A Downloader's Diary (40): August 15, 2015
by Michael Tatum
There are fewer records this month than July -- though to be fair,
two titles comprise five discs. August is always tough for this
column, even though it began this month four years ago.
Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-69 (Soul
Jazz) Killjoys have been complaining about the quotidan music and
shallow lyrics on this compilation of hits from Trinidad, Jamaica, the
Bahamas, and elsewhere, but I say that depends on what you deem
"poetic" -- just because Lord Byron (the calypso star, I mean)
resembles Edward Lear a great deal more than he does the Right
Honorable George Gordon doesn't mean he and his like-minded buddies
don't have a gift for whimsical rhymes and ribald subject matter. I
ask you: wouldn't you like hearing a catchy uptempo ditty about James
Bond villainess Pussy Galore, the first moon landing, or the first
heart transplant rather than one limning, say, "Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage?" All right, all right, the heart transplant one is
historically inaccurate -- the recipient (Jewish grocer Louis
Washkansky) and the donor (car accident victim Denise Darvall) were
both white, so there was no "Negro Heart" involved, though Darvall's
kidneys ended up saving the life of ten-year-old Jonathan van Wyk, a
black South African. But would you really let that spoil the one in
which the sassy Brownie fantasizes about being a bed bug biting the
asses of the most voluptuous women he can find? Or the one in which a
ghost thwarts Lord Kitchner's "Love in the Cemetery," or the one that
justifies prostitution as "Exchange Not Robbery?" As for the music, it
doesn't always walk in beauty like the night -- the formula is part of
the charm. And they keep the hijinks and hilarity going without a
Sparrow song in the bunch. A MINUS
Golem: Tanz (Corason Digital) Between the
energizer-bunny rhythm, vaudeville trombone, boneheaded chord
progression, and inane lyric, the track these klezmer-punk renegades
open with might irritate and/or frighten away sweet shiksas like my
darling wife, and that's how these madcap New York jokers want it --
for them, a chant like "Dance dance dance dance dance dance dance" is
a clever feint lulling you into a false sense of what banalities to
expect next. Which just happens to include: a naive virgin washing
away her wedding night jitters in the mikin veh bath, a Yiddish cowboy
who speaks English to his kids and German to "the guards," and a
Russian Jew who joins the anti-Semitic Soviet Armed Forces in order to
enroll in med school, then eye-pokes someone who dares call him a
"kike." Then they appropriate an inadvertently hysterical Russian
public service announcement detailing the horrors of Vodka: "It makes
you sickly, makes you cough/Makes you smell like dirty socks." Later,
in a related playlet, mastermind Annette Eziekiel Kogan and her dapper
sidekick Aaron Diskin play two miskayts -- poor souls so homely
they're actually cute -- who fall in semi-committed lust after
overlooking various shortcomings and grotesqueries. Musically, the
band strangely recalls the Mexican pop music my grandparents played
while I was growing up, which explains why Mexico City based-label
Corason Digital scooped them up when JDub, former home of Matisyahu
and Balkan Beat Box, went bust. And as for that deceptively dimwitted
opener? It turns out it commemorates the life of a concentration camp
survivor who emigrated to America, amassed a small fortune, and lived
the rest of his years to the fullest. If that's not enough of an
accomplishment to make a man do the sher, I don't know what
is. A MINUS
Hyperdub 10.1 (Hyperdub) Glasgow-born, London-based
Steve Goodman boasts a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of
Warwick, which he's put to good use as the author of 2009's Sonic
Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, a study of
"acoustic force" -- what people like you and me call "noise" -- and
how it affects whole populations when utilized as a weapon, warning,
or instrument of torture. He begins by chronicling a disturbing 2005
report that the Israeli air force utilized deafening sonic booms --
high-volume, deep-frequency cacophonous reverberations caused by
low-flying jets traveling faster than the speed of sound -- to
terrorize Palestinians on the Gaza Strip. That might give you some
insight into Hyperdub, the webzine he founded in 2000 and upgraded to
a proper record label four years later, which for many represents
