VII: Tijuana Hangover

Now think about what this band could sound like on their first full length. Think about what it could sound like when they tighten up the beats and make the arrangements go somewhere, but keep the fun and the energy. Think about what it will sound like when you’re pushing those nifty bass lines through something other than your computer speakers. And think what will happen when that bass player realizes he can play half the notes and be twice as awesome. Pretty sweet, right? (10/08/07)



At Indefinite Articles, the writers undertake Preemptive Strikes, a category of posts subtitled: "Movies we haven't seen, books we haven't read, games we haven't played." Their Long Hauls tackle bodies of work as varied as Highlander, Star Trek: TOS, Doug, and Metal Gear Solid. Writing this as I am under the marque of my series of a season of a show off the air for nearly five years, I have a certain affinity for this project.

Between these two extremes of criticism, lies the status quo of the blogosphere. With neither the willingness to admit to their preconceptions nor the reflection of posterity, the electronically chattering class hops to keyboards as quickly as possible to register its opinions on whatever movie or record crosses their path. Now that "the scoop" is had by hitting post as quickly as possible, one needs only get a link to an mp3 and the critical equivalent of "OMG FRIST!" to claim blog supremacy. Beware quality; that way outdated timestamps lay.

Thus, we have the cycle of buzz: a band exists, gains exposure and then hits critical mass. Immediately, there is a spike in the blogosphere's attention before the only one's inquiring are the one's who care about the music. The brown dwarf that remains after a buzz band's rise to glory.

It was after just such supernova that I first looked at the Black Kids. It was October and I was hopeful. Going back and listening to Wizard of Ahhhhs, I can't help but feel it still. Listening to "Hit the Heartbreaks" the mugginess that pulls the voices together and makes a frenzy of the synthesizers and teenaged voices may not sound professional, but it lent them an urgency more compelling than most punk bands.

On Partie Traumatic, The Black Kids lose this along with much of what made them so special. One of the difficulties in listening to a band that cleans up its sound having finally gained access to professional studio, gear, and production assistance is trying to disentangle one's own ideal images from what the artists envisioned. When the Mountain Goats left the lo-fi era for the 4AD era, they picked up a slew of fans but left a few at the onramp wondering what happened to the songwriter who they'd associated with their own militantly lo-fi ethos. The Goats were of course a curious example in that they eventually picked back up many of those fans, but were also notable in that the tidal shift in their music was one of style and not one of quality. The Black Kids could hardly blame the failures of Ahhhs on a broken boombox: Partie Traumatic sounds remarkably similar apart from brighter synthesizers, better vocal tracking, a bevy of overdubs, and a generally more busy soundscape.



Perhaps these things are a matter of taste, but compare - if you can - the first three seconds of the two versions of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You." In those three seconds, you have the beginnings of all the problems with the sound of this album. For all the band's failures, restraint was hardly one of them but it only worsened in the studio. The original version could admittedly be recorded more cleanly, but its reverb drenched solo guitar succinctly declares the hook and allows plenty of space into which the band can drop. The new one brightens the tone almost to distraction and leads off by scratching the rhythm before a second, almost identical sounding, guitar comes in to clutter up the track even more. The rest of the track feels like a clinical exercise. The backing vocals are sometimes separated out so far that the shouts seem like they're coming from a different room and the hyperactive bassline from the original still hasn't quite found a groove.

Partie Traumatic isn't all bad, and it certainly deserves more consideration than Pitchfork saw fit to give it. At its best, it's an incredibly accessible dance record that has all the inviting post-punk cues that made them the darlings of the blogosphere in the first place. The musicianship is consistently stronger, and the lead vocals are much stronger than before even if the weakness of the backup vocals (more the parts than the voices) is made awkwardly obvious by the brighter production.

Despite its high points, The Black Kids had little hope of recapturing our imaginations with this album. Even were it to have equalled Wizard of Ahhhs, we would have been left wanting because so much of what we loved in it was unrealized potential. To see them here - a record deal, a record - and but no closer to finding the next gear, is perhaps the biggest disappointment in listening to the album.

Still, we should probably be honest with ourselves: where could they have gone? We wanted to believe that their irresistibility would translate into something more and that they could be more than the sum of their influences. But what cause did we have? When Marissa Cooper got in the Cohen's Land Rover to drive down to Tijuana for the weekend on the heels of all her chaos, did we really expect anything else but for her to end up drinking alone in a sketchy bar before overdosing on pills? Nine times out of ten the dancey 80's revival band will remain just that, and just as frequently the poor little rich girl will mix Cuervo and codeine. When the surprises happen, they're brilliant. A glimmer of redemption for Marissa, Turn on the Bright Lights for the hopeful.

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The Tennessee Trick Deck

It’s maybe the laziest tendency of the national media when covering “underground” music to sell the image of a modern day Laurel Canyon, to attempt to recapture the mythical days when the most creative and popular artists of the day collaborated on one another’s best works during the 60s. This inclination in covering new music is really quite natural. After all, simply naming a young band that most folks have never heard and who might never appeal to the masses is largely pointless, but depicting those same artists as being a part of a scene- even if merely by circumstances of time and place- lends otherwise anonymous talent the collective weight of community. It’s intuitive form of marketing both the bands and the news, and when media outlets can’t find a localized narrative to suit a general audience, they’re often apt to just invent one.

The same article that the Times published as an 80s retrospective on Sonic Youth and the influence of No New York was again written in the early 2000s when we became re-obsessed with Manhattan and all things Strokes-ian. The New Yorker recently published its love letter for Los Angeles’ art space The Smell and the new record by No Age, and Salon reached for the holiest of hyperbolic metaphors when they proclaimed Portland “America's Indie Rock Mecca” (while, oddly, also somehow drafting the image of northern Oregon as sort of an alt veteran’s version of Boca.) Seattle, Brooklyn, and Montreal have all been given the same treatment, along with countless others. In fact, it seems that all it takes for a city to be decreed the new capital of Cool is to have 3 or more bands playing decent music within a 30 mile radius of one another.

The glaring exception to this rule, of course, is Memphis, Tennessee. In fact, I'll go so far as to say the River City is without a doubt the least glamorous “important” place in rock and roll. Its legacy of all-time greats maps like the hub at Dallas-Fort Worth (or, more appropriately, FedEx), a convenient meeting point from which the region’s country, jazz, R&B and blues musicians to cut and distribute records or depart on tours. Despite being touted as the “Birthplace of Rock and Roll,” the city has never sustained much of a scene of its own so much as been home base for a variety of diverse and largely independent artists. Its musical notoriety today is literally as a place where musicians come to buckle down beneath the lip-served notions of history and without the distraction of, you know, stuff to do before a track is finished. Also, sometimes people die there. It’s not an especially bad town by any means, but, having spent nearly 3 years of my former life a quick trip down interstate 63 away, I can tell you from experience that the locals- and the bands- have to make their own fun.

