Grimes: Visions (2012)

(4AD)

Claire Boucher, Canadian performance artist and musician under the name Grimes, favors a sprightly, punkish electro-pop not fully dissimilar to Crystal Castles, but less immersive and with a stronger top-40 influence. That's led many to approach her as an indie-grade populist, and admittedly there's some pop-worthy weirdness and oddity to be found here, starting and not concluding with the heavy metal-grade cover art. But the aggressive banality of her songwriting and its distinctly anti-pop tendency toward bland mindlessness seem to undercut some of the more intriguing tendencies she shows off here.

That "performance artist" title is key to understanding exactly what's going on within Visions, which though overhyped is certainly one of the more sharply independent and nuanced albums of the year, clearly recorded and released by someone completely aware of what she was doing and the fuss it would cause. She approaches the LP in the form of a DJ spinning twelve-inch singles, melding grooves into towers of bliss -- but she's the sort of DJ who doesn't give the game up ever, at least not until very very late in the night (long after the crowd has probably left, therefore long after the album has finished). The pleasures she offers are limited and curiously opaque; in the same vein as the Weeknd, she's setting up artificial roadblocks to connecting.

The presentation is certainly fine, though; you can feel her bobbing her head and programming the hooks on "Genesis" and "Oblivion," two excellent early cuts that fulfill the promise of the dark, dense synthpop you might hope for. The only serious debit? Boucher's vocals, which tend toward the emptily twee and flat, and not in a manner becoming to the songs she's singing. This doesn't distract too much at first, but as the beats and backdrops grow more repetitive and less inspired, her cooing and belting seem increasingly like some sort of put-on. And you get that sinking feeling that you're listening to essentially a dilution of a Japanese pop mix CD some high schooler put together in 2001.

In the interest of balance, it's fair to note that it's not hard to imagine Visions working tremendously well as a party album -- just at a very, very specific sort of party, and again, extremely late at night because this is defiantly not a midnight or even 1:00am record, it's most certainly 3:30 or 4:30am, like Waffle House hours. Boucher's potential is considerable; she crafts lovely soundscapes that can tease and twirl enthusiastically, but there needs to be a bit more development and depth happening before she can really live up to the attention afforded this release. As it is, Visions is a limited-appeal project that somehow broke through; one hopes this does no harm to Grimes' chances for future success, but right now people are hearing the potential more than the music.

Chuck Berry: After School Session (1957)

(Chess)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This isn't a time capsule, or a dissertation, or any definitive blistering rundown of the early triumphs of Chuck Berry, St. Louis' giant among giants and the true King of Rock & Roll. This is an LP in a carefully orchestrated, staggered and designed sense clearly meant for listenability. It excludes the first three major Berry singles, anyway; "Maybellene" and "Thirty Days" are both missing though their b-sides are here, and "You Can't Catch Me" is noticeably absent as well. It sounds odd, but this resistance to the "instant greatest hits" scenario -- it would've been easy and tempting to replace the instrumentals and blues slow-burn incidentals here with the hits, after all, and there couldn't have been much artistic impetus to do otherwise in this era long before the legitimate supposed "art" of the rock long-player -- improbably makes the record stronger. Its pacing feels deliberate, it impresses and seduces methodically.

The result, thanks to a seamlessness of aesthetics and a healthy spreading around of the greatest wealth in the master's early catalog, is a definitive context for the classics included here. We open with one of Berry's first true manifestos, "School Days," which begins with a sardonic play-by-play of the trials of teenhood before allowing total release and a rolling over of Beethoven: "Hail, hail rock & roll! / Deliver me from the days of old." It's grand when you really think about it, and permanently prescient and universal. But like the other masterpieces included here, it's really just extraordinarily adept dance music before any of its literary aspirations, which are plentiful but not emphasized on this record. The verbose anthem to end them all, "Too Much Monkey Business," finds Berry spitting out phrases that give him solidarity with a working class he well understood, having already spent plenty of time with all the mentioned annoyances of work and life -- nearly every line, in its speed and wisdom and humor, with nary a breath between ideas, is immensely quotable: "workin' in the fillin' station, too many tasks / wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, a dollar gas, aahhh!" -- but its agelessness comes from its pounding beat and flawlessly angry-beautiful guitar lines.

The second half opens with one of Berry's most sumptuous singles ever; what it lacks in the innovation of "Too Much Monkey Business" and the thematic hugeness of "School Days" it compensates in its pure poetic fervor and breakneck pacing. With the confidence and spark of the master storyteller he is, Berry runs down through the ages with a sampling of the many triumphs caused by and for the "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" -- it takes little perspicacity to recognize "brown eyed" as meaning something else entirely, and this stunning rock & roll song becomes a musical empowerment.

