Wire: Pink Flag (1977)

(Harvest)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

What do you think rebellion sounds like? Musically, I mean. Is rebellion a flower-power thing, an anti-war newspaper song, "folkies playing drums" and all that? Is rebellion even something tangible to be primarily associated with adolescent fervor, or are we talking more about just the basic expression of nonconformity? Is rebellion "Revolution 9"? The bold strokes of individualism like when Patti Smith covers "Gloria" and makes it her own on Horses, or when John Lydon goes under the Berlin Wall, or when Poly Styrene snarls in response to the adage that little girls should be seen and not heard -- that's a favored definition. But there's something about Wire's Pink Flag, one of the most unique and strange artifacts of punk rock, that seems deeper, weirder, more devoted. There is a casualness, an almost mechanical deadpan to the repetitive riff "3 Girl Rhumba" and its brash, half-assed insights ("Think of a number, divide it by two / Something is nothing -- nothing is nothing!") that is more than just gleefully primitive and raucous-past-the-distortion-point. Both those aesthetic qualities are valid and significant, of course, but this song is a threat. And it's a threat because, well, it sounds like these boys just don't care how you feel about the results.

They say it themselves in the demonic earworm "Mannequin": "You don't even start to interest me / Not even curiosity / It's not animosity, it's just you don't interest me." The strongest of kiss-offs: apathy (though "My mind is unwilling and your flesh is so weak" will do in a pinch). Ultimately, nearly every other landmark punk album had some degree of audience service in its philosophy. The tip of the iceberg must be Never Mind the Bollocks, essentially such a barely-disguised greatest hits package as to be three steps away from A Collection of Sex Pistols Oldies. Don't even limit yourself to Great Britain. The Ramones, the Clash, the Damned, Blondie, the Saints, and certainly Patti Smith and Television all exorcised their small rebellions in the firmly established context of good old rock & roll. The song structures, for example, in the Saints' "Messin' with the Kid" or virtually any Ramones song are essentially pared-down revisions of ideas wrought by the Stones, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry two decades earlier. It isn't that Wire is immune to such pleasures so much as they are interested in brushing away the dross and cutting it all down to its essence even more so than their peers. These songs rush in, make their point and then leave -- with no friendly repetition or carefully orchestrated hooks. If there is a hook, you might hear it once. Then it's gone.

So the band -- consisting of fussy, restless renegades Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and razor-sharp but subtle frontman Colin Newman -- rewrites "Wild Thing" as a sarcastic parody of self-help manuals and feel-good relationship philosophy in "Feeling Called Love." All the big riffage, even a singalong peak, but it's all over in eighty-two seconds. "Champs" even offers handclaps and a certain curious joy. In some alternate universe, "Start to Move" and "It's So Obvious," only one of which even exceeds a minute, might sound like radio hits but they're out the door in a flash. Even for someone who loves Wire's approach here, it's hard to hear the wittily pouty "Fragile" and "Champs" without thinking of what a career this band might have had if they'd further explored their effortless, focused popcraft. Minimalism in this context amounts to a certain gleeful denial of pleasure, but it also renders Pink Flag both an enigma and an addiction -- because its ideas are so numerous and come at such a rapid pace, all quickly discarded, the immediate need is to hear it all again.

Raw as it is, it's also intensely well-recorded. Among the more elaborate constructions here, the instant classic "Ex-Lion Tamer" has, like "Mannequin," a fully fleshed-out structure with a bridge, chorus, backing vocals and a tight rhythm, all peaking with the ultimate in fascistic commands: "Stay glued to your TV set." Throughout the song, the volume level goes up, and up and up, so slowly it's almost unnoticeable, but pronounced enough that the track is deafening by the end. The unsettling slow-burn "Strange" -- the longest track here, and one of only three longer than three minutes -- adds interlocking guitars and a flute, yet its variation upon the nightmare is equally unforgiving given the time to engulf us all.

