The Byrds: Fifth Dimension (1966)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In a way it's interesting that I've never written much about the Byrds here, or anywhere that I've ever put up any kind of music criticism, almost as if I was afraid to try and delve into a body of work that's had such an effect on me. Three Byrds LPs were a staple of my early childhood, an outgrowth of the band's appearance on a compilation tape my brother had. They were Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn! Turn! Turn and Greatest Hits. The latter is the only of the three I listen to very much now. Tambourine Man, despite its many highlights, is too earnest for me, and Turn too much of a dated slog. What moved me about this music was its sound -- it goes so much beyond the mere idea of folk-rockers with 12-string guitar and a sort-of-okay drummer. The voices were a lot of it, the ethereal friendliness but also mystery of them. The collision of baroque Appalachia with turned-on rock & roll was something too.

But the truth is that so much of my adoration of this band -- in some ways more important to me than any other, certainly in their accidental formation of my future tastes -- lies in something more intangible and emotional: the constant hunger for a transcendent moment, the sort of thing that was so often out of reach of conventional white rock bands and is a more admirable goal for them than anything technical. It's all over Greatest Hits, for me the definitive way to hear the Gene Clark-era Byrds. Just listen to that moment on their first and best single, the cover of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," when Roger McGuinn's interpretation of Bob Dylan's lyric "I promise to go under it" erases any gap between words and meaning; it's audible in him that he means those words to his core. The Byrds are seldom arch or sardonic, but nor are they oblivious and sober -- their essence is the matching of their genuine maturity with a thirst for the new. For me, as much as Gene Clark's work is for many the essence of the Byrds, the band's true nature comes to its peak on the four incredible albums that follow his departure, starting with this one.

Clark was of course a brilliant songwriter, and a strong case could be made that he's a far better one than Roger McGuinn -- and virtually no one disputes that David Crosby is not the best personality to be positioned at the Byrds' front lines. Fifth Dimension is really a stopgap, a fine band looking for their footing after a crippling loss, but in its strange search for an identity it happens upon a sound that remains nearly unique. For all their sure-handed experimentation, the Beatles weren't so bold as to attempt to make Rubber Soul and Revolver the same record.

There are aspects of Fifth that still seem desperate: the band's version of the rock standard "Hey Joe" is one of the weakest on record, the awful Booker T.-like instrumental "Captain Soul" reminds us of the limitations of the folk-rock universe, and the closing kiss-off "2-4-2 Fox Trot," a sound FX-laden repetitive nothing, would barely be sufficient to justify a b-side placement. (I admit I thought it was an extremely cool song when I was younger and attracted to anything "weird." The Royal Guardsmen's "Airplane Song" and Tom Tom Club's "Booming and Zooming" will suffice now.) But more generally, the record's conflation of folksy melodicism and genuinely oddball, almost jazz-like tonal experimentation make it in retrospect a brilliant document of a strange moment. Much as the Byrds conceived folk-rock itself out of wholecloth, with hangers-on like the Cyrkle to gingerly follow, here they recorded some of the earliest music that justifies the "psychedelic" label.

A lot of psychedelia, like a lot of folk-rock, would prove gimmicky and pandering. Fifth Dimension presents us with noises and asides, and moments of unexpectedly shattering beauty, that are truly new and that still resonate with the sense of something being created. One of the most impressive songs from this period still boasted Clark's contributions and was left off the record; the brilliant, barbed, bizarre "Why" showed up as the b-side to "Eight Miles High," forming one of the few '60s singles that can compete with the Beatles' "Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever" twofer as the most vital double-sided 45 ever pressed. A lot of folks claim, and they may be partially right, that everything Fifth Dimension accomplishes can be pared down to these two songs. Certainly "Eight Miles High," primarily a Gene Clark song but launched into the stratosphere by McGuinn's guitar, is among the boldest and most adventurous songs ever labeled rock & roll, a ringing parade of tricky and unexpected guitar acrobatics matched beautifully with sinister, alluring harmonies and an exhilaratingly seductive crescendo. It's unwaveringly scary and beautiful in equal measure and deserves its pedestal wholly.