A downside to the recent trend of media coverage is that a city without a featured profile on page 1 of the arts section often leaves its musicians precious few ways to access the national conversation. Jay Reatard has felt the brunt of this neglect. Since his late adolescence he’s been the creative force behind projects like the Reatards, Lost Music and Angry Angles, and he’s spent over 10 years a return to punk's origins as a singles-driven medium, releasing his self-recorded songs without regard for the integrity of who constitutes your band at a given moment or even knowing who was going to press the vinyl. In 2006 he released Blood Visions, his first record as Jay Reatard, a concept piece about possibly murdering ex girlfriends played in the catchiest way possible. And with the buzz he worked up from touring that album (and from occasionally wailing on drunk assholes at his shows), he’s managed to release a steady stream of singles for the last 2 years. Highlighting exactly what kind of exposure Memphians can expect for their hometown’s coolness currency is that Reatard has remained pretty much under everybody’s radar all this time… despite having been releasing his new material on Matador for the last year, one of the most established and powerful independent labels in the world. 17 of these tracks have now been compiled on one disc as Singles 06-07.

Not so much growing out of his punk past as rounding it out, this collection absolutely slays. The DIY aesthetic Reatard carries over from the best old punk acts belies the sophistication of his influences and the subtlety of his new compositions. There are new wave referents (“Night of Broken Glass,” “Let it All Go”), pitch-perfect pop (“All Over Again” and a cover of the Go-Betweens “Don’t Let Him Come Back”) and plenty of thrashing rockers (pretty much everything else) rounding out a near-flawless 40 minute set.

Without our crutch of regional association to buy coverage, we’ve lost some of our ability to self-regulate perspective. The temptation is to compare him and the rest of what John Norris’ hair has recognized as the new lo-fi “scene” to acts like Guided By Voices, but that would be faulty. Not just because Reatard’s own endowments stop well short of the attention span required to appreciate Quadrophenia but because at least in GBV’s heyday the term “lo-fi” was a de-facto descriptive for an emerging genre of home-recorded bands that broke through established ceilings of critical and mainstream acceptance. It was actually a relevant thing for GBV, Pavement, Liz Phair, Sebadoh, and others collectively defined an aesthetic that was more than an arbitrary group of good bands- they were a substantial part of what made the 1990s music boom an “alternative” in the first place. The same can’t be said of today’s supposed movement, which conveys little more sense of community than an overlap of MySpace friends.

But even a man whose choice of surname is, frankly, pretty retarded (he was born Jay Lindsay) deserves more than that. What impresses most about Singles 06-07 exists independent of its recording quality, which is nowhere near emphasized to the point that bands like Times New Viking have chosen to make theirs. Upon one listen, it seems glaringly obvious that the production value on this year's Rip It Off are intended to be as inextricably tied to the songs as their melodies, and this seems to make them wear thin in a way that Reatard’s more sturdy, road-worn compositions don’t. A record that “sounds bad” usually translates into a great live show, and TNV certainly have their share of pop hooks and a sense of hip that certainly owes little to their being from Columbus, but Reatard just has something that the Vikings lack.

No, the most impressive thing about Reatard’s Singles is that you have to be reminded that that the compilation represents the fruits of a single year. It’s merely a chronological document and nobody, least of all the man himself, has even claimed that it’s his best work. The fact is that he’s just so shit-hot right now that he can shuffle together his output any which way and is still dealing aces that trump nearly any other rock release of the year.

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Live Blog Listening Party: Stay Positive by The Hold Steady

While we at Neon Hustle certainly esteem each other’s opinions, we’re by no means monolithic in our likes and dislikes. Even if we tend to agree or disagree on the specific quality of something, oftentimes the reasons for those assessments are at complete odds. So when a band we all admire (for predictably different reasons) releases a new album, we're of course going to try and make sense of it all.

The Hold Steady will issue their fourth LP, Stay Positive, in July on Vagrant Records. One of the most anticipated new releases of 2008 (at least in our camp), we’ve consequently wasted no time in assembling. What follows are our opinions of the album—biased in orientation, baseless in gestation, and bellicose of argument—as produced in real time listening to Stay Positive. Our missives have been edited only for length, coherency, and to mask the scent of three budding alcoholics.

Into the breach...

*********

Brendan: Any things to say about The Hold Steady or Stay Positive before we begin? Thoughts, expectations, etc?

Darryl: As a general thought, I have enough faith in Craig Finn as an artist that I was willing to put in the effort to work through some tracks that irked me at first (like “One for the Cutters”) and at this point I'm a pretty big fan of the album. I'm not yet sure where I put it overall in their work.

Steven: It’s not as good Boys and Girls in America, certainly, but that album was pretty freaking spectacular. It's strange, the Hold Steady sort of assumed the mantle of being the voice of America's youth with Boys and Girls, and this album seems a very concentrated reaction against that.

Brendan: In terms of literally using their age to reconnect with adolescent experience, this seems a more overtly pop-punk record. But my initial reaction is that I immediately connected with a higher percentage of songs on Stay Positive than any other Hold Steady album.

Steven: Okay, well let's go.

TRACK 1: “Constructive Summer”

(Tattoo by Adam Suerte, Brooklyn Tattoo. Thanks to Mr. Lee.)

Darryl: The unreconstructed pop-punk fan in me adores this track. So does the rest of me, but that part especially.

Steven: Yeah, I'm a total sucker for unadulterated optimism, which this song has in spades.

Brendan: "Constructive Summer" marks the first Hold Steady track with backing vocals by Lucero's Ben Nichols, who guests on 3 tracks.

Darryl: Wait, he's somewhere other than here and “Magazines”?

Steven: I didn’t even know he was on this track! The only time Nichols ever distinguishes himself at any point in this record is in "Magazines".

Brendan: Here's my problem: people seem to like the shout-along choruses that started in earnest with "Chips Ahoy!", but I think the band is underselling itself by not letting any other member of the band/guest compliment Finn with a true backing vocal. Nichols sings in his lower register the whole time and he's absolutely buried in the mix.

Darryl: I think the other vocalist is a false need. Yes, there are amazing bands with great second vocalists (Saint Mick Jones?) but I by no means think they need to define the band. Even sing-along songs can work with layered vocals by a single singer.

Moreover, I think the inclusion of a second vocalist with presence risks diluting the impact of a band whose identity is in so many ways defined by the consistency of Finn's gravel. Insomuch as second vocalists come in, they fill specific needs (“Chillout Tent,” “Constructive Summer”). I dig.

Brendan: So why even have the guest vocal then? What specific need is filled here? I mean, Nichols has a unique enough voice to be used well, but he really seems noticeably buried in this mix. Like, it stands out that the response vocal is so low.

Darryl: Could the story in “Chillout Tent” be told as well by Finn? Maybe, but the fresh voice adds so much to it. On this track, I think it's a matter of creating a dynamic that follows the sort of band/concert/summer/experience evoked by the song. I can almost envision Ben leaning into a mic at a live show to sing this, and I think that's what it's supposed to sound like.

Brendan: I do have another point quickly if we're off that one. What's the threshold on Minneapolis shoutouts? The "double whiskey coke no ice" lyric in "Constructive Summer" is, in a song otherwise not actively acknowledged to be set in Minnesota, is a reference to Dillinger Four.

Darryl: I appreciated it. And I appreciated Dillinger Four. It's subtle, which is nice.

Brendan: The band is from fucking Brooklyn . Pick a loyalty already. At some point, you fail to be from your hometown.