"Strange" is, by this band's standards, something of an epic concoction. But it's long strictly because it can hold their sinister interest for that long. "Pink Flag" is more of a dramatic, overblown stage piece, meaning apparently to mock the flamboyant extremities of prog rock; even it devolves into a series of broken one-chord rave ups, strikes of drum and guitar like some demented H.P. Lovecraft reversal of the beginning of "A Hard Day's Night" drowned out eventually by the band's screams. This only enhances the worldview of "Field Day for the Sundays," which slags off bourgeois lifestyle, middle class fantasy and the TV set you're glued to in under thirty seconds and two spit-out sentences: "I want to be a field day for the Sundays so they can fuck up my life, embarrass my wife and leave a bad taste striped toothpaste can't remove on Monday morning. I want to be a target for the dailies so they can show pictures of me with a nude on page three, so lacking in taste, touched up near the waist looking as limp as Monday morning." These two extremes of Pink Flag don't run in opposition. They both demonstrate that only the barest elements are necessary for a reformation of rock & roll as a catalyst of astonishing tension, fury and barbaric humor.

Musically, it's one thing -- more implosive than explosive but inspiring of plenty of danceable glee, if clipped and frequently interrupted. But rock & roll never was just rhythm and melody, it's the whole package -- the attitude, expressed less often in a lyric than a snarl. Pink Flag's vaguely apocalyptic, dada-influenced fuck-it-all worldview would seem like an expression of almost deathly nihilism if it did not circumvent any attempt to interpret it so straightforwardly, unimaginatively. It must be said, the lyrics -- many by Newman, many not -- are a delight even at their deathliest, and are at times arrestingly poetic ("If you had a room he'd paint it white / Survives the day, prefers the night"). The inner sleeve reads like the world's strangest advice column or autobiography, all detached philosophy and mathematical oddity. But is the inaudibly shouted "Mr. Suit" -- "Take your fucking money and shove it up your arse... I'm tired of fucking phonies, that's right, I'm tired of you!" -- a satire of lesser punk bands' empty anti-authority ethos? Is it a sincere attack upon capitalism? Is it a mockery of the duplicity of so many of Wire's peers? Unlike the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Ramones, and well, basically everyone else, Wire wasn't on a major label; they never shook hands with the Mr. Suits. One thing's for sure: the song is a riot, and a joy -- even Newman is having a blast, you can tell by that cheerful "come on!" he emits after the first verse. But it's also scary, threatening, and that makes it all the more cathartic.

The guttural abandon of most great popular music is key here, but so is a rare sort of imagination; Wire may have rebelled against the same systems -- mostly musical and infrastructural, maybe a few political -- as all other punk rock groups from the first wave, but no one else did it in quite the gleefully oblique way they did. The Pistols could scare you, but Wire could trap you, in a dirge or in the deafening silence when a song just collapses. There's strange beauty in "Reuters" or "Lowdown" for all their cacophony and drone, in the descent into chaos of "Surgeon's Girl" (later revised into even louder chaos on "Too Late" from Chairs Missing) and "Pink Flag," and in the sensation of being found out and exposed on the deservedly legendary, outrageous climax "1 2 X U" -- the inverse of "Field Day for the Sundays." And yet they can also offer "Straight Line," one of the cheeriest punk songs not performed by the Ramones. At the end of it all, punk washes away along with most everything else because Pink Flag is singular, maybe even more than the band Wire itself was. It does something new with rock & roll, something new with the rock album, its structure, the interweaving relationship of the songs to one another and of the songs to the listener. It's one of the definitive LPs, one of the reasons the LP deserved to be created, and better than most of the reasons we probably thought it was created back in 1977.