It sounds so right to hear the four classics (many rank the ballad "Havana Moon" below the faster cuts, but not me; it's exciting, romantically sad, and beautifully sung, and then there's that world-shaking "OWW!" in the middle of it) broken up in this way you almost can't believe that the general preference among Berry's fans is the hit-after-hit structure of The Great Twenty-Eight. That's a splendid experience, but this is something else that can actually provide the listener with even stronger appreciation for Berry's gifts. There's no question that the choice cuts elevate the rest of the material; instrumentals "Deep Feeling," "Roly Poly," and "Berry Pickin'" mean little out of context, but here they provide moments of reflection amidst all the ruthlessness.

To boot, there are some songs here that deserve a careful level of attention and warrant far more affection than they've received over the years. "Wee Wee Hours" is difficult to argue with anyway, a piano-driven and genuinely shaken blues, and the same goes for the quite delightful "No Money Down" -- a fan favorite that reminds me of the Coasters' later "Shoppin' for Clothes" with Berry's own love-and-car numbers -- but don't discount the oddball ballad "Together (We'll Always Be)" which positions Berry as a sort of cracking Dion in a rather charming plaintive vocal rare for him. The record closes with two exquisite but forgotten atmospheric pieces that richly deserve rediscovery now; both exhibit the neglected cinematic quality in Berry's writing. "Down Bound Train" sounds like the lost overture from some John Ford epic, while "Drifting Heart" positively aches with romance and the film noir night-sky fever of Sweet Smell of Success. No one would argue that "Drifting Heart" deserves a place among Berry's top classic singles, but it alone makes this album worth buying -- which says a great deal about the quality control in the performer's music at this stage.

As composer, musician, and singer, Berry is much more than professional on this protracted debut. He's crafting consistently fascinating and elegant music that rather well deserves the setting Chess provides for it here. It's a small slice of Berry and '50s Berry in particular, of course, but whoever put this sequence of tracks together and presented them in this fashion deserves a veneration that history hasn't really provided. I'm not saying you ought to make this the first Chuck Berry record you pick up, but along with One Dozen Berrys, Chuck Berry Is on Top, and especially St. Louis to Liverpool, it's as essential to your library as one of the compilations. It's not mere archival history, though that's a part of it, it's all so immediate. There's so much pleasure in even the filler, you won't regret a run through the early LP discography at all. I shouldn't have to tell you how rare that is amongst '50s pop stars.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Chess Box (1955-75)
The Great Twenty-Eight (1956-65)

Madonna: MDNA (2012)

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The B-52's (1979)

(Warner Bros.)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Like your train's ready to collide with it, the opening notes chime away and then stomp a bit while Cindy Wilson begins her swinging stride with that simple "remember?" and the phenomenal, alert and immediate crush of it is magnified all the more by the knowledge of what's coming, of which the song, "Dance This Mess Around," provides not even a hint. Wilson shows little patience with pleading for your cooperation, instead insisting and chiding and demanding in the listless, independent howl that launched Kate Bush, Björk, Merrill Garbus, and need we go on: "WHY DON'T YA DANCE WITH MEEE?" Fred Schneider shows up to egg her on with jokes and surreal pronouncements about how "they do all sixteen dances," but Cindy's is the total performance. Kitsch this and kitsch that, and she does of course proceed to help Schneider with those "yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahs" and conjure up wacky names for the sixteen dances in question -- but the enduring, lasting reality of this moment is its completely unironic celebration of a female identity as undiluted, undisguised, unmanipulated. Its cumulative impact could make you cry.

If you weren't too busy dancing, that is, which you are. Voice of experience: this record was a greater comfort to me than a thousand Nick Drakes in a state of grief some years ago, and I remember thinking exactly: "How can I be sad when this music exists in the world?" Not just when it's playing, when it is possible. The closest analogy might be a Gene Kelly musical; there's something that heavy and life-affirming in these oddball grooves. And filmic influences permeate, of course, starting with the melodramatic Peter Gunn interpolation in the overpowering new wave dance opener "Planet Claire," a genuinely otherworldly creation that sets the stage with joyous curiosity.

