Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me (2010)

(Drag City)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

You know why I think the White Album is the Beatles' best work? Because it's like the aural equivalent to Frederick Olmstead's landscape architecture (Central Park, Biltmore Mansion, World's Colombian Exposition; read Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, possibly the greatest book of the last decade, to learn about him) -- it's overwhelming, huge, and it only reveals itself with time. It is too much to process at once, and too good to appreciate immediately. Full of nooks and crannies and secrets and weird winding alleyways, it's sprawling but precise. Its precision is designed to look messy and cathartic, because the album is long -- incredibly long; 30 songs, over 90 minutes, more than twice as long as any other Beatles LP -- by necessity. It's a massive thing to tackle because that's the way it had to be, born of the near-total lack of synchronicity between the four band members at that time. Instead of compromising, they let it all out, and the result barely hangs together and is awe-inspiringly wonderful.

I'm a minimalist by nature. I think most pop songs should be shorter than they are. I think movies should almost never exceed 109 minutes, and really think Freaks and Dumbo had the right idea by barely hitting an hour. Some people say this is because I have a pathetically short attention span, but I don't even remember who those people are. The thing is, Joanna Newsom's new album appeals to me despite its audacious length (a triple album, it's roughly 33 minutes longer than the Beatles' opus) because every second of it is measured, emotional, crucial, needed... sometimes funny, sometimes weird, sometimes sad, always thoroughly compelling. I let Kubrick get away with his long movies because Kubrick is someone who you're willing to give your attention to for three hours, regardless of what he's talking about. Joanna Newsom is the same, but she's not giving you an endurance test here; you're not allowed to complain that Have One on Me is too long. It isn't even the heavy workload that all that Beatles pop bliss was. It's designed to be taken slowly. It might be more accurately described as a trilogy of albums than as a single triple album. It could fit on two discs but Newsom would rather you let this wash over you so you can build your relationship slowly. And she's not in a hurry for you to realize it just might be a masterpiece. But I've spent three months with it now: It just might be a masterpiece.

Conceptually brilliant, the record's divisions become clearer over time. From the time I've spent with the lyric booklet I think I can work out that it (often loosely and/or metaphorically) covers the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship that's fraught with fear and doubt from the beginning. But I work better with feels and musical ideas than with lyrical themes, so I've come to think of LP1 as the pop record, LP2 as the folk record, LP3 as the psychedelic record. I don't mean to suggest that the three are each a stand-alone product, because they refer back to one another in ways it make take us all years to realize, the way Pet Sounds and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea did. But I think this is the way to explore the album: to take on each record as its own work, get to know it, and move onward, thus giving the final full listen the same sense of journey I still get from the White Album and the only other exceptionally good triple album I can think of, 69 Love Songs and Sandinista!. (Sorry, All Things Must Pass.)

We did give the record a cursory listen when we finally got our hands on the set and the pleasures were frequent, but flew by too quickly to catch or concentrate on. So it has to be noted: As background music, Have One on Me does not work. It doesn't work all that well in the car either, at least until you know it really well. I will concede the immediacy of The Milk Eyed Mender is mostly faded, and you have to work a bit more than you did to find the stark, effortless beauty of Ys (the slightly strained seriousness and pretension of which have also receded, thankfully)... but you don't have to work to love the album, it's just a different animal and needs to be heard differently than you expect or it might appear. It's a quiet, detailed, intricate recording and it needs your full attention to be adequately appreciated. And it is never boring, but before you know the songs, two straight hours is a bit much and not the revelation reviews like this might lead you to expect. Take some time with disc one when you don't have anything else competing for your attention. Ready? Good, now let's talk about it.

***

The very first sound you hear on Have One on Me is Newsom's voice, and it marks a departure out of the gate. Newsom's singing was altered permanently by a vocal cord injury during her promotion of Ys; she now sings lower and slightly more "conventionally," though hardly in the obscene American Idol manner the word might imply. But if you think this might rob her voice of some of its distinctive personality, worry not -- it doesn't, and if anything her singing is now more expressive and varied than ever before, occasionally calling to mind Billie Holiday as much as Joni Mitchell. As if to match the new tones of her vocals, the songs have become subtler, more sophisticated, the compositions tighter and more adventurous and surprising, lacking the (however appealing) ramble-ons of the previous record. "Easy" is a conceptual rather than visceral opener. Longish and tricky and slow, it documents a bed occupied by a couple at the eye of the hurricane, peace and oblivion with the constant threat of passing time and looming conflict just beyond the bedroom door. The slow crawl forth of a string quartet precedes Newsom's piano, returning at last after its Ys hiatus, and cinematic arrangement. Already the song structure is warped, but seen in the light of the album "Easy" is downright conventional, its repeated parts clear and obvious, its tempo only slightly wavering back and forth for its six minutes.

But Newsom wastes no time tripping onward into surrealism and head-spinning aural restlessness with the title track, some bit of business about Lola Montez and the "Spider Dance" that she claims is about public female exploration of sexuality. The words evoke Wonderland, or Medieval Europe, but the startling fact here is the music, with breathlessly moves from delicate folk to hopping, marching clap-alongs and orchestral soundscapes and one entirely new melody after another, one sudden shift in tone, style, and production after another -- over eleven minutes of secrets and revelations. "Have One on Me" (the "one" seemingly being a poisoned drink from a trusted fellow human; you're welcome) is appropriately named, setting as it does the stage: cryptic but weirdly perfect lyrics, and wildly unpredictable, hushed, intensely felt. As soon as you've resigned yourself to the odd beauty of one moment, another comes careening around the corner. It could be at least a dozen songs... all of them memorable.

For act the third, another left turn, here into simplest folk with brevity. "'81" finds Newsom and her harp singing (more beautifully than ever before) about a solo walk through the Garden of Eden -- the title is a numerical homonym, the lyrics in fact referring to "AD 1" -- but the voice aches with seductive loss. Her melody is infinitely persuasive, but the way she lives in every word, it doesn't even need to be. With "I believe in innocence, little darling / I believe in everyone," time could stop, and she achieves this as easily in under four minutes as she just did in almost twelve. But that's the thing: She always gets there on this album, and she always knows just how long to stick to it.

My first of five nominees for The Song of the Album follows. "Good Intentions Paving Company" is atypically literal, less atypically personal, sad, and witty ("How I say to you 'Honey, just open your heart' / When I have trouble even opening a honey jar"). The song seems to be about travelling a long distance for a lover and experiencing the gradual law of diminishing returns on the other's end with repeat trips. She sings of wanting her man to pull over the car and hold her, and of torturing herself over complex relationship details during flights from far away, surrounded by vastness and weighed down with a heart full of same. Extraordinarily catchy and involved, the piano-driven "ooh ooh"-filled highlight flexes Newsom's more conventional compositional muscles. The bridge and verses are obvious here, but she still plays with structure enough that the return of the backing vocals six minutes in is cause for joy... like a familiar landmark on a highway. The track is simply stunning in ways previously unexplored from Newsom.

