Old 97's: The Grand Theatre Vol. 2 (2011)

(New West)

!! CAUTION !!

Read my review at Metro Times. (Scroll down a bit!)

They lost me. :(

I saw Old 97's at Cat's Cradle a few months ago. Read my thoughts on that here.

[SEE ALSO:]
Blame It on Gravity (2008)
The Grand Theatre Vol. 1 (2010)

B.B. King: His Definitive Greatest Hits (1951-93)

(MCA)

You're gonna have to ask somebody else about this.

I dig some of King's early R&B sides like "Three O'Clock Blues" and "Hully Gully Twist" but generally I am not a huge fan of this slick, smooth kind of electric blues that he's laid down for most of his career. I've actually never been a big fan of this sound -- Albert King and Buddy Guy do nothing for me, either -- and for years I assumed this meant I wasn't into "the blues," but then I discovered the likes of Blind Willie Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and the rougher-hewn Howlin' Wolf. Only when sitting down with a theoretically grand piece like "The Thrill Is Gone" does it really strike me that I for some reason just can't hear the beauty or passion in it. I know King's guitar style is hugely influential and vital and that he is one of the Greats, and I have absolutely nothing against him nor would I deny any of his accomplishments. But his music, his most beloved and celebrated music, bores me to tears. It's my fault and I'm sorry. I realize it's great music and I should love it but it whooshes by me and leaves no impression, much like other luminaries I would name if I didn't already fear this post was too alienating. I intended to review this compilation and hopefully either come to appreciate it or do a better job of explaining why it isn't my thing, but I just don't have much to say. Forgive me?

Big K.R.I.T.: Return of 4Eva (2011)

(s/r) [download it here]

The free hip hop mixtape is sort of our modern equivalent to the 45 in the '60s -- amidst the illusion of disposability comes freedom. But the comparison is far off in terms of volume; you could spend every day listening to the latest offerings across the net and have little time for much else, and that's if you limit it to relatively high-profile performers. In the '60s, you got the A-side which was often freewheeling and imaginative and pop crass or pop class, and the b-side which was frequently a baffling nonentity or just a visibly subpar work that had to be buried someplace. Make that nearly always, unless you were dealing with some sort of great artist with a breadth of excellent material to provide.

Rappers like Big K.R.I.T. are going to save the best stuff for their studio albums, those things you're supposed to pay for, so even the most gifted artists aren't going to rise to the level of an actual LP on their mixtapes. Take a look at Das Racist's Sit Down, Man and while it is awash in brilliance, its lack of focus is marked. Forget it. You might get some snazzy experimentation, or you might get noodling, usually a lot of it -- these things often cover nearly the full runtime of a CD, sometimes more. And if one, for whatever reason, takes off, it usually garners a tidal wave of hype, seeing as it's free and all. Which is the whole point, from the record company's perspective.

While I see the virtues of the mixtape format, I personally hope it doesn't last forever. I'm much more intrigued by Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music model, which last year offered work-in-progress songs and other goodies as a series of virtual singles, setting up his album as the healthily built-up climax of a music-filled year. The idea of the mixtape is to plunder, to find the gems amongst the fuckaround. Return of 4Eva is getting ectastic praise, especially in hip hop-exclusive circles, but let's get serious. Big K.R.I.T. is a smart and talented guy and he's only playing to his strengths about half the time here.

Don't get me wrong -- you can totally see why it's making an impact. For one thing, it goes down easy as fuck. K.R.I.T. is a remarkably affable performer, but he also stumbles a lot, his chick-fixated everyman persona sounding like the eyeroll falsehood rappers shouldn't have to worry themselves over in fucking 2011, particularly a man who seems as tuned in and politically conscious as K.R.I.T.; even when he scores on the party music front, it still seems like kind of a put-on -- a bit like Lupe Fiasco's bewildering stab at the same on this year's Lasers, only more down-to-earth. And as much as he keeps up the pace up with steady, occasionally superb production, Big K.R.I.T. can't escape a certain level of sameness and boredom as these 77 minutes wear on. His motifs are fun backing vocals, which feel best on the earlier tracks before the novelty stops sticking, and a play at the fake-ominous backing tracks of early '90s West Coast rap, best exemplified (and most infectious) on "My Sub."

