John Coltrane: Ballads (1962)

(Impulse!)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Like most who've fallen under the Coltrane spell, I believe Giant Steps and A Love Supreme to be the essential works of one of the 20th century's major creative forces. After that, I diverge from the norm unequivocally. For one thing, I believe his "free jazz" peripheral items like Om to be among the most beautiful music he ever recorded, and that Africa/Brass is easily as innovative and influential as A Love Supreme. And then there's Ballads, one of the biggest sources of controversy among Coltrane scholars. The common accusation is that he didn't want to record it at all, that it was a concession to Impulse! and a reactionary move against criticism of his hard bop records (and Africa/Brass). Believed it be laid down quickly in a slapdash manner, it's seen more than anything as a step backward -- an album of standards that includes no music actually written by Coltrane himself. I don't really know or care how much of this is true; I wouldn't put it past even an idiosyncratic record label to worry itself sick over an artist's direction. It's my firm feeling, however, that there are nearly no more intense pleasures available to us as music listeners than Ballads.

And more to the point, I would put it past Coltrane to not care about something he recorded. I don't honestly believe that he was capable of getting drawn into such apathy -- not to paint him as saintly, but this is simple mathematics: terribly young at the time he died (40), he never had time to screw up or to become the jaded business-worn figure, prolific though he may have been. The serious reason I think the "all standards" controversy is bunk, though, is the nature of jazz itself as formed in the hands of people like Coltrane. Clearly, these standards are a mere launching pad for a collection of ideas by a fascinating and robust quartet. It's fair enough to suggest that those ideas are necessarily less vibrant and prescient than those typically explored by Coltrane's various units, but it's nevertheless a stirring feat to hear his fully developed musicianship in service of material that in so many hands would seem tired and basic, witness the very use of the term "standard." If you don't accept that logic, which you really should, fine, think of this as a vacation with John Coltrane to the French Riviera or something. That's no less beautiful than the act of turning jazz on its head with every packed-in note, it's just something else, some other mood this extraordinarily gifted individual was able to give off.

Ballads is the sharpest and most confident of Coltrane's romances, with warmth enough in its introspection to make a listener feel lifted and embraced. It's not simply a performance of songs, it's a definitive recasting of them as golden seduction. The seduction wastes no time; the gentle swaying of "Say It" is instantly tempered by the sophisticated playing of Coltrane as well as McCoy Tyner's hopping, charged piano. Convention gets turned around just slightly throughout both sides of the record; "What's New," for instance, is almost a straight read but with just a touch of the giddily arrhythmic. "I Wish I Knew," by contrast, might add nothing more than that extra sense of yearning to the sax, but it's so much more powerful than such a simple word as "yearning" can get across.

That's because the playing here is so deeply felt, as always, but amazingly just as much so on distant items like these worn-down songs. Coltrane plays both tenor and soprano here, as on My Favorite Things and Africa/Brass, and charges into the emotional center of each track as a vocalist typically would. The entire band does superlative work here, though, supposedly basing their recorded arrangements and performances on only a limited knowledge of the songs and a painfully brief rehearsal for each cut. That's hard to believe considering the intricacy of, to start with, "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "All or Nothing at All." The latter has Elvin Jones starkly pound out a drum introduction with a building, cascading rhythm suggestive of later, wilder freedoms. The song that develops is gloriously illusory, like a mutated bossa nova, a thing so vague that it somehow can't be reached, but as the chaos mounts it features as well the most lyrical sax line on the record -- until tune and sense are slowly and sensually lost.

It's "You Don't Know What Love Is," however, that most conveniently defines the tremendous artistry and immediate appeal of the Ballads aesthetic. Another galvanizing introduction washes over us with drummer Jones pulsing inward -- a wet and disorganized pathway into total bliss -- until stabbing, angular single notes and an abrasive arrangement contrast on the verses with the sax flowing outward -- all growing clearer and more traditional as the clock ticks, until it seems to fall together tantalizingly just before it ends. It's an arresting performance, but most importantly one that's both engagingly strange and gut-level beautiful. That keen sense of the immediate in even the most unexpected setting actually points the way ahead to A Love Supreme.