With its melancholy "in your arms" refrain, "No Provenance" could be born of the same week of writing as "Good Intentions Paving Company"; it certainly seems to reflect similar structural and lyrical ideas, and sequels it neatly in the lineup. You're less likely to hum "No Provenance" a few days later, and if anything this song leaves one wanting more, retaining its subtletly throughout. It is meant to be heard carefully, to have its pangs of doubt weighed and understood. Magical, jazzy forms and careful intimacy sharpen the blade. Newsom's production places her harp in the center but the emphasis -- particularly as the song progresses -- is on the complementary instrumentation, and most of all on her voice, which continues to discover new shades and tones heretofore unimagined.

Nominee for Song of the Album #2 is "Baby Birch," -- a lullaby like the later "Esme," only this child was never born -- the purest and most persuasive pop song of Newsom's career to date, albeit slow and fiery and nine minutes. But the song's spare sound (harp and vocal only until the stirring conclusion) and elegantly concise melody give Newsom the opportunity to approach soul -- soul of the highest, most seemingly supernatural and permanent variety, like Sam Cooke singing "Tennessee Waltz" or Aretha Franklin on "Do Right Woman" -- in her vocal, which is so effortlessly gorgeous (but hardened, even angry, always bursting with feeling) it could make you weep. There simply aren't many people alive at any given time who can sing like this, much less than can write and play like this simultaneously. Somewhere buried in this magical, pure, brilliantly considered moment is five decades of the right things in rock & roll, and this is what maturity should sound like. And then the rest of the band comes in and seems to drive the song to altogether different waters. You will not hear a more moving song this year. (And if only you could see her play it live, folks, the way we did first; try to.)

So that's Record One. What do you think? Listen again, come up with insights undoubtedly better than mine. Spend time with it. Put it on shuffle, whatever, doesn't matter. If you have the vinyl -- which is mastered fabulously -- leave that on your table for a while. Don't move on until you feel acquainted with these six songs. It won't take long.

***

Interlude #1:

In the last week of March, Amber and I saw Joanna Newsom at the Carolina Theatre in Durham. For a venue of its rather substantial size, the theater offered an intimate and highly comfortable, hushed, elegant surrounding for the sharing of one's art with a thousand or two while allowing each forged connection to seem immediate.

We had the odd experience of hearing many of these songs live before in any other context, as we'd been unable to locate the record and I had steered clear of leaks. This did not rob them of their immediacy. She played most of the first record and touched on the others after opening solo with the morbidly friendly "On a Good Day." And "Baby Birch" jutted out like the glorious lament that it is, its frayed emotions shimmering. Her band crafted a gigantic sound, and her rapport with them was palpable when she joked about not knowing whether her harp was in tune or not. It was a night of beautiful, passionate music played by someone at the top of her game. People spend lives obsessing over the great rock & roll of the past; this is happening right now, art and personality and invention of the highest order. Go see her!

***

And I assume you are now ready for Record Two. It's this one that may have the most in common with Newsom's first couple of albums, but that does not make it significantly less a revelation. And the woman greeting us with "On a Good Day" has grown considerably older since The Milk Eyed Mender with its many sprightly morsels. The song is barbed, wicked, deceptive as it reflexes back on its own optimism: She's saying hello on a nice day, but the clarity makes the imminent end (of love? a state of mind? the world?) too obvious not to lend a sense of doom. Her celebratory cooing segues into mourning as she shakes her head at the choices you've made that keep you far from her "love for you." All this is explored in under two minutes, lending any additional credibility (if needed) to the more rambling tracks: Newsom knows when economy is necessary, and keeps this heavenly, sobering beauty quick and cutting.

As on the first LP, the second cut travels into storytelling and metaphor. "You and Me, Bess" is a complete seven-minute opus about a girl put to death for stealing a horse. Newsom explores something new here -- menace. (Listen to the brass.) Instead of gentle strokes at her harp, here she seems to pound at it in broad, workmanlike gestures as though chopping a tree. The connections to the title track are inescapable -- a woman serving her own interests, inciting awe and rage, and our heroine here must then pay the price. In composition, this song is more grounded than "Have One on Me," but it compensates in its increasingly full, claustrophobic production, placing the listener in the oven, or the gallows, closely recalling (perhaps intentionally) Leonard Cohen's ethereal "Joan of Arc," replete with beautiful la-la choruses.

And closing Side Three is my Nominee #3 for the Song of the Album. "In California" has folks from all over falling over themselves with Joni Mitchell comparisons, and these are not inappropriate; for me, this is more a mark of how dramatically Newsom's voice has changed than anything (listen to this and "Peach, Plum, Pear" side by side). I find this to be a microcosm of the feel of the album, even more so than the title track because its words are more direct. Musically, it's one beautiful and brief passage or refrain after another. Vocally, Newsom continues to startle and amaze with her readings, which seem so blatantly capable of rendering banalities sublime that she could easily get away with being a far less inspiring lyricist than she is. But I have a feeling -- backed up because the song is directly reprised in about an hour -- that the story being told in "In California" is in many ways the story of the album as a whole, repeating its themes of relationships in unfamiliar territory as heard in "Good Intentions Paving Company," here rendered less confusing and far more submerging and sad, the sound of a person sinking... slowly, very slowly. The gradual transformation (rather than rapid changeover) of the song to the boisterous menace and then anguished cry it becomes is as galvanizing as anything pop music can bring us. And yet again, you want every section to stretch on longer than it does; after eight minutes, you are still left longing for more, more of everything.

Despite Newsom's choice of a triad division, there is a stark and seemingly deliberate change in tone at the halfway point of Have One on Me... it becomes an even more intricate and more difficult album, the melodies more subtle, the production less intrusive, the arrangments more obtuse. Even more than the first nine cuts, the final nine demand to be listened to very carefully. Most of the songs before this point could work equally well out of context. With two exceptions (and your mileage may vary), these songs rely intently on one another. At the opening of Side Four, Joanna announces "I was tired of being drunk / With my face cracked like a joke." "Jackrabbits" -- only Newsom and her harp -- is the most deliberately paced song of the album, but one of its most purely beautiful: When she feels like it, Newsom falls into a "tell you that I can love you again... love you again" chorus of shattering vulnerability; it sounds like a difficult to confession or conclusion to make, a tortuous song to allow oneself to sing. This builds onto its languid perfection until the casual atmosphere becomes as pointed, hushed, elegant as all that's already been revealed to us.

The same confessional tone, vocals in the center, a quiet and direct communication that builds into a shouting, leads us into the lengthy, fiery "Go Long." Lyrically, Newsom goes for the jugular, consciously artless and accusatory: "You think you can just stop when you're ready for change / Who will take care of you when you're old and dying?"... (Note the Lennonesque rhyme avoidance there.) Musically, it's a thing of complex beauty, harp and strings crafting a baroque wintry landscape that envelops the listener... but for the duration, all is not well. "You have done harm," she tells us.