Of course there are a few gems that make the price of this record more than right: "Dreamin'" and "Rotatin'" are both glorious summer hip hop made for beach drives and street cruises that feel smooth as silk and drift along thrillingly without ever pulling into overdrive, one welcome virtue of a lot of mixtapes. "Highs & Lows" is an exquisite slowjam that doesn't feel as overwrought and familiar as most, despite mediocre lyrics (K.R.I.T. isn't the finest wordsmith yet, though as mentioned, his consciousness lyrics seem more felt), and "King's Blues" is one of the best rap cuts I've heard this year -- reaching strongly back to pre-1986 old school but with fuller production, it has a complete enough feeling that it could be a fully-realized classic single. It definitely leaves a hint of great optimism; it alone would make the mix worth downloading.

Much of the rest, while pleasing enough, is far less than what I think Big K.R.I.T. is ultimately capable of. It's none of my business but much like T.I., who he periodically resembles vocally, he could stand to drop the machismo and cop to the busy pop that seems his forte. But I wouldn't be surprised if he took some other left turn. I would be surprised if the first great record he did was one we weren't expected to pay for. And not pleasantly, because as much as I love free music (legal and otherwise), devaluing great rap is not something I'd advocate.

Al Green Gets Next to You (1971)

(Hi)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Probably the hardest thing for us to imagine now, forty years after Al Green entered his most fertile period, is that his music was even then a throwback. A few years had passed since the heyday of the emotionally ripped Otis Redding and Sam Cooke records of yore. James Brown was by now thoroughly concerned with sweat generation, Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On was still ahead and his fixation was on social comment and musical accomplishment. Pure soul music was quaint in 1970, particularly soul music without a hint of machismo, occupied solely with cooing and whining and purring and quirk -- all of which have, like Stevie Wonder's nasal phrasing or Prince's otherworldly falsetto, entered a cultural lexicon that wouldn't have seemed conceivable at the time.

Not so today -- today we know Green as an innovator, the inventor of something. The lineage is surprisingly direct. Al Green Gets Next to You, his breakthrough effort as an album artist, makes astoundingly attractive, addictive hay out of something as simple as a seamless cobbling together of sensuous romance and filthy backwoods funk. It is velvet and smooth without the artificiality of Barry White or Isaac Hayes, never mind the factory brightness of Motown in the '60s. Green quickly asserts himself as belonging in the class with the masters -- his delivery is more nuanced than any of his peers except Gaye, and his adaptability, the craft of his voice, is a universal treasure, so undeniable as to arouse suspicion when confronted with one who doesn't fall in love with it on contact. The hit "Tired of Being Alone," written (like much of the next album, Let's Stay Together, but little of this one) by Green alone, is the perfect explication: tauntingly sad horns and one of the most superhuman, hurt, magical vocal performances to ever light up the radio. Willie Mitchell and the backing band keep up perfectly, and after a calmly sexy opening the record bursts open into harmony and urgency -- flawless and celebratory of flaws, it is an out-and-out masterpiece.

But you know that. What you may not know (indeed, I didn't, having loved Green for some time but never fully investigated his LPs) is that everything else here is worthy of it -- just as spacious, crisp, alluring. Usually Green renders brilliance from the same taut, wound-up self control he exhibits on the single (dig the rhythmic infection of "Driving Wheel"), but he can let go like crazed James Brown on "I'm a Ram" and come off just as naturally. Regardless of one's gender or sexual orientation, the slowed-down Parliament of "Are You Lonely for Me Baby" is the wettest and hardest of turn-ons; opener "I Can't Get Next to You" manages, impossibly enough, to amp up Otis in a breathing arrangement that beckons the audience forward. From there, the minimalism and unfettered beauty are consistent, on both laid-back rockers like "Right Now, Right Now" and material like "All Because," the kind of earthy soul that no one was bothering to make time for in this period. Green made sure they'd start to do so again. And true to form, he even writes a song about Jesus, "God Is Standing By," that's everything Gaye's "Wholly Holy" is not -- honest, well-written, sweet and lilitingly affecting. Even more impossibly, he wrings an excellent performance out of a song by the Doors, whose version of "Light My Fire" he of course effortlessly renders obsolete. Not once across the album does he make an undue indulgence or overstay his welcome; it's all gently throttling and sneakily powerful, any of the three or four genres he tackles done exactly the right way.

