Big Star: #1 Record (1972)

(Ardent)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

What made Big Star so explosive? The "power pop" label they essentially created doesn't begin to explain it, nor does the almost chemical perfection of their music. Like no one since the Beatles, Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens of the legendary Memphis cult outfit took -- in their painfully brief period as an active and functioning four-piece entity -- the idea of the guitar band to its white-hot extreme of impassioned precision: loose in the right places, universally and permanently powerful and pertinent. All these guys knew was what they loved: Southern soul, British Invasion, and Byrds, and like their most hallowed heroes, they made assured hay of it all. In a world in which the marketplace (and their label's distribution) was built to handle this decidedly pure-pleasure, seemingly very commercial music, Big Star would have been one of the most popular bands of all time. That they were not resulted in one of the most fascinating and musically fruitful artistic declines of the twentieth century. But #1 Record captures the Big Star that was consciously intended, the moment before destruction, the initial masters meant to pack a wallop.

Striking the newcomer first is the easiness #1 Record has falling on the ear. Divorced from the self-conscious heaviness that has tainted and dated so much '70s rock, "Feel" breaks down the defenses immediately with its grinning anglophilia, but it's "The Ballad of El Goodo" that will win every heart but the most hardened. Alex Chilton had been the star of seminal teen-pop band the Box Tops, who recorded oodles of moving blue eyed soul singles in the '60s, at which time he was affecting an unnaturally gruff tone designed to match up with the popular R&B of the time. But here he sings in his frayed, sweetly lilting real voice for the first time and unleashes an almost hymnal lament of such unpretentious, ground-level power and personality it threatens to tear apart at any moment, but it never does -- the band maintains their committment to pop throughout this naked emotional moment, leveling all the record-collector rock trappings the production might entail. It's a ballad played by giant Kinks / Who fans, but written by someone of astoundingly personable talent.

The late Chilton was not a prolific master, but he was the greatest white American rock composer aside from Brian Wilson; his compositions inspire well-deserved reverence because to devalue them is to devalue the very idea of rock & roll, and more importantly rock & roll as a beloved youthful force, before it became what Neil Tennant later called "the safest institution of all," before adults pretended to understand it. It is this strange moment of purity that the greatest, most transcendent practitioners of adolescent pop from Martin Gore to Paul Westerberg must tap into, but none ever seemed to have the direct line Chilton did. This isn't to discount Chris Bell's contributions -- he was the force behind this album, and more on him in a bit -- but Chilton's youth-solidarity, lyrically and musically, is a remarkable element of what has lent his work its lasting impact.

An explanation: There is the high school counselor who will tell you that you, the dumb kid, are being naive. There is a better than outside chance that the counselor is quite correct. But the failure -- and the reason you hated your high school guidance counselor -- is in his or her failure to see the humanity in that naivete. That is what "El Goodo"'s magnification of trivial problems, or human reading of massive ones, offers: a pillow of empathy. Chilton's Friday night teen dream "In the Street" and shatteringly beautiful young love anthem "Thirteen" take the concept to its most unadulterated. He is truly speaking a language, an elusive vernacular of never-condescending youth, from a palette of emotions at their most unadorned and intense. "Thirteen" especially, against its snowy-soft acoustic backing, is a love letter of sympathetic arrogance, achingly real and personal: "Won't you tell your dad, get off my back / Tell him what we said 'bout 'Paint It Black'"... with all the awkwardness and false-starts of an early relationship. "If it's over, let me know / If it's no, well, I can go." Chilton's elegant simplicity of sentiment and complexity of expression at this stage recalls Boudleaux Bryant ("Problems") and of course Buddy Holly ("Not Fade Away") and Brian Wilson ("I'm Bugged at My Ol' Man") but somehow, his steadiness seems singular -- a force even he is so afraid to tamper with that he would offer it rarely.