Like nearly all of Coltrane's work, Ballads is designed to reward careful listening, even if its central conceit and pretense seems to be the crafting of dinner music. Dinner music, great as it may be, seldom shimmers like this, and it's hard to ignore or escape the knowledge that these songs are impossibly elevated beyond their origins. They may be worthy of their status or not, they probably are, but it's Coltrane's actions and violence upon them that matter. Even at the album's most conventional, it's still nocturnal joy ("It's Easy to Remember") with a pulse-pounding undercurrent of frayed, serious, messed-up love and sex. The most beautiful, involving, and (why not) danceable of these songs is "Too Young to Go Steady," the band unbelievably tight with its arrangement's consistent pressing onward, backdropping the sheer and absolutely knowing nature of Coltrane's sax playing. When this crisp, indomitable Ballads whispers off into the night with its lonely crystalline sound, you feel you've heard much more than a simple Coltrane album of jazz-standard covers. But hell, that would be enough anyway, I'm pretty sure.

[SEE ALSO:]
Giant Steps (1960)
A Love Supreme (1964)

Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It (2012)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Mike Hadreas' song "Hood" is, no words minced, a masterpiece. Released as the single from his second album as Perfume Genius, it sparkles out clearly as a raw moment of entirely unguarded expression -- from its bare-minimum, haunted "you'd never call me baby if you knew the truth" hook to the unfiltered catharsis of its piano explosion, the thing is an act of emotional terrorism. In exactly two minutes it moves, crushes, and challenges, a seemingly one-on-one communique on which we're invited to listen in. You wish it wouldn't end so quickly, and yet it's perfect that it does, and invites the kind of repeated-listening obsession you can't believe you're subjecting yourself to.

The side effect of "Hood" is it makes everything else on this entirely pleasant and often touching record sound slightly drab, purely a consequence of its everything-falling-together-in-proportion perfection. If you enjoy the key track, there's little doubt that you'll find some things to appreciate on the LP despite the far-outlying nature of its peak. The stark, stunning intimacy appears throughout the record, with excellent use of minimalist sounds like the terminally sad plinking piano on "AWOL Marine," the subdued string arrangement on the dramatic "17," the intricate and whispery dreampop of "Floating Spit."

But despite the command Hadreas exhibits in his best moments -- he knows his way around a classicist piano ballad for sure, as "Hood" and "Take Me Home" prove most immediately -- many of the peripheral songs here have a tendency to sort of float away unnoticed, and paying extra-careful attention doesn't seem to help much. A chunk of the tunes just aren't quite "there" yet, but of course when they connect, they soar. The second best cut is likely "Dark Parts," which brings in some faint pop propulsion but succeeds greatly on the basis of its aching lyric ("I will take the dark part of your heart into my heart," a flooring, deep-rooted sentiment that becomes all the more so when you discover he wrote the song for his mother), but the complex subtlety of the melody on the busy "Floating Spit" points a bright way forward as well. It's easy to guess that this is only the beginning, and Hadreas will be gradually developing into the capable and assured artist he already sometimes hints at being.

Hadreas' voice -- sometimes passing from "lovely" into "moony" -- will remind many of Sufjan Stevens, something amplified by their similar tastes for an almost painful-to-us vulnerability and a regular surrender to pure prettiness that Hadreas seems to be working actually a bit too hard to temper. ("All Waters" is a dirge, "Put Your Back N 2 It" is not nearly so exciting as its title implies, and if you're anything like me you spend "Sister Song" wishing he'd break into a spirited rendition of the Magnetic Fields' "Drive On, Driver.") What makes the record a bit of a task to listen to is not his musical tastes but the sometimes harrowing suggestion of a complex and tortured history -- put in your time and it rewards you, but in the dramatic funeral wheeze baroque "No Tear," the wounds are plain and deep. The record's like a hymnal for perceived sin, lush but subversive, brief (32:13) and confessional. Caught in the right mindset, it's also downright heavenly.

