Washed Out: Within and Without (2011)

(Sub Pop)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times Blogs.

Alexander "Skip" Spence: Oar (1969)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This record's primary purpose is to generate simultaneously a desire to hug it and a recoiling, creeping disgust -- so given my taste for Alex Chilton's solo work and the Beach Boys' Love You, not to mention Daniel Johnston and (why not) Nick Drake, this would seem a dream album for me. And in one way, I'm amazed that I have managed not to hear it until I was 27, because it's like ear candy to me: dissonant, hyperemotional acoustic psychodrama unfettered by overarranging, with croakingly complete but vague, barely-there songs. Skip Spence was of course the guy who came at a bandmate from Moby Grape with an ax while on a particularly heavy acid trip; upon being freed from the resultant stint in a psychiatrick ward, he showed up at a studio and recorded this lovable slice of shambolic beauty. "Diana" and "War in Peace" are the sound of a broken man, full of the wailing coos that would mark Big Star's "Kanga Roo" a few years later. Say this for a handicap of the sort that addled Spence: it removes all blockage to the kind of wordless desperation that is flawlessly captured on Oar; we don't just recognize this sadness, we feel it.

Part of what separates Oar from its desolate descendants is that its classic rock connection goes far beyond Spence's career lineage. The blues rock elements that built up to the ax-wielding moment are easily audible on "Little Hands" -- ethereal and ghostly, yes, but somehow rootsy as well, an agreeable call forward to Iron & Wine and Great Lake Swimmers, though more unhinged than either. If that's too subtle for you, "Books of Moses" hammers it home. But Spence here exhibits none of the obnoxious machismo that's dated a lot of traditional rock from this period. It helps that the sound and production are a stunningly proficient evocation of a mood. That's the key. As hyperactively eccentric singer-songwriters go, Spence lacks the melodic sense of Brian Wilson and the personable warmth of Alex Chilton, even Daniel Johnston's eagerness to please, but he can wring feeling out of these sparse numbers that Cat Stevens and James Taylor could've only dreamed about. Either would kill for the casual cabaret of "Lawrence of Euphoria," the unsentimentally delicate folk-rock of "Weighted Down," the effortless deja vu of "Dixie Peach Promenade" -- neither would have been able to glean anything honest from them the way Spence does.

Better yet, this rant is not artfully delicate or pretty -- not at all beautiful in a typical singer-songwriterly way; like a Terrence Malick film, its grand emotions come from its rawness and sincerity. It is lovely, it shimmers (see the glorious "Cripple Creek"), and it makes its points with agreeable brevity, the songs fading as soon as they've made their point satisfactorily. Spence's vocals are also ideal for the sonic setting he's concoted, the strain you can sense in his lyrics and singing only making "Broken Heart" that much more convincing and priceless. Maybe this is all extraordinary and prophetic by accident, but it's no small feat that even now, a 1969 album can make a seasoned follower of fringe rock music as uncomfortable as the splendid, otherworldly closing tangent "Grey/Alto" does, to say nothing of the out-of-time "Margaret Tiger Rug."

How refreshing that oar is unembarrassed at its off-kilter sentimentality and playfulness, even at relatively conventional intervals like the naked, stark Simon & Garfunkel guitar move "All Come to Meet Her." Were the album's emotions -- which tend to reflect the confusion that one would expect to haunt a guy just out of rehabilitation --not as unorthodox as its sonics, it would be a home run. As it is, it's very very close.

Wilco: The Whole Love (2011)

(Anti-)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

BTW, the vinyl edition of this is one of the nicest new LPs I've ever purchased. Worth the money.

Big Star: Radio City (1973)

(Ardent)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Where do you begin talking about an album stacked with one undeniable genre classic after another? Everything that's ever been called "power pop" leads back to this, and pretty much all of it is inferior.

Alex Chilton was clearly a talent in the Box Tops, clearly a maverick by the time of #1 Record, and clearly a peak-level pop genius once Radio City rolls around. His expertly crafted but emotionally bleeding pop-song forms are so perfect they seem almost manipulative. He is in a league with almost no others, and the songs on this record are as close as anyone's come to that sudden rush of "I Get Around" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand" since the '60s.