Chris Bell is no less idiosyncratic, but his approach is more indirect. The abstract anger of "Don't Lie to Me" is admirable ("I told my dad, and now I'm telling you, don't push me 'round!") and bears solidarity with Chilton's approach, but he is far more intrigued by contrasts of style than the sheer force of a melody and vocal. "Don't Lie to Me" is a British hard-rock assault, very similar to Badfinger or to Get Back-period Beatles with its hotly compressed guitar solos and general air of chosen, contained madness, but whereas a dichotomy of brash words and gentle music would likely fascinate Chilton, Bell is (at this point) eager to separate the two. "My Life Is Right" is given the album's most rote, conventional arrangement -- an almost by-the-book 1970s torch ballad -- but Bell sings it with such stunning force ("Once I walked a lonely road / I had no one to share my love" seems incalculably serious and real in his context) that it overwhelms its musical context until everything seems gorgeously synchronized, the band sympathetic to Bell's every tic (listen carefully to the way the track skitters and bounces on "Lonely days of uncertainty"). His vision of the rock song as singular emotional force -- his vehicle even more than Chilton's -- is never so elegantly realized. However, it is "Try Again" that comes across as his loveliest success here, a simple and leaden force of sorrow, his equivalent to "El Goodo" and one of the most bracingly sung ballads of the period; calculated or not, the pain is palpable here, and a comfort to behold.

Bassist Andy Hummel contributes "India Song," a moment that escapes all of Bell and Chilton's preoccupations but equals them with its sweetness and adorably untouched lyric ("let no one know until I've gone" as the all-time middle class fantasy). It's neatly placed at the halfway point, but something sadly goes slightly awry with the sequencing afterward. Discarding the ethereal outro "ST 100/6," Side Two is bookended by Chilton masterstrokes: his most complete rocker up to now, the celebratory and perfectly performed "When My Baby's Beside Me" and the jaw-dropping ballad "Watch the Sunrise," a delicate, knowing, alarmingly adult life-saver, Chilton's voice showing delicacy on a level with Nick Drake or Richard Thompson. Three strong ballads make the balance, but stringing them together was perhaps a mistake; "My Life Is Right," Alex's groveling, teasing "Give Me Another Chance," and "Try Again" are all strong on their own, but become numbing when piled together (at least, until you've heard the album five hundred times, by which time all you notice is how much you love every second). This in a sense is a function of Bell's vision for #1 Record (the Beach Boys used to arrange LPs with ballads all on the second half), the album he waited his whole life to make and spent a chunk of it tweaking and perfecting, the project and notion that consumed him, whose commercial failure would truly break his heart, perhaps irreparably.

Everything about the album reflects both the excitement of creation and discovery and a remarkable degree of care. Chilton was just a voice in the process here, a star performer, a featured songwriter. Big Star was Chris Bell's vision and consumption. He had a vision of a permanent youth, a defiance against the widespread adulteration of the music he loved, and he yearned to capture every pop conceit and guitar-rock juggernaut of his world into an LP, a band. #1 Record is not an album about hooks, or an album about emotions... it is an album about well-crafted, perfectly engineered hooks in humane but impressive sync with purest, ebbing and flowing emotions. It's about being young and impressionable and stupid and alive, it is specifically designed to enter the heart and swell, to become part of a life. That was all Chris Bell wanted. The ultimate tragedy is that he would not live to see it become that important to legions of people, as it is today. With Jody Stephens now the only surviving member of Big Star, we are left with a ghostly moment in time, a capturing of moments of optimism and determination that meant so much to these people. The way those aspirations would be ripped to shreds would become the subject of music scholarship and fandom, giving Big Star the extra push to become one of the most seriously beloved and analyzed bands of the last forty years. But #1 Record brings back the moment when they were as they (especially Bell) intended: a guitar band doing absolutely everything right, no stone unturned. It is still a beautiful creation.