But there is fun to be had here; as stunning as that video for "Hood" is, featuring Hadreas locked in loving embrace with porn actor Aprad Miklos, it's also quite playful. The uneasily direct and soulful Millay poetry reading "Dirge" isn't one, and the hushed, shaky waltz "Normal Song" offers a bit of release and hope: "Take my hand when you are scared," he sings, and it's the quiet fruition of the redemption longed for on "Hood" -- yet it's "Hood" we come back to. Can't help wondering what that means.

L7: Smell the Magic (1990)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The riot grrl movement was one of the cultural miracles of the early '90s, and what a pity that my suburban backwards southern modern rock station utterly ignored it (Garbage and Hole were as close as it came, and that's not much consolation); it seems almost unfair to play up or praise L7, one of the best bands of the decade, on the basis of their refusal to cooperate with rockist gender roles, but it's equally uncouth to ignore that element. You know what made this music special and empowering? It wasn't some reductive "women can scream and rock too" pandering to radio formats, L7 was empowering and heroic because they didn't give a fuck. It wasn't that they busted open gender roles and rewrote "the rules" or whatever, it was they refused to accept that those things even began to matter. They laughed in the face of the idea of pinning them down as "female music," of "female music" being a thing at all, which it isn't. But is it nevertheless fair for a privileged white male to say he finds this music galvanizing and glorious in some part as a result of that specific refusal to adhere to "tradition"? I certainly hope so, and I have to imagine it has some considerable role in explaining why I love this band's records despite never being (and still not being) a fan of metal, trash, "hard rock," virtually any harder-edged guitar-driven material. This, though. This speaks to me.

My affinity, for years now, has always been to L7's subsequent commercial semi-breakthrough Bricks Are Heavy, but that's mostly because I hadn't spent much time with their earlier work until recently. This second album, which was originally an EP but was later repackaged with additional tracks and now may as well be considered a stopgap between L7 and Bricks, is a gem. It's reasonable, of course, to be curious about why the sort of person who can't stand obvious markers like Zeppelin and Sabbath would love this, and no, it's not because it's "female music." It's the songs, man. Songs. They are almost painfully sharp and melodic, such a strong strengthening of their prior work, full of towering, leery menace that's also totally pop. So L7 appropriates the classic rock tropes without compromise, but also redefines them -- gleefully.

Donita Sparks, Suzi Gardner, and Jennifer Finch trade lead vocals back and forth but it's Gardner who makes the outlandish and throttling initial impression with her spitting out and screeching of "Shove," a splendidly nonchalant and totally assured anthem that captures that feeling of nightclub electricity in a tiny room like few recorded pop songs can. The aggression sets the stage beautifully, and it's not a stretch to imagine this all as a blistering live recording, on a scarring night to remember. "Fast and Frightening" has that nocturnal, dark mercilessness, Sparks letting loose whoppers like "straight girls wish they were dykes" and the magnificent manifesto "got so much clit she don't need no balls." But the hardness is deceptive; what it really reaches back to is rockabilly, especially Eddie Cochran and Dale Hawkins.

You really don't have to listen hard to note such clear-cut yet appealingly realized influences, quite apart from the towering guitar funk exercise "(Right On) Thru" and the outstanding garage rock "Deathwish"; and god bless them, in our 2012 context, for not being wholly indebted to Lesley Gore and the Ronettes as is now the parlance of so much surf-punk and hardcore, led by men or women. Nothing against those wonderful artists, of course, but it's so much more interesting to hear a band with a classicist rock & roll sound that's interested in riffing on the Monkees ("Packin' a Rod," sneering joy) or Paul Revere & the Raiders by way of the Ramones ("Just Like Me," boasting an unforgettable riff). There's even a place for British new wave, so unfairly disdained by most of the U.S. indie-rock underground of the period, on the methodical and bottom-heavy "Broomstick."