But discount the accompanying album and you miss several songs that may not synthesize the Byrds' new approach so economically but certainly present additional layers and angles from which to consider it. At a glance, "5D (Fifth Dimension)" is stoner claptrap, a bunch of poetic scientific babble (actually a paring down of Einstein) speak-sung by McGuinn in his "The Bells of Rhymney" voice, but as the song progresses and he lets out an unprompted "ohhhh" and the band's harmonies -- darker, stranger than before -- kick in, the evolution is obvious and their naivete becomes an object of affection rather than ire. The old Byrds are still evidenced on the traditional-ish number "I Come and Stand at Every Door," eerie but gorgeous, and the standards "Wild Mountain Thyme" and "John Riley." The change is not just in the tasteful string arrangements from new producer Allan Stanton, worlds beyond any meddling attempted by Terry Melcher. The voices -- with Clark now replaced by Chris Hillman -- are more halting, emotional, thus in some sense more appropriate to the material than the confidence and detachment all over Turn! Turn! Turn!.

The moments on Fifth Dimension that feel truly new are those that carry forward from the strong raga and Coltrane influences of the leadoff single. The "Eight Miles High" sequel is "I See You," a fine rock number that sees further bracing guitar experimentation from McGuinn at the peak of his inventive powers, but even David Crosby's "What's Happening!?!?!" is a distinctive creation, sounding for all the world like an Ravi Shankar-infected sitar adventure without actually featuring even a second of real sitar playing. As on "Why," that's all McGuinn's 12-string you're hearing. Less of a stretch for the band but ironically pointing the way forward is "Mr. Spaceman," a remarkably witty country-ish take on UFO abduction that gives McGuinn an opportunity to show off with a splendidly warm vocal and melody -- in my head now since the age of four, roughly -- and one of the best, most concise guitar solos on any rock record ever.

But inevitably, "Eight Miles High" stands above all. The Byrds had been listening to Coltrane a lot, according to legend, and also to the Zombies, who'd managed to include improvisational jazz interludes on several big songs (and would continue to up to their breakup). So for this record, McGuinn uses his 12-string to initiate a ragged and stunningly lyrical imitation of the saxophone of the twentieth century's single most gifted musician. In the process he single-handedly creates a new sound, and it goes beyond psychedelia. This was 1966, before the Velvet Underground, before Forever Changes, certainly before bands like Television who would so emphatically capture the yearning emotional force of jazz in Tom Verlaine's guitar playing, in a sense whose roots are unmistakably audible in "Eight Miles High." In so many ways, this feels like a new beginning: the start of the real California Sixties, as we remember them, and of everything that would grow outward, ready to mutate and grow. It starts with someone pulling a stunt that doesn't sound quite right at first but that feels profoundly, fascinatingly, ear-tinglingly wonderful. There is no more noble pursuit for rock & roll.

Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets (1974)

(Island)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A quick breath of artful liveliness on the heels of Eno's departure from Roxy Music, Here Come the Warm Jets sets the stage for one of the truly distinctive careers in pop music of the 1970s. Written and recorded (almost simultaneously), quickly to boot, with the kind of restlessly fussy enthusiasm that prompted the Velvet Underground's less polished sonic experiments not too many years earlier, the album is surprisingly immediate for something that was created in the interest of throwing unrelated musicians and ideas together and seeing what might happen.

Eno's sensibility is easy to brush under the glam rock rug, but what he's really doing here is proving himself one of the few experimentalists capable of taking up the Beatles' mantle of using the studio as an instrument. In that regard he is of course a kindred spirit of David Bowie, and the first few Eno albums frequently resemble Bowie's work from the same period, albeit with a more personable, less rehearsed quality. Several songs here -- in particular "Needle in the Camel's Eye," "Cindy Tells Me" and "Blank Frank" -- are almost power pop. The whole record charms because it's "big" and enveloping without abandoning the vagueness and subtlety that make Eno's writing and singing so provocative. Even now that it's passed into the textbooks as a small-scale rock classic, it feels just weird enough to belong to you -- smart and florid without lapsing into pretension.

The Beatles and Bowie comparisons come up because the recordings as often as the songs themselves are playfully arch and weird, arty without prog, and consistently surprising. Like his influences, Eno has a knack for tossing left-field and even unmusical ideas into larger pieces so seamlessly that they all transform into absolutely convincing radio music. In the abstract, "Baby's on Fire" is intense and disturbing, a bottom-heavy forecast of Devo and Suicide that extrapolates into dissonance, but couched between confectionary monsters "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch" and "Cindy Tells Me" it's all windows-down fun despite the desperation of it all. Even the VU couldn't quite achieve that.