[Editorial Note: This review contains some very minor elements from a quite awful piece I wrote about this album in 2004. Just FYI.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Keep an Eye on the Sky (1970-74)

Cut Copy: Zonoscope (2011)

(Modular)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

I adore this album. Give Cut Copy all of your money please. And pump this in the car this summer, as I surely will.

Ida Cox & Coleman Hawkins: Blues for Rampart Street (1961)

(Riverside)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I checked into this record due to the presence of Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax, knowing little about Ida Cox's storied career, but while Hawkins' band provides beautifully restrained arrangements, shadowing their swing-period glories, it is she who ended up throttling me. When the LP was recorded, she was nearing her seventies and had been retired for two decades. We're not hearing her sing these mostly self-penned blues classics at her peak, but the wisdom and fire, the frayed edges, make all ten tracks genuinely affecting.

"Blues for Rampart Street" itself is a stirring evocation of bygone years, "Wild Women (Don't Have the Blues)" a monument of teasing eroticism made all the more intriguing by the power in Cox's fading voice. Perhaps best of all is her interpretation of the standard "St. Louis Blues," maybe the most resigned and wounded version I've heard, but there is not even a hint of falseness or strain on this entire disc -- all the songs movingly capture echoes of 1920s and '30s dancehalls and romance and promises running almost tangibly through Cox, the mood sweet but melancholy in the loveliest way.

Ida Cox would never record another album; this short-lived comeback was her last musical project before her death in 1967. It's rare that blues historians get such an unfiltered glimpse at an aged legend, and even rarer that the result is so revealing, ghostly but present. But what makes Blues for Rampart Street truly exceptional is the effortless universal appeal it packs. Dig jazz or blues at all? Pick this up and set forty minutes aside for it; you absolutely will not regret it.

Iron & Wine: The Shepherd's Dog (2007)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Sam Beam was an important performer to me in the last decade, someone who brought the integral forces and potential of American music back into focus -- modern and vital and mysterious, untied to any specific time. When Kiss Each Other Clean, his latest album under the Iron & Wine moniker, was issued and felt like the letdown of the year to me, I got the urge to scramble back and reevaluate a record I came to absolutely adore a year after its release, The Shepherd's Dog, the third I&W album and the first I bought. I would soon discover even greater pleasures in the prior Our Endless Numbered Days and any number of peripheral releases, but Shepherd's Dog opened up a door for me. When encountering fans who felt that this record was moving too far in a polished, lush direction, I balked. But now that I have had the same reaction to Kiss, I tend to wonder: am I turning into one of those people? A fresh appraisal of Shepherd's Dog seemed fair.

Short answer: No way. Recorded and released in what now seems like a quaintly hopeful time, The Shepherd's Dog has worn its first four years gracefully. None of the MOR hangups that mar Iron & Wine's major label debut exist here, and all of its charms are as intense and its music as impressive as ever. Beam's intricate folk, already breathtakingly beautiful on his first two LPs, seems to open up as the curtain of a theater here to reveal a pastoral landscape dotted with menace and private emotion, elation to bitterness to sorrow but never emptiness.

Undeniably, Shepherd's Dog does stand out from Creek Drank the Cradle and Days: gone is the lo-fi simplicity, in favor of a carefully produced musical kaleidoscope: more percussion than ever before, electric guitar, piano, elements of heretofore unexplored rhythmic valleys, generally the sound of an actual band, which does wonders for the liveliness of these songs and the flights they take. Beam's populist sweetness -- the spinning-around childhood spilling into college-age reflection, an easy connection either way -- allows for a relatively easy Astral Weeks comparison; even if Shepherd's Dog has nothing like the complexity of that masterpiece, it's certainly what Beam strives for, a worthy objective for his talents. As his once-stark folk spills into busy, detailed, soft atmospheres, it earns a remarkable adaptability, the claustrophobic woodshed and the grassy field of "Brown Eyed Girl" approached with equal enthusiasm.