At its best, Smell the Magic causes a streaming out of hyperbole. The total headfuck "Till the Wheels Fall Off" drives on and on intensely, the sort of thing that generated the rock standby adjective "face-melting"; and the tormenting earworm "American Society," aside from anticipating the hit "Pretend We're Dead" with its riff, peaks with an honestly glorious refrain. And that one was originally an outtake!

Sweltering and exhausting, this is a stunning leap beyond L7's debut, and you know it's gotten under your skin by how fast it seems to skitter by -- at a mere thirty minutes, it feels much shorter. For me, this is so much more vital than anything produced by the concurrent grunge movement, and though my teenage self was happy with all the Pearl Jam and Hole and Live and Garbage on the radio, I have this perpetual feeling that I missed the actual '90s and the broadening of thoughts and horizons it might have given me because I wasn't turned on to L7 at the time. The same goes for bands like Luna and Pavement, but who knows -- if I'd been aware of L7 in my formative years, maybe it would have had such an effect on me that I would have a taste for classic rock and metal in my twenties! It's an outlying possibility, but this record is such a consistent and addictive pleasure I can actually imagine it happening. You never know, right?

[SEE ALSO:]
L7 (1988)

Lambchop: Mr. M (2012)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

To open with a bit of honesty: I'm not altogether familiar with Lambchop outside of their peripheral involvement with other bands and the chapter about them in Our Noise. The only record I've heard by them prior to this one is 1996's How I Quit Smoking. One of the stories that sticks out for me from the book is how cathartically emotional the band's concert appearances are reported to be, especially in Europe where they enjoy considerably more celebration than stateside. Spending time with their new record, Kurt Wagner's hushed and grieving tribute to the late Vic Chesnutt, I can easily understand why so many are reduced to tears when seeing them. But my lack of context prevents this from being a more comprehensive review; I'm inspired certainly to catch up on Lambchop and then one hopes I will be able to speak about Mr. M more articulately. For now: it's involving, lilting, immersive, and it's working for me more than all but a handful of the records released thus far in this dismal year.

Disarming as the profane "If Not I'll Die" is with its dreamy Wizard of Oz strings, it gathers us into the meditative slow burn of the album's particularly strong first half. Songs like "2B2" and "Gone Tomorrow" screw darkly into a moment, minor-key moods with quiet monetum, a sad and spirited reluctance to snap out of it. The latter is particularly beautiful, its gentle shuffling jam slowly building to a stunning slight lift from "Ceremony" at the climax. The theme of obsessively slowed-down dance music happily carries through to the immersive "Mr. Met" with its crawling bass riff, but Wagner and company interestingly seem to lose themselves most of all on a pair of instrumentals. "Gar" is unabashedly sweet with calm piano and Bowie-like harmonies that seems to beg for some oblique entrance to a '70s rock playlist alongside Eno and Rundgren; and "Betty's Overture" is a score without a film, lovably suggestive of Beautiful Music.

Mr. M fades out slowly, harping on the phenomenon of nearly melody-free prettiness on "Nice Without Mercy" and only very occasionally starting to drag. The romantic simplicity is always tempered by sadness, and occasionally the chilly cynicism of something like the catchy manifesto "The Good Life (Is Wasted)." Wagner's vocals weave quietly in and out of band performances that are routinely impressive but seldom call excessive attention unto themselves. Without any setting up whatsoever, you get the sense that this is a band worthy of a particularly fiery sort of passion -- and more of us should be following them.

Animal Collective: Sung Tongs (2004)

(Fat Cat)

How many Animal Collective albums should one listen to before one is satisfied that Animal Collective is very simply not their "thing"? That's an open question to any and all fans reading this. I don't want any anti-"hipster" sarcasm, either; I genuinely have the feeling that lurking in this music somewhere is something that would connect with me. I came to the band backward, during the mass internet hysteria about Merriweather Post Pavilion, and was seduced instinctively by "My Girls" and especially "Bluish" (best love song of the last five years? maybe) -- and of course the Collective's palette of influences is near and dear to me.