Lyrically, not much of it makes much sense because it's very much an album of sounds -- word sounds as well as the instrumental and mysterious kind -- but the feminist philosophy at the core of the brilliant "Cindy Tells Me" are as welcome as the blissful surrender of "On Some Faraway Beach," the song that utterly defines the philosophical core of Eno's work for the next decade. "Cindy" is a dip into Eno's most ardent pop friendliness -- its melody and hooks ("that's what they want and that's what they choose" read with joy, not dismissal) don't challenge, they tittilate, all hope and no alienation, and as gloriously uplifting as any AM chestnut from the period. But "Beach," despite being clearly the work of the same artist, could scarcely be more different, not so much a wall of sound as a bed of it, deliberately poetic and withdrawn in every way that "Cindy Tells Me" is specific.

These songs both reveal Eno's gift for forming an entire composition into an irreducible work of art through his brilliance as a producer, but one is for our gut and one's for our heart -- he achieves hazy emotion, defined by us, but he does so through playing and arrangement, a triumph of complete nonverbal communication that builds gradually (no vocals for three minutes) and peaks quickly, so much a phenomenon of swimming in sonic beauty that even its deeply moving piano coda feels like a momentous moment of high drama. Such powerful creations, both of these, but "Faraway Beach" demonstrates Eno achieving transcendence in heretofore unimaginable ways, wringing something human and effective from the simplest of ideas and the most seemingly sterile basis of knob-twiddling, carefully engineered atmosphere. He'd be doing a lot more of this in no time.

The rest of this is the sound of a superb voice finding itself -- shambolic piano things, cranky menace, meaty and thick bass and synths, stereo drum immersion, dirges with hooks, eccentric spoken word tidbits and what sounds like a lost Les Paul and Mary Ford jam (in the latter half of "Some of Them Are Old," which otherwise resembles a Beach Boys outtake from their late '60s art-rock period). There are enough strange noises and itching, irresistible hooks on this record to keep a person busy for years, but what sticks with you is the odd, stilted beauty of it all, occasionally opening up to a stunningly unguarded and expansive moment like "On Some Faraway Beach" and the title cut. Eno's weirdness is so intimate, both more introspective and more grandiose than almost any other major artist of the '70s -- his preoccupations are wide-ranging, musical theater on up to Lou Reed at his nastiest -- and Here Come the warm Jets reveals him as a craftsman of the highest order for his ability to tie it all together.

June albums

The sequence of the reviews below is arbitrary. Retro views not included: R.E.M. '84 (posted yesterday), Brian Eno '74 (coming tomorrow). I'm obviously behind on reviewing new music but less so on listening to it, and can tell you nine albums I love that I will be covering here soonish and implore you to check out are the new releases by: Hospitality; Kate Tempest; Lake Street Dive; Lyla Foy; Ratking; September Girls; Sohn; Toumani Diabate; tUnE-yArDs.

Rosanne Cash:
The River & the Thread (2014)
(Blue Note)

RECOMMENDED - Frequently gorgeous, with minimal production and songs that seem stretch outward beyond perception. Cash's voice is undoubtedly among the most expressive in modern popular music, and the record's starkness overcomes most of the pratfalls of country today, though its slick sameness will wear on some, conquered only on repeat listens by the top-caliber writing and performances.

***

Against Me!:
Transgender Dysphoria Blues (2014)
(Xtra Mile)

RECOMMENDED - It's trite to put the identity questions posed here under a microscope, when the point is much more that this represents punk at its base utility, an act of defiance against an uncomprehending, unsympathetic broader world. There's poetry, triumph, fury in it despite its metallic, blunt-force harshness, and it's a more cathartic experience than Arcade Fire will let us have anymore.