July albums

Sorry this post is so late. My life intervened pretty annoyingly this summer; read all about it here if you want the decidedly non-fun details. But I did listen to music during all that. Below is about half of what I've been evaluating lately, with the rest to come as soon as I can spare the moments. I've extracted myself pretty much completely from a lot of the established critical voices across the Web because it seems -- as evidenced below -- that what other people are hearing and loving is more than ever wholly divorced from what's connecting with me. The two records that lit up my spring and summer near the bottom of this post have received little attention elsewhere, while between Marissa Nadler and Sun Kil Moon I'm finding it increasingly hard to be persuaded that the Pitchfork establishment isn't just punking everybody. But lord knows there's no less sharp, vibrant music than before. You'll read about some of it here, some shortly after.

Oh, and Amber Morris contributed (semi-unwittingly) to the Real Estate, Beck and Sam the Sham reviews.

Young Fathers
Dead (2014)
(Aticon)

RECOMMENDED * Interesting, atmospherically vibrant debut by this Edinburgh (by way of Liberia, Nigeria and Maryland) alt-hip hop collective, heavy on melody and a broad pallette of influences that calls TV on the Radio and Shabazz Palaces to mind, with more of a cloudy cumulative impression than a lot of specifically striking numbers. The record comes after a few mixtapes I haven't heard but is breezy enough to make a quick impression and is mostly a flexing of innate gifts; check out the sweeping, unexpectedly gorgeous "Low," tense and aggressive "Mmmh Mmmh." It's a bit short and unfocused, but we'll probably be hearing more good stuff out of these blokes.

***

Five Live Yardbirds (1964)
(Columbia)

RECOMMENDED * New to me, this unusual live document is interesting for a few reasons, only one of them being that it's one of maybe two albums in existence that doesn't suffer for Eric Clapton's involvement. The choice to have a live album function as the band's debut is actually something that was considered by George Martin for the Beatles; history's been kind to his decision not to pull such a stunt after checking out the acoustics at the Cavern, but the tactic is an excellent choice for this somewhat less disciplined but equally raucous live act -- captured in the spring of 1964 at the Marquee Club. The Yardbirds would subsequently create considerable magic in the studio, brilliantly combining a fervent pop sensibility with the blues obsession audible here -- a balancing act none of their peers ever quite figured out, except maybe the Animals -- but this is pure rave-up rock & roll, capturing an eager band with unstoppable energy and a great repertoire of cover material. It's sort of a pity that this is a stronger document of a peak-moment British Invasion band than any of the Beatles', Stones' or Kinks' similar recordings from the period.

***

Marissa Nadler
July (2014)
(Sacred Bones)

!! CAUTION !! * Iiiiiiiii'mmmmmmmmmmmmm ggggggggggggggggllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadddddd yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyoooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

***

Bo Diddley
20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection (1955-62)
(MCA)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * I generally frown on these homogenized greatest hits sets that were put out -- along with similar variants from other labels -- in the early part of the last decade with titles like Icons and Essentials and such, but this is the best (and best-sounding) introduction I'm aware of to one of the crucial architects of rock & roll. A big part of what makes it so much more immediately engaging than the just-as-worthy Chess Box, despite some unfortunate omissions, is that it never stops being fun. The all-time classics "Bo Diddley," "Who Do You Love" (Diddley's strongest piece of proto-hip hop along with the hit "Say Man") and "Road Runner" keep the beat going all night across a sweltering dance floor even now, while "I'm a Man" and "Diddley Daddy" reveal Diddley's hard blues roots and "Crackin' Up" shows off his pouting vulnerability. But best of all, perhaps, is "Mona," proving there's no barrier between filthy primal rock & roll and burning, yearning romance.

***

Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire for No Witness
(2014)
(Jagjaguwar)

Impassioned in the garage, restrained and dull in the opera house.

***

Ashford & Simpson
Best Of (1973-90)
(Capitol)

RECOMMENDED * Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson did their best work as composers for other artists, most significantly Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, but they also recorded some zippy singles about their own marital bliss -- they've got the passion if not the voices to communicate desire, passion and yeah, solidity. This is one winning and agreeable compilation, and breaks a sweat; the songs are almost invariably about commitment -- the ups and downs, highs and lows. Mostly ups and highs. But then, these are singles. Woefully missed is the cover art from one of their other best-ofs, which is almost comically indistinguishable from a depiction of the pair cooperating in said marital bliss with coy grins on faces; good for them, I say.

