A Downloader's Diary (44): December 23, 2015
by Michael Tatum
Those who have suffered through my brief introductions to this
column over these past few years know two things about them. First, I
hate doing them. And second, the dark days of November/December are my
least productive weeks of the year. So there aren't as many records
discussed below as have been knocking around my download
folder. However, unlike my usual practice, I'll keep plying through
2015 well into 2016 -- and will certainly find time to say nice things
about Courtney Barnett, who certainly has earned a slot in my top
five.
Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch) Because I've
absorbed this companion record to Anderson's documentary of the same
name over a dozen times on headphones, I disagree that this gorgeous
song cycle doesn't contain any "music." In any case, without her deep,
rich backgrounds, her natural speaking voice has always been musical
in its timbre, cadences, and timing, as in this well-turned joke: "Now
I had heard rat terriers could understand
'about' . . . five-hundred words, and I wanted to
see . . . which ones . . . they were."
But what makes these meticulously structured remembrances of
Anderson's mother, childhood, and artistically-inclined dog Lolabelle
endlessly fascinating aren't individual parts per se, but rather how
these strands of memory, when tied together, explore how we approach
death, and how discovering what connects the living, the dead, and the
things we leave behind doesn't make the process any less
impenetrable. Like Anderson, I keep my own mysteries. Why did I burst
into laughter when the mariachi band began to play "De Colores" at my
grandfather's funeral -- the song I associated with him -- before I
broke down crying? When our beloved beta Ruby passed away, why did I
sob about him being "my little boy" while sitting with my wife in the
office of Forever Friends Pet Cremation? Anderson explores her own
riddles by connecting parallel lines of thought: between a diving
board accident that puts her younger self in traction and trying to
pinpoint the one moment she thought her mother loved her. How
Kierkegaard's observation that "Life can only be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards" recontextualizes a Lou Reed song she
doesn't cover, but lifts wholesale from Ecstasy. Then there are
paradoxes she leaves unresolved: casually mentioning she's seen three
ghosts in her lifetime, but only reveals the identity of one. How the
meaning of a repressed memory -- the self-serving nature of
storytelling -- negates the driving force of her entire career. And
what is the meaning of Anderson's dream, in which she invents a way
for doctors to sew Lolabelle into her stomach so that she can give
birth to her? "It's just the way . . . things had to
be," Anderson notes sadly. I think of Ruby and I understand. Like Lou
and Laurie, my wife and I never had children
either. A PLUS
Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (Sub Pop) "If there
was nothing left to lose/Then you'd have something to prove," coos
Victoria Legrand to the twirling majorette on the bewitching opening
grabber, and she's not kidding. What I don't understand is why
August's dull Depression Cherry garnered such strong notices
from the usual suspects (Pitchfork, cough cough) and this one,
released a scant three months later, has been completely ignored -- is
everyone embarrassed about overrating them then that they're hedging
their bets now? In any case, this has to be the nuttiest marketing
scheme by an indie rock band to date -- it's like Springsteen decided
to drop Human Touch in autumn as an apology for putting his
fans to sleep with Lucky Town in the summer. And yet it gets
weirder: without sounding drastically different, this material,
supposedly recorded during the Depression Cherry sessions yet
not considered "outtakes" or a "companion album" by the duo, has me
scratching my head in a side-by-side comparison. What exactly makes
this one superior to its drab predecessor? Slightly more emphasis on
the backbeat? More attention to melodic detail? Chewier chord
progressions? Legrand's casual use of the word "peridot" (gem-quality
olivine, a deep green, magnesium-rich mineral)? The songs are on
average a measly five to ten beats-per-minute faster? It isn't a
peppier philosophical outlook, that's for sure (first couplet:
"Imitation red carnation/Nothing is new and neither are you"). The
differences are subtle -- as you'd figure with this band, probably too
subtle. Yet this recaptures the stately grandeur of Bloom without
sallying further into "the larger stages and bigger rooms" they
complained about crafting their music for in the note they published
on their website -- this sounds more organic and "homemade" without
falling into the trap of being chintzy. Now if only the majorette
didn't drop le bâton on the well-titled "Elegy to the Void."
B PLUS
Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (OGM Recordings) Especially
since they've been dormant since 2005's excellent The Craft,
this Sacramento duo's undiminished chops are pretty inspiring from
guys on my side of forty -- like, say, Steely Dan resuming after an
equivalent amount of time on Two Against Nature, they've lost nothing
musically or lyrically, with the enjambment-loving Gift of Gab
spitting out breakneck rhymes so rapidly the transcribers on RapGenius
have been throwing in the towel and resigning themselves to a parade
of bracketed question marks. So given this constitutes their fourth
full-length in a decade and a half, I'm chomping at the bit for the
two other volumes they promise in this fan-funded trilogy in the next
two years. Yet though I'm hurt that they stoop to the moldy canard
that critics don't have the talent they do and therefore should keep
their opinions to themselves (I thought we compared musicians to each
other rather than to ourselves, but never mind) I'm nevertheless moved
to point out they waste far too much time reminding us how dope they
are -- content does occasionally present itself as a problem,
especially if they're going to waste a couplet on the presumed color
of Jesus' skin like it was 1991. But Chief Xcel's old school beats and
samples are so strong such nitpicking will only occur to you if you
stop and think about it. And anyway, I approve of sentiments like:
"Funky like Good Times, Soul Train, or What's
Happening/Darker than the random check of passengers/Traveling
first-class/Blacker than the President/Well, half of him." And before
you inquire about the blackness of that episode of What's Happening
where Re-Run humiliated the gang by bootlegging a Doobie Brothers gig,
send out good vibes that consequential installments contain more
material like the grim "Escape," about an aging gangsta operating past
his sell-by date: "Being respected as an OG/Someone no one dares/To
cross, but what he doesn't realize is/No one cares."
