Daft Punk: Discovery (2000)

(Virgin)

RECOMMENDED

Daft Punk's 1997 debut Homework exhausted many listeners, including this one, but its impact -- especially given its relatively late entry into the dance music platform that had been in place by then for over two decades -- was beyond measure. It also exhausted house music, at least from the perspective of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo -- they did everything they could think of. Discovery entered the world eagerly at a time of considerable before-the-storm hedonism, a shot of unapologetic joy that's pointedly unopposed to being stupid. It doesn't feature songs any more than its predecessor so much as just bare, unadorned hooks distilled to their illogically orgasmic essence. It's all cream filling, and thus just as grating as the prior record, just as artistically intriguing, and depending on the moment, just as inspiring of bump-and-grind dancefloor pyrotechnics.

The first two Daft Punk records were both received lukewarmly upon release, but they each gradually grew into significant albums, slowly finding their audiences until they had a decade's worth of moments. That's despite each of them having sizable hits, in this case "One More Time," a curious single indeed. The track marks an immediate reversal from the stark relentlessness of Homework; not merely less beat driven but spending much of its time in a pregnant pause absent of percussion, it consists of what sounds like a distantly sampled introductory splash from a long-forgotten disco record, followed by just a fragment of its chorus. It's the essence of something, deliberately robbed of whatever meaning it may have had, as alien in its fashion as an early Beatles record just making its way Stateside -- but rather than presenting an unsettling, unexpected, unforced pleasure, its sensations seem implanted, almost grotesquely. In an era when pop music was so frequently accused of being overly engineered, Daft Punk went further; "One More Time" is notebook pop, a radio single concocted by HAL 9000.

Its relentless cheeriness does betray a surprisingly broken-feeling nostalgia, something that folks stuck working in the lobby at AMC where it played on a loop for a whole summer or trying to concentrate on their game of checkers at the Tipsy Teapot likely ignored or couldn't even sense. But it nags at you; the autotuned robovoice is as capable as HAL of saying things it doesn't mean: "music's got me feelin' so free," indeed. By and large, Daft Punk's longing to capture a midnight-summertime flood of unjudged bliss translates to something that, considering it's mostly nonverbal, is surprisingly on-the-nose. The entire first half of Discovery is, in a word, annoying.

It's not that the record lacks ideas or is overly bare at any point, an accusation that the simpler, more evenly breathing Random Access Memories would one day face. Like Homework, it comes flooding out with evidence of the personality and fixations of the band, from the "Mother" intro and fussy classical hook of "Aerodynamic" to the obvious Stevie Wonder lift on "Night Vision." Like a lot of cut-and-paste musicians and producers, Daft Punk see the virtue in everything they process and seem to be influenced by everything in all corners of pop culture, which can make them seem alternately offbeat or individualistic and, far more often, an unfiltered mess of junk. There's no mistaking that Discovery is a wavering record, less confident than Homework, which leads in part to its kitchen sink tragedy -- but it loves its kitsch, and as much as it glares backward toward disco liberation, the experience of listening to it resembles some perverse marriage of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" to the 1910 Fruitgum Co. more than the actual music of Chic, Gloria Gaynor or K.C. & the Sunshine Band (much less their descendants).

These canned Casio hooks, sporadic beats, fun times at grownup Chuck E. Cheese and extended commercials for the ABC Saturday Night Movie have their contrived charm; "Digital Love" is exactly the song its title suggests, and "Harder Better Faster Stronger" is a tricky enough act of goose-stepping manipulation, locating soul in its eerie fascism, that it's little wonder it was destined to become more famous than itself. (Given how much Daft Punk are attached to friendly flourish, it's even more ironic to hear this side by side with Kanye West's masterpiece Yeezus, on which they aided West in upgrading blues braggadio to late last night with uncomfortable, unadorned charisma and menace against blown-out void.) At worst, though, this is either irritating exercise music ("Superheroes") that yearns to be turned off or Sega Genesis scoring ("Crescendolls") than yearns to be turned off or repurposed as the cheap soundtrack to your camcorder-shot vacation tape.

Like so many dance or electronica records, Discovery comes around at last past generic tangents like "High Life" and prog silliness like "Veridis Quo" when it drops the winking self-awareness, the AREN'T WE HAVING A GREAT TIME EVERYBODY??? vibe of fun crammed down one's throat. A record this haphazardly sequenced makes little to no effort to set a mood; it crashes down on the table in the middle of the party then gradually burns out. What's odd is, that's the good part. The turning point is the slow groove "Something About Us," a genuinely crafty ballad in the vein of Sade. This is followed by actual R&B on the tremendous "Face to Face," without question the group's best song up to this point. They're aided here by house producer and vocalist Todd Edwards whose tasteful but exuberant efforts take the cut past its lopped-off "Billie Jean" intro into an emotional realm heretofore unexplored by Daft Punk's often hollow-by-instinct club music.

That's just one facet of the record's refreshingly melancholy back half. "Face to Face" would become a major hit in U.S. clubs, and it's one of three cuts here that suggest how much potential Daft Punk really had. While the doo wop flameout "Too Long" actually justfies (title notwithstanding) its sprawling ten-minute length with a hard beat and arm-waving climax, "Short Circuit" toys much more conservatively with a simple Bernie Worrell / Tom Tom Club meltdown that transforms rapidly from vice to drone in an organic yet completely unexpected manner -- it feels like a piece of music that resolves the conflicts of Daft Punk's divergent pop sensibilitues: their obligation to innovate versus their obligation toward dancing versus their love of great, listenable pop recordings. All Daft Punk's records toy with the weirdness and unceasing revision of identity -- at its best, Discovery is about realizing just how limitless the concept can be.