Little attention was afforded Shepherd's sequencing, but much of its magic can be attributed to the gradual build and climactic blush -- it opens with three delicate but assured anthems. "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" was made for the beginning of someone's road trip, the meaty classic-rock hooks of "White Tooth Man" delivering on every gritty Byrdsian promise Beam ever made, "Lovesong of the Buzzard" making glittery and raw romance of its desolation. Here, though, Beam sticks the knife in, with one of the strongest three-track runs in recent memory. The almost unearthly "Carousel" gives way to the creeping Appalachian glories of "House by the Sea" (very nearly the finest song he has written to date), then to the lyrically scathing, musically ecstatic "Innocent Bones" an unforgettable humanist relief quite conveniently sharing its year of origin with the Arcade Fire's similarly themed (and far less subtle) "Intervention."

"Wolves" returns to the spinning, layered intensity of the early cuts; anything would be a letdown after hearing Beam let himself go completely on "Innocent Bones" and its companions. A second series of more reflective gems, also unmissable, dominates the second half of the LP. Literate and on the verge of falling apart like late-period Big Star, "Resurrection Fern" suggests the direction one wishes Kiss Each Other Clean had pressed with, while "Boy with a Coin" lives exclusively in the moment of Shepherd's Dog with its teasing rhythmic and vocal tricks, a shower of noise, and "The Devil Never Sleeps" brings the fireside, perhaps slowly dying or creeping along uncontrolled.

Of all the record's many shimmering highlights, only the widely beloved "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" bears any suggestion of the overbearing balladry direction that Beam would choose to take next; because of his subsequent work, it now becomes a difficult song to listen to, but get beyond that and you can still detect the novelty, and the well-intended emotional crescendos. Most of its points, though, are made more succinctly elsewhere on the record (and are not hampered by vampire associations).

The all-important Specialness of Iron & Wine lies not in any cosmic-American skewering of roots music but in its sheer shorthand celebration of same, and the special (calm, collected, but devotedly passionate) way Beam has of tying it all together with his voice in a singular, personal manner. That world-apart wisdom can deliver a music that is at times indescribably lovely, a carrying on of Morrison, of Nick Drake, of Gram Parsons, of any unpretentious, dignified quiet master of song.

At its best, The Shepherd's Dog achieves something rarer than even Beam probably realizes: it's communicative of actual joy.

[SEE ALSO:]
Kiss Each Other Clean (2011)

The 6ths: Hyacinths and Thistles (2000)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Whereas the 6ths' debut album Wasps' Nests defied explanation and convenient pigeonholing, being a series of songs as instantaneous in appeal as they were obscure in origin, its sole followup Hyacinths and Thistles requires a setup. Released only a year after Stephin Merritt's magnum opus 69 Love Songs under the Magnetic Fields rubric, it feels like a low-key collection of potential leftovers from that project. Only Merritt probably knows if that's the case, but most of the songs could have fit comfortably as minor entries in 69 with its smart, mannered use of guest vocalists. It's worth approaching, then, as a sort of Magnetic Fields b-sides comp, only with no Merritt-sung tracks. That comparison ends up meaning more than its association with the 6ths. Wasps' Nests felt like a large-scale undertaking, and an important one to Merritt, in every sense -- its major label backing down to the caliber of its guests. The feeling of a toning down on this far more modest release is unmistakable.

That's not to say Merritt isn't up to his usual brilliant business here. Who could argue with the sheer spectacle of American icon Odetta singing a Merritt auto-standard called "Waltzing Me All the Way Home," or synthpop celebrities Gary Numan and Marc Almond nailing the bleeding mechanical emotion that always cuts to the core in the Merritt canon, or Katherine Whalen (Squirrel Nut Zippers) given at last a song worthy of her abilities, the charming and strange "You You You You You?" But inevitably, nothing here adds up to the emotional heights of 69 Love Songs, the ample cream of that particular enormous songwriting crop having already been exploited. (The Magnetic Fields wouldn't release another album for four years after this.)