***

Sun Kil Moon:
Benji (2014)
(Caldo Verde)

!! CAUTION !! - I've only sporadically listened to Mark Kozelek's work in the past and remembered liking it, but this dreadful exercise in rampant, whiny oversharing sounds like an Adam Duritz solo album, with a rather astonishing level of ego on display. Can't decide which thing I care least about: Kozelek's history of sexual experiences ("man she could suck"), the time he went to the movie theater to see the Led Zeppelin film, his close friendship with famed fellow borehole Ben Gibbard, or his grandma his grandma his grandma his grandma his grandma his grandma. There are some nice buried melodies but the dude is too self-consciously pained to be Loudon Wainwright, too far up his own ass to be Nick Drake. Blehhhhhhhhhhgh.

***

Architecture in Helsinki:
In Case We Die (2005)
(Bar/None)

Progressive power pop, in case the relative failure of even A.C. Newman in attempting such a concept didn't sufficiently discourage you from thinking it was a good idea. Dusk at Cubist Castle wasn't this busy, and you can dance to Of Montreal.

***

Coming up in July: Young Fathers; Marissa Nadler; Angel Olsen; St. Vincent; Real Estate; Beck; Bo Diddley; the Yardbirds; the non-Yard Byrds; more.

R.E.M.: Reckoning (1984)

(I.R.S.)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

On recently seeing 1983-vintage interviews with the members of R.E.M. I was stunned to see just how young they were, just how impressionable and naive and even innocent they seemed. This creates a disparity and yet it explains something. The disparity is, how did these people manage to look so goddamn disaffected and hip all the time (the proto-Radiohead, don't deny it) and keep putting out their relatively disaffected and hip music, even with the rock press taking them under its wing, obsessed like popcrits have been with few bands since Captain Beefheart or whatever? Murmur was the precursor to a seduction of adolescents. Which brings us to the part I now understand, that Reckoning is reactionary and tentative because it has to be, and it pretends it's not reactionary by being tentative, and it avoids being hurt by that because it's reactionary. Right? Right.

For the seduction to be driven by journalists is such a copout, of course. What kind of asshole of the rock & roll world is it to be the sort of people music store clerks and (oh lord, no) scenesters follow around? Worse, "intelligent" scenesters. Peers the Replacements had scenesters, but their scenesters were immature and nuts, and a lot of them were babes. If R.E.M. was getting laid in 1983, it was probably by Village Voice writers. How did any kind of rock music get driven to this kind of seclusion? "Radio Free Europe" did get jacked up once on American Bandstand, and the kids did dance.

Speaking of "intelligent," what does it mean in a pop group? That's the buzzword people have tossed around about R.E.M. for decades now. They are the "thinking" band. Thinking, of what exactly? "The biggest wagon is the empty wagon is the noisiest / The consul a horse, Jefferson I think we're lost" is a lot of words leading in no direction at all. Reckoning's cover is a coiled snake or a river, a beautiful painting by Howard Finster, in which nothing moves in any direction.

Murmur created such buzz that no one in the band knew what to do on the follow-up. That's why Reckoning is a collection of ten extremely divided, separate Byrds jangle-songs jumbled together and very mathematically divided onto two sides, labeled "left" and "right". The albums have the same producers, Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, but they are surprisingly different; absolutely none of the subtlety of the first album is evident on Reckoning. This helps it greatly. Nothing could possibly have hurt the record more than to condense Murmur's mystery into one dirge in a series. Reckoning has neither menace nor dread. It leaps out, many times. The band arguably never performed so tightly as in this period, a theory borne out by available live shows from the period. Bill Berry's formidable grit and force as a drummer is the most holy sort of contrast to Peter Buck's shimmery guitar, Mike Mills' cloudy melodic mystery and Michael Stipe's full-on art school dynamism. All are at their best here.

Side One oh god I'm sorry Side Left is five great radio songs with personality beautifully hampered by nervous second-album-by-critical-darling restraint. "Harborcoat" rings out with harmonies that the band and Mitch Easter would have considered outright unacceptable on either Chronic Town or Murmur. "7 Chinese Bros." builds to a miraculously rousing chorus that actually begins and ends (compare "Catapult" and "Sitting Still" with their very slight, clipped refrains) and expands the sonic palette with conservative piano. And "So. Central Rain" is the most commercial song they recorded until "The One I Love," hands down, and it is meaningless, completely, but packs insanely prescient emotional power that can shake a person up to this day. "Pretty Persuasion" is a rock song. It really is, I mean. The vocals are a little oblique, at first, but there's drum fills and a meaty structure and a wild chorus and crazy guitars all the way through, particularly at the bridge.