[SEE ALSO:]
Homework (1997)
Random Access Memories (2013)

Deerhunter: Microcastle (2008)

(4AD)

RECOMMENDED

Bradford Cox is a sadsack, but sometimes we need that. For years I've thought of Halcyon Digest, an album by Deerhunter that I love with all my heart, as something of a fluke. It's almost as confusing to keep up with Cox's various projects and personas as it is with John Darnielle and Stephin Merritt, even if Cox is a bit more of a natural collaborator, so I placed the Atlas Sound record Logos and this infamously leaked New York pseudo-shoegaze album on a sort of continuum. They've always blended together to me, and generally despite putting it on a number of times over the past several years with varying degrees of concentration, it's only in the last few weeks that Microcastle has started to move me. Is it a question of attention span? Mood? The context of Deerhunter eventually putting out an album I actively disliked (Monomania)? Whatever the case, I hear wisps of both the intricate moodiness of Halcyon and the galvanizing beauty of Atlas Sound's Parallax in this, like steps along an evolutionary path. Cox's music always rewards repeated attention, but it's hard to heartily recommend a record so elusive that it literally took me half a decade to appreciate it. All the same, here we are.

Microcastle may or may not be a drug album -- it certainly rewards the same sort of zone-out trance as zoomhead classics like Oar, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Sister Lovers and any number of early Brian Eno touchstones. Shambolic, beautiful, slapdash, it aspires to the buzzing and metallic sheen of old Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine records -- but Cox is too outsized a personality to make that a convincing analogy. Even in his subtlest, softest gestures he is a figure of full-on melodrama, gesturing theatrically. So Microcastle starts like you'd expect it to end: a hungover encore, a party gone too long.

And then the cooing starts but not from Cox, some combination of come for me comfort me cover me, sweet and broken. Lockett Pundt might evoke Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel on "Agoraphobia" but the band has other ideas. It's a tired comparison any band attracted to the sound of jangle has struggled with, much as the prior generation incessantly dodged Byrds analogies, but R.E.M. is inescapable here. It's a good aspiration for Deerhunter to try and craft an album that subsumes the listener completely, that reveals secrets gradually the way their famed fellow Georgians once did. Like Murmur or New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Microcastle turns out not only to craftily hide its hooks, melodic peaks and cathartic moments, it teases just enough to encourage continued exposure.

It's hard to define why it's therefore less rewarding than the band's next record, except maybe just that the songs aren't as strong or thematically potent. Each individual song, major and minor, is a microcosm of the whole album: pretty and vague, with a hard, dreamlike edge. What it seldom is, with scattered exceptions like the subtly graceful stop-start rhythmic "Little Kids," is playful. At moments you could drown yourself in the desolation of it all, in a manner not dissimilar to the Antlers' oppressive Hospice from a few months down the line. But then, again, there are the secrets: like Big Star's "Daisy Glaze," the title track begins as a barely-there dirge full of late-night angst and a yearning whine from beyond, then suddenly hops into action.

This, too, is a micro-replica of what the album itself does; its midsection is wholly occupied by a beautiful but minimalistic suite of songs that sound like discordant lost demos, troubling in their rambling despair; by the under-two-minutes "Activa," with its eerie swirl of kalimba and tortured vocals, it seems to be lulling us to sleep. Then: at long last rock. The deservedly famous "Nothing Ever Happened," written by the band's rhythm section, is the emotional peak here; its feeling of triumph feels almost quaint against the emotional claustrophobia elsewhere, yet it makes sense. The band would position it in the future as their signature anthem, their "You Made Me Realise," and it's easy to understand why.

"Nothing Ever Happened" also recasts everything that comes afterward; it's here that Deerhunter first hint at the eclecticism that would make Digest such a pleasure. Cox's "Saved by Old Times" and "Twilight at Carbon Lake" bring back Stax memories, with funked-out stutter on the former, last-dance-at-prom romance on the latter. And Pundt's other contribution "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" sounds like someone's arm's-length idea of what this project was initially intended to do: it's a worthy and convincing shoegaze imitation, with even a bit of Pixies. Even if it has none of the sophistication of Cox's songs or even Pundt's own other contributions, it dares to be fun. Hence Microcastle now feels in retrospect like a split of the difference between the best work of Deerhunter, Atlas Sound and Pundt's side project Lotus Plaza. It's satisfying, detailed, intriguing, but it's an unfinished story -- for better and for worse, depending on your headspace right now.

[SEE ALSO:]
Halcyon Digest (2010)
Monomania (2013)

Archers of Loaf: Icky Mettle (1993)

(Alias)

Almost no band looms larger in the Triangle rock scene (and the general Chapel Hill, NC mythos) than Archers of Loaf, who reigned througout the '90s despite endless record company problems as a sort of southern answer to Pavement much as Antietam were the South's Yo La Tengo. Produced like Mitch Easter mush with a metallic grind, catchy and grandiose if you listen closely enough, and strongly reflective of a time when the fabled grit of L7 and Pixies were inescapable, the classic debut album Icky Mettle doesn't make the comparisons hard to understand. Leader Eric Bachmann projects more rock-star confidence than Stephen Malkmus, albeit with a slight croak in his voice (and is a bit less self-aware), but he has the same snarl, verbosity and buried sweetness. The Archers come on with subtlety as a recording unit -- you have to crank the record up high to get a sense of the anger and passion of their stage performances -- but even with such practiced coolness and detachment, it's obvious at even a glance that there's something mildly contrived about this raucousness.

The dual guitar attack of Bachmann and Eric Johnson is the best element of the unit at this point, somewhat glossing over the fairly standard songwriting by boasting better technical strength than most cult bands of the post-grunge years. Some of the solos have a beauty and bright edge to them suggestive of Television (especially Richard Lloyd's contributions) and the Flamin' Groovies. That latter point seems pertinent on the initial single "Wrong," a hook-filled time capsule of 1992 modern rock radio that could be power pop if it were a little hotter on the treble. At 3:41, it's an appreciably crafty construction with the brash rock quiet-loud move during a broken-down bridge straight off a Who or Boston record. The whole song seems like an endless chorus, approached with gusto. Bachmann's lyrical psychodrama gives it an edge and tension but really the object is straight-ahead obnoxious rock & roll. When the power chords casually slip in on other songs, like "Web in Front," it's an almost naked expression of attitude in the classical sense -- the band might never have aspired to major-label stardom but the radio was always on their minds.