It's helpful to Chilton's quirky focus that the late, great Chris Bell left the band before this album was recorded (though he does show up on a couple of tracks). Without Bell, there is nothing holding Chilton back; he dives full force in both of his natural directions -- the rock & roll purist with every second engineered for life-shaking effect, and the psychologically exhausting avant-pop mastermind. #1 Record was the pop record, Third/Sister Lovers would be the shattering, dissonant masterpiece, but Radio City is the perfect fusion.

The songs here that foreshadow Third would sound perfectly at home on that record, so delicate they threaten to fall to pieces, almost unearthly in a way sensed only in the paranoid drama of Chilton's voice. "O My Soul" is his "Good Vibrations," the most unconventional and jarring of the lot, with its lurchingly messy musical narrative and a shreiking, hanging-from-the-rafters band performance. "Morpha Too," near the end of Side Two, provides the payoff, Chilton alone on piano sounding devastated: "I don't know shit, and I don't know what to do / I'm in love with you." His fragmented, hellish rock move "Life Is White" (a rejection of the first album's love song "My Life Is Right"?) turns evil harmonicas into a wall of fire, with Alex crushing everything under his brilliant teenage lyrics: "I know what you're like / And I can't go back to that" turns to "I know what you lack..." Again, he has the most important skill for a true rock & roller, and the one most of them after the mid-'60s blatantly lack: he is blind to banality, and he understands that rock & roll is a different world in which literary standards do not apply. He intends to speak to an audience that does not like flowery poetry any more than they like being looked upon as dimwitted tickets to wealth. His sincerity and lack of pandering make his work that much more moving... and disturbing. He is so much like Brian Wilson in this sense that it's hard to contemplate.

The shuddering, mad intensity of Third is predicted as well by "What's Going Ahn," a psychological trauma set to music that means to rivet us in its slow pace, and does. But the song is far more conscious of its blunt power and wit than, say "Kanga Roo": "Well, I like love, but I don't know / All these girls, they come and go / Always nothing left to say." Turning adolescently filthy '70s riff-rock on its head with its adruously crawling, tentative pace, the song's tracking of emotional depth in simplicity of expression is startling. But that's merely a preview for the almost voyeuristic breakup ballad "Daisy Glaze." Never did Big Star seem more prophetic, predicting (and bettering) alt-rock's traditional dynamic of the whisper-quiet ballad building gradually to a full-out emotional explosion. A pity that no one who copped this technique ever matched it remotely so well to so harrowing a series of fragmented but illuminative setiments. The lyric reads like someone's diary in the midst of a breakdown, even quoting at its glorious climax the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" directly and brilliantly -- "And I'm thinking, Christ / Nullify my life, nullify my life." The song ends in the oddly joyous announcement that "You're gonna die, yes, you're gonna die," by which time the emotional ambiguity of Chilton's particular brand of power pop has proven itself many times over.

All the same, Chris Bell and #1 Record are hardly absent here; they shadow over the more commercial material, and it's in the fusion of Radio's rambling and Record's bliss that Big Star hits their peak. "Way Out West," written by bassist Andy Hummel and sung by drummer Jody Stephens, is wonderfully unpretentious, a worthy sequel to "The India Song." The breathless, Beatlesque "You Get What You Deserve" is another powerful angry-male diatribe, with such familiar speeches as "Try to understand what I'm going through" and "You've gotta have a lot of nerve."