If these songs bring the lack of meaning in Michael Stipe's lyrics into focus, one can hardly argue against the fact that they prove a vital point of his being a master of atmosphere maintenance. A few of the words are excellent, if free of any kind of depth except that which free association can offer. "So. Central Rain" is beautifully written ("eastern to mountain, third party call, the lines are down, the wise man built his words upon the rocks but I'm not bound to follow suit"), and who really notices what "Pretty Persuasion" says (aside from the important "goddamn") or what "Harborcoat" means (nothing)? No one, even among those for whom the words do mean everything. Perverse, but true. The invisibility and simulated intricacy of those words actually adds to the surreal beauty of the performances, even if it does land far away from the enigmatic mutterings of the band's earliest work.

"Time After Time" is just more disparity. They call it their Velvet Underground song. It drones, of course, droning is the thing to do, but it drones so above and beyond '80s indie rock shtick. It's, like, a song, you know? A beautiful, shimmering, slow, mature song, the one that creates the most gripping chasm between the R.E.M. look, the hipster posturing, and the band's actual skill set. It simultaneously connects a line to the revealing duplicity here: The art-school cover, the oblique music videos, the music, they manage that detached pretension, but they also are apart from it. The cover is stunning, the videos are often gorgeous, the image has some kind of reality, the rock & roll is the image. Whether they mean it or not, they are masters of achieving sincerity while retaining a special kind of elevated eccentric status, a skill that would continue to abet them for a long career.

Without compromising great songs or doing much to connect them, the first half of Reckoning scores completely with a technique we'd now consider rather foolish of dealing with a problem by pretending to ignore it. Flip the record over and you witness how the same idea can fail.

The problem begins but is not limited to the songs, three of which are questionable. "Little America" is gobbledygook, but it's fast. "Second Guessing" is stupid, unfinished, annoying, but it's fast. "Camera" is the loser of the album. A tribute to R.E.M.'s late friend Carol Levy (a photographer), it begins as a plodding power ballad and just gets worse with an insipid guitar solo and steadfast refusal to start moving. The lyrics, curiously, are somewhat redeeming here: "I fell by your bed once / I didn't want to tell you / I should keep myself / In between the pages"; even though they also contain the first reveal of a fondness for schmaltz lurking under the surface of Stipe's rebellion against convention ("Will you be remembered? / Will she be remembered?"), the strange, startling confessions have a ring of truth. But the song sounds like a band's tribute to their dead friend. It can't move past that idea and fails to connect for five hideous minutes.

An even more private composition, the middling but complex "Letter Never Sent," does pick up the pace and beckons quite enjoyably in the direction of the sing-song southern folk of Fables of the Reconstruction, but the strongest cut of side two is the novelty, the country tune "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," easy enough to dismiss as a tear-in-your-beer joke but in fact one of the most well-written songs on the LP and easily the most direct. The only lyrics on the record to match the sweet, unabashedly smitten lyrics of "Rockville" ("Everybody else in town only wants to bring you down, that's not how it ought to be" is read with such sheepish showmanship by Stipe it can generate the rare involuntary smile) are the simple "Time After Time" couplet of "If you're tired and you're tried, you can find me in my room." Obscurity is all good and well, but R.E.M.'s best moments are when their personalities shine through the rubble, and when, in "Rockville," they give in to their country heritage full-force with a great and lively pop song (formerly written as a thrash number), it is to exist in awe of the management of this and all else on Reckoning. They know what they're doing, but they are human beings always.

Reckoning has its limitations, sacrificing not just the mystery and wonder of Murmur but a lot of its excitement. However, it's leaps and bounds above its predecessor in emotional power, with even relatively oblique songs like "Harborcoat" generating chill bumps through harmony and the consistent surprises of melody and production. A beautiful, charming, smart record, it takes the Chronic Town / Murmur R.E.M. sound as far as it can go, almost systematically, exercising in all of its songs one extreme or another of their sound, exhausting it even. "Rockville" and "Time After Time" break through that wall entirely, with the former seeming to deny it ever existed, and it was through this open door that the band gracefully exited, bound for the next adventure.