"Web in Front" is also the prime reason Icky Mettle got everyone talking about Pavement, already somewhat legendary at the time despite having released just one full-length record; the slapdash ferocity, ringing guitar and the chanted "ALL I EVER WANTED" over a cloud of sludge and snarl are all red herrings to offset the song's sheer earnestly uncool strength and grandness. "Last Word," the cut that sits between these two small landmarks, even has a conventional big metal chorus; the screaming is dull, but the constant chatter keeps things unusual.

Mettle is deliberately produced with a flat enough sound that even the big transformative climaxes here and there take a while to catch on with you. The intimate bass-only quiet of the first minute of "You and Me" helps communicate its drama; not just lyrically (note the "Angie"-like accusation / lament "I been so down lately, you been so low lately, nothing seems to work out for you and me"), it's sophisticated enough to suggest a complete story we can't fully detect. Then the mandolin exotica of "Hate Paste," a wild outlier with the usual business slathered all over it -- versatility fused with apathy, a punk ethic drawn back to the Replacements and earlier.

When we talk about the angst being contrived, we mean "Fat," which feels readymade for the Butch Vig remix with its big bitter "WHAT DO YOU FUCKINNN," and "Plump Line," the verbose and reflective boorishness of which throws in a witty rejoinder like "you got a collection of things cause that's the best you can do" but jinxes it with the oddly smug sketch of an indie rocker, rhymed with "nothing's gonna stop her." We mean the fuzzed-out drama "Learo, You're a Hole" which sounds like a commercial summarizing the concept of "alternative" rock as of this moment. It's surprising it wasn't all over the radio in 1994 until you get to the chorus, which nevertheless seems a pure put-on Frank Black lift. Even when Bachmann is unhinged, it's a programmatic unhinged. Emotion is audible beneath the booming riffage on "Slow Worm." But where else?

These were adults, and the Archers have a following of seasoned popular guitar music lovers -- and yet the music somehow or another feels excessively familiar, excessively worked over. How much of this is merely a result of its being a product of an offbeat, unexpected attitude change that would even more unexpectedly overtake the industry for a time over the next few years? Icky Mettle is an impressively clever record, but it's awfully slight. The Archers are too afraid to imitate Dean Wareham so instead they lightly parody him (on "Toast"). Politics interest them but only enough for the barbed bon mots of "Wrong." And they dig towering riffs and switched-on pop, as who doesn't, but they're determined to bury it. This record is invaluable as a way to escape into those times and a moment when this could all seem new again. But it's also a distant, unfeeling record determined to offset much of its own appeal. The result is it's interesting, but it's hard to feel anything for it. I'm just being honest, it's the least I could do.

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours (2008)

(Interscope)

RECOMMENDED

I missed this at the time. Naturally I knew of the Australian collective Cut Copy but did not listen to a full album until I was assigned to review Zonoscope in 2011. That was a lovely Monday morning indeed -- Modular sent me a promo CD and I took it on my then-unusually long commute with me; the heat in my car wasn't working, but soon enough I couldn't even tell anymore. I was smitten with that album and, as I generally tried to, I took a listen to the band's prior work before I sent in my piece, but neither of their previous albums made nearly such a big impression on me. I've enjoyed In Ghost Colours off and on since then but my hunch was always that it was a dry run despite its reputation -- just to ensure I wasn't bullshitting, I've spent time lately also with Zonoscope and the bizarrely ignored Free Your Mind and yes, they've improved enormously since then.

Some of this is down to a question of mood -- the band's, that is, not ours. The two Cut Copy albums from our present decade are moodier, druggier, more tempered in even messages and longings that are probably jokes (no one says "free your mind" in 2013 and means it, right?), while In Ghost Colours is so blatantly sweet and cheery it could give you a toothache. One of the things I like about Cut Copy is their earnestness -- not only do they seem warm and approachable, in contrast to even good bands operating in a similar vein (like Hot Chip or WhoMadeWho) they do not seem particularly self-aware. Dan Whitford sings his heart out, and as composers and producers (here with James Murphy associate Tim Goldsworthy) they're refreshingly direct in both their laying bare of influences and their unguarded emotion, less psychodrama than all-embracing bliss.

That brings us to the other thing that appeals to me most about the group: with each chapter in their narrative, they have edged closer to dispensing with every outside notion of what band they're supposed to be, having been billed in their brief time with Interscope in the U.S. as a breezy hybrid of the dance club and the rock show. By Free Your Mind, the guitars are basically gone. Colours, though, captures them in a transitional moment. For long stretches, you almost can't even make any disco dreams of this. It's really quite a straightforward group of anthemic pop songs, sometimes resembling (of all things) Ian Broudie's Lightning Seeds thanks largely to Whitford's incessant good mood.

"Feel the Love" -- another readily adopted hippie buzzphrase -- feels as fresh as a jump out into mountain air, and while it's afraid to shed its rawk orientation, this is one of two cuts that suggests the way forward for the band and wouldn't sound terribly out of place on their subsequent albums. The roller-rink synthpop peaks with a vocoder hook on the bridge, but it's not so much an electronic detour as an homage to early '80s power pop like the Cars. "Hearts on Fire," one of the album's signature cuts, bears the most explicit resemblance to the writing and production ideas on Zonoscope but is less potent, and winds down into a rather weak chorus.