tUnE-yArDs: whokill (2011)

(4AD)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

It's a really good thing this is a blog post and not a legitimate writing assignment because I've lived with this album for the better part of a week, through roughly five and a half listens, and I still don't feel capable of articulating how I feel about it. Hope you don't mind hearing this story, but here goes: in the middle of the fourth time all the way through I had to stop in to the grocery store and heard one of my favorite John Lennon songs, "Watching the Wheels." Usually this cut always sends me into a reeling fit of nostalgia, sorrow, and joyful discussion about Lennon's lovingly domesticated message. Today it sounded lifeless, petty, dim compared to whokill. Different vernacular, different time, different purpose? All granted. But there was a time when Lennon himself with that old band of his could have that kind of effect on all other music, and still can when those songs recirculate, and in no way -- regardless of how great "Watching the Wheels" really is -- is that ability not worth praising.

tUnE-yArDs' supersonic force Merrill Garbus is a rarity indeed -- the singer-songwriter of remarkable maturity whose work also explodes with youthful life. Garbus produced the record, wrote nearly all of it (sharing a cowrite credit on four cuts), and performs the overwhelming bulk of its music, solely accompanied by bassist Nate Brenner and scattered supplemental players. But this is Garbus' world, one of stirring excitement, funk, joy, despair (not any pop-twee notion of sadness or happiness -- actual, felt depth, even when she can hardly be writing about herself), and full-force, exuberant individualism. It is like nothing else in the pop marketplace at the moment. It must be heard, and now.

Garbus' uniquely direct, even invasive approach is bracing in its clarity -- her music is so busy, so overloaded with pleasing ideas and bizarre tangents that it can take time for the curtain to lift to reveal just how expressive and beautiful it is. "Es-so," incredibly early on the album, will leave some exhausted the first time around, sounding vaguely like a malfunctioning Prince b-side, but there is so much happening in it, and once the surrender happens, the dancing takes over, and eventually all you can hear is its shimmer. One detail that will fail to escape even the curious hearing it at a comfortable distance will be that, in contrast to every stereotype of singer-songwriter genre exercises, this is body music. With only a few fleeting exceptions, every second of every song slams somehow -- throbbing, stomping, pulsing, bubbling, vibrating, marching, bumping. "Gangsta" is as original and vibrant a dance song as you will hear in 2011 or most likely 2012; it will eventually become clear that it's also witty and discomforting, but its bleeding edge on top of expansive delicacy and almost impossibly elegant sense of threat is what's really special, followed up by the teasing "Riotriot," which perverts its pleasing simple sing-song riff by building it up into menace until Garbus explodes unaccompanied with the so-wrong so-wise "THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND / THAT I'VE NEVER FELT BEFORE." The climax of the record, the moment that gives its assaultive ideas their purpose -- this is the now we need to know, the unfamiliar we need to embrace.

But beats are one thing. The spirited, inventive instrumentation here, uncovering alien noise from ukuleles and horns and loops and Korg keyboards and an unearthly combination thereof, plus Garbus' infectious vocals and drumming and "stick clicks" crafts a bed of sound nearly unheard of in Western music, certainly in rock & roll. But as much as Garbus engages in the sound of Tanzania, the music of which she says was a key to inspiring her harmonic process, or Jamaica, rock & roll is what this is -- a stunning deconstruction and revamping of folk and R&B conventions until all that's left is what's most rattling, most impossible to shake, most subversively moving. "You Yes You" might populate your head with pleasant Paul Simon memories, the vocals and music perfect Vampire Weekend politeness, until Garbus bursts in with a wonderfully obnoxious "Dance This Mess Around" snarl, demanding "WHAT'S THAT ABOUT!? WHAT'S THAT ABOUT!?" The barbed anti-materialism, anti-criticism of materialism rant that follows is worthy of Johnny Rotten's gleefully fucked "Bodies," only Garbus feels comfortable enough to finally let romance into her idealism and eye-rolling. "Throw your money on the ground and leave it there, you! Yes, you!" This is what is known, in our American rock context, as New Music.