[Originally written and posted in 2006, with a few corrections and additions now.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Eponymous (1981-85)
Chronic Town EP (1982)
Murmur (1983)
Collapse into Now (2011)

Format change info

Hi, everybody. Because the time I have to listen to music seems more and more to be vastly eclipsing the time I have to write about it, and equally because the quantity if not quality of writing posted here requires a dedication that is really difficult to maintain without being paid for it (not that I'm placing myself as being as good as the people who do get paid so much as just noting that I don't want to participate in any kind of devaluing of their work), this is a really long sentence. Where was I? Oh, I am going to be making a change to the way reviews are posted here -- assuming that I don't have a change of heart after I sleep on it. I'm extremely behind on reviewing both new and old music in this space, and I think the best solution is not to cut the number of albums I cover but to reduce the number of full reviews I post.

I quite like the format I've used on the "Also Recommended" posts at the end of 2012 and 2013. That's what you're likely to be seeing on future reviews here. Note, however, that this mostly applies to either negative, neutral, or mildly positive reviews. It's rather likely that most anything that would receive a "highly recommended" tag will still get a lengthy writeup. (That being said, there are exceptions to everything. I'm posting something about Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sometime this summer and I adore them, but I'm having doubts that they will be sufficient inspiration for an essay.) I'm still giving each record the same amount of attention, just making cruder, possibly less reasonable drive-by judgments, so it's win-win all around! And I like being forced to rein in my wordiness, so it's likely that it will be more fun to me as well, hence less hemming and hawing about sitting down to write here, hence more posts, hence happier readers? In theory? I guess? I hope to have the first such post up by the weekend, along with one or two complete reviews, both of older albums. The first revolutionary short-reviews post will be called "June albums." Future monthly posts will follow.

What kind of stuff will be relegated to the short review pile? Artists I don't know but feel a need to weigh in on, mildly interesting things I run across, failed follow-ups, other sorts of runoff, and things I sense are good despite not being a fan of their genres (that covers two of the reviews in the post coming up). What gets a full review? Generally something by an artist I absolutely love, or anything I'm confident I will have a lot to say about. As a consequence of all this, One Sentence Reviews will be discontinued. My apologies. But if it ends up saving me as much time as I suspect it might, I may start Wuzzon again. (The Also Recommended post at the end of the year will remain because it's meant for records I liked but didn't have time to listen to enough to form an entirely confident opinion.)

If this post disappears in the next 48 hours, you will know it's because my inner stubbornness wouldn't let me change the routine at this blog after four years. Because I can't think of any other good reason not to change, unless you really think I have a lot of exciting and original stuff to say about, like, Architecture in Helsinki. (No slur on them. Just... c'mon.)

The Artwoods: 100 Oxford Street (1964-66)

(Edsel)

There are a lot of bands like this in the '60s -- garage kids with nothing better to do than start a band, or forgotten castaways from the British Invasion, the stuff of Nuggets and Pebbles -- who made that such an exciting, electric time in the true democratic playing field of rock & roll. Surprisingly, a lot of them had more consistent bodies of work than you'd expect; the Creation or the Count Five, for example, were solid rock bands with skills that went beyond their obvious classics. Judging from this compilation that gathers, so far as anyone cares to check, the bulk of their output, the Artwoods aren't such a jewel. They're quite competent, and if you have a taste for this Spencer Davis Group-like blues-rock aesthetic (with a touch of Booker T.) from the time, you're likely to at least bob your head and receive no urge to turn the thing off. But the Artwoods, while very successful in their heyday as a live act, never took off in the studio and it's easy to hear why. Their music in and of itself just isn't all that interesting or distinctive.

The band's primary claim to fame is the presence of singer Art Wood, brother of future Rolling Stone Ron; the unit was among several signed to Decca in a scrambling of sorts to get into the Brit guitar band business after their embarrassing dismissal of the Beatles. Wood's delivery as a vocalist is somewhat similar to Eric Burdon, which is largely why the Artwoods are frequently mentioned in the same breath as the Animals by those who remember them. Wood is less a blues singer, which makes his work here frequently less labored than Burdon's, but he has a more limited emotional range; the same goes for the band, who come off as a frat-rock variant on the Yardbirds. Again, this stuff isn't bad, especially if you love the period, but there isn't much to be said about it.