Candy-O didn't have anything like "Out There on the Ice," which hits an odd and intriguing dichotomy of Whitford and the band's psychedelic doo wop vocal arrangement and what amounts to a strong, classic house beat circa 1989 or so. The band can't get its head around how to make this work quite yet, and the result feels too deadpan -- it's fun but it never lifts off into unforced hedonistic joy, which if you know this band is what you expect. A lot of the most pleasing moments afterward are fleeting, like the keyboard breakdown on "So Haunted," pure pop with just a little touch of windswept techno flourish. The most they ever really cut loose for a full song is on the band's biggest hit thus far, "Lights & Music," the Cut Copy song I most clearly remember hearing around the time of its release. It's a great piece of fast-paced, synth-filled joy but it's still not quite dance music. Notice the way that, on the bridge, everything drops out except the guitar, as though it's '97 and we're listening to alternative rock radio again.

Most of In Ghost Colours settles into kind of a holding pattern with this stuff: happy, indistinct, straight rock with big peaks and some little stabs of keyboard, usually hitting a half-chorus followed by a dramatic dropout then big, bass-heavy explosive return. "Unforgettable Season" sets the pattern, strongly suggesting the Alarm or even Midnight Oil, and what's strange is it's not even really in Whitford's vocal range.

We keep harping on dance music because Cut Copy are great at making addictive, explosive and ecstatic dance-pop with massive beats and unforgettable melodies, like a much more domestically placid Depeche Mode, and eventually they would become one of the more fearless rock bands from their time in regard to wholly shedding the rock part. In Ghost Colours is an enjoyable record and might have worked best for me had I discovered it in its moment.

Now I keep wanting to hear the later records, and indeed, there are more hooks and better sustained ones in just the first few minutes of "Need You Now" than on most of this entire album, and the flair for drama has improved (that particular song sustains its tension for an incredibly long time without trying patience), the rampant sunny positivity seems more carefully earned, and not that it's hugely important but the lyrics are much stronger. The same for how "Free Your Mind" gurgles its way in two albums later. It's not that the group have just shed elements to become somebody else, they've honed their craft and found their ideal niche. The pure bliss on the bridge of "Corner of the Sky," that irresistible otherworldly melody on "Dark Corners & Mountain Tops," or the blissed-out red-light rampage of "Sun God" all have their origins here. Maybe the highest compliment for this breakthrough record is that it's hard to let it pass into quiet without replacing it on the speakers with one of the two sequels.

[SEE ALSO]
Zonoscope (2011)
Free Your Mind (2013)

Patti Smith: Horses (1975)

(Arista)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The dispute over how much of rock & roll is image and how much is music lingered long before and after Horses was released, but there may never have been such a perfect case study in the utopian notion that it's equal parts of both: gaze for a time at that iconic cover image and you realize that here, it's all true. Maybe more than any other album cover ever shot or designed, it seems like if you never had any idea who or what Patti Smith was, that image would be reason enough to buy or listen to the record. Smith is a fully uncompromised nonconformist, whose gaze outward from a sun-dappled corner in lord knows what nowhere invites us in but only on her own terms. Her "Group" does not appear, for her own neuroses and the complete reality of her character are the subject and the complete world of this music. So along with the bold balance of talent and impression, we have the perfect contradiction: an image-conscious, unremettingly original portrait of a woman inviting us to be seduced by the cool, steely purpose of a damn good and damn hip experience only to then be drawn into, yeah, a damn good and damn hip exploration of the darkest edges of popular music by a person who is hiding nothing. Smith is there on the front because the record is all her, fully bared, and free of excuses or tempered fear. You're either coming along for this or you aren't, and more's the pity for your own life and enrichment if you aren't.

Describing Smith's music to one who hasn't heard it seems almost inevitably reductive. Smith is a writer, a rock & roller, a poet, all of the above. She relights a flame that had been blown out somewhere around 1970 when the Velvet Underground ended their association with Lou Reed. You can draw a straight line from Reed to this, detouring a bit with the first two records by the New York Dolls, but that association is more instinctive. In general this is raw rock & roll but it's literary, like Reed, like Chuck Berry; it's no more personal than an Al Green or LaBelle album of the same period. No smarter or rawer than Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club. But it speaks that language in Smith's firmly, singularly analytical fashion. Her major trait is she adores rock & roll. It is her lifeblood. And the lifeblood of this music is New York, the crumb-infested stage of CBGBs, the liberating grunge outside. The seamy, slimy New York of the '70s flows through it in all of its glorious blood, gore and sleaze.

But who was Patti Smith? Who is Patti Smith now is another matter. In 1975, Smith had already wandered in and out of Sam Shepard, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Blue Oyster Cult's orbit, and she embodied an almost perfect ideal of both the New York art and rock & roll lifestyles. She wrote music criticism for Creem, as did her friend and guitarist Lenny Kaye, and played far-out, artful, oddball, semi-spoken word shows at CBGB and the Mudd Club. Her muse was the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who snapped the cover photo of Horses. Smith and Kaye formed the nucleus of what would become the Patti Smith Group and issued the instantly game-changing single "Piss Factory" b/w "Hey Joe," inspired by the liberation of poetry -- specifically nineteenth century, vampiric proto-punker Rimbaud -- and rock & roll wrought upon the working stiff Smith had become to pay her rent. The rest of the band consisted of bassist Ivan Kral, the late pianist Richard Sohl and the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. This was the Group signed by Clive Davis to record for Arista in 1975.

But Horses -- produced under fraught circumstances by John Cale, idol, legend, rock genius poet and at one time the co-leader of the Velvet Underground -- remains Smith's statement above all. It's a culmination of a twisting, some would say a queering, that had lurked in the rock subculture since before the '60s burned out. Smith was and remains a child of the most idealistic properties of '60s counterculture, and Horses more than perhaps any other punk album means to pick up with the passionate liberalism and artful sense of progress that was briefly so integral to even mainstream popular music. Smith is no flower child, but she understands the earnest yearning of the flower child. She understands more than anything, as demonstrated in her brilliant live b-side cover of "My Generation," the outrage at the center of the rock odyssey, and does so some years ahead of Johnny Rotten. She is no passive receiver of the baggage of being misunderstood. She intends to allow us to make no mistake about who she is, what she believes, where she stands, whose world we are entering.