My fourth nominee for the greatest Have One on Me cut has been my favorite for some time now, "Occident," and I've lived with it long enough now to believe it may be the record's greatest moment. It's a strange choice in a way because it is among the most conventional songs of the album, few wild tempo changes and aural tricks. It is strongest for me precisely because it is so subtle, carrying the same beauty that passes so divinely through so much of this magical record, here muted and explored carefully, slowly. It helps to know the album's other secrets. Having seen all that she and her music can do, when she hits that one special two-note piano lick on "Occident," it is heartplay. Her vocal is more ragged here as well, unpolished passion cutting through all the guarded witticisms and poetry of Newsom's confoundingly impressive 2010 lyrics (the lovely turns of phrase come too fast to capture in the proverbial bucket: "slow heart, congregate") -- every time her voice cracks and tears, it seems like a secret's being revealed. Her ability to sound like a different person from song to song is startling -- the impatient, commanding, world-worn lady here ("What in the world are we waiting for?") a stranger to the optimist and poet of "'81," the wide-eyed secret hope buried in the honey-jar heart of "Good Intentions" now "so tired of the guessing game." But as wrapped up as you could be in wonderings about all this despair, what emerges above all is that bloody piano, its effortless wisdom and comfort, a perfect evocation of the beating heart amidst all the miserable doorways life requires us to pass through on our way to wherever. I know she's telling a story here, I feel and sense it and someday I'll try to know for sure, but oh, that piano. (And these 5.5 minutes seem achingly short, still.)

Record Two will take longer, especially side two. But affix yourself to it and its bittersweet charms and you will find the incredible feeling of a great work revealing itself to you.

***

Interlude #2:

It was, for me at least, a worthwhile rock & roll moment for whatever pantheon I end up creating someday of same, the ones that actually happened to me that wouldn't seem really rock & roll to the Cleveland museum crowd but that's what rock & roll is, goddammit. That would be seeing the 3-LP package of Have One on Me on vinyl at the Joanna Newsom show for $25 and scrambling to go find an ATM that would take my card so we could run back and buy it. We ended up entering a Marriott to get the cash and ran along the streets of Durham so we could have this elusive record and drive home with it, no longer waiting for one outlet or another to re-fulfill its orders.

I'm not a romanticist about physical media; I download music all the time. I even illegally downloaded this album after we bought the record because unlike many modern LPs, it isn't packaged with a digital version. But I do not believe you can replace the feeling of running through a city to buy a record and then opening it up and perusing the contents and putting the needle on it any more than you can replace the feeling of experiencing something actually new like a Joanna Newsom album by playing your Who LPs every day for the rest of your life. The past may be fertile with revelation but there is no element of participating more divinely rewarding than to become a participant in your own culture, to find the excitement and rolling revealing shades in something that's really new, that's happening now, that will come to your neighborhood next week if you're lucky. Celebrate the golden age by all means, but don't let your own golden age pass by. Every day is something immense.

***

There's no question that the third disc of Have One on Me embodies a concentration of its most difficult moments. By now Newsom assumes you are invested enough to go out on a limb. But the first track is pure bliss: "Soft as Chalk," the last of my nominees for the album's best song, sounds at first blush like a tender love song but, knowing this lady, is probably something far different and far more. No matter; its winding beauty approaches Kate Bush rambles, a stirring and entirely unexpected piano solo cutting through everything. And still this is more pop music, more assured and accessible than likely anything on Newsom's first two albums. Perhaps nowhere else is her evolution so tangible. To listen to this and not be moved in some way would seem quite a challenge.

The confidence mentioned above is key, because as the record moves to its conclusion, the guard Newsom let down earlier on seems to raise itself again. Her emotions do not fray on "Esme" the way they did on "Occident," even though the song itself seems equally sad (a lullaby, it seems, for a young girl) and its arrangement (back to harp-only) more demanding. It's as though the time of mourning has already passes into resignation, as though she is writing and singing of the distant past. On the "kindness prevails" refrain, her newfound soulfulness is commanding instead of vulnerable.

"Autumn" reintroduces Newsom as the virtuostic composer of Ys, in a slightly more bite-sized 8:01. The inevitable practictioners of the "entire album at once" stunt mentioned early in this blog post will begin to lose patience here. The similarities in arrangment to "Esme" immediatly prior may mask the ample personality of the lyric and vocal. The feeling in proper mindset is of being transported. There was a time when middle America left home in droves to pick up songs evoking something so vague and ethereal as leaves falling (see Roger Williams' #1 hit "Autumn Leaves"). Newsom lets out more than one (calculated) anguished cry as she did in "In California," but the tentatively hopefuly horizon that still guided has given way to a lonely dreamscape, a once-beloved place rediscovered dead.

You could be forgiven for forgetting instantly about all the staggering melodies witnessed thus far when confronted with "Ribbon Bows," a song that in every classisist sense I can fathom is just about perfect. Lyrically, I contend this to be her best work so far, documenting and interweaving many kinds of drifting and summing it all up with the tirelessly witty "I take my doggone god to task." But more than ever, even with her harp accompanied by stereo glories, she sounds alone. (If you're looking for verification that you will love Have One on Me, I recommend downloading this track.)

The penultimate cut, "Kingfisher," probably is the most reminiscent (on all three discs) to the previous album, the audacious and delicate stunt Y's, and will be memorized and dissected by many in a similar fashion, including but not limited to those who will be driven to encyclopedias and mythology readers by its progressive trappings, the very title alluding to myth. But as for me, I think this is more than anything a continuation of the prior track's God and love questions, its winding and confusing narrative relatable both to love driven away and God brought in for questioning. Note that musically, the song (like others on disc three) repeats a motif or two from "In California." Although the lyrics are lovely to read and the melody memorable, the performance seems slightly labored, the ideas long-winded and not as personable as are the average for Have One on Me, and I would unquestionably name it as the song I've fallen in love with least. But I'm still glad it's there.

No song on Have One on Me matches the explicit "Does Not Suffice" for lyrical straightforwardness; the song is unequivocally about the breakup of the relationship in "Easy," "Good Intentions," "In California" (which it directly reprises; the entire melody is a continuation), and various others. As many have pointed out, "Easy" and "No Provenance" are also referenced in the lyric; there are more than likely other quotes that the internet has yet to notice. The final minutes of Have One on Me are a wrenching document of the last moments of a relationship, personal enough to be slightly difficult to listen to; the lines that lend the song its title are, in fact, eerily familar to me and I imagine to anyone who has ever broken up or been broken up with. By calling up the previous snapshots we've witnessed and topping them with an atypically fragile vocal, Newsom calls to mind the falling apart of a life slowly built, purpose and regret pushing her in equal measure and opposite directions. "Everywhere I tried to love you," she mourns, "is yours again and only yours." She fades away into echo and the increasingly powerful drums and strings overtake her.

***

Whether Joanna Newsom's third album will turn out to be her grandest statement is impossible to say this early. As broad in scope and crazily ambitious as the record might seem, it is also decidedly grounded and subtle, becoming (musically, at least) more textured and vague as it goes on. This makes it less difficult to imagine how she will follow it. But one thing seems certain to me: she will continue to surprise, restlessly and relentlessly. And in the meantime, she's given us something that is a modern marvel to be treasured, in all its weight and artful shine.

Gene Vincent: Best Of (1956-63)

(EMI)

This isn't the cover art for the CD I have; I can't seem to find that artwork on the Net but this'll do, as it ties in with something I talk about below. There's another disc called The Screaming End, and one called Dance to the Bop, as well as the two-disc set pictured. All seem to be pretty solid collections.