Not that Garbus lacks peers, or precedent. M.I.A. is hardly a stretch, even if she'd never stand for recording an entire album (like tUnE-yArDs' debut, bIrD-bRaIns) on Audacity. But Garbus' seemingly born-in ingenuity as a songwriter more closely recalls the equally gifted Joanna Newsom, as much as Newsom has yet to exhibit the wild eclecticism whokill revels in. For sheer unblocked catharsis, I can't help thinking of Josephine Olausson from Love Is All, but whereas Olausson is clearly exorcising demons -- however artless and lovable those demons are -- Garbus is anxious to thrill, to please, to entertain, to make sense of a world outside herself.

As for the ancestry of this noise in the pop galaxy, never mind the moments that plainly display a Blondie or B-52's reference point on some superficial level, it certainly seems to me that this is what it must have felt like when London Calling, with its effortless integration and fussing up of ageless sounds, or Remain in Light, investigating the spiritual depth of polyrhythms from a hyperactively emotional standpoint, were released. Garbus is really that imaginative, that graceful, that pressing.

In fairness, she is a singer whose work is genuinely made grand by her voice. Without it, this would only be what's vague and dispassionate; slap on this, say, Zooey Deschanel's voice or even Inara George's and you'd get something perhaps interesting, far more risky than their usual work, but hardly life-saving. Garbus completes the portrait; tUnE-yArDs don't surrender to girl-group politics or obsess over their aesthetics. If it retains anything from those old records, it's none of their mustiness. That's thanks to the subservience to the songs (in the vein of Van Morrison or Tom Verlaine) and the remarkable fluidity and virtuosity of Garbus' singing. She can sound so entirely unlike herself from track to track -- like a more coy and intelligent Anthony Kiedis on opener "My Country," like an even more sinister PJ Harvey on "Wooly Wolly Gong," like a way-out seductress on "Powa" or a streetwise wanderer on "Gangsta," or like a crestfallen romantic on "Doorstep" -- that she has no such thing as a "real" voice, except to the extent they all reveal the same basic humanity. Even Mel Blanc ultimately sounded "like" Mel Blanc. This is different; the voice invariably reveals what's behind the songs, which are worrisome, hard-edged, at times sensual, and always inexhaustibly good-hearted.

And that last trait is what allows tUnE-yArDs to uncover a broad and infinitely assured emotional vocabulary. That a fired-up love song like "Powa," about needing to be held down "before my body flies away," can coexist peacefully with the doubt-fraught, warmly hilarious but sharply feminist semi-anthem "Killa" ("I'm a lemon, not a black-and-blue kinda woman") is as infinitely reassuring as, indeed, the celebratory cry against victimhood "Bizness" or the empathy and desperation Garbus expresses, note for note perfectly, on the masterful tragedy "Doorstep."

"Doorstep" is the song of the album, probably the song of 2011. With the storytelling verve of Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" but all of the audible pain the older song omits, Garbus sails into a wrenching tale of a man, boyfriend or husband, so immensely loved his arms inspired her "first joy in life," who is gunned down by ghosts from his past in the doorway. Amidst a repeating plead for understanding from the "p'liceman," Garbus gives a harrowing performance, recounting the details and the injustice and the hurt, the depth of hurt. Then about two minutes and forty seconds in, the heretofore stark instrumentation gives way into a lush prom-night backdrop while she cries her eyes out, and every human who listens will in turn rush to find a way to cope and she shakes her head and wonders simply why the violence, maybe the same violence she was head over heels for on "Riotriot," is permitted to contain her when she's "tried so hard to be a peaceful, loving woman." It's the fulfillment of the Joplinesque, soulful cry of joy on "Powa," and the most disarming, soft, heartrending moment of an astounding album.