ground zero in the now-ubiquitous electronica subgenre known as
dubstep -- this is a man fascinated not by music or even rhythm as
much he is sound, texture, and, especially, dissonance. This
disorientingly copious thirty-five track pig-out celebrating the
label's first ten years focuses on what Noel Gardner of NME dubs
"dancefloor bangers," but Americans raised on "Get Low" and "Turn Down
For What" might not hear it that way -- engaging rhythms abound here,
but the prevailing mode here is more the trippy lo-fi electronica that
the Brits do so well. Surprisingly however, with Burial and DJ Rashad
the only names a neophyte like myself registers in the old long term
memory bank, this zips by engagingly, even if the proceedings are a
mite anonymous until Mark Viera (handle: Flowdan), of the same crew
that produced Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, smears a little grime on the
dancehall-inspired "Ambush." Don't get me wrong -- to choose but one
example, I dig the slurping synths on Ill Blu's "Clapper" just
fine. But close-minded rockists such as myself do prefer some nifty
catchphrases, whether banal but efficient ("Wind it up!") to the
winningly bizarre ("I need a blanket cuz I'm cold mother cold") to the
surprisingly useful (someone should hire Spaceape to chant "Am I new
age therapy spreading fear and disease" on Jenny McCarthy's
doorstep). Verdict: as head candy goes, not nearly as hard as I might
prefer. But crunchy enough to fleck tiny bits of enamel off the old
medulla oblongata. A MINUS
Miranda Lambert: Platinum (RCA) People go a little too
far when they label Lambert a "feminist," but she isn't exactly your
average Nashville blonde either -- the first song justifies taking the
surname of your husband by noting it sends a message to your father
that you're your own woman. The album is full of these paradoxes, as
on "Automatic," in which Miranda remembers the halcyon days when she
taped the Country Countdown on a cheap cassette recorder because she
didn't have the money to buy the albums proper -- presumably a slag at
downloaders, yet simultaneously acknowledges, inadvertently or not,
the reasons why people "steal" music in the first place, i.e. they're
goddamn broke. From an idyllic song about getting rowdy to a
celebration of "old shit" that sounds completely out of character
coming from a thirty-year-old woman, from a number protesting
gravity's war on the human body to a sincere championing of
pre-martial sex as the prime factor that "maintains a small town
population," her slightly twisted tropes enable her to get away with
the nostalgia-mongering that rankles on so much other Nashville
product, so that when she says she misses the days when "staying
married was the only way to work your problems out" you nod in
sympathetic agreement rather than counter with statistics on
infidelity and domestic violence. As such, this isn't merely Lambert's
victory, but also one for songwriter Natalie Hemby, who has her name
on seven out of fifteen tracks, including many key songs fitting the
theme. Which is what, exactly? Eat, drink, and fuck in the back of
your Daddy's pickup truck: for tomorrow you might be pregnant and
married to a guy who looks like Blake Shelton. Perish the
thought. A
Jenny Lewis: The Voyager (Warner Bros.) Though I
appreciate Carl Wilson coming out in Slate against anti-California
prejudice -- I'm tired of being forced to the back of the bus every
time my wife and I vacation in New York -- I'm afraid that even as a
native, I must demure. There are qualitative demarcations between
Rumours, Late for the Sky, and (look it up) What's
Wrong With This Picture?, and though Jennifer-oh-Jenny bests
Jackson Browne and Andrew Gold as a wordslinger and tunesmith, she's
never led a band as strong as the Mac on her solo recordings. I said
"solo recordings" -- if you're going to self-plagiarize yourself, as
Lewis does on this album's "Slippery Slopes," you better make damn
sure no one's going to play the end result up against 2007's Under
the Blacklight and rue the absence of Blake Sennett's arrangements
and Rilo Kiley's underrated rhythm section, and those excited that
she's looking to Beck and Ryan Adams for production pointers should
probably reacquaint themselves with the aforementioned's sorry
discographical pages on Wikipedia. And before I start carping about
the occasionally mannered singing and perfunctory lyrics, I should
probably mention that I enjoy almost everything here regardless -- no
doubt if someone like, say, Bethany Cosentino were to produce material