!!!A+ COMPILATION!!!

Gene Vincent was never a huge star. He just changed everything. To hear these violent, raucous songs with their earth-shaking rhythms and ringing, relentless guitars is to hear the stage being set for a great percentage of the best pop music that has been released in his wake. This isn't mere rockabilly; this is the recording of life, and the invention of a world. At least as much as Buddy Holly, Vincent fired the shot heard round the world, especially in England. If Holly sang to the heavens, Cochran to the gut, Vincent sounds as though he is staring straight into you, speaking and snarling at you across a space of fifty years which feel like nothing much.

With his band the Blue Caps, Vincent built on the country music scene in Norfolk and hopped and skipped over the competition. A demo coaxed along by a local talent scout and DJ landed a contract with Capitol Records. Vincent's charisma as a frontman is undeniable, but the Caps were very much a band. The records would count for little to nothing without the astoundingly inventive guitarist Cliff Gallup, to whose widow every British guitarist of the ensuing decades owes a royalty check.

Vincent's only U.S. hit is "Be-Bop-a-Lula," a strutting, confident, pure-sex slow burner of the first order. It was widely mistaken for Elvis because it's practically a cover of the idea of Elvis, like what Mr. Presley would have sounded like if he was as lecherous and dangerously horny as the Christos and clueless parents falsely claimed he was. And Vincent would matter if this really was the extent of his recorded legacy. The song's defiance, lyrically and musically, captures the essential noise of rock & roll rebellion at its early peak. The thoughts and desires come too fast for Vincent to articulate, and that's where we get the roll in rock & roll, and that's how we get the authorities in a tizzy. Even today, the song is scandalous, palpably rising the temperature in any room where you hear it, especially at night.

Despite no further major hits existing, the classics on this disc come from right and left thereafter for the next hour-plus. He's got the audacity to open "Woman Love" with a post-coital chuckle, all swagger and cigarette dust before he settles into singing about fucking and, yes, laughing about it. "Race with the Devil" identifies Vincent's lone actual competition and recalls Chuck Berry's first few singles, capturing cars and Satan with redneck intensity, thereby defining rockabilly forever.

My favorite Vincent track is probably "Who Slapped John?" which lit the room up when I used to play it at 1AM on Saturdays at the Soapbox. From its first electrifying seconds, it's rock & roll the way people who loved it rapturously -- and the way moral guardians who hated it furiously -- wrote about it, the way you'd imagine it if you'd never heard it but had someone describe it to you. To this day, it's maybe the most frequently ripped off song in Gene V.'s catalog; as recently as 2006, my favorite modern band, Yo La Tengo, rewrote it as "Watch Out for Me, Ronnie," but pick any decent rock & roll outfit and they've either covered this or done their own revision. But I could make an equally strong case for "Blue Jean Baby," which is quintessential; it opens as a stark, sweet-nothings ballad and ends up encompassing garage, rockabilly, R&B, and even military marching music. Does any '50s recording more brilliantly cover the kitchen-sink snowballing basics of what this music was, and would become? These two songs are as exciting as anything recorded by the brighter stars of Presley, Cochran, Perkins, even Holly, inevitably bettered only by Berry, Penniman, Bo ("Cat Man" is a Diddley remake), and Ray Charles, but what isn't? Such wild transitions are frequent on the disc. The songs are well-crafted and endlessly surprising; "Bop Street" opens with a Bo Diddleyesque skit before evolving into a curiously yearning Gene croon and finally skittering along into big-beat territory, relentless and psychotic as ever.

Rock & roll this solid can be exhausting. These songs were meant to be heard on 45s, and loud. I mean loud, seriously loud. I recommend sampling the comp a bit at a time. I'm not fucking around when I say this sheer insanity can become oppressive after a while. I am not a "new music sucks" guy but there's not been anything recorded that pounds and screams at you as wildly as this. Every bit of punk and metal that practictioners think is so damn ugly and powerful pales in comparison. "Hold Me, Hug Me, Rock Me" barely has any shape, just an unstoppable pushing forward with orgasmic force. Listen to the way Gene can barely let every word take shape, listen to the way you can hear the walls in the room melting. The band can barely keep up with him, he can barely keep his breath or keep up with the Caps, and so it goes -- replete with guitar solos that make Dave Davies sound like Les Paul -- and that goddamn pounding for two and half minutes and then it just stops and leaves you there. Out of fucking control. But no brute, Vincent could show equal aplomb on a sophisticated (though still lightning-energized) number like "Double Talkin' Baby," with its keen guitar tricks and measured rhythmic perfection. Or display gleeful intelligence and a command of his own abilities with the absolutely delightful delivery of his "Pink Thunderbird" boasts, which stands surprisingly well with similar ideas Bo Diddley was working up at the time.

Rob Sheffield said once that all great songs are either fast or sad, and that's why ballads are usually a sticking point for me from the great rockers. Gene Vincent is different, and this may be one of his most significant attributes, one that lets him stand apart from his peers. His ballads are as exciting as his rockers. His vocal on "Should I Ever Fall in Love Again" displays the same red-hot passion and testosterone -- controlled insanity -- you hear on "Brand New Beat." On "Wear My Ring," he puts Elvis' crooning to shame; whether from precision or attraction or loudness, he has a personable quality you trust -- he sounds like an actual human, not the distant creature Presley became. The best slow one is "Jezebel," a Western-flavored bit of nonsense that Vincent works magic on to create melodramatic misterioso magic, followed by "Wedding Bells (Are Breakin' Up That Old Gang of Mine)," which ably applies a macho aesthetic and sentiment to the sweeter side of Vincent's vocal virtuosity. No sentimentality here, just the sound of freakshow youth: he'd rather fuck than marry, and with pipes like this guy's, presumably he did a lot of the former.

Since I really became aware of Vincent, admittedly only a couple of years ago, I've thought of him as the beginning of white rock's tiny erotic wing (really, rock & roll sacrified sex when it became Rock and folks had to turn to their soul collections for anything attuned to the flesh; John Lennon might've been the last white rock singer with any in his approach), and because Vincent was a cripple, surrounded by boiz bouncing around on his stage (as described in this great blog post by The Hound) I ended up thinking of him a lot when I read the really explosive novel Everything Is Illuminated last year (if you've just seen the pretty decent movie with Elijah Wood, you gots no idea how good this fucker is). The book features a character with a gimp arm, fetishized by his innumerable lovers, whose attentions -- though humored -- baffle him. The weirdness of sexual power and attraction, the oblivious and effortless beauty of that same weirdness, you can define these things and so much more with a vocal inflection and a guitar strum. "Crazy legs, crazy legs, boppin' all over the floor."

Vincent outlived his friend Eddie Cochran -- they were in the same car crash that killed Cochran, a watershed event for several other reasons (clue: four young men from Liverpool) -- but still died young, and his legacy remained tied to "Be-Bop-a-Lula." But someone identified with those rollercoaster screams in "B-i-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Bo-Go," and that's why people are still playin' the guitar. The first time I think I ever heard of him beyond the Beatles' Hamburg cover of "Be-Bop-a-Lula" was in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (I know you hate Rolling Stone and so do I, but this book -- the 1980 edition -- is terrific) when the following photo was labeled thusly:


(Found the pic on Myspace/Photobucket. Let me know if I pissed you off!)

Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, planting the flag at Iwo Jima. His music was secondhand, his guitar a battered prop. Who cared?

Certainly not me upon seeing this when I was 17. Whoever says image doesn't matter is a fool. I remember something churning inside me upon seeing that photo, very deep down in there, something that told me there were secrets unimaginable in these old records I'd glossed over in favor of the utter unimaginative shit I listened to at the time like Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews. All these things that seemed so big and inaccessible when you're sitting in chemistry class, universal things: FREEDOM and SEX and LIBERATION and rhythm and the bright lights tonight, all that shit. The music sounded like I wanted it to, like it never had before, because I could hear all those things in it. To this day, I don't think anything in all art shares that powerful basic core-of-humanity stuff the way rock & roll, specifically the rock & roll of the 1950s, does. And that picture of Vincent, accidentally iconic, accidentally beautiful, planted the seed for me years before I knew jack shit about his music.

The final cut here ("Lazy River") is another ballad but this one sounds distant, like it was recorded from the next room; Vincent seems to be singing to us from an entirely different world, his voice hovering above the sparse brushes and guitar. It's fun to imagine everything happening at once, the room wartorn from all the barriers broken, virgins willingly defiled, destruction and passion everywhere -- like a tornado hit. After thirty tracks of this madness, the band puts down their instruments and Gene wanders out with a smirk, leaving us all breathless and reeling.

Jeff Beck did some lameass Gene Vincent covers album that every freaking bio page on the web of GV mentions. Who gives a fuck about Jeff Beck. Gene Vincent could chew that loser up and spit him out.

Here is YouTube of Vincent and Blue Caps performing in 1958. Oh, yes.

The International Submarine Band: Safe at Home (1968)

(LHI Records)

RECOMMENDED

Narrative: A Harvard dropout named Gram Parsons decides to pursue music and ends up fronting a perpetually unlucky and indistinct psych-rock band, who are so completely un-celebrated their performance in a Roger Corman movie is overdubbed with someone else's noise, while the band that will give him his muscle and an assured career is already world-famous and achieving their peak in California. Somehow or another, two things happen: The band disintegrates after a couple of singles, and Parsons becomes enamored first of folk-rock and then of pure country music. And then, lightning strikes the world and history is made.

Safe at Home is best explained through its deceptions. Parsons' entire life reads as fiction, and his first group the International Submarine Band's lone album sets the stage. To begin with, it's not really an album by the International Submarine Band, the psych-rock band mentioned above, who splintered some months before its recording into the offshoot Flying Burrito Brothers, who enter the story much later. My understanding is that Parsons' various fixations (and perhaps he was not alone) were driving the band toward folk-rock well before the amicable split. Circumstances shifted around again and the upshot was finally that Parsons and buddy John Nuese were forced to assemble a new International Submarine Band on a moment's notice for LHI to record An Album, informed almost entirely by a country music obsession.

This is the result. Heralded as the invention of country rock, it arrives from the hands of accidental innovation. In and of themselves, a lot of these songs don't invent anything so much as they expand on an idea that already existed. Country is one of the foundations of rock & roll, and in 1968 those foundations were not so far away yet. Thus, it can be difficult now to hear the country in some of the rock songs, and the rock in some of the country songs. The one ingredient truly in place for Parsons' later records is his voice; despite some mishaps, it has all the poetry of Sweetheart and Grievous Angel. And the unflinching at something so desperately uncool as country music is a new phenomenon for 1968.

Personal: I'm a longtime Parsons fan but this album is new to me, and my opinion may be colored a bit by the way I discovered him, like so many others, via the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which was not just my introduction to him but the way I first explored anything resembling country music. What's always intrigued me about Rodeo is that it is very close to being pure country, but it still sounds like the Byrds, and there's still something barbed and beautiful and weird about it all in that very Byrdsy way. The Flying Burrito Bros. would infuse Parsons' songs with soul and power, and Parsons' solo records would attain an unexpected level of heartwrenching beauty. The International Submarine Band is his artistry at its most basic: a manifesto with the country and pop concepts still more or less separate. Maybe it's because these musicians weren't used to playing together, but this all seems just a tad too slick and competent. It's solid all right, but where's the tension, where's the bite?

The problem's illustrated most strongly by the two Johnny Cash covers, which come off as slightly lazy, and this is a great disappointment to me as I can't think of many things that excite me more in theory than hearing Gram sing "I Still Miss Someone." And the reading of "Folsom Prison Blues" seems fundamental, rote, bored, and lamely segues into Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right," a pairing that does neither song any great favor. The Jack Rhodes composition "A Satisfied Mind," already covered shortly before this by the Byrds and, recently, by Johnny Cash himself shortly before his death, is equally routine.

But no reason to carp. Not all the covers are weak. Parsons provides Merle Haggard's "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known" with a reverential, passionate reading, and the band falls in line tightly behind him. Sun Records maven Jack Clement's "Miller's Cave" provides the ISB with the basis for their most convincing true country-rock hybrid of the record, a magnificent recording that deserves to stand with Parsons' greatest.

The LP begins beautifully, with the stunning Parsons original "Blue Eyes," which reveals him as some kind of maverick immediately on appearance. The triumph is twofold: in songwriting terms, he's already knocking out affecting Nashville music with the best of them; even the words perfectly capture the playful but genuine yearning of the best commercial country music from Hank Williams on down. It blends seamlessly with the covers, but lingers in the mind far longer, an auspicious signal of what was to come. Safe at Home's other peak has the opposite effect: with scarcely anything to do with country, "Luxury Liner" sticks out harshly, but its double track vocals, and wildly grinding sound prove a level of eclecticism Parsons would never entirely have a chance to explore. It is simply killer pop music.

We have, then, an extremely well-recorded album (seriously, the sonics are incredible) with an EP's worth of great music and plenty more good music. And maybe it did invent country rock. But it didn't make country rock matter. The Byrds would give Gram his megaphone to descend like some winged freak upon the world; the Byrds would pick all this beauty up and get it coated with grit and grease. Safe at Home is a fine record, but it's livelier as a piece of history -- in the context of what it preceded -- than as a listening experience. For this fan, anyway, Sweetheart of the Rodeo is the true beginning, but Safe at Home is essential for anyone with a love of this music and this mythology.

Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters (1973)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I knew Herbie Hancock's name and a good deal of his music years before I knew the difference between Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Does that make me somewhat ignorant or does it speak to the fact that any way to fall in love with music is the right way? You can say what you like about fusion, and I'll probably agree with you; the stuff is driven by pure virtuosity and noodling for noodling's sake and I can't relate to that because I like my stuff driven by songs. But if Head Hunters is fusion, call me a fuse-head and send me down to the Weather Report concert. This was a hugely important album to me growing up, and while it's easy to split apart the things you once loved and how much you cared for them (I thought the Police were the second greatest band in history when I was in seventh grade), I don't think you can discount what formed your tastes and how it all meshed together, and Head Hunters was the first album I ever bought and loved that could remotely be called "jazz." It would be years before I could even begin to understand why it felt so right to me, and I guess in a way I still don't.