***

St. Vincent (2014)
(Republic)

RECOMMENDED * Delightful and barbed enough pop to put you in a trance (dig the At the Drive-In interpolation on "Birth in Reverse"!). Still, it seems to me that Annie Clark is holding us all at arm's length somehow, even though she says this is her extroverted record. There's something just a little too professional about it, even though the synths are nasty and Clark's vocals impeccably frayed and full of character. But there's not a weak or ill-advised moment and the right person will find much to love. The voyeuristic anthem "Digital Witness" makes up for everything, anyway.

***

Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs
Pharaohization (1965-67)
(Rhino)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * In addition to one of the filthiest pieces of barely competent, trashy garage rock ever to reach mass popularity with "Wooly Bully," this bizarre outfit recorded a succession of assembly line nursery rhymes and novelty tunes that are conceptually worthy of the Ramones. Some of the many forgotten treasures here: the accidental rock-critic anthem "Oh That's Good No That's Bad," the proto-MRA neckbeard lament "How Do You Catch a Girl," the relentless "Banned in Boston" and the thrillingly vile "I Couldn't Spell !!*@!". In contrast to lots of archival collections from one- or two-hit bands, this brings it for just about an hour. Not that "Wooly Bully" and the splendidly raunchy Big Joe Turner / Big Bopper hybrid hit "L'il Red Riding Hood" (one of the best songs ever written about a woman's clitoris) wouldn't be enough.

***

Real Estate
Atlas (2014)
(Domino)

Unceasingly pleasant, unceasingly polite, unceasingly boring. I don't ask for much, but can't we keep some personality? It seems for this admirer of folky, washed-out guitar hooks as though excessive separation of elements and the DDD pillowy bed of sound so familiar from the early CD era isn't even a good fit for nostalgia, but in an age when people want to sound like Mark Knopfler and Tom Petty only sleepier, what do I know? Gr8 for chillin' poolside though, y'all.

***

Tinariwen
Emmaar (2014)
(Anti-)

RECOMMENDED * Another terrific band (like the thornier, more jagged Ngoni Ba) displaced and disheartened by the militant regime in Mali; following big breakthrough American success with their last record (a long time coming; the group formed in the late '70s), they recorded this one in the California desert. It rumbles, grooves and quakes, it's catchy and bluesy, and about as immediately accessible as African music can be for a western audience new to it.

***

Artic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006)
(Domino)

!! CAUTION !! * Alex Turner is a... brilliant man with lots of well thought out, practical ideas. He is ensuring the financial security of Domino Records for years to come. Oh, and his personal hygiene is above reproach.

***

Lydia Loveless
Somewhere Else (2014)
(Bloodshot)

She went to a party, someone gave her some blow, the tears came right to her eyes and the phone was right there. So you got a phone call and here it is, and other yearning alt-country psychodramas and collapses. She's an "outlaw," sez the press, but mostly combines the ragged, uncertain maturity of Tracey Thorn with the classic fatalism of Richard Thompson. As a result, the lyrics are insightful and harrowing, but the music (excluding gripping, triumphant moments like the chorus of "Wine Lips" and Loveless' guitar work throughout) and production are a little too much of a retread of seemingly every other modern country record for me. (And as established last year with the Pistol Annies and Kacey Musgraves, I just don't have the ear for it.) At its best, an emotionally striking achievement all the same.

***

L7
Hungry for Stink (1994)
(Reprise)

RECOMMENDED * New to me, actually; I love their prior two albums and have for some time. This one is only inferior to them insofar as it bites just a little bit less -- success hangover? maybe, but more likely the result of an evolution completely beyond the punk ethos to full-on hard rock -- but the second half is still searing and they are, any way you hear 'em, one of the top guitar bands of the last twenty years. It's a sin that more people don't celebrate that.