Last year I made a proclamation, to whatever extent such silly templates and rules even shape this weblog, that the A+ rating you see at the top of this review would be withheld for any album until the end of the year. I stand by that, it seems logical enough. Chronologically, none of the last four albums I think deserve such a grade would've earned it from me immediately. But the fifth most recent one, Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, would have. This is just as unquestionable an instant classic, an instant benchmark for me. Ten incredibly well-crafted, resonant songs that are felt and playful and direct and immense, all over way too soon. It would be dishonest not to plug it in the highest manner possible. Again I say, buy this now.

The Velvet Underground: White Light / White Heat (1968)

(Verve)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The purpose and thrust of the Velvet Underground, the one they were too mild to express on their Warhol-showered debut album, was the articulation of the secret urge of so many without the smarts or skills to pull it off: the literate garage band -- the absolute maximum capacity of poetry without pretentiousness, musical or otherwise. No one better has ever been born to realize this, not even his bandmates, than Lou Reed. Reed's vocal performance on White Light / White Heat is a tour de force, a slice of macabre magic. Putting Edgar Allan Poe into rock & roll has its own stark implications, but Reed is smart enough (smarter than the Doors or Jefferson Airplane by a zillion miles) to revel in what counts from the actual act of reading Poe, rather than being Poe -- the joy, the utter fixation and thrill, in the bizarre, the grotesque. He oozes with this unashamed flamboyance; he c-c-c-c-c-couldn't hit it sideways, awww it tickle him down to his toes, and then he feels his mind split open.

Reed's confidence and hyperactivity is leagues above his Dylanesque calm on The Velvet Underground & Nico, and this is the sole studio album on which the band's chops are on full display; in song after song, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison impress tirelessly, passionate and giddy in their search for the most unhinged noises they can muster up. Some sophomore albums display newfound comfort, some are portraits of confusion, some certifiable documents of instant creative burnout. For the Velvet Underground, album number two marked a moment when all eyes were no longer on them, when they were blessed with freedom and cursed with a nonchalant public. Their tactic was to create a record with the boisterous, flowing anarchy of their live show. Cut loose from the Factory and all the image-making it entailed, no longer are they bound to uphold anything except their batshit, stunningly prescient idea of rock music -- riddled with in-the-red distortion, feedback, and scarcely contained cacophony. If anything, they're more outlandish than before -- but this time, it comes from deeper. It has almost nothing in common with their debut.

No Andy Warhol. No Nico. No films playing behind them, no dancers in front. Just guitars, bass, viola, and drums, with expertly minimalist production by Tom Wilson. It is almost impossible to believe that this man was thickening and sweetening Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" just a couple of years before. Now here he is, serving as less a producer than a documentary soundman, exposing the world to guitar insanity that would send Art Garfunkel cowering into the closet.

This band was twice as dangerous as even the heaviest of their most gifted peers -- the MC5, the Fugs, the 13th Floor Elevators, to name a few -- first of all because they would stick "Here She Comes Now" on an album with "I Heard Her Call My Name" and "Sister Ray" (but more on that later) and mostly because it was guitar (and drums and bass and viola) insanity. It could not be attributed to drugs or to political opinion or to metal illness. It was people enslaved by music, and it was forceful -- not in the way people think of the Velvets as being confrontational, but in the sense that you're with them or against them.

There is no sequencing logic to White Light / White Heat, nor is there much logic to the way the music is thrown together to begin with. Only six songs, and one of them is seventeen minutes, and another is hardly even a song. It has taken the Velvets less than three years to come to the conclusion that the Beatles would in the same year, over a decade after their formation: that it doesn't fucking matter. Like the White Album, the VU's LP spits in the eye of the Sgt. Pepper logic of an album arranged like a film, opening softly then flowing towards a climax and an ending. There is no easing into the Velvets' world. The brash intensity is there from the first second and it doesn't cease. The title track, a methamphetamine-oriented sequel to the far more maudlin "Heroin," is so loud you might not even notice how conventional it is, but the power is in the convention. It's a ruthless dance song, and you'll dance when you're not wondering what the hell Lou Reed is talking about. Who cares? This is pure rock & roll, tangential and derailed; at one point John Cale's bass goes off the deep end, and the whole band follows. It's beautiful... then the song ends.