Recorded quickly almost to the point of being tossed off, Head Hunters captures a singular mood and sicks with it. From the opening blips of "Chameleon" to the assured, shimmering abstractions of "Vein Melter," Head Hunters feels to me as if it aims to seduce. The criticism of fusion -- both theoretically and usually in action -- is that it is a purely cerebral genre, jazz without the passion. But this is music I feel in my bones; it is dance music, funk, body movement. For sure you can lean back in your chair and be impressed with it if so inclined, but who needs to think when your feet just go? I don't seek any greater truth in my music than that, honestly. And I can assure you that I was taught so much by these grooves which ramble onward for as long as fifteen minutes but are never boring, chiefly about the strange warped beauty in the best improvisation. I wasn't a musician and I'm still not, so the technical specifications I can't delve into, but that's why I think this holds up so well for me -- it doesn't need explanation and even defies it. It's direct communication, so for me -- length regardless -- it's rock & roll.

And listening to the disc again today, I find it's like revisiting one's old world and finding as much joy in it as ever. I know more Hancock now, a lot of which I really love and some of which I probably love more than this and some of which I do find as tiresome as a Return to Forever album. I've heard Miles Davis' batshit experiments that make Hancock going out on a limb sound so much less extreme, but Head Hunters still moves me in this curious way. All four cuts are memorable and unfold breathlessly. It's playful. It has wit. "Sly" is as explosive an integration of ideas, "Watermelon Man" as gorgeous a reinvention, "Chameleon" as tight a groove as you'll ever hear. And etc. I don't know if you need this record, but I know I do.

I got hit with a copyright notice from someone last week over my Goldfrapp MP3s. I haven't quite been sure how to continue since I want to find a way to share without stealing but I'd rather not piss anyone off. Here, from the Youtubes, is "Sly," the song (a perfect tribute to the Family Stone) that made me want to hear this album when I heard it on a mix someone gave me ten years ago.



I'm working on a better option to play music here that will be more fun for me than YouTube videos but hopefully won't make anyone feel infringed-upon.

Since it's been a while since I posted (in large part due to the self-doubt imposed by the copyright violation notice), I'll just toss the latest music news down here. Sorry to focus on Yo La Tengo again, but really quick: They've announced a new EP, this one of remixes of their Popular Songs standout "Here to Fall." Remixers include De La Soul and Pete Rock! I'm excited about this one. It's out the same day as the new Roots album, which I personally think will be loads of fun (it features a guest shot from Joanna Newsom!).

Speaking of our idols growing up, Blur was a major one for a lot of us, and April brought huge elation for Blur fans with the release of their first new song since the outstanding Think Tank (2003) on an exclusive Record Store Day 7" (UK only). The song, "Fool's Day," is a total one-off with no further recording plans being made, so of course it's tantalizingly great. You can hear it at their official website.

We're still massive Beatles fans here and we love Paulie even though he can be kind of a fuckwit (just kiddin', Paulie), so it's kind of interesting to hear that the Wings and Paul McCartney (and possibly Thrillington!??!) back catalogs are to be reissued by the boutique label Concord, which (news to me) is somehow associated with the weirdass Starbucks label he's on these days. Post-Beatles Paul is kind of a minefield but if you dig around long enough, you find some rich rewards, so dig away, and feel good about not helping out the deservedly ailing EMI anymore. (No such consolation if you're in the market for October's Beatles vinyl remasters.) If you're in the mood for some completely sick Wings shit you've probably never heard, find some way to get the b-sides "Sally G" and "Country Dreamer," further proof that Paul with his guard down trounces professional Paul.

In other Beatles news, we acquired Beatles Rock Band this month and while I -- a video game rank amateur -- am learning to be competent with the fake geetars, I think my money's worth comes from unabashedly drooling over the glimpses of multitracks and session material that show up here and there. I'll give those guys even more money if they burn all that on some DVDs for me.

This past week we saw the Tallest Man on Earth at a tiny chapel in the University of North Carolina and it just might have been the best and most intimate show I've ever seen. More on that when I review his brilliant new album before too long.

Finally, just a few days ago, one of my favorite schlocky boy bands, Interpol, released a new song, which is very good and is apparently the first sign of a new LP from them. Always good to hear from those kids. Listen to the new track at their website as well!

Been spinning lots of new records this month and I'll try to do a better job of talking about them in the coming weeks! Briefly: Apples in Stereo = their best since Discovery of a World Inside the Moone. Tallest Man on Earth = genius. New Pornographers = strong showing, still making up my mind about it. New record I probably won't review for a long time because it kind of sucks: Eels' End Times, a disappointment in a string of same. New records I want to spend some time with and haven't yet: Gil Scott-Heron, Kaki King, and I still haven't quite figured out how I feel about Owen Pallett yet (though John Darnielle's recent endorsement in his blog has me keeping it in mind).

See you guys tomorrow with some Gram Parsons discussion.

Hot Chip: One Life Stand (2010)

(Astralwerks)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Oh man, I'm excited about this album; having just listened to it again, I'm not sure if I can do it justice, but I'll try. It was either "No Fit State" or "One Pure Thought" that initially hooked me on the UK techno-pop fivesome Hot Chip a couple of years ago. These are essentially disco songs which capture that inexplicable euphoric feeling of flipping off somewhere into oblivion. Being a nearly-lifelong synthpop convert (as captured in the last two entries here), I was thoroughly knocked out by what this group was doing, pounding ahead with confidence and no fear of body or mind. "One Pure Thought" is, for me, one of the five greatest singles of the 2000s. Although I loved The Warning and Made in the Dark, I was a casual enough fan that I didn't even know until recently that the band actually had an earlier album (Coming On Strong). But One Life Stand has changed all that forever now; whatever Hot Chip does from now on, I'll be paying attention.

I don't know why this record feels so different to me from the wildly ambitious, gem-filled earlier albums; early reports of it being darker and less beat-driven turned out to be grossly exaggerated. But there was a certain kind of song on those older LPs, and "One Pure Thought" and "Boy from School" are good examples, on which Hot Chip would take some left turn onto a groove that would just feel impossbly right, and time could almost just stop. It took me a long time to realize that those songs were special and stood out because if you took every bell and whistle away from them, they would be manificently written pop music. They are cathartic by sheer force of melody, and often lyrics (Neil Tennant with a paranoid streak). Some critics have said it feels like One Life Stand doesn't have any really tight, balls-out singles to offer; to me, this could be a greatest hits collection. It's just that the songs themselves are unified, restrained, complete. Production, good as it is, is only a secondary asset.

The songs on One Life Stand hang together through a contradiction, and contradiction is the secret of great pop music. They share an assured vulnerability. Though it's a lyrical conceit, it invades everything. The first notes of track one, "Thieves in the Night," could hook anyone with even the most remote attachment to disco or synthpop. Alexis Taylor's coolheaded but subtly frayed voice comes aboard and starts spilling out some paranoid cautions then slips into an album of confused, sweet, sentimental, occasionally laughably domesticated love songs. Who knows what it really means, but every time his voice shakes on these songs, I feel more like these songs, beats, and lyrics have enough detail to continue revealing themselves for years. This isn't an album for 2010, this is an album you'll be keeping around for comfort, and it isn't often that's so abundantly clear so quickly.