And so it goes: "Jesus died for somebody's sins / But not mine." This is emitted from her ashen throat after a stark tolling of the piano not much less naked or grim than the first moments of John Lennon's "Mother." It's the introduction to one of the key moments in punk rock, but that needn't be the extent of it. "Gloria" is a phenomenal peak of emotional rock music. Ostensibly a cover of Them's garage classic, it undercuts, comments upon and joyously expands it but not with the irony-overload of so many punk deconstructions of classic rock. (Check, for instance, the recorded output of Devo and the Diodes.) "Gloria" doesn't swallow itself up with reverence for its source but it does respect it, and the point is that in this dramatic, tense exploration of a raw, sexual groove Smith finds an absolute, bloody liberation. She and her band raise the stakes as highly as they can and teeter on some sort of mad precipice. At the right bits, they plunge downward but only for a moment. And through it all, Smith's singing guides us, introduces us with profound, unadulterated pleasure to the one walkin' down the street and this crazy feeling that she's gonna uh-uh make her mine.

"Gloria" is merely a prelude to the more heart-stopping expansion of a rock & roll masterpiece later on the record, the nearly unrecognizable cover of "Land of 1000 Dances," but it acts conveniently as a massive, booming bookend. The shorter, calmer selections are no less powerful and absorbing. "Redondo Beach" might be Smith's best composition, an invigoratingly catchy reggae dilution that hides for the first several listens its harrowing subject matter -- of negligent motherhood, of a public drowning, of another swallowed-up plunge into darkness. "Free Money" is a reversal of sorts, cataloging with naked honesty the -- almost supernatural -- need to provide for a loved one. The nine-minute "Birdland" is a stark, freeform moment that thrives on subtle atmosphere as much as on Smith's magical performance tics and the eclectic virtuosity of her band. It may take longer to appreciate "Kimberly" and "Break It Up," but both are crucial, the latter for its forecasting of Television's Marquee Moon (it was cowritten with Tom Verlaine, who also features on the recording), the former for its strangely calming peace, warmth, pure beauty. On repeated exposure, nearly every moment of Horses is bound to find the listener rapt with attention, longing to be in front of the band, longing to dance with them, and imagining almost tangibly Smith staring right into them.

And then the other shoe drops. The ten-minute odyssey that is "Land" is scary, demented, dangerous, one of the most dramatic and furious recordings of rock music ever released. The band seems barely to have a hold on itself, as though the track threatens to leap off and fly away taking you with it. But Cale would readily tell you, as would Smith, that crafting this indelible illusion required nearly infinite patience and calculation. It is in fact a few performances being manipulated to create one, no more unnatural an act than what Les Paul and Mary Ford were already doing circa "Lover," but it is such a magnificent and singular experience you can get delirious enough to declare it maybe the reason we invented multitrack recording. There's just little description that can do it justice -- Smith opens by speaking in a normal tone of voice and the first-timer might think nothing is amiss. But for anyone who has gone down this road before, the mere words "Boy was in a hallway drinking a glass of tea" are enough to lead you to sit up straight, to pay attention, to go quiet and prepare yourself.

In part as a result of the intricate multi-tracking of her voice, Smith punches certain phrases with a ready, enticing fervor -- "the boy looked at Johnny"; "he merged perfectly... with the hallway" -- while others seem too passionate, too upset to be so firmly prefabricated: the repetition of "started smashin' his head against the locker" comes across as genuinely unhinged. There's a real scene unfolding here, a scene of rape and murder on one end, of sensuality and music on the other, merged eerily as one into a poetic, violent conflation of emotions that nevertheless comes to us under the most direct and unfettered purpose. Johnny Rotten would approach all this a few times on some of the Sex Pistols' singles, when he would lift the curtain behind his wild threat and reveal only more threat still. But Smith is twice as scary, twice as alluring because the more crazed she seems, the more real she gets to us. Her character Johnny gets it driven into him by an unchecked male force hard to define -- and as the drama increases, as the tension becomes so great we can hardly stand it, Johnny lifts himself up and tears off his leather jacket and answers the question of whether he can't give us nothin' but surrender. It's all sudden, everything that happens here. "Suddenly / Johnny..." and the band goes as manic as Smith -- as either of the two maybe three Smiths -- in the background, and you don't think it can get any more intense and unbearable and then it does, and what happens then?

What happens this is dancing -- absurd, glorious, every bit of progressive dross and singer-songwriterly wank washed away until all we're left with is rock & roll, a drumbeat elevated into the godlike stature it deserves. The pure, fuck-bomb filthy goddamn shit that made all of the pop culture worth caring about happen in the first fucking place. Don't care if Smith's poetry busies it up because all she's doing is aligning herself with it, and she's the show here. Do ya know how to pony / like boney maroney? Oh, it's beautiful, and how it swells into erotic oblivion then caresses its way back and back and folding back until, yeah, just a little drumbeat, just a dance... to a simple... rock & roll song. Oh, it's the kind of moment when whatever else is happening in the world is superfluous. Even "Elegie," the last song. I'm sure it's a lovely song. I've heard it a hundred times probably. Can't remember a thing about it. All I remember is my jaw still agape from the thousandth time through all thousand dances. All I can think to do is point to the previous track and say "we built it, let's take it over."

I have nothing firsthand to offer you with regard to how Horses changed anything. It's clearly a moment that bred much of what we now regard as punk and new wave, but it's harsher, less accessible than the Ramones or Blondie or Talking Heads or even, overseas, the Damned or the Clash. It feels like part of no real moment, like a moment unto itself, and it seems almost gauche to attach all of these outer events to it. One thing I can say personally is that of all the albums I owned when I was a teenager -- and it's one I bought chiefly because of the bands who named it as a great influence, so many thanks to them -- it is maybe the one that annoyed my parents the most. And it is here, even beyond Smith's sensitivity, her band's perfect assemblance of groove, punching precision and atmosphere, and the lyricism and grace of it all, that Horses still seems like a truly great achievement, one that does everything it meant to: leather jackets and simple beats and that odd, insistent, constant propulsion of New York in those days -- it is so god damn young, a pure rock & roll experience, one of the best we can have, and it is a thrill and a pleasure to live in a world in which it was once possible.