Darryl: Says the man who reps Texas but still has the "I Love the OC" shirt.

Brendan: But why is Brooklyn not a part of their mythology?

Steven: Inertia?

Brendan: Of course, Newton! What a fool I've been!

Steven: Seriously, if you're going to be a hyper self-referential band, you have to call back to your old albums. And for whatever reason, Finn sang first about Minnesota. That was what, 10 years ago now?

Brendan: More than that if you count Lifter Puller, which I do.

Darryl: Whether conscious or not, there's always a degree of resistance to change. Which in some ways is representative of some of their characters, and in other ways simply a product of growing up and not being quite willing to let go.

Do we want to move on to “Sequestered in Memphis”?

Brendan: After this: “Constructive Summer” is so far is the #2 best opening track on any album this year. Because it rocks face. That is all.

TRACK 2: “Sequestered in Memphis”

Darryl: I had my doubts about this track when it premiered, but I've since come around to everything about it. The story, the characters, the sound, the instrumentation.

Brendan: This is Nichols’ second track.

Steven: I'd have never known.

Darryl: When you talk about them addressing a new range of experiences, is this one of the tracks you're talking about?

Steven: Yeah, this is certainly part of that. It’s the first time any of Finn's protagonists deals with the fallout from their actions.

Darryl: Exactly!

Brendan: I don’t know about that. He's flippant about the "consequences".

Steven: Sure, but even if the protagonist is dismissive of those consequences, he's still dealing with them if only because he’s being questioned by the police. The acceptance of those consequences comes later in the album, which we’ll get to. It’s a soft-build up, but an important change in the usual HS narrative.

Darryl: I think it's as much about the context as anything else. "Reality" or "the law" or whatever is an abstract or perhaps nonexistent entity in other tracks.

Brendan: "Do you think I'm that stupid? / Well look, what the hell, I'll tell my story again …" This guy doesn't give a shit; you’ve got nothing on him.

Darryl: It bears mention that even if the same kind of character is still dodging the same kind of issues, the story is being told from a different perspective than usual, which I think is a notable difference. (This might be Gideon in twenty years.)

Steven: It's THE noticeable difference, in my mind. I completely agree that the character's paradigm hasn't shifted at all. But, again, the previous consequences were usually detoxing in some way or another. This dude's got a shitstorm of problems coming his way beyond “my head hurts”.

Brendan: In any event, as the only one of us who has lived in both Texas and the Memphis metropolitan area, I am tempted to make this my banner HS song. I probably would too, if I didn't place a horrible stigma on first-singles from albums.

Steven: You could do worse. This is a kick-ass tune. For instance, you could choose....

Brendan: Uh oh

TRACK 3: “One for the Cutters”

Steven: … this one. We’re entering the two-song doldrums of the album.

Darryl: It's such a drastic shift, and it references back to something altogether different both in style and era from the first tracks.

Brendan: I’ll bite. I love this track. Go off.

Darryl: First listen: Too long, weird instrumentation, your songs are NOT sing-along songs!

Steven: The harpsichord is cloying. It's too long. And Finn’s first foray into economic/social justice just feels false to me.

Brendan: Tell me why "When one townie falls in the forest does anyone notice" aren’t the best lyrics on the record.

Steven: It’s didactic.

Brendan: Ah, but why isn't this growth? I mean, he's spent how many years now playing on the middle-to-lower class sandbox? Previously, the only upper-class characters were there to score, and we get that.

Darryl: A friend of mine was a big fan of Separation Sunday, but found Boys and Girls too "sing along song" for her tastes. Of course, she reads a lot of Joyce and lived in Greece for a while. She doesn't love HS for the Springsteen drenched opening of “Stuck Between Stations,” or the chorus of "You Can Make Him Like You." She liked the fact that Finn could tell a story with words, punctuated by music, like nobody else these days. That's what SS did, and that's what this song does. Awkwardly, it puts its musical adventurism totally in service of the story.

With this song, if I listen to the music, I want to tear out my headphones. If I hear the words, I'm pretty much hooked.

Brendan: I love the harpsichord. Why is the instrumentation not rewarded?

Darryl: Because it sounds like a troubadour traveling through Sherwood Methampheta-Forest. This is not a great song. But it's not "The Greatest Man that Ever Lived" either.

Steven: So why are you so taken with it, Brendan?

Brendan: This song, to me, is when Stay Positive hooks me. It’s lyrically engaging, and if you can't take harpsichord, I understand. But if you like the sound, this is an exceptionally well paced track, and Franz gets double credit for the rising piano scale.

Steven: Yeah, the piano is fantastic.

Brendan: If you like the piano, recognize that it is a direct foil to the harpsichord. You like it because the melodic work is already being done in another register!

Darryl: I like this song for the characters it creates and where it puts them. I like the sound insomuch as it carries me into a mildly unsettled feeling that I think is something key to the story. The Stranglers were a post-punk band, but they never had the dancey-ness of New Order or the heart on the sleeve emotion of the Cure, but what made them interesting is how they created sweeping, dark, and occasionally operatic songs that were drenched in reverb, experimented with synthesizers and other instrumentation, and were dark in the most pathetically 15 year old deadjournal way, but were still interesting because they held you with their melodies and their ideas.

What ultimately gets me, though, is that I never liked the Stranglers that much. And I don't like this song this much, even if it's got some incredibly redeeming qualities.

That's pretty much all I wanted to get out there. And also that I don't really think I'd call it well paced.

TRACK 4: “Navy Sheets”

Steven: Continuing with the theme of "totally wasted backup vocalists," that's Patterson Hood you can barely hear on this track.

Darryl: Continuing my theme of not knowing that a backup vocalist was brought on...

Brendan: This record has a weak as hell mix.

Steven: I only know it’s Hood because of the band’s website. How did you know about Nichols?

Brendan: His voice is more distinct, plus there was the promo material.

Darryl: Also, Brendan stalks Lucero.

Brendan: Not since That Much Further West, thanks.

Steven: That was the one album Darryl recommended to me! No wonder I dismissed them.

Darryl: Damn, my bad. I can't remember when I'd have put that as my Lucero pick. I like that album, but I'm not sure I'd have ever put it over Tennessee as an intro.

And is Is it safe to say that, given the digression, that no one has overwhelming opinions on this track?

Steven: Yup.

Brendan: We just spent the whole of "Navy Sheets" talking about another band!

Darryl: I don't know what this song reminds me of.

Brendan: It reminds me of the re-done CGI in the Star Wars re-releases of the late 90s.

Hey guys, if I ever meet George Lucas, remind me to punch him in the junk

Steven: It reminds me that I want to skip this track whenever it comes on.

TRACK 5: “Lord, I’m Discouraged”

Steven: Craig Finn said this album was about growing up, and this is most clear-cut example of that. It’s definitely the album’s highlight.

Darryl: I figured that would be your take. Given your DBT appreciation and affinity for this sort of song, this was written for you.

Steven: Yeah, I’m predictable.

Darryl: And probably right.

Steven: I can't think of a single fault with it. Seriously, a copy of this song should be buried in a time capsule or sent into space or something, just as evidence of the worthiness of human endeavor in the 21st century.