The first record of the 2-LP set offers four powerfully propulsive killers in a row; "Thieves in the Night," the shattering "Hand Me Down Your Love," and the irresistible "I Feel Better" build up to a phantasmagorically thrilling climax with the title track. Then, a left turn: the amazingly delicate and emotional "Brothers," a song that completely fails to question its own near-banal honesty ("I can play Xbox with my brothers"), and is all the more impressive for it, in the process proving Hot Chip's alarming melodic chops. They could have been a power-pop outfit just as easily as they became electropop, and they'd be a blast either way.

But it's a mistake to believe they only know one way to make an electropop song: The immediate explosion and onward to fadeout is not a rigid formula here. "Alley Cats" begins as a reflective, quiet dirge and builds to beautiful chillout with an unstoppable rhythm; Taylor and Joe Goddard's voices bounce off each other to glorious effect, and Hot Chip places all their electric trickery well into the background, giving their own opinion of what's most important. (And this makes it harder to ignore that the song is brilliantly composed and quietly touching.) The breezy but potent "Keep Quiet" amps up the potential for the New Order comparisons I'm sure plenty of people have made, backing up its skittering beats and hushed, persuasive vocals with a wonderfully incongrous string section, post-punk with a knockout beat.

The riskiest, most uncommercial cut is the highly proficient modern doo wop "Slush," which opens the second record. I'm sure dance purists are more than a bit put off by the song itself and its perverse positioning, but if perversity represents a diverse expression, is there anything wrong with perversity, particularly with a band this adventurous? And "Slush" doesn't deserve to die on some b-side or iTunes exclusive someplace. The menace and desperation (but of course, detached desperation!) that color its final two minutes make for what is among the most special moments of the record.

Side Four features some of Hot Chip's purest dance music so far. "We Have Love" is completely convincing disco-soul, with just the perfect Pet Shop Boys tinge of regret to make it linger in the mind long after its monstrous big beat has flattened you. "Take It In" moves to industrial and Music for the Masses for its inspiration but explodes in a rainbow of sound and harmony for its widescreen chorus, becoming a melting pot of dance history to attain nirvana for anyone who spends their life getting their kicks this way, the increasingly weird and misfit set that never thought disco had died. The song is beautiful enough to be loved by any pop music audience, but apart from that it's best described, like so much of One Life Stand, as sounding like a culmination, a fulfilling of potential. Something like this garden of love and delight, specifically that captured by "Take It In" and "One Life Stand," is ultimately why we have dance music, and why it has endured.

Not one of the ten cuts here is too long, or inessential. None of the slow ones get stuck in a spot where it kills the party momentum, and I don't have an issue with seeing this exceptional album as party music. Just as easily as you can fall in love with this music on headphones, you can find a million places in it to escape to bright lights and body movement. To hear this record is to celebrate the sheer timelessness of rock & roll in all its durability, for living room shaking or dancefloor communion or sad reminiscing or private consolation, never tempering its intelligence and soul. And if you love the indescribable feeling of the best dance music as much as I do, trust me, this is full of the transcendent moments you spend long nights looking for. Let's keep Hot Chip at this magical state of simultaneous vulnerability and confidence for at least another couple of albums. Then they're allowed to evolve. But the only problem with this album is it's too short. More ASAP.

This is terrific on vinyl! Buy it! (But be aware that it doesn't come with a download, and oddly transposes two tracks.) If you don't know Hot Chip, download the two songs provided below; I selected the two most "immediate" rather than my favorites this time. I truly believe this is their best album thus far (although the songs I've recently sampled from their debut really impressed me, I must say), so if you like these, pick up the record and keep an eye on Hot Chip, who are growing to be one of my favorite current bands. (In case you're wondering, I think my two favorites are "Hand Me Down Your Love" and "Alley Cats." For now, at least.)

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One Life Stand
We Have Love

Information Society (1988)

(Tommy Boy)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If you grab the first person you know with a general knowledge of 1980s pop music and ask what he or she thinks of Information Society, you're likely to be told they were a Midwestern cash-in on the wild popularity of two of the then-biggest bands in the world, Depeche Mode and Talking Heads, taking advantage as a bonus of the Heads' inactivity by the latter part of the decade. They'll remember -- and possibly be nostalgic for -- the biggest hit, "What's On Your Mind (Pure Energy)," and might even remember one or two of the followups, but that's likely the only penetration the Minneapolis group will have achieved. The U.S. charts don't give you much else to go on, either. And experts and critics, even those who follow synthpop and dance music pretty heavily, aren't likely to have much of an opinion. But I discovered in that last couple of years that, somewhat surprisingly, Information Society are a group that is worshipped and spoken of with amazed reverence among a very specific group: DJs. They live on in considerable significance if only in this fashion, much like their labelmates Naughty by Nature. The first couple of Information Society albums are widely considered, today more than ever, a DJ's best friend, and dance music masterworks.

Listening to this album again, the reasons are obvious. With the lone exception of the errant ballad "Repetition," a song that doesn't deserve to share the vinyl with the other nine, every track is immediate, fast-paced, and muscular; you don't have to know what the fuck it is to respond to it. The innovations are striking: they sample other media in a rhythmic manner I don't believe anyone else was tackling yet (and not many others have since, though the Books seem pretty proficient at it). Their seamless, utterly nonchalant integration of rap and Latin traditions is breathtaking now and I find it hard to believe it wasn't then.

The first half of the album keeps this on the down-low and fairly conservative, but it still has some excellent conventional dance-synthpop such as the emotional "Walking Away" and the Pet Shop-infected "Lay All Your Love on Me." I even like the power move "Tomorrow," which could've been a Eurythmics song. But it's on side two that things get moving and the group starts to go a bit mad. I played every one of these songs in blocks of '80s music on various nights DJing and they fit seamlessly with better-known material. Even the experimental one-minute closer "Make It Funky" was useful as a way in or out of something, and I have heard it at least twice played by others (and it points the way to some of Daft Punk's voice manipulating nine years or so later).

I guess what I find most remarkable about these songs is that they are unapologetic beat-driven dance music; the intellectual pursuits the band name might suggest appear nowhere, and yet they play nearly as well on headphones, where the rhythmic sidesteps and stereo tricks have an insanely modern seductive power. "Over the Sea," to begin with, is aurally huge, and confidently propulsive, a top-drawer kick in the gut where you least expect it. "Attitude" somehow fuses Art of Noise with blues-rock, and does it brilliantly. "Something in the Air" adds mysterioso vocal distortion and amps up the classic artistic power move of pulling in uncommercial ingredients to make pop music that falls on the ear perfectly. And for all of these songs, the pulsing forward and the late-night caffeinated beat are unrelenting.