But something's missing, and I have a feeling it's a thing with me. Your friendly context here is that as I write this I'm in the middle of reviewing the new album by (the) Gossip, one of those bands whose primary interest to me seems to extend only to a single beloved LP (Music for Men, a shy DJ's best friend in mid-2009) and a few stray cuts -- their new record suffers from the same issues as Goldfrapp's last one, it's steeped in the very wrong kind of 1980s pastiche and seems a reaction against carefree synth-disco, which to me amounts to a certain betrayal. The smoothness and sterility of it is driving me nuts, and I have to listen to it several more times (because I do that when people are paying me to write about something, not like here where I snap judgments in y'all's face) so I needed a break. And I've had this Sung Tongs lying around a while, I like Panda Bear and Avey Tare's voices, I "get" what the band is about, and I heard this was a pretty abrasive record, which sounded nice right then. Plus we'd just seen Shortbus in which music from this album is prominently featured.

It's too much for me, and as I sit with it again now something about it is just irksome; I seem to remember a publicist at one point calling this pets-running-out-of-the-room music, and though I tend to like bizarre and angular and "irritating" music like Yoko Ono and tUnE-yArDs and shit, I'm with the pets on this one. There's something in the space between sounds here that's getting the wrong sort of rise out of me. I like the vocals on "Get to Know Your Rabbit" or whatever. And I feel sort of dejected because the Collective is really the fruition of a prediction of mine a decade ago that we'd soon see the Beach Boys surpass the Beatles in influence, yet I can't seem to enjoy it, or get the emotional push I do from Smiley Smile. The bent, crazed ambiance and the intricate harshness of the sound is somehow like a roadblock, even though I can sense something beautiful happening nearly all the time for the duration of this record.

Positive message, though: You really don't need to go to college. But... can I make one hipster joke? Just one? Maybe you have to go to college to appreciate this music. I can't seem to. But how can I write off a band with this much to offer? Is there anything wrong with working through the murk and the mess to get to the good stuff, anything wrong with a band that takes some work to listen to? Am I just getting impatient? I don't have the answers to any of this, I'm asking you, the viewer. As for Sung Tongs, two befuddled listens later (don't tell anyone but I skipped around a lot the second time through), it's going in the "I have no clue what I think of this" pile.

M. Ward: A Wasteland Companion (2012)

(Merge)

Read my Metro Times review.

Feeling cynical these days, I guess. Not so long ago I felt this man could do no wrong (excluding his "bands"). Now...?

[SEE ALSO:]
Duet for Guitars #2 (1999)
End of Amnesia (2001)
Transfiguration of Vincent (2003)

The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night (1964)

(Parlophone)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

This is the Beatles' masterpiece, or at the very least the unimpeachable peak of the band they initially set out to be, from basements in Liverpool to the crawlspace behind cinema screens in Hamburg. Explosive, impassioned, blissfully fucked-up rock & roll, the highest kind of art and communication. Rubber Soul may have the strongest songs, the White Album may be the strongest amalgam, but it's this record that gives the base visceral reaction of knowing you're hearing the Beatles, an actual band, proving their utter mastery of everything. The moment it captures is so vivid and so present it can bring a tear to your eye as much as it adds a bounce to your step. They'd never record with this enthusiasm again, and they'd never fill an entire album with Lennon/McCartney songs again.

