Yo La Tengo is an even better record, but the band is still making music — as they continue to on Fakebook — for people who already love the kind of music they love.

Whether the hiring of James McNew in 1991 changed their attitude or whether his entrance was just a timing coincidence is hard to figure, but the band's maturity on their next three records was well beyond that which they had previously exhibited (Fakebook having been a covers album for the most part). May I Sing with Me, Painful and Electr-O-Pura are still the most commercial-sounding albums they've made, May I Sing fitting in with the post-Nirvana haze without being able to make the lucrative connections their peers Sonic Youth did at the same time, Painful reversing the My Bloody Valentine concept for a major label and even generating slick videos and a fairly hot-sounding single, and Electr-O-Pura being one of the few records that completely defines the "alternative rock" moment of the '90s. From there onward, the band is in their own universe, developing ideas as if an island, recording every style of rock music that's ever existed and plenty that haven't, one day the loudest band in the world and the next day the quietest. But nowhere is their complete creation of a singular universe clearer than in the singing. Kaplan doesn't belt things out these days, nor does he ape Verlaine or Reed, he whispers sweetly and casually; there are certain songs on the last several albums that would be outstanding even if they were nothing but his voice: "Our Way to Fall," "Last Days of Disco," "From Black to Blue," "Season of the Shark," the actively stunning "How to Make a Baby Elephant Float." Georgia's vocals have become no less assured and for me, she's not just the best singer in the band but maybe in the world, and many would argue she isn't a singer at all. And she can play the drums pretty fucking hard while she does it, too; she did a great "Little Eyes" in Asheville [in 2003] amid the banging and her voice remained remarkably soft and even inviting.

There are also the lyrics. Except on Tiger, the band always had good ones, but their focus has changed. Ira and Georgia were married in the late '80s, but only since the new century rolled around have relationships become his primary focus in songs that seem at times painfully personal, a condition no doubt enhanced by his wife's presence just behind him at the drumkit. "The Crying of Lot G" is, like Lennon's "Well, Well, Well," less a song than a random confession set to music, though Kaplan prefers cooing to John's screaming. It sounds like a song about a fight, though such presumptions may be unhealthy. The trend continued with Summer Sun's delirious collection of love songs to Georgia, from the troubling "Don't Have to Be So Sad" to the sweet "Nothing But You and Me." Going a bit earlier, "My Heart's Reflection" may well be the most moving love song of our time, capturing with VU-like urgency the passionate and complete need for somebody right now, this minute, in total and almost scary conviction. I wouldn't want to assume anything about Ira and Georgia's relationship, now in its third decade, being his subject matter of choice (and maybe hers, in her less oblique material; "Today Is the Day" certainly raises questions), but they could not possibly deny that it holds considerable weight with their image, that it affects the way people listen to their music. Spin's review of one album wondered if "Autumn Sweater" was about them cheating on one another. "It's nice," said Ira, "that people care." Kaplan was also once asked if he minded people asking him about the marriage. "Not if they don't mind me telling them it's none of their business." It isn't, but the way it's captured in the songs is.

Another question. Do you remember a few days ago when I quoted someone saying that the biggest fan of any given artifact is the one least qualified to judge its relevance? I'm about to commit the crime of proving it. I am incapable of being nonchalant or critically sharp on the subject of Yo La Tengo. It is just never going to happen. I am a shameless mound of hero-worshiping dirt here. If this displeases you, skip the rest of this and know only this: As usual, they have surpassed expectations and delivered a nearly perfect A++ record, to my mind their fifth in a row. My Beatles comparisons will only get worse from now on, I'm afraid. So I can't recommend this album highly enough. Now read the review if you want.

The album has what I think instantly has become my favorite first few seconds ever. Georgia beating the drums with the strength of a thousand, Georgia laughing softly if you turn the volume high enough, and then the hardest, dirtiest, most triumphant riff Ira's ever played. We made it, bitches. We are back on the air.

An eternity after leaving Summer Sun with the ethereal, in retrospect ominous cover of Big Star's "Take Care," Yo La Tengo immediately counter anticipations of their demise with this first track, "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind." Wide criticism of Summer Sun and, to a lesser extent, the prior album was that it was so bereft of rock songs that the band was sliding into easy listening. This was untrue in either case; Summer Sun was lacking in guitars, but there are many other Yo La Tengo albums with nothing but guitars. As much as I loved Summer Sun, however, even I was relieved by the news that Not Afraid would be a return to the mixture of noises, peace and chaos, that embodied I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, their most eclectic album of all. The consistency of Summer Sun was kept in place by dropping a few loud songs that were subsequently included on an EP, Today Is the Day. While Sun is not to be faulted, it may in fact have faced off nearly all of its critics with the simple inclusion of "Styles" and "Outsmartener," and yet so what? It's perfect the way it is, and now I Am Not Afraid will hopefully allow people to hear it for its own virtues.