"The Gift" runs as long as "Revolution 9" and is guaranteed to piss off the people who despise the latter song twice as much. While the Velvets jam at stage right, John Cale goes into Orson Welles mode, reading in unerring deadpan the run-on sentences and O.-Henry-meets-Poe logic of a short story created for a writing class by Lou Reed. The disturbing factor is that the experiment actually works, and that Reed's characters and situations are screamingly funny even when you know all about the twisted conclusion. "He needed her, and she wasn't there," Cale announced, followed with the unforgivingly precise sitcom-ironic "awwwww" from the others. You can't escape without a kind of adoration for the pathetic, deluded Waldo Jeffers. The humor is magnified by Cale's deftly understated reading, Lou's gleefully elaborate setting up of his twist, the neverending instrumental that conforms not once to the rhythm of the story, and the very fact that it's all on a rock album.

The Poe corner of Reed's psyche, which he would decades later explore on an overwrought concept album called The Raven, gets transplanted to the modern era with the botched lobotomy saga "Lady Godiva's Operation," a surprisingly intricate -- and melodic! -- ballad of a transsexual who, after seducing the doctor's sons, goes under the knife to horrific results. Singer Cale and terrifying interjector Reed see this as neither poetic justice nor anything of much more interest than the apathetically described junkies and hookers of the rest of the album, just a tool to get under the crowd's skin and terrorize them in perfect Hitchcock or Corman mold; the otherworldly sound effects at the climax are genuinely horrific (and intoxicating). The Byrdsian guitars and Cale's Welsh delicacy can deceive you into thinking nothing sinister is amiss, but then along comes Reed, whose flair for drama makes Phil Spector seem like Rick Rubin: "Now comes the moment of great, great decision! The doctor is making... his first incision!"

Without its surroundings, the eye-of-the-hurricane ballad "Here She Comes Now" might seem much more innocuous on a record where, otherwise, any given cut is scarier than the most "evil" moments of The Velvet Underground & Nico. The undeniably college rock-prophetic song (it has aged even less than the record's other cuts) is deceptively simple, and terrific; on the heels of "Godiva" and as a predecessor to the geyser-orgasm of the last two tracks, it's impossibly tense, even with appropriately shimmering production to match the subtle lyricism. This is a good example of a song that sounds and feels entirely different outside its original context, like looking at different colors side by side.

Every connotation of Side One explodes on "I Heard Her Call My Name," one of the most dizzying, intense songs of the '60s, and without a doubt the loudest. Musically, it's nothing less than an assault. While Moe keeps time with ruthless, jaw-dropping precision, the men lose themselves completely, and the guitar attack -- making no melodic sense and all the better for it -- builds for four and a half minutes without a break or decrease in velocity. There's no great climactic explosion -- that's saved for the next song -- and it all would mean nothing if not for Lou's barely coherent, ecstatic, murderous, insane lyrics and vocals. He wails out his story of pining for a woman who's "long dead and gone" and now he hears her calling him. Jumping again from the pages of Poe, this time his masterpiece "Ligeia," Reed looks us in the eye with emotions and desires not of this world or any, and he has the audacity to do it with the thrill-ride exuberance of James Brown. You can't explain that which defies definition, but in the end "I Heard Her Call My Name" is the very essence of everything rock & roll ever shot for. It makes all the sense in the world because it doesn't.