on the order of the disco-lite pastiche "She's Not Me" or the
bemused-not-bitter "Just One of the Guys," I'd be frothing at the
mouth at what a artistic breakthrough the album represented. But
unlike Cosentino, Lewis has made a point of setting the bar high,
something she's not going to ironically dismiss with her rainbow
pantsuit and the iconic Warner Bros. Burbank palm trees on the CD
label. Also, the meaning of the metaphorically muddled title track
completely mystifies me -- something you can't say about "The
Pretender" or "Lonely Boy," which at least accomplished
self-mythologizing on their own solipsistically narcissistic bullshit
terms. B PLUS
Spoon: They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) A common rockcrit
cliche -- the indie smartypants who knows his record collection
forwards and backwards -- defines the limitations of the formalist:
someone who knows how to ignite your synapses with a drum beat or
guitar riff but uses his musical acumen to camouflage anything
remotely resembling an unguarded emotion. That's Britt Daniel in a
nutshell -- I've been a Spoon fan for a decade and I don't think I
could tell you one damn bit about what kind of person he is, either as
a flesh and blood human being or even a contrived persona digitalized
and written on aluminum and plastic. I can't even find evidence of a
wife or long-term girlfriend in his online interviews. Thus, his
albums are only as effective as their hooks, and are differentiated
only by the tiny bits of himself that peek out from underneath his
tightly-wound aesthetic. Granted, new keyboardist/guitarist Alex
Fischel helps ensure this is the band's most immediately arresting
record since 2002's Kill the Moonlight, while legendarily
EQ-ignoring producer Dave Fridmann makes this boom and scratch and
bubble like no album they've ever done. But if Kill the
Moonlight bemoaned the dead-end slacker lifestyle (which Daniel
denied) and 2010's Transference dared breach the mystery zone of
long-term romantic commitment, what's going on here? I say it's about
getting what you want but realizing it's not all that you thought it
was cracked up to be -- the holy rollers have got him down, there's
still rent to be paid, and all of his peace is hidden on back-masked
tapes that he no longer owns, all mitigated by a mysterious innamorata
who, if we're to take the urgent "Rainy Taxi" at its word, must have
to put up with some frustratingly mixed signals. May I recommend the
more straightforward "Break out of character for me/Time keeps going
on when/We got nothing else to give." A MINUS
Suburban Base: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum &
Bass: 1991-1997 (Suburban Base) Hardcore will never
die! -- although there is a very good chance it will evolve, fade,
or transform itself into whatever electronica subgenre gets the UK
ravers ecstatic this week. Which isn't to say that the music doesn't
have staying power, or that it can't be contextualized for those of us
who get our thrills in our living rooms rather than dance floors, or
that a stellar comp couldn't make sense of what back then seemed like
too much of a good thing. So meet Dan Donnelly of Romford, the
administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Havering -- a
"suburb," if you will -- who in the late '80s opened a record store
specializing in dance music called Boogie Times that eventually
branched out into printing its own white label records. You can see
why that format might be a plus in electronica circles, which both
cultivates facelessness and zips to the next big thing when a "star's"
fifteen minutes of fame (you know, the A-side of a 12" single) are
up. So don't be nervous that you don't recognize any of the artists on
these generous three discs selling retail for less than one --
Donnelly had an ear for the novel, the voltaic, the quixotic, the
onomatopoetic, the vivacious, ending his run only when it stopped
being a source of personal pleasure. Tracking the progression of a
scene that goes from shallow to arty as soon as the club rats turn up
their snouts at the immortal "Sesame's Treet," each of these three CDs
can be played from beginning to end with nary a dull spot, and the
pacing and segueing ensures that each moves like one thing. Too much
like one thing, actually -- I've spent a month with the damn thing and
"Sesame's Treet" is the only thing that sticks out. Maybe if hardcore
had come up with a few more hooks like that, maybe it wouldn't be, you
know, dead. B PLUS