***

Beck
Morning Phase (2014)
(Capitol)

!! CAUTION !! * It's been a long time since I listened closely to any of Beck's records (we had a long history, it ended bitterly), but when did he become this dull? Not one moment makes an impression; at least he used to be funny. This reminds me of the fucking John Denver records my parents used to play. The inexplicable modern indie rock attraction to unmitigated lite-FM boredom has apparently spread to '90s nostalgia acts now. Coming soon: Billy Corgan's album of Doobie Brothers tunes.

***

Wild Beasts
Present Tense (2014)
(Domino)

RECOMMENDED * For some reason "Nature Boy" makes me want to watch Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The rest sounds like a particularly indulgent Martin Gore (or Bryan Ferry, on "Sweet Spot") solo album -- so, not bad! "A Simple Beautiful Truth" and "Past Perfect" -- delicate schlock -- convinced me. Though now I will spend the rest of the decade getting this band confused with Wild Nothing, who do pretty much the same thing?

***

Asylum Street Spankers
Live (1997)
(Watermelon)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Among the major regrets of my previous ten years in a catalog of plenty is that I never saw this band live before their untimely, financial crash-related breakup. They are an acquired taste, sure; some say -- not without reason -- that the relentless comedic setpieces within and without their original songs render the music trite and trivial, and honestly I could do without some of the wacky stuff. (Some of it, like a rockabilly cover of the Beastie Boys' "Paul Revere" not included on this disc, is sublime.) You do get a bit of it here, as on most of their releases, but when the group focuses on their particular brand of acoustic mayhem and despair, it shrinks the ironic distance of years between the band's choice of cover material and their own sensibilies. I think that's crucial: the banter may be safely sardonic, the music seldom is. It will surprise casual fans that wunderkind vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Christina Marrs, one of the best American musicians of our time, provides only some of the highlights (like the crushing, mindbendingly sexy "Sugar in My Bowl"). The rest is a true ensemble. Check out "Bizness" and "Last Kind Word," or better yet just let the band's irresistible, haunting fast-yet-soulful version of the great murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio" covert you single-handedly.

***

Neneh Cherry
Blank Project (2014)
(Smalltown Supersound)

RECOMMENDED * Sensual classisist -- and, in case you forgot, an absolutely terrific singer -- returns after seemingly forever with Four Tet in tow. Complex and serious throughout, but at its best when she cuts loose and gets weird; the title cut is as far out and intense as anything on the St. Vincent record.

***

Nana Grizol
"Ruth" (2010)
(Orange Twin)

One of Athens' most interesting current bands jumped out of the gate with the heartfelt, celebratory Love It Love It, a flawed album that was hard not to adore passionately, and after a few years I'm still not convinced they waited long enough to record the follow-up, which bears all the hallmarks of a rush job. It's surprisingly slow with filler instrumental and otherwise, but of course offers some huge contributions to collective cult goodwill, the same sort of stuff the first album was overflowing with. The bouncy yet mournful "For Things That Haven't Come Yet" is probably their best song so far. But we miss the barely-put-together but infectiously enthusiastic lyrical insights of Theo Hilton, somewhat in the manner of the Modern Lovers, that so generously filled the band's earlier work.