"Sister Ray" may or may not stand up to that, but it forces you to think it does. Mastered louder than any of the other songs here, it intends to make an instant mark -- or wound. Again Reed's tale, told with the enthusiasm and vocabulary of a little boy in a playground, centers around death, but here he adds prostitution, drugs, sailors, and blowjobs to the mix. Someone's just come back from Carolina, someone's sucking on a ding dong, someone needs a dollar, someone's staining the carpet, someone's been murdered, and the police are knocking on the door. The aural attack of the music, similar to the previous song but making its point (or lack of point) gradually instead of all at once, is too seductive for me to keep the characters (Duck, Sally, and their pals) straight yet Reed seems to know them all like brothers and sisters, but he too gives in to the music eventually. "Whip it on me, Jim! Whip it on me, Jim!" Poe arrives again -- "Who's that knocking at my chamber door?" The music could be a story in itself... it begins with standard Velvets guitars-and-feedback, then someone (Cale, I think) sits at an organ and it's louder than everybody else and everybody else tries to be louder, and eventually the song mutates into a white noise dirge and it gets faster and louder and goes on for seventeen minutes. Legend has it an engineer walked out. How could you start this without needing closure on it? Well, you can and will because there is no closure, it's all a moment. Seventeen minutes and it's still a moment, no second wasted. It's funny and danceable and disturbing and unforgettable. They had better songs, but none that explained their dynamic appeal so well; everyone gives the song every ounce of their energy, and it is -- recognized, ignored mistakes and all -- a triumph.

What's endearing about White Light / White Heat is not the veneer of cool that's undeniably there; Reed wouldn't learn to be himself until after John Cale left the band. In simple terms, it's the thrill of a band that's employing the studio as a tool without leaping too far into its capabilities, and doing things more for the hell of it than to make an impression. To be less cerebral, it's a band that has found a way to stick to the wonderful power of rock & roll at its basic, most primal form yet somehow take it further, expanding its horizons and running to unheard-of lengths with it. They're having fun. They're toying with us. And we love it.

[Revised from an essay originally posted at d-b.com in 2003.]

[SEE ALSO:]
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

Panda Bear: Tomboy (2011)

(Paw Tracks)

!! CAUTION !!

You know why Wild Honey is a better Beach Boys record than the nebulous evolving theory of Smile? It gots soul, that's why. "Our Prayer" might be a disarming recording, but it's the glory without the guts; even if "Darlin'" doesn't move you more, "The Warmth of the Sun" surely will, unless you're a fuckin' alien or a prog rocker.

Or a fan of Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, possessive of one of the greatest voices currently in the indie rock scene. What you essentially get with his work in Animal Colective or alone is an eternity of "Our Prayer" as concept, a painfully extensive exercise in the belief that, well, pretty is enough. On Lennox's prior record, Person Pitch, he tempered indulgences like the overwrought, melodramatic 1940s film score "Bros" with beds of music, and even occasionally songs. Only once on the followup -- the pleasing enough "Alsatian Darn" -- does he cop to such philistine temptations. The rest of the time, he expects the aural immensity of his vocals to carry fifty full minutes all by themselves.

But even things as nice as Lennox's pipes can get old after a while, particularly without any serious variance to back it up. True fatigue sets in around the ridiculous "Surfer's Hymn," an all-too-literal blotch of saccharine choir practice feted by -- of course -- the sound of the ocean. Before that, it's so difficult to distinguish Tomboy from Person Pitch it barely seems worth the trouble. And afterward, the boredom and sameness grow overbearing; Lennox wails against the darkness with something like enthusiasm, but he is in serious need of structure. There's not even the grounded emotion and vague wit of his band's "Guys' Eyes" or "My Girls," and certainly not the open-armed loveliness of "Bluish."

Those scattered Animal Collective triumphs aside, the one time I've truly loved Panda Bear is the same moment as the one time I've truly loved Pantha du Prince; the pair's collaboration "Stick to My Side" from last year's Black Noise is heavenly, Lennox's voice as instrument and not centerpiece, giving Pantha's noodling something warm to hang onto. These two need each other. Or at least, they both need something more than they're capable of on their own. As it is, Tomboy is basically sludge. You might find something lovely and worth remembering in the puddle, but parsing through the in-your-face mess will take longer than most of us have to spare.

[SEE ALSO:]
Person Pitch (2007)