This compilation offers a lot of the Artwoods' R&B-leaning singles. We get standard rockers, standard ballads, the standard repertoire of blues and American rock cover material -- if a bit less obvious than that of some of their peers. The highlights are scattered around here and there, usually redeeming moments in less than memorable performances: the arrangement on "Sweet Mary" is basic but made to sound enormous with the aid of good, slick production and an excellent solo from guitarist Derek Griffiths (who wrote the liner notes for this early '80s release). The oddball chamber pop of "Oh My Love" is the sole suggestion of real eclecticism, with great piano sound and the instantly classic couplet "When I kiss your eyes / You know that my heart dies." The band reveals a good way with Gene Vincent melodrama on "I Keep Forgettin'" and prove their mettle as backing singers with their interesting, haunting work on "One More Heartache." There's even a weird Kinks thing called "Keep Lookin'" but the disc is largely rounded out by odd instrumentals that undoubtedly made more sense on stage; why bother with this when we can all go listen to the Mar-Keys?

It's hard to turn you away from this. If you are a fan of off-the-beaten-path '60s bands like the Action and the Blues Magoos, you should at least give this a listen, but I can't really encourage you to do so without reservation unless you're a real cultist for the dregs of British Invasion rock. It sure beats Gerry and the Pacemakers, anyway.

East India Youth: Total Strife Forever (2014)

(Stolen Recordings)

RECOMMENDED

Moody and heavy as a broken dark night but often breezily pretty all the same, the debut album from William Doyle, who spins the knobs and records as East India Youth, couldn't be easier to get into. As modern techno goes, it's almost suspiciously immediate, with a good deal of brooding ambiance tempered by bursts and stabs of melody and sensually pleasurable beats 'n' moans. It goes forward at length without really settling into a coherent mood, but despite a boring denouement it never truly falters either.

While there's nothing unique or new about what Doyle's doing here, he will go far as a stylist, capturing complicated and offbeat moments with the verve of Four Tet and the Field, only with more of a sense of audaciousness and adventure than either (lately, anyway). Like James Blake, Doyle's sort of a de facto singer-songwriter dabbling in a world that frequently downplays the importance of songs themselves, but Total Strife Forever has considerably more variance in its grooves than Blake has yet exhibited. The pulsating first part of the title cut will turn your mind inside out with its gorgeous thump, especially on headphones or a great system, but skip down the line a bit and find something like the blown-out "Midnight Koto." It's just as interesting, but it doesn't even sound like the same performer -- a sign, some will say, of an identity problem, but I think it's more like creative restlessness and eclecticism. Part two of "Total Strife Forever" is Eno-like drone but loud, and "III" booms forth with what sounds like a pipe organ at a funeral just when it threatens to recede into the background. There's a lot to hear.

Doyle is a very young Englishman -- just 23 -- and the most endearing moments of his record are those that have him connecting with the peculiar identity and history associated with his age and nationality. On four particular cuts, Strife becomes essentially a pop record, and such a good and unusual one that you start to wish it went all the way. The Beatles are an evident influence on the minimal but melodic twins "Looking for Someone" and "Song for a Granular Piano," but it's Bowie who makes the grand entrance. "Dripping Down" owes a lot to Berlin-period Bowie, up to its operatic "fiiind new love" climax, but its plugged-in, insistent pop also fits with the darkened, drugged club atmosphere that's the main event here. An even stronger catharsis comes at the peak of "Heaven, How Long?" which is written like a Bowie song but sung like one of Martin Gore's Depeche Mode showstoppers, and it fulfills the back end of its open-armed chorus even more completely, sliding back into brutal backbeat and the emotional connection that anyone who sits at the crossroads of electronica and pop pines to reach.

The major impression is not that this is a rock or pop record trying to be something else, but that the entirety coalesces into a disconnected but intriguing collision of sounds that are, more than anything else, pretty. With the ghosts of Eno and the Beatles both in tow, this is simultaneously a solid dance album and a rather terrific rainy-day album. Doyle's gift is that he sees little daylight between the beautiful, distant piano that opens "Glitter Recession" and the glitchy computer sounds that are just as lovingly broken down on "Hinterland." The former is drowned out in the end by oceanic white noise, the latter breaks out into soft, chilled, sinister trance, but both cuts achieve an ideal balance between the skill and curiosity of a great producer's technique and the personal subservience to full-hearted bliss that's just as important on a night in as a night out.