Because this album has it all. It's like a reunion with a friend. "Pass the Hatchet" is ten minutes long. It has processed vocals, and handclaps! Yet nearly everything else on the album is even more surprising. Summer Sun managed this the first time around, but Not Afraid continues to catch me offguard after five complete listens. One way in which it has proven Sun detractors correct is that it's the first Yo La Tengo record ever on which the least effective songs (relatively) are almost invariably the slower ones. Meanwhile, the unwieldy 8+ minute jams are, this time, addictive tracks I defy you to skip. These are no "Sunsquashed" endurance tests: "Daphinia" is a beautiful ambient piece, "The Story of Yo La Tango" is unfortunately not a tango but still beyond reproach and dazzling. As for the ballads: "I Feel Like Going Home" and "Song for Mahila" are sweet but mildly trite, "The Race Is On Again" — highly appropriate title notwithstanding — just feels anonymous. But true story: I thought "Season of the Shark" was anonymous in 2003 and I was once bored by the whole of May I Sing with Me. So these feelings will probably change. Still, what is up with the lyrics on "Mahila"? Did Yo La Tengo have to prepare material for a Jerry Lewis telethon? If so, I apologize for this joke.

The rest of the album contains nothing but forward-looking, boundary-stretching but instantly appealing Yo La Tengo, wrapping themselves around every idea with unflappable energy. "Mr. Tough" is insanely cool late-'60s soul with the potential to be world-saving massive; the horns are wonderful, and the bridge, driven by Ira's remarkably emotive piano solo, is glorious enough to knock anybody's defenses down. This and the other songs here are, like "Black Flowers," notable for sounding nothing like Yo La Tengo have ever sounded before. I can't get over the eclecticism displayed by "Mr. Tough"; it's on the level of stuff the Clash did on Sandinista!. Add "I Should Have Known Better," their most relentless rocker in a decade or so, to the list; this one, too, could sell a radio listener on them while defying all logic: the guitars (and organ) are turned up higher than any metal band's [do metal bands have organs?], but James and Ira mumble the words, refusing to look for emotion in the obvious places. "Watch Out for Me, Ronnie," finally, is truly special. Coming from anyone else, this filthy, enormous garage band tune might be precious or derivative, but the commitment to a great, awe-inspiring time here is such that if it's just rockabilly-revival Nuggets stylistics, it jumps to the all-time top of the heap. People have done this before, but nobody has ever put this much behind it, and just as significantly, Yo La Tengo have never done anything like it before. To argue that the placement of something like this on an album and in a catalog full of things with no obvious similarities is to ignore the nature of bands like YLT and the Velvet Underground, who refuse to confine themselves yet rarely stumble in their efforts to unite a hundred years of history under one roof. If anything, Yo La Tengo have been around long enough now that we can safely say they've taken their cause to places Reed and company couldn't have imagined, from undersea documentaries to kids singing "motherfucker" at the top of their lungs. And hey, Yo La Tengo even write their first bit of total hippie shit with the excellent and wildly psychedelic (and jazzy!) "Point & Shoot." Make love not war, indeed!

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass also contains an interesting quirk that might go widely unnoticed. It's only the third Yo La Tengo album ever that includes not a single cover. It's a kind of irony given how much work is done to make them sound like a band that is only just discovering how they want to make music, so exhaustive is its investigation of genres and ideas. That said, the album's two best songs are pure Yo La Tengo. But again, they jump to the top tier of the catalog easily. The delectable, easygoing "Sometimes I Don't Get You" is soul, beach music, love, and weirdness, as apt a description of the band in general as I can muster up without mentioning feedback, which the song doesn't have. Ira sings it with curiosity that transcends bitterness and resists the temptation to emote excessively over the wondrous Motown bridge. It's funny, it's sad, it's universal, it's so them.

My favorite track for more reasons than I want to count here is "The Weakest Part." What I can decipher of the lyrics are astonishingly personal and lovely, and wise. The song sounds like Brill Building pop, or the Beach Boys, but written by a band that understands these forms intimately. "Beautiful" isn't enough to describe it. I love it because it could not have been written by anyone else, and it could not have been written by the people who wrote it ten years ago. I love the lilting, soft, sexy elegance of it, but I love even more the way the rhythm and drums and muscle drive it forward with strength, the kind of thing so few bands can manage that Yo La Tengo could do in their sleep. I love Georgia's vocals, some of her most expressive ever. I love knowing that it's possible for a band to have been together for twenty-two years and still be improving. I love how this song and the band that performs it make me wish I could do what they do.

In an old review of an unrelated album that I'm otherwise too embarrassed to let anyone see (which, as you now know, is saying a lot), I did say something I still like, which was "The album is like a gift for having survived adolescence." I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, aggressive name aside, is like a gift for surviving young adulthood and sticking it out through today. Snapshots of the last four years that come into my head may be, by some standards, uncomfortably reliant on pop culture and other frivolous things, but I'm not ashamed to tell you that one I never seem to shake is the image of standing at the Orange Peel watching Ira Kaplan attack his guitar during "My Heart's Reflection." There was nothing else in the world at that moment. Sometimes I think there still isn't.

***

[Again, originally posted in 2006, heavily edited circa 2008, and here we are.]