Still, a few moments stand out as unique, some of them sublime. Bob Mould is such an unlikely fit for Merritt's songwriting stylistics that it's a joy simply to hear them collaborating, on "He Didn't." Cibbo Matto's Miho Hatori gives the artful gift of a lifetime with her almost unbearably sweet reading of "Lindy-Lou," and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon is irresistible on the achingly brief "The Dead Only Quickly." And there are the traditional '90s Magnetic Fields soundscapes, halfway between Cole Porter and Vince Clarke: "Give Me Back My Dreams," "Just Like a Movie Star," and "As You Turn to Go" feel almost unnaturally divorced from Merritt's more famous outlet. But not everything is well-advised. The record's sixty-minute runtime is enticing until you realize nearly half of it is closing track "Oahu," an agreeably minimal pop song that descends rapidly into a bare, simplistic keyboard line repeated over and over and over and over again, ever slower and more plodding, until it unceremoniously stops (or, more likely, until the listener shuts it off).

All Stephin Merritt's projects are worth consideration, and this is no exception; no Magnetic Fields collection is complete without it, and the fan of Get Lost and 69 Love Songs will find many pieces here to win their heart and add to the tremendous canon. Take it as a no-nonsense collection of fine melodies and rhymes from a first-rate songwriter, nothing more or less. Only when compared to Wasps' Nests does it fall short, which says more about the brilliance of that album than the inadequacy of this one.

[SEE ALSO:]
Wasps' Nests (1995)

Tennis: Cape Dory (2011)

(Fat Possum)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Additional point: Light as the breeze and equally enjoyable, even invigorating, when it's playing, this album has absolutely no presence once it's done. It is readymade for early spring listening, though, so keep it around at least till early May; I doubt it will have much staying power beyond that. Also, Amber pointed out while we were listening to it again this week that the guitar playing and rhythmic ease is akin to the doo wop / Sun Records / Van Morrison sound the Walkmen have adopted on their last couple of albums; this also goes back to the skewered classicist '50s texture in Television's "Prove It"... which just goes to show, you can make anything lightweight and bubbly if you try hard enough.

The Kinks: Kinda Kinks (1965)

(Pye [orig] / Castle [reissue])

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

After the hardscrabble, consciously raw R&B of the Kinks' debut album, Kinda Kinks finds the band smoothing out some of its rough edges while finding their aggressive muse much more convincingly, their time on the road having paid off in their performance abilities. Despite its reputation as amateurish and vapid, this is the first excellent Kinks LP, although it is enhanced vastly if you track down the 23-track CD version.

The appeal of Kinda Kinks is that it captures Ray, Dave, Mick, and Pete at their peak as the band they initially intended to be: frayed-edge Big Beat confrontation snarlers. In modern parlance, think of it as punk-blues: "Look for Me Baby," "Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight," "Come on Now," and "Got My Feet on the Ground" have the grit of the Stones with an extra push -- Ray writes in the American black music vernacular far more convincingly than his peers. Unfortunately, his voice continues to strain, all too dignified and British to really wash over the consistently excellent music. That's a minor carp when the band is so tight, the songs so addictive and convincing. You forget any problems you have with the presentation and dance your ass off. (And Dave's much more limited voice, perversely, can really sell a groove.)

The number of covers on Kinda Kinks is reduced dramatically; we're left with two, an able and impressive "Naggin' Woman" and a crushingly tepid "Dancing in the Street," although it's a sort of thrill to hear the Kinks take on Motown so soon after the covered song was recorded. The original is just too famous and beloved, and there's no comparison, and to boot Ray is far out of his element.

But where Kinda Kinks really spreads out is on the ballads, which find Ray coming into his own at last. The delightfully catchy "Don't Ever Change" and "You Shouldn't Be Sad" owe a bit of debt to Paul McCartney's slow ones for the Beatles, but their charm is considerable, while "So Long" -- on which Ray even sounds like Paul -- carries the weight and emotion of something like "I'll Follow the Sun" even farther. Without the vague hint of self-regard and pretension McCartney always brought, "So Long" nails a romantic longing and regret with painful ease that foretells the many treasures to come in the Kinks' catalog.