***

September Girls
Cursing the Sea (2014)
(Fortuna Pop!)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * This is rock & roll that I, an increasingly grouchy librarian in my thirties, understand intimately. September Girls are a Dublin quintet so new they've only played Stateside on one occasion so far -- at SXSW -- and are getting lost in the flood of neo-noise dream pop groups that have so dominated the attentions of indie bloggers in the last few years (in part because so many of these bands are led by women, and you're surely familiar with the critical need to throw things together for no more compelling reason than that). But they're different for several reasons; sure, it's all a throwback to the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine days of yore, but it's a beautiful throwback, with a buried pop sense as strong, varied and well-schooled as such godparents ever had. The songs are vastly more compelling than those of the far more successful band Dum Dum Girls, with whom they're constantly compared. Again, there's no doubt the whispered shoegaze wall of vocals appeals to me because of various long-held prejudices and joys, but this fast and sad music has an innate magic that I don't think is limited to their interest in the records they like. Take the unapologetic bitterness of "Another Love Song," the girl group meltdowns in "Talking" and the absolutely perfect (almost Kimberley Rew-like, don't tell anyone) "Someone New," the million dollar riffs and drama on "Green Eyed" and "Sister," or the turn-it-the-fuck-up pulse running through all of it. By the time "Money" builds to a persuasive climax that eats at you like 1986 never ended, one wonders what the hell is the matter with appropriating the sounds you love most. Nothing, when the results are this fresh, invigorating and, well, (for all their self-conscious darkness) lovable.

***

The Replacements
Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981)
(Twin/Tone)

RECOMMENDED * A hint that they're more than juvenile thrash, but only a hint, and what's wrong with juvenile thrash? The splendidly self-deprecating liner notes by Paul Westerberg are the best part, but the music has its winners -- both funny and otherwise. "I Hate Music" and "Customer" constitute charming laziness of a sort seldom exemplified by hardcore bands, who were and are typically more worried about making an impression than these ne'er-do-wells, while the considerable sophistication of "Shiftless When Idle" and "Johnny's Gonna Die" transcend the small-town Minnesota glue sniffing anthems that populate both sides. You can hear the band's future in it even if they couldn't, and that parallel purity and complexity are what make the record finally more intriguing than tedious.

***

Hospitality
Trouble (2014)
(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Plenty of indie rock bands that've shown up in this decade show a determination to zoom right past the hip parlance of post-punk and appropriate the weirdly crunchy, buzzy ambiance of '90s alternative rock, including -- horrors -- the stuff that was on the radio at the time. Brooklyn's Hospitality are different from someone like the more unabashed revivalists Yuck because their attraction to such music isn't the surface jolt of pleasure and memory but how much more complicated and involved the act of listening to guitar music seemed then, even that recently. Songs and records held secrets they took their time revealing; sometimes they still do, but only sporadically is the effort celebrated. So Trouble's indelible melodies and idiosyncratic, multilayered performances may go unnoticed by many but not here. The songs are all different but mostly share an impeccable sense of interplay, the rhythm section bubbling under Amber Papini's sharp, hard, complex vocals and outstanding guitar playing. Papini is a formidable talent calling to mind Neil Young and Karen O in equal measure, though her gift for restraint is her own. Her songs are engagingly straightforward, smart and well-written midtempo pop, sophisticated without being slick. I have yet to hear the band's apparently less eclectic, more immediate first album, but what connects here are the many, many ideas being tested out and exercised, from the unnerved New Wave of "Going Out" to the doo wop interpolation (almost worthy of Television's "Prove It") on "It's Not Serious." Papini's guitar boasts considerable lyricism throughout, peaking with the magically fevered solo (best of the year, probably) that closes out "Last Words." That song's a particular miracle, six and a half minutes of Fleetwood Mac / Postal Service / Brian Eno magic to make you either dance or cry, probably both. From there, the band goes out on high, edging on the divine with the acoustic lullaby "Sunship" and the utterly wounded "Call Me After." I knew immediately that this album was special, but it's taken several listens for me to realize how special. I can't wait to hear what this band does next.

***

A long-festering essay about Wire is coming soon; two more lengthy posts like this will follow, but I can't exactly tell you how long. Also probably going to say my piece finally about two of the luminaries of 20th century music, Billie Holiday and Hank Williams, if my life settles down as much as I'm hoping it's gonna. And I'm also gearing up to write about my favorite album of the last thirty years but just to be an asshole, I'm not going to name it. Have a great September and please let me know if you're still out there and haven't given up on me!

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.)