Brendan: Even though Kubler goes to the finger tapping in the 4th minute? Seriously, is the guitar solo worth a fucking thing anymore?

Steven: I'd say absolutely, but then I'm a DBT fan

Darryl: I'm not sure the guitar solo can really exist as an independent entity anymore. Especially with a guitar solo like that, you can't help but be reminded of every other shredder to do the same, or some similar thing, before it. Hair metal ruined any stretch of notes that fast and that long for future generations.

Steven: So does that mean I'm a dinosaur? Because I’m a total sucker for guitar solos.

Darryl: No, it just means you're not as jaded. This song really is fantastic. I think I’m willing to indulge the guitar solo in the sense that it seems to fit in a bizarre, depressed way.

Brendan: Someone tell me what this story is about.

Steven: It's a guy with an ambiguous relationship with a girl who's clearly on the downward spiral, praying for her salvation. So it's the first ever HS protagonist outside the prism of the usual lowlifes.

I think that guitar solo is there just to make sure that we know the guy hasn't given up all hope. In the first couple of verses he’s just listing off all the things gone wrong, but after that solo, the tenor of his confession changes to one where he puts the resolution in the hands of God, who wouldn’t handle the situation any worse than he has. There’s something powerful in that.

Brendan: That last line might also be the admission that he's completely moved on. He hoped she's alright because she's not in his life to watch over anymore.

Steven: Oooh, I like that, even if I’m not sure I totally agree.

TRACK 6: “Yeah Sapphire”

Steven: This is a fucking great song, even if it’s pretty redolent of “Constructive Summer,” musically speaking.

Brendan: Only slower and not as propulsively interesting. Nothing here speaks to my 16 year old self, except the Sacto shoutout, where I was born and hope never to return to.

Steven: I thought we had decided this album was beyond the 16 year olds? Anyway, this is a pretty cookie-cutter HS song, but there’s a ripping line I’ve totally latched on to: “Dreams they cost money, but money costs some dreams.” I also think its tempo works great after “Lord, I’m Discouraged”.

Brendan: I never agreed that this wasn’t for “The Kids.”

Darryl: Structurally, this could be a sing-along. It has all the makings of the Boys and Girls tracks that put us in that place, but it's more restrained. I'm not sure if that's intentional or whether they swung for the fence and missed.

Brendan: Is Boys and Girls really a sing-along record? I sing along to “Chips Ahoy!” and “You Can Make Him Like You”, but is that the REAL HS?

Darryl: I don’t know if there’s a “real” HS. I think there's a continuum of evolution, I don't think they're static.

Steven: Is “sing-along” a pejorative term for you guys?

Brendan: No, I like sing-alongs, but not without a defined secondary vocal presence (see “Magazines”). But I consider a straight ahead rock song that I can sing along with to be an unevolved version of what I used to like, back before I realized that I couldn’t mute every other chord effectively enough to play ska.

TRACK 7: “Both Crosses”

Brendan: Worst song on the album?

Steven: This is a very dense track, lyrically speaking, that is frankly beyond me without access to the lyrics. With that caveat, it’s pretty bad, but what makes it so? The banjo doesn’t help things, I know that.

Darryl: The indulgent instrumentation and dense wall of sound.

Brendan: Are Finn's lyrical pretensions towards Catholicism an affectation at this point? Do they serve a purpose beyond saying, “I went to Boston College!”?

Darryl: I think Catholicism is a crucial element of some of his characters.

Brendan: Ah, but this is not a character-driven record.

Darryl: Not in the broader sense, but I think it's still stories about people, and still very directly so.

Brendan: But without the context of the other characters.

Darryl: You mean across the whole album/catalog?

Brendan: Yeah. There is no connect on this album’s characters. It’s not a story record.

Darryl: I think that's true - and in the sense that the characters could sometimes be drawn without Catholicism and be no less full, I think it can sometimes be a crutch for him.

TRACK 8: “Stay Positive”

Darryl: The pacing on this album is really great.

Steven: Yeah, we've been listening to this thing for about two hours, and that's the one thing that's struck me most about it. There's really only one off note ("One for the Cutters").

Brendan: So, is this one a reach-out to the kids? You’ve got shoutouts to Youth of Today and 7 Seconds.

Darryl: Only if you reach out to the kids these days with references to bands that started in the 80s.

Brendan: Ah, but the throwback shit is popular with kids (like me).

Darryl: True, but the song rags on the actual youths of today (not the band) pretty heavily. “The kids are too skinny, the kids are gonna have kids of their own, etc...” It seems like it’s looking at the scene by looking back.

Also, this is Stay Positive’s reference-every-other-HS-track-ever song.

Steven: "Stay positive" the song is to Stay Positive the album as that long guitar solo was to "Lord I'm discouraged": bit of levity before the resignation and fatalism set in (in the album’s case, the last three tracks).

TRACK 9: “Magazines”

Steven: Wherein we finally meet Ben Nichols.

Brendan: Somebody please tell me why "Magazines" shouldn’t be a hit?

Steven: I'm actually surprised that this wasn't the first single.

Brendan: This is the most adult of any relationship Finn seems to write about. Not to say middle aged, but characters with real jobs and the same leanings they had when they were 17. You know, like anybody else.

Darryl: I think that's pretty accurate; it's definitely a lot closer than anything on Separation Sunday, but I'm still put off by some of the lyrics. “Hits her like a tambourine,” "I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you'll still let me kiss you." It's this sort of lyricism more than any other factor that reminds me of the mall-emo genre. There's a casual misogyny and a dynamic of objectification that's eerily reminiscent of Fall Out Boy, Brand New and company. Which isn't to say it's a bad representation of that character, but it weirds me out.

Brendan: I'm just saying, these are as fully formed as any characters on the record. Why can't their experience be taken as a matured relationship?

Darryl: Because I think after the first verse, the character of the woman isn't really defined by much apart from the way in which she's pursued by the men.

Brendan: Is “Magazines” the best song on the album?

Darryl: I don't think it's the best song on the album, but I do think it's probably the best single on the album.

Brendan: Do either of you have significant issues with the hypothetical of if the album ended now? Would you miss the latter songs?

Darryl: No. It was a great album up to this point, and resolves pretty well here.

Brendan: And how can you not love that “Magazines” ends with the exact note as “Holland 1945”?

TRACK 10: “Joke About Jamaica”

Steven: So does your previous observation make these next two tracks superfluous? Because I really like the narrative conceit of this one. I think it's pretty important to the album, both as a warning against superficial self-worth, and a pretty sardonic take on ossifying in a youth-dominated culture.

Brendan: Explain.

Steven: It's about a groupie who thinks she's hot shit till she gets older, at which point the bands won’t have anything to with her. So she gets bitter: “The boys in the band, no they’ll never be stars.” It doesn’t really add anything to the album thematically, but it reinforces the themes. And it's very listenable.

Darryl: But being written from the perspective of a woman, I think it is a different take.

Steven: Yeah, but I think there's also a bit of transference there. The fears of age squeezing you out of a youth-dominated scene are probably front and center for Finn and Co.

Brendan: Why the marked lack of Tad's leads? This is the first track to feature them since "Lord, I’m Discouraged". I remember when I first started listening to HS, Kubler’s guitar was all over 'em. But I think there are 2 guitar solo tracks on this entire album.