In short, it's an empowering album, and the first half particularly is the sort of four-cut run that makes you believe again: "Planet Claire" into "52 Girls" into "Dance This Mess Around" into "Rock Lobster" is pretty much as good as the pop album gets for such a stretch, and to have it all dressed up with this sly, unabashed Southernness and, again, empowering femininity and, yes, adventurous / ambiguous sexuality, is something that flies far beyond art-student bohemian retrotainment. "52 Girls" is a classic, for instance, wholly separate from any such concern despite its wry pop-culturalist lyric; it's the melodies, the hook, the bottomless unexpected turns the guitar line makes, the shoegaze-predicting soar of the vocals.

Something as simple as individuality and assertiveness can, at a level this basic, form the guts of art. "52 Girls" is expressive enough, but the willful surrealist play throughout, borrowed as it is from the terminally underappreciated Yoko Ono, could've proven some kind of massive consolation to a certain sort of teenager, the same as that "WHY DON'T YOU DANCE WITH ME?" Fred, Cindy, and the iron-voiced Kate Piersen wind their way gleefully through deeper cuts like "There's a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon)" and the greatly amusing "6060-842" with inexhaustible showmanship and enthusiasm; even the Spector groups were positioned behind a haze of constant threat. This is people doing something, doing it for them and for you.

The visceral clash of that power and the surface-level kitsch peaks and explodes certainly on the grand, unedited "Rock Lobster," which prattles on for seven minutes nearly with an increasingly unstructured chutzpah that often threatens to lose track of its own disco thrust -- especially when the three vocalists begin to rattle off the names and sounds of "a dogfish / chased by a catfish" and of course Schneider's all-time classic "There they saw... a rock / It wasn't a rock."

Guitarist Ricky Wilson is the backbone and voice of this extraordinary band at this point in their career, making them surprisingly closer in this regard to fellow new wave stalwarts like Blondie and Television instead of the equally dance-infected, genre-defying Talking Heads, who were driven almost wholly by their rhythm section. Wilson's loss would prove catastrophic for this band, but his consistent incisiveness and sense of fun as a guitarist infuses the first four B-52's LPs with a charismatic voice and firepower. The dynamic of the B-52's in their early years is a wonder to revel in, frankly; the only analogy I can think of that seems so rich in its multigendered, positive communal drift is the Fugees, and they lack the familial unity here.

Yeah, the second half of this LP is a huge dropoff from the first, but by then you're so knocked over with giddiness you'll barely even notice, and "Hero Worship" and "Lava" keep the fire burning well enough; it's a party with a built-in hangover. You'll visit both for the rest of your life.

Burial: Kindred EP (2012)

(Hyperdub)

This is a mellowing of, arguably, dubstep's premier practitioner -- formerly anonymous twiddler and Four Tet schoolmate William Bevan. Though it has moments of obliquely pretty affect, more ambitiously fragmented and screwed than the numerous works of lesser artists in Bevan's wake, and is certainly a technically strong performance -- divided in two lengthy suites of clipped, soulful noise and an afterword -- it still doesn't work for me. Expansive though it is, it seems to be to be drilling further and further down a clanging, arrhythmic road I can't go down -- but it's got an 89 or something on Metacritic so file this under "things I felt obligated to acknowledge here but don't really have a strong feeling about or desire to ever listen to again."

Angie Stone: Black Diamond (1999)

(Arista)

This is another bargain bin item, but with its pedigree -- Stone cowrote much of, and sang backup on, both of D'Angelo's albums -- it seemed worth a plunge. The impression that there's something here is aided by a contemporary memory of the song and video "No More Rain (In This Cloud)," both of which hold up as a strikingly individualistic "moment" of sorts in the often compromised and homogenized, "safe" world of neo-soul.

Unfortunately, this well-meaning album has very little presence and is fatally backward-looking, the semi-hit owing considerably to a Gladys Knight & the Pips sample which is by far the most musically audacious moment of the sprawling, overlong record. Stone has a pleasant if sometimes overworked, actorly voice, but what she lays down here is the same sort of benign, easily acceptable R&B that stormed the charts in the late '80s thanks to the likes of Anita Baker. Well-sung, technically proficient, thoroughly inoffensive -- well, until the generic lite-jazz cover of "Trouble Man," which is pretty offensive. This is elevator stuff; it probably sounds great at the Limited but isn't much fun to actually listen to.

But Stone's had a hand in some superlative popular music, so we'll assume the production (by about twenty different people) here is just misguided and won't write her off.

The Shins: Port of Morrow (2012)

(Columbia)

!! CAUTION !!

Read my Metro Times review.

[SEE ALSO:]
Wincing the Night Away (2007)