Beyoncé (2014)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

From the beginning -- from a hard-won origin hinted at throughout her stellar, inventive fifth solo album -- Beyoncé Knowles has been an immaculate example of a self-possessed artist. Not for her, ever, was the invariably shining spotlight a reason to lay her cards out or to expose her every idea and secret maneuver -- in the earliest videos she made with Destiny's Child, her control over your own impressions of her was paramount. She was already thinking beyond the bounds of her or any group; you could see that in her with little effort. There's always been the sense that she was deliberately hiding something, deliberately waiting, deliberately only letting you witness and hear and notice what was necessary in the moment. In the olden days when it seemed so much more acceptable to commodify this business, we called it quality control. It's reductive to pretend that Knowles is selling herself as a brand any more than Prince or the Beatles or Dusty Springfield were -- the selling wizardry has been and will continue to be in service of the music -- but it's also silly to pretend that her imagery, her persona, her determined full-scale self-presentation is irrelevant.

Knowles is really an old-fashioned entertainer in a very real sense, which is likely the key reason her records get more crossover attention than others in her genre, from Ciara to Dawn Richard to Kelela, who deserve it just as much. No, no, it's not the cult of personality, it's not her marriage -- post-Magna Carta, does anyone really believe Jay-Z is helping his wife out by making his requisite cameos on her singles? -- and it's only partially musical prowess. This is one brilliant record, but it didn't create Beyoncé the Untouchable, and none of her prior LPs, while they all featured incalculably perfect songs and moments, have been nearly this consistent or fearless. Nah, it's because of pure showmanship; like Prince, she does it all -- dancing, singing, producing, writing. Like the Beatles, she's allowed her feel for the eccentric to meld beautifully with her populism until she can release something genuinely weird and everyone joins up. As a performer, Knowles evokes direct memories of Gene Kelly; they both exhibit a profound level of tight control over their movements and voices that can come across sufficiently clearly and full-bodied as to be intimidating, yet they also are brilliant at producing the image of looseness, the humanity underneath the expertise. That control has fused finally with an audience's trust and this grand, enormous stage has room for a bold and singular risk, clad in black and issued with refreshing nonchalance on iTunes in the middle of the night.

Sexuality shouldn't be analyzed at length at the expense of the pure pop mastery in play here, but sex is a major matter at hand. This many years into an established superstardom, it's very crucial that Knowles doesn't need to have an outside world address or legitimize her sexual independence, that she'd be asserting it regardless. That's specifically addressed on this album, but it nevertheless is an event that at this moment in time, a person of her stature who happens to be a woman would create something as uncompromised and blunt in its sensuality as this -- would indeed encompass therein a direct assault upon a world of anti-woman, anti-feminist blindness and injustice by sheer art of subtle omission. She never addresses the idea that she is not permitted to express herself as a woman, never acknowledges the idea of shame or of subsuming herself to unequal partnership. There is simply no weight given to the opposition. In deliberately, artfully avoiding the political fallout of allowing young girls and women who buy this album to believe that they in fact are permitted to take ownership of their bodies and sexual inner lives, she creates one of the true political albums of this decade in America -- and a courageous victory in the culture war upon the individuality and expression of women. Beyoncé, without question, came -- unexpectedly -- at the perfect moment.

"Pretty Hurts" has been interpreted as a manifesto, a statement of purpose, but this would make it an act of preaching. Plenty of other pop stars, male and female, have gone that route. The reason this song sets the stage for this full-length embodiment of who Beyoncé is at this moment in time, and the perspicacious recognition of where her audience in this specific diagram, is that it is a personal venting: a collected, scathing, quite mournful wake-up call. It's musically adventurous enough but the voice in all its nuance registers all across a scale from command to pain to want. Knowles is just 32, but she is already savvy in regard to the demands placed upon women in her industry as well as probably most; "pageant the pain away" is an apt phrase in the craftily presented collection of large grievances in regard to plastic surgery, the pressure not to age, the pressure to "be happy." It's not that she's unaware this act of protest will resonate everywhere, it's that such an endpoint is incidental to her need to record it, indeed to record it without obvious radio-friendly flourish or structure. That's the first sign that this album is for her but we're welcome to be there, and far from constructing something (like so many successful rock bands) out of tone-deaf flaunting of the vagaries of fame, her sensibilities remain stirringly human.

That's clear enough from her presentation of sex all across the record. Fucking is addressed as a physical manifestation of desire and, more importantly, as fun; that's more radical than you probably think it is. Even Prince, wonderful as his songs about Nikki's castle full of the 1984 equivalent to HMWs and jacking u off with them were, tended to imply freakiness as an eternal player in some larger conflict of sex and God, sometimes even as a punchline rather than a warm facet of being alive and being in a (serious or not) relationship. Oh, like any great blues or rock singer, Knowles talks about her prowess a great deal and quite convincingly, and she's more than entitled to do so, but the orgasmic joy is something in which we participate, feeling -- like in the earliest rock & roll -- no need to dress up beautiful base needs with pretension or psychodrama. Despite the absolutely incompetent Jay-Z verse, "Drunk in Love" is the most blatant celebration of absolute want and absolute lust to be so enthusiastically co-opted by the mainstream in decades. The unashamed expression of power and desire on Beyoncé's part that is not presented solely for straight male pleasure, valid as that may be, is so important. It's not just lyrically or vocally that the track seems overtaken with steam; even the "pop" moment sets down a vague, adventurous backing track over which Knowles scats and pauses as much as she lets loose. But no, no one else probably ever has made "all night" and "surf-board" sound like the kinkiest of private dialogue.