Jack White: Lazaretto (Third Man/XL Recordings) Having
encountered the titlular archaism by complete coincidence while
re-reading Italo Calvino's masterful On a winter's night a traveler
(p. 70: This was as we passed the Church of Saint Apollonia, then
transformed into a lazaretto for cholera
patients . . . ), I feel qualified to take on
Jack White's thematic metaphor. Is this album a quarantined holding
station for bad feelings too sick and twisted to be unleashed onto a
pure and pristine listening public? Nah, that would be a Nick Cave
album -- though the artiste would never describe it as such, this is
is White's comedy record, supposedly adapted from a batch of short
fiction he wrote when he was nineteen and found moldering in a box his
attic. Now personally, as back stories go I find that a little bit too
pat to be credible, which is why I'm lodging a protest once I quit
doubling over in laughter -- I mean, the man busts his lip on Wine
Spodie-Odie, proves he can dig ditches like the best of 'em, complains
about not indulging his God-given right to entitlement, plays dumb
like Columbo for his woman, and nicks some choice rhymes from
Horton Hears a Who, all while bulking up the flesh and muscle
on his country-blues monster til its ambling gait shakes the
rafters. Now all I wanna know is if the hilarious "3 Women" refers to
Janice, Sissy, and Shelley or Meg, Renée, and
Karen. A MINUS
Honorable Mentions
Eno/Hyde: Someday World (Warp) Or, Yes Pussyfooting
("Daddy's Car," "Witness") **
Wye Oak: Shriek (Merge) Wye pine? Well, she's awfully
good at it ("Schools of Eyes," "Paradise") **
Eno/Hyde: High Life (Warp) The lion oversleeps
tonight ("Lilac," "Cells & Bells") *
Trash
Robin Thicke: Paula (Star Tracks/Interscope) I have a
deeply ingrained cynicism against displays of "vulnerability" as
public as this -- when a Padre fan asks his girlfriend to marry him
via stadium jumbotron, he does so because societal expectation demands
for her to answer yes, even though they know zilch about their
relationship. Where privacy entails true risk, and doesn't pressure
the woman into a scenario in which she is "required" to give into the
man, a mass audience unwittingly plays into the manipulations of
passive aggressive men, a rule that goes for Lou Barlow (who at least
got some good songs out of it), as much as this calculating asshole,
whose serenading of his sixteen-year-old biracial future ex-wife with
the song "Jungle Fever" during their first dance should have been a
red flag predictor of his future callousness. Except this putative
show of contrition even screws that up, revealing more unsavoriness
about its creator than I think even Thicke himself realizes. Why on
earth would he sing a song about his own salacious impulses, and have
a chorus of young girlies echo or answer every self-directed
finger-wag? Why would he recall an evening when she chased him with
his favorite golf club, then pretended to down twenty sleeping pills
-- to make her look good? If she's a "spoiled rich kid," does that
mean Alan Thicke got screwed out of some Growing Pains
royalties? Why does he cutesily refer to her pedalian appendages as
"toesies?" Why does the album cover ape Jimi Hendrix's Band of
Gypsies? Wouldn't Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man
have been more apt? And why would you try and win back your wife four
months after being served divorce papers with a hastily-written batch
of quickies and sloppy seconds that might remind your wife
of . . . aw come on man, do I have to take that joke to
its logical conclusion? D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T, dude. C
Sharon van Etten: Are We There (Jagjauuwar) How
pathetic is this indie songstress? When I found out this was a song
cycle about a recent break-up, my first thought was: wait a minute,
what was the last one? My second? Um, where's the "Rolling in the
Deep?" B MINUS
Morrissey: World Peace is None of Your Business
(Harvest) His most direct political statement: when he indicts the
beef industry for its role in the nation's rise in colon
cancer. C PLUS
YG: My Krazy Life (Def Jam) Ah, no actually, pretty
konventional. C PLUS
First Aid Kit: Stay Gold (Columbia) If you put a
million papegojors in a room and forced them to listen to Gram Parsons
records for eternity, two of them would eventually be able to imitate
his cadences -- but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd come up with
"Hickory Wind" or "Grevious Angel." C PLUS
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