The most famous of the more toned-down and sophisticated songs here, "Tired of Waiting for You," gave the Kinks a smash hit (their last for twenty years in America), and it's a unique, stunningly far-reaching bit of adolescent heart. Ray Davies mumbles out much of the vocal from what sounds like the corner of his mouth, as though he doesn't really want to hear, while the band seems to intentionally plod along to suggest the boredom with which the narrator struggles. Held-back quiet anger, sustained for three minutes, would soon become a Kinks treatment; "Set Me Free," heard in the disc's bonus tracks, is an equally stirring example, while "See My Friends" adds vaguely Eastern textures and a menacing drone to craft one of the most remarkable early Kinks records, on which the band begins to lose their handle on the anger. Instead of giving vent to it at last, they'd come to move in the opposite direction.

"Something Better Beginning," familiar to Americans for its inclusions on the first Kinks Greatest Hits record, is a forlornly tentative romantic classic, with an apprehension toward new love that's atypical for pop lyrics and mature far beyond the band's years. But most intriguing of all is "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl," buried on Side One with most of the fast ones, capturing a creeping, brooding Skip James undercurrent with the put-upon sensitivity of Davies' more accomplished new songs. He still can't compare to the blues greats, but he finds a niche here, a low-toned near-growl full of nuance and hurt that makes one wish the band had recorded more in this regard. It sounds unhinged, scary even, and there's nothing else like it in the Kinks universe.

You will, however, bear witness to some equally striking material in the bonus tracks if you pick up the Castle CD (and, hopefully, the forthcoming reissue). As I said when discussing the first LP, I don't typically plan to ever discuss bonus tracks within album reviews, for two reasons: They're not part of a given album and shouldn't be a consideration when giving an opinion of the full product, and we will be discussing them in a different, to-be-determined format at a later date. But the first four Kinks albums depend too much on the bonuses, and have too much excellent and crucial supplementary material, for me to entirely ignore the extra cuts.

The classics stream forth after the album ends: "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy," a weird, skittering single that was quite a hit, even though it takes longer to fully comprehend than most of their '60s singles; the U.S.-beloved "Who'll Be the Next in Line," a prototypical nonconformist statement; the aforementioned two-pronged genius attack "Set Me Free" and "See My Friends"; and the sweetly cutting, brutal "A Well Respected Man," a rather obscure EP track that managed over the years to become one of the band's most popular early numbers.

But two songs you're less likely to have heard before stand out. First up is "I Need You," not to be confused with the near-simultaneous Beatles song, the most abrasive and ruthless early Kinks rocker. If "All Day and All of the Night" and reflected the band's growing virtuosity and accomplishment since "You Really Got Me," this casts a a shadow over both, bearing down on the feedback, the pounding, the crunchy guitars and delectably simple riffage, and (especially) the emotional intensity. It's inexplicable that this wasn't an A-side. "Till the End of the Day" would soon go even further.

The final track on the Castle CD is time-stoppingly incredible. "I Go to Sleep" is a frequently covered solo piano demo from the Ray Davies catalog, never properly recorded by the Kinks, but this deserves to be in their canon. A ghostly, panging lament of a loss, conquering her absence with her presence in his dreams, it is quite, quite a song, and Ray has never sounded ghostlier or more destroyed. Yet again, he explores vocal avenues here he would never again approach, and for all the brilliance the Kinks would offer in the years ahead, that is a pity. Do not miss this song. If buying some pricey import copy of Kinda Kinks is the only way you can get it, do that. Run, jump, fly to get to it. And don't listen to anyone else; if you dig the Kinks at all, you will dig this album.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Kinks (1964)