The aptly titled "Blow" and nearly as aptly titled "Rocket" are more explicit yet than "Drunk in Love." The former is a tricky, intimate, filthy groove that seems to futz around with the inside of your head, its hook delightfully nasty and circular, suggestively rhythmic in its "keep me coming keep me going" insistence. What she does to stretch, sweeten, darken, thin out her voice here would be fascinating if you weren't too caught up in the song to think much about it intellectually. (I heard the song maybe half a dozen times before I noticed there's a horn in there somewhere.) Like so many of these songs, "Blow" seems to abruptly become something entirely different from the bridge onward, and in clashing sweetened eagerness with winking perversion ("I can't waaait till I get home so you can tear that cherry out"), lush, pillowy bump and grind with minimalistic funk, the track seems to compress an LP's worth of ideas into five minutes. "Rocket" is a bit more direct, a pure Princely slow-jam, but Beyoncé's vocal command of each moment in it recalls him less than Marvin Gaye, especially in her relationship to the arrangement and the playful, jazz-derived way she slides through it on her own rhythm. Sarah Vaughn didn't sing about being a "bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad girl," but if she had... And more than once, with her soft laughs, her low-key intonation asking if you wanna touch it, her "hard. rock. steady. rock." and post-orgasmic "damn," and on the peak, babe, time just cuts out and quits.

Both "Blow" and "Rocket" could, unlike "Drunk in Love," be about sex between anyone -- casual partners, forty-year marrieds, teenagers, good friends, newlyweds, or people who would get in big trouble if anyone found out they were doing this -- but Beyoncé arguably gets at harder truths when it specifically addresses marriage. "Jealous" is perhaps the least musically effective cut on the first half of an admittedly front-loaded record (the first ten cuts are noticeably superior to most of the back third) due to its slightly overwrought "keeping your promise" hook, but lyrically it may be the most accomplished piece of them all, full of telling and troubling details. It's a justified rant of real adult pain that addresses the potential imbalances and chaotic interludes of a long-term emotional and sexual partnership, the agony of cooking a meal for someone naked and waiting for them to show up when they don't. The marriage or relationship it talks about sounds unhealthy, badly one-sided, but it could be nothing more than a moment -- what matters is that it captures this pain flawlessly. Some of the same could be said for the urgent "Mine," immediately timeless despite another weak moment (the "good girl" bit), which makes a big deal out of the little things, says we should be married, and lets it all out enough to admit that the woman laying herself bare isn't feeling like herself "since the baby." This conversational tone, these wisps of detail, are the background that fuels romance, sex, confessional, heartbreak, the substance so often missing from pop music dialogue.

But the towering "No Angel" is the more heartening example of Scenes from a Marriage narrative; interestingly gathering up a highly modern trap sound but also the '90s dance pop you might've heard a lot at the mall a decade and a half ago, its monosyllabic sensuality is significant because it captures a moment of raw, unexpected connection and the turning point in an idiosyncratic, unusual relationship -- which you'll probably agree, most relationships are. It's the document of a pair whose crimes, indulgences, kinks (that's the implication) are equal and are only now discovering it. Knowles slams the door and demands "Tell me I'm a problem" but when the truth sits in an ugly lump before her comes the revelation: "I love you even more than who I thought you were before." It's as startling and sexy as those fireworks in To Catch a Thief, when Grace Kelly wonders: "Ever had a better offer in your whole life? One with everything?"

As mentioned, Beyoncé peaks early, but its conclusion isn't a major downturn. "XO" is the album's darkest-night melodramatic peak, "Superpower" is a conventional slow-burn soul track (the best moment is provided by an ingratiating series of "doot doot doot doot doot doot"s) but that's something. The power ballad "Heaven" raises itself above other power ballads mostly by virtue of being sung by Beyoncé. "Blue" is a step up, a good strong melody that -- thanks to a guest spot from the singer's daughter -- invites comparisons to Stevie Wonder's untouchable "Isn't She Lovely" and is perfect for her voice. These cuts are all fine and would have fit in nicely on Beyoncé's previous efforts without much change, and if the entire album was in their league it would still be worth hearing.

Beyoncé is more than worth hearing, though, it's a treasure, and three of its strangest, wildest songs exemplify a level of ingenuity seldom heard in such quantity and with such assurance, and even more seldom to result in such massive popularity. Though he has many collaborators, the heretofore-mysterious Boots is a credited producer on all three, and if he is indeed (with Knowles) the link across them, he can be looked upon as edging closer to avant garde in pop than anyone since perhaps Missy Elliott (whose frequent associate Timbaland also worked on one of these tacks). Besides boasting one of Beyoncé's best-ever hooks (which doesn't appear until 2:50 in), "Partition" is another act of sexual assertion matched here with a club song -- brutal beat, astounding vocal workout, bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz bzz, and so horny he want to fuuuh. Heyyy Ms. Carter, indeed.

The trap lift "***Flawless" is better yet, the album's most gigantically uncompromising series of "what the fuck" stunts, with sped-up voice manipulation and twin key phrases: "bow down bitches," of course, and the sneering, perfect "don't think I'm just his little wife." That it takes time to include -- on a mainstream pop album, remember -- a lengthy, brilliant, stirring speech on feminism by the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie during the instrumental break is a sign not just that we are living in a welcome new cultural moment but that Knowles has every intention to contribute to it, to live and operate within a revolution of hearts and minds. In some ways, rather than anything Knowles does, it's the climax and key to the record, rendering it a selfless decision on her part to step aside in such a way.

But "Haunted" is ultimately the album's greatest moment, and Knowles' most original and breathtaking track to date. It's the sort of creation that seems intriguing at first blush but becomes more staggering, more fascinating the more carefully one listens to it. Opening as calmly possessed spoken word (the intensity of a repeated "9 to 5 just to stay alive" steely in its purpose), this quickly shifts to nocturnal, hazy club music somewhat in the vein of (far lesser talents) the Weeknd and AraabMuzik. Knowles stirs dance with paranoia here, and she and Boots even let the song become completely stagnant, cloudy, strange when the beat falls away -- she even goes so far as to smirk that she's not gonna make any money off this. "Oh, well."