Darryl: I think the role of the guitar changes pretty significantly in the style of the last few songs. With Boys and Girls there was a pretty significant shift to other instruments, though.

Brendan: I half want to enter a philosophical deathmatch with Steven over guitar solos. But okay, let’s move on.

TRACK 11: “Slapped Actress”

Darryl: What's the best album closer HS have done?

Brendan: “How a Resurrection Really Feels”

Darryl: Yeah, that's always been my pick, too. Both for what it does for the album and for the song itself just kicking ass.

Steven: “Killer Parties”

Darryl: That was my second choice. I think “Slapped Actress” is third, with “Southtown Girls” coming in last.

Steven: Considering “Southtown Girls” is a pretty strong track, that's still some high praise. They certainly know how to close out albums, in other words.

Brendan: That, or they have a high percentage of good songs equally worthy of praise.

Darryl: I dunno, I don't think “Killer Parties” would have worked nearly as well had it been placed anywhere else on the record. “Southtown Girls” is the exception in that I think it may have been better somewhere else.

Brendan: Let’s wrap this up, then. Best songs: "Magazines,” "Lord, I’m Discouraged," "One for the Cutters"

Darryl: “Lord I'm Discouraged,” “Slapped Actress” and “Constructive Summer”

Steven: “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis”. So there’s a general consensus about the best songs, with the obvious exception being “One for the Cutters”.

Brendan: So is this album a progression? A regression? A holding pattern?

Darryl: I think it's a progression. If you look at Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me as records heavily focused on stories and words, and at Boys and Girls as their first step towards a more musically adventurous band, I think it's hard to see this as anything but a further progression down that line. There’s a question as to whether it's been a success—there weren't the missteps of “One for the Cutters” on Boys and Girls—but I don't think it's regressing or holding. I think they're pushing themselves for sure.

End Transmission

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The Big Laydown

It started in late 2006, with the curio announcement that Scarlett Johansson- yes, that Scarlett Johansson- was to make an album. What’s more, she was to make an album of Tom Waits covers. Eye rolling turned into a sustained level of interest, which was piqued with the accompanying details. Dave Sitek, musical backbone of the adored TV on the Radio, had been tapped to create a backdrop for the assuredly surreal sounds to come. Cameos and collaborators piled up with each infrequent press release, along with rumors and gossip, whisperings of Ziggy Stardust sightings in the bayou, and speculation as to whether or not Johansson could actually, you know, sing. More than a year and a half later, Anywhere I Lay My Head arrived.

The average music fan has probably heard some of mostly the same criticisms. The record certainly has its rough spots, and yeah, the lows are pretty low indeed- especially the painfully-obvious music box on “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” and the hideously juvenile dance track train-wreck that is “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” But it is also true that the highs are actually quite close to… stunning. Sitek’s now-trademark percussive drone, highlighted by string and woodwind flourishes, pair beautifully with some of the melodic highpoints of Waits’ career, which manage yoke the sometimes meandering and abstract tendencies of Sitek’s own band to some plain perfectly-written songs. While Johansson’s immature contralto stands out repeatedly in the record as a glaring point of weakness, it is, at the very least, an interesting diversion in places and occasionally manages to reach peaks simply not suggested possible by her previous known work at the mic.

It turns out, that we could reverse the billing on the closing duet “Who Are You” and have a decent case that Tunde Adebimpe alone would have made this a terrific TVoTR release. Consider his tracks as nothing more than a collaboration between him and Sitek, and we could easily extrapolate Bowie's sample into an album we’d call at least 3.4 times better than Heathen and proceed to argue its relative merits alongside Scary Monsters as his last good albums. In all actuality, pretty much the entire first half of the album (up to and including the co-written Johansson/Sitek original) is an unqualified success. Johansson’s taste in covers material is vindicated by some long-overdue attention paid to a couple of Waits’ should-be classics. The Brooklyn all-star backing band cameos (members of TV on the Radio, Celebration and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) exceed their ill-defined expectations and produce some great instrumentals. Bowie remains convincingly Bowie-like (in shades of Lou’s “Satellite of Love” no less) and Sitek absolutely produces the shit out of everything. Then we drink some lemonade, maybe watch Manhattan again, and head home happy in the early summer night.

Yet although most reviewers have claimed pretenses wanting to of give the album a fair shake, everybody seems to hedge against venturing any kind of strong sentiment as to the ultimate quality of these eleven tracks. The resulting critical response has come in deceivingly mediocre ratings and disingenuously superficial assessments. No attempt is made by anybody to reconcile the phenomenon of why this album, once a nexus of fairly intense fetishism by more than a few people, has been met with such absolute indifference upon its arrival. Given the principles involved and lopsided results, it seems that there would be at least a little spirited debate about Anywhere I Lay My Head. Yet a glance around the media reveals that it’s not just that the major outlets aren’t into it, but the fact is that nobody seems to be into it, and the question of why has consumed me...

Right around the time that anticipation of the Scar-Jo record had mounted, another musical debut by an indie-crush-worthy actress arrived with little fanfare. She & Him is a collaboration between Zoey Deschanel, she of healthy filmography and radar-straddling profile, and M. Ward, he of notably consistent (and Pitchfork-approved) folk-inflected solo career. The two have produced, by all accounts a lovely little collection of songs entitled Volume One, consisting of both covers (by the likes of key Ward influences Smokey Robinson and the Beatles) and originals credited to Deschanel and produced by Ward. With a studio band assembled by Ward and featuring members of the Decemberists and Devotchka, the duo manages to recall the pop highlights of obvious idols Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline. Despite a few missteps, like the poorly-placed slowdown of “Take it Back” and a completely useless afterthought of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” (seriously), the album is full of affecting, hook-filled songs that know when it’s better to quit than risk going too far out of their depth.

At a loss for explaining the different receptions for Johansson’s and Deschanel’s respective efforts, my mind wandered among a number of possibilities. Obviously, the subject of novelty in music has been on my mind recently. When and why a given project may be dismissed out of hand while another is celebrated for whatever reasons still evades me. What I have come to understand, in a very “hipster-bashing is a totally hipster thing to do” kind of way, is that coolness-as-commodity requires a level of sub-cultural protectionism. This is often taken (rightly or wrongly, but mostly rightly) as exclusionary and elitism by the world at large. And, for people who spend as much time listening to and thinking about music as I do, the single biggest conceit we seem to make for our obsession is the lonely life of being a definitive arbiter of our own tastes.

Of course, these standards become compounded by the fact of indie-rock being a still largely male-dominated society, begging the engagement of forces beyond rationale, and sometimes bordering on misogyny. Scarlett was everybody’s dream girl from Ghost World through Lost in Translation. Now we respond to the unmistakable signifiers of her being finally and totally co-opted by the mainstream: appearing in lousy Bruckheimer summer blockbusters, going bicoastal (and unabashedly “Hollywood”) and, most painfully of all, dating Ryan Reynolds. As such, these recent albums are more than anything a referendum on the state of the people who made them. Anywhere I Lay My Head isn’t especially bad, but the collective yawn it has elicited is our final proof that Scarlett Johansson just isn’t cool anymore. Divorcing our opinion of the woman’s work from any ability to care about it is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves from the fact that such an undertaking high likelihood of being an abject failure. To invest ouselves now risks seeing Scarlett make a joke of herself- and, by extension, us- in the most demoralizing way possible: on the E! Network between comments about her upcoming role in yet another shitty (and profitable) movie.