The record's best cut might be its penultimate, which saw earlier life as the Society's debut single. "Running" is seven minutes of radical kitchen sink disco, going farther in Latin inflections than any other cut, offering up an achingly hungry-to-be-sampled electro hip hop backing, and jumping off the cliff of sanity in a way as convincingly devoted as when the Velvet Underground used to do the same thing on songs like "The Murder Mystery." "Running" takes you to the edge of the body-movement world and dares you not to fall. Only Daft Punk puts more batshit balls-to-the-wall head-explosive synth-drum-bass-sampling onslaughts into the mainstream now, and god knows if anyone did then.

The accusations that the group ripped off Talking Heads are rooted in nonsense; Tommy Boy seems to have attempted to sell the band's image in this way with the self-consciously quirky music videos (and perhaps even the touting of both bands featuring a female member, which evidently was a much bigger deal in 1988 than it would be now). The "What's On Your Mind" video, though very appealing, is pretty derivative. But little, polyrhythms excepted, in the music recalls Talking Heads, who were influenced heavily by disco and dance music but never really attempted it. And the Heads, as the same malcontented press moaned a few years earlier (and as the same malcontented press moaned even earlier about Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, and today about Vampire Weekend), did not invent polyrhythms. The Depeche Mode comparisons, meanwhile, are inevitable because of the vocals, but for one thing, everyone who made synthpop or dance music in the '80s ripped off Depeche Mode; for another, Mode sidestepped soul and directness in favor of melodrama and irony, and I don't recall them having any of these simple pleasures and simple quirks and, hey, Latin-infected rhythms and hip hop influences. And in the end, Harland seems to mean what he says, and part of the point of DM is you never really know what they mean.

I personally was glad to discover there was still some sort of a fondness for this band, as I've always been pretty impressed by them and was never sure why. One of the things I particularly love is Kurt Harland's voice (he sings all but one of the vocal tracks), which is a bit technically stronger than that of most male singers in this genre -- think Dave Gahan after his vocal training in 1997 -- and seems weathered with wit and emotion. I also like that they underline the arbitrary separation of synthpop and dance music by casting off the strained seriousness of most acts in the former category but also feeling no need to bring in layers of irony to gloss over their fun. They're really a dance group dabbling in every cutting-edge style of the time that just integrates a few synthpop ideas. None of the trappings and pretensions of impression-making are here; this is people who love music making music, which is timeless. If only there'd been more popular groups like Information Society (and Fine Young Cannibals) at the time, maybe dance music would be taken more seriously now, as it's long deserved to be. And who else in America wasn't afraid of this kind of music then? Even the people who said they weren't were. Or else we'd have more to show for it.

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Over the Sea
Something in the Air

Goldfrapp: Head First (2010)

(Mute)

I discovered Goldfrapp in 2005 on, of all places, what used to be 120 Minutes before it moved to MTV2 and changed its name to something I can't quite recall anymore (crack research team unavailable). The video was "Ooh La La," from their Supernature LP. I was pretty blown away by the seductive, mildly goofy pop bliss of the song, and by the 1970s afro featured by one of the sidemen in the video. Expecting further power pop madness in the obnoxiously wonderful vein of Slade or suchlike, I listened to the album and instead discovered eclectic modern dance music, like Eurythmics reimagined as something altogether more exotic.

Subsequently I acquired -- and dug equally -- the prior record, Black Cherry. (I haven't yet given my undivided attention to their debut, Felt Mountain.) Unfortunately, while I've spoken to a few people who adore it, I was left cold by the 2008 followup Seventh Tree, a rather bizarre hybrid of ambient and '70s British folk-rock. The only song I really liked wasn't even actually on the record; it was a remix of the track "Happiness." I remember thinking that Goldfrapp's fear of pure dance music worried me a bit, because that's a step on the path to some hardcore pretension. I'm sad to report that now, Goldfrapp has put out their most no-holds-barred dance pop album to date, and although I'm finding it an improvement on Seventh Tree, I'm still disappointed and I can't say I particularly like where this group is headed. Goldfrapp has journeyed back not to the '80s of Yaz and the Cure but to the '80s of Olivia Newton-John and Xanadu... you know, the shit we never really liked that much to begin with. Fat synths, plunky drum machines, Stacey Q gloss, big arid soundscapes of cruel days and crueller nights, straight from a 1986 nightclub to the Muzak machine at the 2010 neighborhood K-Mart.

The problems are apparent on the very first tune, "Rocket," which is propulsive and sexy ("I've got a rocket / You're goin' on it") and hook-filled but also begins shortly to slide into the slack-jawed boredom of adult contemporary pop. It's one thing to detect a cunning sense of fashion somewhere deep in those generic grooves (see Pet Shop Boys' Behavior), but placing them up as something specifically to care about and be nostalgic for, I just don't relate. I never liked Berlin and I still don't like Berlin, and this is a Berlin record. The title track and "Dreaming," for instance, are the sort of thing that would render me very likely to change the dial during a 4:00am drive with Jammin' 99.9 FM on.

Head First continues in precisely this regard: eminently listenable, even enjoyable in its infectious visitations From Beyond the Grave of various Madonna and Bananarama hooks, but periodically -- and, it seems, deliberately -- lazy and boring. At least Seventh Tree was creative; this is just a step or two above a freaking Garbage album, and Alison Goldfrapp's presence can hardly compare to someone who fakes this shit as well as Shirley Manson. Posturing has always been a part of Goldfrapp's formula, but it's never been the point until now. The one unqualified success is the shimmery "Believer," strong and reverent but not quite backward-looking dance music that should have been the model for the rest of the LP. Among the rest, even the best songs are surprisingly derivative, and even if that's the whole idea, I find it tiresome. "I Wanna Life" is a perfect example: it feels great running down your throat, to use the most disgusting analogy I can think of, but not only do I find myself enjoying it strictly because it reminds me of some of my favorite hits of twenty years ago, I quickly realize that those hits actually had far more personality and were simply better than what Goldfrapp is tossing around here. Adding insult to injury: they close a nine-track album with another of the ambient annoyances that they've occasionally dropped before, the inconsequential "Voicething."

Personality is what's missing here for me, really. And yet again, what I don't understand is that the absence of it and the slide into MOR seem purposeful, even like a statement. Please tell me boring music imitating hits of the past isn't about to become stylish (though Goldfrapp are neither the first or the worst offenders in this regard in the current indie-rock world). I don't mean to rag on Goldfrapp here... with two mediocre records in a row, I'm just starting to think their direction is one I can't really follow. But if you are in the mood for a total nostalgia trip, by all means, take this one. You can listen to "Rocket" (included because it's a good representation, and rather catchy) and "Believer" (included because I like it a lot) right here, and I think they'll give you a good idea of whether you'll want to seek out the whole shebang. I don't mean to let my disappointment color everything here. If you need a good party record, you could easily do far worse. But be careful; these grooves do relent and reveal the pillowy mush underneath. It's true almost any of these songs would blend in perfectly between your favorite Wang Chung and Haircut 100 singles. I just question whether that accomplishment is the best use of Goldfrapp's ample talents.

I understand there's a really good remix of "Rocket" floating around. Maybe the pattern will repeat itself?

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[Download links to "Rocket" and "Believer" removed because of a copyright claim from Mute Records. Soz. You can probably listen to them at Lala.]