"Lennon/McCartney," of course, is an in-name-only attribution. All but three of the songs on A Hard Day's Night are John Lennon's work. This creates an interesting paradox: the album is worlds away from the movie that gave birth to half of it. Richard Lester's film is about community, confusion, imprisonment, and freedom; the album is about one man's demons. A Hard Day's Night is Lennon's real primal-scream record. "Please Mr. Postman," "All I've Got to Do," and "Ask Me Why," among others, had given some hint of the beautiful ache he was wont to bury behind some semblance of rock-boy swagger. The world in the palm of his hand, he's hiding no longer -- the depth of emotion, the joy and the pain, in every note he sings here is inescapable.

The eponymous track flies through you like a bullet train, opening the album with a thunderous guitar chord and Lennon's desperate-man-in-love theme. It's a decided evolution from "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." It adds something like pure charisma. Lennon gets by on similar arresting tactics for the swinging "I Should Have Known Better," girl-group shuffles "Tell Me Why," and "When I Get Home," all with stinging vocals that seem to prove Lennon's commitment to his material. No ordinary pop star, no studio musician punching the everyday clock, could sing the way he did in a million years.

What's more, there was a truth in these songs, a resignation but also a bracing desire to hope. "If I Fell," his most naked love song aside from "Don't Let Me Down," is in many ways the centerpiece of the LP. It often feels like these songs exist in a medium where they cry out, begging to be heard and understood. Lennon is deadly -- articulate, sexual, brilliant, and seemingly always on the brink of devastation, destruction. His voice is the Beatles' best asset by a longshot... it expresses so much that is inexpressible, in songs like "When I Get Home" that could easly be slight and forgettable without him. Alas, not one song he sings here isn't wonderful.

The voice isn't everything; as if to prove it, "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You," written by John but sung by George, comes flying out. It speaks volumes that it offers the same intensity in a voice that is, at best, not even a thousandth as good as John's. This is a song I come back to frequently. It roars with movement and one leans against the cracks, knowing something's hidden in there and waiting for it to show itself. The payoff is on Side Two.

Lennon seems liberated completely on the non-film songs. Sounding genuinely bitter on "You Can't Do That," he keeps the mental anguish rolling on three of the best rock songs of all time. "Any Time at All" one-ups the uncontrollable engine of the title track by heading somewhere with it. It is possible to lose oneself forever in the guitars on this track, and it's the Beatles' most raggedly delicate rocker, bleeding from all corners. "I'll Cry Instead" is so eloquent, sad, witty, personal, and vaguely weird it's hard to believe it comes from one of Lennon's songs and not either of his books. A country riff backs Lennon's sighing heartbreak clown routine, wailing out words about coming back and showing 'em all that he knows aren't true, and making them that much more moving as a result.

"I'll Be Back," the album closer, covers the same kind of territory, but the Beatles have saved the best for last. The melody is John at his peak, and his singing is something you can't explain, especially since the darkness and light of his lyric humanizes mindsets that we can't explain any more easily. The band's restraint hides the grandly affecting statements backing the song up; they sound just magnificent.

And although his single "Can't Buy Me Love," a raucous and rousing but somewhat generic rocker, doesn't amount to much in these surroundings, Paul winds his way skillfully through a set that threatens to overshadow him entirely. You know "And I Love Her," you love it (especially if you've viewed a performance of it through Richard Lester's lens) and you probably know "Things We Said Today." Paul's lyrics here -- though more indirect -- are a close match for John's in "I'll Be Back," and the cloudy hop of this gorgeous song is irresistible.

With the music business in the palm of their hands the world over, the Beatles lost none of their vitality. Their strengths are intact, refined and perfected, and this is the crown jewel in a fine career, a record of unparalleled grace and understatement, a powerfully succinct thirty-minute set of songs that, like the film, brims with life. Rock & roll has never been so gloriously beautiful while retaining the strength of its core. A Hard Day's Night is more than just a culmination of this band's near-perfect first three LPs: it's indispensable. The band needn't have done anything else afterward. It's to their credit that they did, but this is their highest statement on record. They laid themselves down here and that's it. Everything else is a luxury.

[Slightly modified from a review posted elsewhere in 2003.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Please Please Me (1963)
With the Beatles (1963)