It is now abundantly clear that only thing Ms. Johansson could have done to change anybody’s opinion of her record was to be less famous when she made it. In the hands of an unknown (preferably male) quantity, we’ll not only forgive such a “novelty” project, but applaud it heartily, as in the case of the Dirty Projectors, whose Rise Above was a fixture on every cool kid’s favorites of 2007 list. A collective based in the consensus Center of the Universe (Williamsburg, apparently) has every advantage to produce- without fear of reprisal- a Black Flag covers abomination that remains, nine months after its release, as flimsy and frequently unlistenable as it did the first time I ignored it.

Likewise, Deschanel gets a pass for essentially being so far out of the greater public consciousness that it doesn’t matter when she fails. And she inevitably will fail. Volume One, for all its pleasant moments isn’t exactly announcing itself as a definitive work of an assured new voice to take the medium by storm, though Deschanel’s prominent role in M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming The Happening promises to be a debacle enough to ensure that she’ll have the chance to produce a few more volumes of She & Him to try for something even better. And you know what? I’ll bet they’ll be pretty good, too. If only the poor movie star would be afforded the same chance.

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Brighter Than Creation's Dark

Last Tuesday, Drive-By Truckers released their 7th studio album of the past decade, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, a sprawling, ambitious album that clocks in at 75 minutes over 19 tracks. The following is our attempt to make sense of it all.

Steven: One of the reasons why I enjoy Drive-By Truckers so much is that they're bold and talented enough to look into the minds of people who aren't like them, and somehow wring from that an impressive verisimilitude. That’s a talent that shines through most clearly on "The Righteous Path", which is without question my favorite track of this album, because it so perfectly captures the fear and uncertainty of the American middle class, both in economic and spiritual terms.

But really, the whole thing is peppered with the points-of-view of so many different people -- a soldier in Iraq; the ex-best-friend of a meth addict -- that, at the end, you're left with more a mosaic of contemporary Americana than a simple rock album. In that respect, there’s not much different, ideologically, about the songs on this album than any of the Patterson Hood/Mike Cooley offerings on The Dirty South or Decoration Day. That’s certainly not a bad thing, mind you. Call me classist or priggish or whatever, but I think the experience of listening to a kaleidoscopic album that tries to convey the American experience (whatever that is), or hell, any experience in an immediate way, is ultimately more rewarding than the mostly-meaningless lyrics of, say, The National (and I say that as a big National fan).

Still, it’s not all business-as-usual here. The sound of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is defined by the absence of Jason Isbell (who, alongside Hood and Cooley, shared singer-songwriter-guitarist duties on the band’s previous efforts until he left to pursue a solo career). Isbell was always the most pop-friendly of the three, as his songs were the most likely to venture out of the southern-rock/alt-country niche that the band had consigned themselves to since they released Southern Rock Opera in 2001. But Isbell’s replacement, John Neff, primarily plays the pedal steel, obviously not an instrument you freely associate with the Billboard charts.

What we’re left with, then, is Drive-By Truckers totally embracing a new ethos, not quite alt-country but not quite southern-rock, which is uniquely and distinctively theirs. No one will ever confuse the brilliant opener “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” as anything other than a DBT track, even if the majority of alt-country/southern-rock acts are interchangeable.

Drive-By Truckers have long ago transcended the notion that they were little more than an empathetic Lynyrd Skynyrd, but Brighter Than Creation’s Dark propels them higher still, as one of the best bands working in America right now.


Brendan: One of the enduring criticisms of alt-country (and its indie-blues, folk, and southern rock variants) is the genre’s fetish for the stories of poorest of the poor during the Dust Bowl. And while I wouldn't exactly imagine Jay Farrar jerking off to The Grapes of Wrath, the vicarious experiences sought and documented by so many of the form's practitioners never did really lend their music the credibility that permeates those Folkways anthologies that inspired them. And, perhaps its greatest crime of all, alt-country never really added anything but superlatives to the legacy of Dylan, Cash, Young, Cooder, Parsons, and the five-headed genius from Big Pink. No matter their approximation of long-forgotten traditional American musicians' work, alt-country’s practitioners never sounded anything better than an impression of their impressions- sort of like how nobody remembers how George H.W. Bush actually talked so much as they remember Dana Carvey's version on SNL.

This is where the most glaring exception to my argued rule should be recognized: Drive-By Truckers make a more convincing case for redefining the terms of alt-country than I could refute. DBT are a band that remembers and respects the self-reflexivity of traditional American music. The original line of our black-originated music splits into millions of tributaries and flows again into itself, becoming blues, jazz, folk and rock in the same initial chronology while splitting and combining again across thousands of miles to flood our land with an extraordinarily rich and deep musical tradition.

Today we're simply too far downstream to really remember where the river began, so Drive-By Truckers look for points of reference closer to the currents that carry them right now, namely the "classic" and country-influenced rock of 70s and 80s AOR programming popular in their native Alabama. Brighter Than Creation's Dark is a work that clearly accepts the horrible truth that Ronnie Van Zandt and Marshall Tucker were, for better or worse, our rightful heirs to Muddy Waters and Lead Belly. With this accepted and unapologized for, Hood, Cooley and Tucker's dispatches from a thoroughly depressed (and depressing) modern South- rife as they are with drugs, poverty and everyday struggles to find the promised beauty of an uniquely American locale- ring with greater historical resonance than their contemporaries' ever could.


Darryl: My first discussions of this album with Brendan were overwhelmed by ambivalence. I’d had a chance to hear the album, and fell into agreement with the same take of the album that I had heard from most corners. That is to say, an impressive work that, while much too long, hits notable highs that excuse the lows. “You and Your Crystal Meth” is in this sense a defining conversation point for the album. The character is drawn vividly, though in lyrics that fall flat compared to the rest of the album, but most notable is the abysmal production that seems to condemn the entire concept of audio engineering and vocal effects processing in particular. But to cast aside the record for this misstep, or “Bob,” the Middle American version of the Geto Boys’ “Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta,” seems both callous and premature. Yes, the album clocks in at 75 minutes, and it isn’t flawless. But there are things I’d change about London Calling too.

I think the characters drawn in Brighter than Creation’s Dark are compelling because I’m never left feeling that the only character drawn to the nuance of humanity is the singer-as-narrator. Not knowing as much about this band as either of you, I don’t know if the songwriters lived these experiences, and I don’t know if the disconnect I feel in some lyrics is due to my distance from the experience or theirs, but it seems much more to be the former if only because I believe them. The care (and I’m keeping this word) that seems taken in choosing the words, and with the arrangements that accompany them, makes the experience all the more engrossing.