But in ascending order, "Mod Lang," "Back of a Car," and "September Gurls" are just about the three most perfect pop songs ever written -- that is no exaggeration applied to an indie friendly underground group; the fluke is not them, it's the rest of the marketplace. "Mod Lang," written several years earlier, is a blues imitation (its words built largely from the clichés of that genre) that endlessly exhilarates in its simplistic chorus: "How long can this go on?" Similarly unforgettable is "Back of a Car," Chilton's most vivid illustration of teenage nights and showcase for masterful melodic sense. With Chilton's best chorus -- "I'll go on and on with you / Like to fall and lie with you" -- it evokes youth with a feverish, fast-paced beauty that defies the walls of trends and (with no small thanks to the uncredited guest appearance by Bell) feels like the absolute apogee of '70s guitar pop, so drunkenly joyous it threatens to burst through the eardrums. The Cars spent ten years trying to manage that song, but as good as they were, they couldn't get a glimmer of the magic in Chilton's guitar, and certainly none of them had a voice like his. These are short, sweet, loud pop songs, their insane perfection and appeal infinite -- the difference between Big Star and the Cars, and the Raspberries for that matter, is fragility. Even at their most robust and hook-filled, Chilton's compositions still sound poised to fall apart at any moment, moments and memories too delicate to last.

An equally grand demonstration is "September Gurls," the song that dispels everything that you ever loved about rock & roll into three minutes of something like bliss. It encapsulates all elements of Big Star's seductive urgency, with the desperation in Chilton's voice, the tower of glory in the guitar solo, and the stinging energy of the lyrics: "I loved you... well, never mind." After hundreds of listens, the song can still induce the kind of chills that pop composers are seldom able tow ork toward. It is not only a wonder that this wasn't a huge hit, it's completely mystifying that it didn't overcome the odds to make this band a household name.

But the album went nowhere, and cult status or not, we will always be missing the impact it could have had on the world at the time. Instead, we get to experience it for ourselves, which may be even better. Chilton was a genius and rock & roll, whether its larger faction knows it or not, will never recover from his loss. Radio City closes out its wonderfully concise command over the attention with Chilton strumming a guitar and serenading us with the romantic, divine truths of "I'm in Love with a Girl," because he knows that's what we'll always need the most, and it's like he's still fucking there, man.

[Edited and revised from a review I posted in 2004.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Keep an Eye on the Sky (1970-74)
#1 Record (1972)

John Maus: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (2011)

(Ribbon Music)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times Blogs.

M. Ward: Transfiguration of Vincent (2003)

(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This record is new to me, and I'm delighted to discover that this and not Transistor Radio from a couple of years later is Matt Ward's artistic breakthrough. On his third album, he proves himself already a master of texture and a cinematic, dreamlike mood that is completely irresistible. From the opening sound of crickets chirping, these fifteen admirably concise tracks whisper in and out but never collapse under their ambience, and provide a showcase for both Ward's humongous guitar gifts and his attraction to bedroom-pop production in the vein of Nick Drake without succumbing to the gimmicry that often marred his prior effort, End of Amnesia.

"Transfiguration #1" is a piano-complemented Floyd Cramer imitation, a stage-setter of sorts, before Ward sets in with stirringly pretty ballads that easily compete with his influences, from the singer-songwriters of the '70s to Yo La Tengo. Ward's resistance to cop to pure sentimentality is a welcome change from his earlier work; whereas "Vincent O'Brian" might once have finally come across as mawkish, he buries under enough electric guitar and drums to make its nostalgia endearing and welcome, never cloying. At his best, though, he is unafraid of a stomping folk-rock that, on "Helicopter" and "Fool Says," verges on psychedelia. He's also unexpectedly witty; witness the filtered drone of the Johnny Cash burlesque "Sad, Sad Song," the jazzy barroom charm of "Poor Boy, Minor Key," the thrilling fusion of country-blues and chamber pop on "Get to the Table on Time."

The record doesn't divide itself convincingly into songs, but they're here if you need them; the melodies here are more persuasive than is usual for Ward's output, before or since (with a brighter arrangement, "A Voice at the End of the Line" could work as a She & Him track; "Let's Dance" is unabashed prom night stuff). It's more likely that you'll find the ambience so enjoyable that you'll simply let the whole thing play through. And that's certainly a virtue not to be taken lightly. Just don't assume that just because the thing is pretty, it's passable purely on that basis; pay close attention and you'll find this no less rewarding.

[SEE ALSO:]
Duet for Guitars #2 (1999)
End of Amnesia (2001)

Moby: Destroyed (2011)

(Mute)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times Blogs. (scroll down!)