The song doesn't stop being magically shapeless when the chorus and hook arrive after three full minutes -- here comes "my wicked tongue," then the beat again -- it just turns into a metallic monster, stunningly vital and confident despite its madness, and such an impression is deliberate, underscored by how it loosens up just a bit at the end and starts to flash when she coos and drops her robotic fervor. It's a masterfully bizarre recording from one of the world's biggest stars, and to have it positioned not merely as the second song on a blockbuster album but placed between the populist, impression-making "Pretty Hurts" and the instant hit "Drunk in Love" can be regarded as a grand proclamation that Beyoncé Knowles, even though she's one of the key cultural figures of her era, is led by nothing save her own tastes and impulses -- which makes her potentially one of the defining American artists of the coming decade.

***

[This was released in December 2013, after I was too far into compiling my year-end '13 stuff to even listen to it more than once, which made things especially hard when I knew almost right away it would have made my already overcrowded top ten for last year. So for cataloging purposes, the incorrect year sits at the top of this post and it will be eligible for my lists and things at the end of 2014. If this drives you crazy, feel free to send harshly worded letters of complaint to my home.]

Camera Obscura: Underachievers Please Try Harder (2003)

(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

With their second album, Glasgow's second finest (we may as well be frank here) soar past their obvious origins. It's true Camera Obscura continue to walk through doors opened by Belle & Sebastian, their debut Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi having essentially been an official homage, but in certain places Underachievers Please Try Harder is something of its own: a modern baroque classic, suggesting Nico, Dusty Springfield and even Leonard Cohen as much as any of the group's peers.

Although the band's songwriting would reach its peak a few years after this, they have taken here a gigantic step forward. The music breathes more than previously, able to get lost in a slow, folky strum with a sweet lilt, taking it at times as far as pure country, but also in the sonic mysteries of the best '60s pop, never melodramatically asserting itself or making ill-advised attempts to turn fixation into gimmickry. The arrangements are focused, the melodies are meant to invite surrender, and it's all Sunday nights, and the last dance of the prom -- and the joys, agonies, mornings-after in between.

Yet as so often with this band, the performance that leaves you reeling is that of Tracyanne Campbell, whose voice is the source of every emotional revelation and achingly human pratfall documented here. She seems to be reliving everyone's young heartbreaks at once yet with a thoroughly adult longing and wit, both because they come from the good-humored place of someone modest enough to falsely claim she doesn't know her elbow from her arse and because she, like so many of us, is sufficiently introspective to have gone over this stuff over and over and over again in her head. She spends Underachievers dealing with pretentious types, from man-children and fake feminists to Mike Leigh-quoting mean girls to boys "who went from Mod to Ted."

There's self-deprecation, like when she deals with a crush on a teacher in the hypnotic "Suspended from Class," but there's mostly the coolheaded wisdom that no one in their adolescence is capable of and that every adolescent needs to hear. We find her resigned and reflective when dodging a drug-addicted ex on the stunningly beautiful "Keep It Clean," calm but subtly broken when pep talking an indie rocking younger sibling on "A Sister's Social Agony." Consistently Campbell's words and vocals alike are beautiful and tough, deeply felt, raw and in-the-moment -- like the best of those singers this band clearly idolizes. There's nothing artificial about their throwback; if anything, the likes of Phil Spector and Marianne Faithfull taught them how best to expose the rawest emotions to the broadest collection of people.

The record unfortunately screeches to a bit of a standstill when, on four cuts, Campbell steps aside and lets John Henderson sing. He isn't bad, actually, but sounds so thin and weak next to Campbell's outrageous brilliance as a performer that it's almost always a buzzkill when he steps up. Listen enough and eventually you get a kick out of the Songs of Leonard Cohen pastiche "Your Picture" and the sweet, swinging "Lunar Sea," but his songs undoubtedly peak when, toward the end of "Before You Cry," Campbell steps in to offer her most devastating bit of optimism ever: "You feel a little sad tonight but you'll be all right."

That sentence could be the Camera Obscura manifesto, and gets beautifully to the essence of their appeal. This album happens to contain most likely their two greatest songs. The theremin doodle "Teenager" is very much in the mold of a Beautiful Music dilution of a 007 theme, but its melody lets Campbell launch into the stratosphere with all of the scolding, yearning and frustration its title implies. By the time its chorus hits, it seems increasingly to be belted not just from her heart but from yours. "Books Written for Girls" may be even stronger; slowed down and minimal, rolling its eyes at poseurs but here placing extra emphasis on how the coldness and calculation of the tragically hip hurts other people as it chronicles the messy self-evaluation after the end of a relationship with a prick, it is rumored in some quiet quarters to be an attack on Stuart Murdoch, stating independence against any attempt to make Campbell and her band proteges of Murdoch's almost assembly-lined peculiarity.

I'm not sure that I believe that, frankly, but it's possible, and what's relevant to us is that indeed Camera Obscura achieve something that Belle & Sebastian never has on this record and their next one: they launch, like few other bands aside from Everything But the Girl, into a level of genuine human maturity that actually justifies the fawning melancholy of their throwback-heavy music. There's nothing quite like the soul-crushed but empowering way Campbell sings "he will disappoint you" and "I think separation is okay" and "you're not a teenager, so don't act like one." It's melancholy in a way that, like all such sonic thrill rides, is a joy to hear and to use within one's own life, but there is much more brimming underneath -- anger, hurt, pain, fear, want. It's pretty, precious even, but it's never cute. Not if you listen carefully enough.

[SEE ALSO:]
Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi (2001)
My Maudlin Career (2009)
Desire Lines (2013)