Of all the songs to kick in as I write this paragraph, “Self-Destructive Zones” just started. I said that I was ambivalent to this record on first listen, but the second time around changed my mind. I sat down to read, cued up the record, and decided to scrap the book. I spent the rest of the evening lying in bed, listening to this record from start to finish. The record, from start (as has been pointed out by Brendan, the opening track is brilliant, no doubt) to finish (I’m not sure whether “Monument Valley” should come after “A Ghost to Most,” but it still works out great to finish it off) is well-paced and filled with good material, but what made me fall for the record was “Self Destructive Zones.” Perhaps it’s the unrepentant pop melody, or the characters and the locations painted in the particular universal that make the best pop song stories. Or maybe it’s just the closest to a certain ineffable quality about Lucero that I’m not sure I’ll ever get over.

Whatever it is, it comes between the country drinking ballad “Daddy Needs A Drink,” the aforementioned “Bob,” and one of the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Neko female fronted tracks by way of “Home Field Advantage.” In this one album, perhaps this one stretch, I think DBT has succeeded in capturing so many of the varied streams of the contemporary alt-country/southern rock/etc. I think that this fact alone justifies the length of the album; it can be so broad but still so cohesive only because it has 19 songs over which to work. Of course, there are elements unrepresented, but as “Home Field Advantage” breaks down into the territory of Wilco’s “I am trying to break your heart,” I think they really have got this shit down.

Are they the best band in America? A topic for later. Is the pedal steel awesome? No doubt.

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Left of the Damned

Future of the Left have produced one of the best rock albums in years with their debut long-player, "Curses." Refining everything great about singer/guitarist Andy Falkous’ late, lamented trio Mclusky, the Cardiff, Whales-based combo has produced a throbbing mass of 14 tracks full of pounding, intense rhythm and acerbic bite. The pairing of former Mclusky timekeeper Jack Egglestone and Jarcrew frontman-turned-FOTL-bassist Kelson Matthias proves formidable here as they rumble and strain at taut reins, lashing tough grooves to Falco’s ever-pointed (and catchy) caterwauling with dogged melodic purpose. As improbable as it might be, listening to “Curses” today, on the eve of its American release, asserts that every second of its 37 minutes is as good as and better than anything in those preceding bands’ catalogues. It is, in the simplest of terms, a fucking excellent album.

Of the many notable qualities in Future of the Left’s music and persona, it is Falkous’ knack for turning a phrase that most readily catches so many listeners. Capable of matching his music's sheer brutality with even the most parsimonious of spoken sentiments, his lyrics are alternately hilarious and horrifying- and often both at the same time. Yet Falkous has clarified time and again that his lyrics, while certainly the product of work and a refined craft, are often generated from near-random impulses of inspiration and may at times be separated from greater meaning by vast gulfs of syllabic dissonance. Some things merely sounded good at the time they were thought of apparently, and anyone who insists on attributing purpose to FOTL's non-sequiters is surely, to borrow a phrase, "an elephantine pedant."

But insisting that there are no bold statements in his paradiddles shouldn’t suggest that those excercises in language are totally without honest emotional content. While never really more than implied, the constant interplay of the personal and political more and more seems to me the origin of this band’s thrilling tension. This is, after all, a band whose very name evokes the uncertain path ahead for a group of their own self-identification since the Mclusky era. Still, I’m not fully sure if, in their hesitance to stake themselves to something weightier than simple criticism, Future of the Left could ever be the howling voice of anybody’s generation. Is this a band willing to appear representatives of a youth class that is both intelligent and angry at our times or instead merely intent to present themselves as driven to such alienation as to be willfully apathetic to them? I can’t tell if this band wants us to know that they have an agenda or not, and as this question had me driving myself crazy for the last two weeks, I eventually wondered: should it even matter either way?

And it is in this light that, as a statement of self-definition, “Curses” brings to mind almost no influence more prominently than George Orwell, whose own creativity was driven by dread-filled ruminations on a world in upheaval- on power, struggle and the multiple impending deaths that awaited everyone in those tribulations. One gets the unmistakable sense of both Orwell and Future of the Left that each produced their works from a similar place of intellectual terror. Orwell’s definition of tragedy was in those occasions when “…it is felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.” Future of the Left are precisely, if nothing else, a soundtrack to the feeling of being destroyed. Likewise, Orwell wrote that, in his own contentious time, man had sunk to a depth at which “…restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” If any common sentiment can be gleaned from the post-Xers regarding our modern condition, I’m not sure what you'd hear, but I'd believe that we’re actually all pretty pissed off about… well… everything. That’s why “Curses” is, even without named targets or an overt politicization, a listen that’s as cathartic as hell for feelings we don’t even really have to understand.

The most resonant art, throughout our centuries, adheres to the same basic principles of connection with its audience. We relate to expressed emotion on both cerebral and visceral levels. Ours are the generations destined to be defined by 9-11, George W. Bush, unfathomable genocide, religious terrorism, continental plagues, the post-Soviet capitalist vacuum and what we did and didn’t do when confronted with them. I wish Orwell was alive today. We need an Orwell to make sense of our world (and a Vonnegut too!) Since we don’t have them, we’ve got Future of the Left to gut out the no man’s land of our zeitgeist, applying the Ego’s voice to the Id’s sentiments at breakneck speeds, meted not by boundaries of taste for sparing we doomed the knowledge of our miserable fate. And given our state, it's all the more appreciable that they can deliver us with such diabolical a sense of gallows humor. But if you’re troubled by the silly crudeness of assertions like “Colin is a pussy! A very pretty pussy (cat),” remember that even the wisest among us once said that irreverence could be a most powerful instrument of liberation, that even dirty jokes are a sort of mental rebellion.

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Less Than Zulu

They graduated from Columbia, they seem to dig sweaters and Polo button-downs, and they’ve listened to “Graceland.” A lot. This is all the information your average alterna-media news source has likely gathered thus far about Vampire Weekend, the four-piece indie outfit from New York City whose debut album will be released in January on XL Recordings. Yet despite a dearth of consumer-ready product by the band, they have prompted a tremendous buzz of blog hyperbole courtesy of two singles and a seeming omnipresence at new music showcases such as last month’s CMJ.Vampire Weekend’s aesthetic owes heavily to their background as honest-to-goodness preppies, and their widely-internet-circulated “Blue CD-R” (an apparent leak of the forthcoming full-length) is littered with allusions to enduring touchstones of upper-crust Americana. These 10 songs reference the neo-baroque architecture of the old-money Northeast (“Mansard Roof”), fun ‘n sun vacation spots (“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”), and the band members’ own private university education (they learned the finer points of the “Oxford Comma” on their own Ivy League “Campus.”) With lyrics that name-check Luis Vuitton and a video depicting the band soft-rocking the boat, VW’s carefully-sculpted packaging ultimately epitomizes a Yuppie-chrysalis/larva stage straight out of Neil LaBute’s Young-Reaganauts-in-Hate period.

Still, what may well be the most frequent issue taken with “Vampire Weekend” will be in the substance 10 tracks, an aggressive pastiche of several African pop music forms and the modern indie canon. The resonant, distortion-free guitar tones and percussive rhythms are immediately recognizable as the product of Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and others’ synthesis of “world music” into pop solutions palatable to white audiences those decades ago. The hooks are catchy and the beats are as equally well-suited to dancing at SXSW as they are sipping tropical drinks on vay-kay from Princeton by your parents’ pool. Upon first listen, there really is quite a bit to enjoy.

However, despite the band’s attempts to shrug off over-intellectualized interpretations of their self-described "mash-up," it is hard to ignore the implications of racial insensitivity which will inevitably follow such an undertaking as Vampire Weekend (the band and the album.) Backlash against white artists rummaging through the history of global musics for their own reinvention is certainly not new. One particularly potent criticism has been the claim of racial/classist tourism on behalf of comfortably safe westerners seeking a fresh stimulus. Though unfairly reducing the genuine open-mindedness of many adventurous listeners, it is ultimately more an accusation levied in disdain for those sheltered, idle Americans who, in an effort to justify their own considerable privilege, claim to engage in meaningful ways with other cultures through little more than 40 minutes listening to a Ladysmith Black Mambazo LP.

In this way, the re-appropriation of multicultural influences in faddish art rock trends may recall the legacy of western imperialism that stripped the African continent of its resources, precluding the later development of any sort of stabilizing infrastructure and precipitating decades of civil ethnic conflict. Vampire Weekend’s own approximation of their sound is adorably described as “Upper-West side Soweto.” Putting cuteness aside, the referenced place is actually an area of Johannesburg populated historically with the poorest of black Africans, ghettoized following the expulsion of migrant workers of the region's gold mines from other sections of the city by the local and municipal governments. A cursory knowledge of South African history remembers the legacy of violence and degredation following the race-riots of 1976, and the economic despair of the locale sees that Soweto remains synonymous with “slums” in the lives of the thousands who reside there. In this light, Vampire Weekend’s venturing back to the Dark Continent is now colored by their overt references to the preppy culture of the 80s, and is particularly damning of a band that seemingly glorifies a lifestyle epitomized by wealthy white Americans during the time of apartheid. This sort of insensitivity speaks to ignorance at best and exploitation at worst.

Perhaps what's most irksome about Vampire Weekend’s disproportionately monstrous hype is the knowledge that exactly this style of genre bending has appeared quite recently. Another mid-profile indie rock record by Montreal post-Unicorns project Islands incorporated such songwriting experiments far more subtly (and more successfully), producing one of the most underrated and enduring releases of 2006. Ultimately, it might be that restraint is what lends an artist’s forays into multiculturalism credibility for personal expansion a much longer half-life of artistic relevance than anyone can expect of an internet flavor-of-the-moment.

Both our instincts and critical conventions tell us that authenticity of origin counts for something, but what, exactly? And what ills can even our honest interest in such experiences really absolve us of when they’re half-hearted at best?

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Challenges

Over dinner last Friday, I found myself in an argument over whether music ought be challenging. This didn't so much start because I have strong opinions one way or another, but because I advanced Brendan's once casually mentioned "Band of Horses as quintessential The OC soundtrack band" theory/objections in a conversation about the year thus far in music. Which didn't so much start because I have strong opinions about his beef with Band of Horses, as because we started talking about Band of Horses. And if there's one thing I don't have a strong opinion about, it's Band of Horses.

As I started going through the music I'd picked up this year, I found myself subconsciously putting releases into one of two categories - better or worse than Cease to Begin, BoH's sophomore release. More than the usual ordered preferencing that goes into these lists, which occurs by the very nature of lists where everything is invariably either better or worse than an arbitrary line in the sand, it seemed necessary that I make this record my balancing point. To me, it is the universal signifier for 2007 - a "much anticipated follow-up record" by an indie rock band with some twang - between these three characteristics I might be able to sum up most new releases I heard this year. It has also left me mildly disappointed, another feature it shares with most music I found this year.

Everything All the Time came out to the great anticipation of most everyone who had ever listened to Carissa's Wierd, promising something along the lines of alt-country shoegaze northwest indie-rock. As it turned out, it delivered on the first, kind of ignored the second and third, but knocked out of the park the most radio-friendly version of the fourth this side of a Grey's Anatomy soundtrack. Unfortunately, Cease to Begin doesn't do much but work within the template of their first release. It rocks a bit harder at points, and croons a bit sweeter at others, but it never really gets beyond the catchy melodies into really interesting songs that beg putting the record on repeat.

When I first heard Some Loud Thunder, I wasn't impressed. Hot on the heels of their stellar self-titled debut, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! were on the verge of breaking into the mainstream, or at least whatever part of the mainstream the Shins inhabit, and proceed to pull the musical equivalent of a rickroll. The first track's distorted-to-hell production left me convinced that my leaked copy was messed up, and the second song sounded like a pale imitation of their first record. And thus, I went into the album with an admittedly negative disposition that took the varying tones and moods as a lack of focus, the stronger songwriting for lost spontaneity and creativity. I somehow missed the raucously wailing "Yankee Go Home," which was the track that the blogosphere meant to choose when it instead started hyping "Satan Said Dance." Then, with a little more distance, I started listening to it again. As it turns out, that first track, "Some Loud Thunder" might be the most frustratingly great pop song of the year. And I mean that as a compliment.

Since my turnaround on this record, I've grown to appreciate many things about it, but the vocals really do deserve mention, along with the de rigeur mention of David Byrne. It isn't just the similarities in the emotive, exposed delivery and curious arrangements that bring him to mind, but that I haven't heard someone sing with this sort of melancholy and longing since Speaking in Tongues. Sure, it's nasal, and the songs, while they develop better than the sketches of songs in their first release, don't have the sort of verse-chorus-bridge structures that the collective pop consciousness clues into immediately, but that's part of what makes it so rewarding.

The last artist I wrote about here was Tullycraft: no doubt there's something to be said for pop music in its purest, most obvious, grab-you-by-the-earworm forms, and it's the reason why the 60's were fucking awesome (even?) before the hippies took over. Is music bad because it doesn't challenge us? Of course not. But is it good because it challenges us?

We will always be playing catch up to artists who are beyond us - insomuch as they create and we consume, we will always be a step behind. In the same way that artists pushing the limits of their form is good, advancing as it were, working to an understanding of the off-putting or out of the ordinary or the just plain weird is how we as listeners grow. As we catch up, we discover gems that we didn't realize were there - history is littered with genius unrecognized until after its time. So this means everyone be listening to John Cage? Hell no.

Perhaps challenging music is an end in itself - music exists as a search for better and more perfect forms of expression and staying atop that evolution is thus clutch - but more likely music has other places, other functions, fills other needs in your life. For me, it's the emotional and aesthetic qualities - how music makes me feel, what music says about life, how fucking fantastic some melodies can sound, how some rhythms just seem to catch me, and how all those pieces fit together. And that's why "Some Loud Thunder" has become my favorite track on the album.

I've heard plenty of explanations for why CYHSY! tweaked the sound on the track, but I'm not sure if I care what the real reason was; to me, the song's themes of alienation and loss are just made that much more powerful as you listen through the broken-speaker-sounding drums to decipher the words. Cease to Begin is a solid album, but it delivers its message as crystal clear as the reverb on the first single's vocals. I may not have had to work for that album, but I also haven't really wanted to listen to it for the last month out of anything other than the obligation to write this post. Some Loud Thunder is one of the few albums released lately that I find getting better with time. Sure, I didn't love it as much on first listen as I did their first record, but I'm willing to catch up to them. It's been worth it.

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