A MINUS
Eric Church: Mr. Misunderstood (EMI Nashville) Between
the thinly-veiled racial paranoia of "Dark Side," the unnecessarily
misogynistic tone poem about Nashville, and the noxious cover art
modeled from action movie posters, 2014's The Outsiders was
exactly the type of reactionary horseshit Church dodged (or at least
muted) on the 2011 breakthrough Chief. Released in physical
form solely to the members of his fan club but available to everyone
else via iTunes, this gets back to basics, with a twist -- first track
imagines an alienated teenager who consoles himself with Elvis
Costello, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Wilco, with the latter's Jeff Tweedy
singled out for being "a real bad mother." Later, the stack of vinyl a
girlfriend leaves behind in "Record Year" -- a basic country music
conceit, right? -- turns out to contain not just Willie and Waylon but
Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. Some may find such
references as apologetic pandering to Liberal rock critic types, but
in a genre in which cynical citations of classic country songs are
offered as actual lyrics (did anyone actually believe Brad Paisley
when he claimed he broke down crying recording "This Is Country
Music?") this is a startling declaration of faith from someone who
lives for strong melodies with a good story attached. I could do
without the bloated melodrama "Knives of New Orleans," narrated by yet
another one of Church's good-men-pushed-too-far -- scared white men
with itchy trigger fingers should not be romanticized as
underdogs. Maybe that's why I don't mind the cornball closer about all
the things Church has learned from his three year old son -- "Say 'I
love you' all day long/And when you're wrong, you should just say so"
-- because it's the only time he realizes empathy is for other people,
rather than something you want people to give to you. "Love's in Need
of Love Today" -- first song on Key of Life, remember Eric?
A MINUS
Leonard Cohen: Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour
(Columbia) This octogenerian has taken his sepulchral croak all
over the world since his ex-manager absconding with his life's savings
coaxed him out of the Mt. Baldy Zen Centre, but how much of it should
be documented? The two-disc Live in London was definitive, but
the 2010 quickie Songs from the Road, released a mere fourteen
months later, shuffled his most overexposed tracks ("Hallelujah,"
"Suzanne," "Bird on a Wire," arrrgh) into a deck of minor classics to
no great effect. And 2014's three-disc Live in Dublin
chronicled nothing exciting other than a guessing game as to what
major metropolis might generate this sacred cash cow's next
doorstop. But this strange beast, assembled from concerts and sound
checks, really does attempt to present itself as "new" product: one
bemused comedy routine (good for a laugh), two recent copyrights
(negligible), two covers (would you believe George Jones?) and two
more minor classics ("Night Goes On" and "Joan of Arc"), led by three
songs you might have missed on I'm Your Man, The Future, etc. because
stronger songs upstaged them, but sound terrific here with the help of
Cohen's crack touring band. I'm especially taken by the brilliant
"Field Commander Cohen," written for New Skin for the Old
Ceremony in response to his time in Israel and, given his later
role in a controversy over twinned concerts at Tel Aviv and the West
Bank, I fantasize about being an envoy to Ariel Sharon types to lay
down their guns for bourgeoisie pleasures: "Waiting rooms and ticket
lines/Silver bullet suicides/And messianic ocean tides/And racial
roller-coaster rides/And other forms of boredom advertised as poetry."
One thing about Fidel Castro, the putative subject of that verse -- he
never wasted much time "working for the Yankee Dollar." Put a fiver in
an old man's cap, will ya?
A MINUS
Drive-by Truckers: It's Great to Be Alive! (ATO) Based
on the RIAA's very strange calculating practices, in which each disc
of a release counts as one copy sold, Bruce Springsteen's Live
1975/1985 has sold thirteen million units -- this boils down
approximately to four million actual copies, mostly as a five-disc
vinyl or a three-disc CD set. So however many beads you swipe to the
right on your abacus, this item materialized on a shitload of coffee
tables, leaving me to wonder -- how often did fans rummage through it
at the time, and how often have they listened to it since? Tallying up
roughly to an epic three hours and thirty-five minutes (longer than
Dances with Wolves but shorter than Lawrence of Arabia), this
three-disc set, which supposedly recreates the experience of an actual
Truckers show rather than documenting a year-by-year artist evolution,
clocks in at a more modest three hours and a quarter -- realistically,
how much utility is there in that, even for fanatics? Yet I'm sure the
fanatics have already picked this package up -- like the Boss, these
Alabamans do inspire rabid devotion in their base. More or less
foam-flecked at the mouth for them myself, I'll objectively note
two-thirds of this reprises songs from their four best albums without
redefining them, and that it offers no new originals or covers to
compensate, save for the minor "Runaway Train," from Hood and Cooley's
old band Adam's House Cat. But the remaining fifteen songs
recapitulated from their lesser albums are impressively choice --
Hood's brutal "Puttin' People on the Moon," about the pissed-off
working class of Huntsville toiling in the shadow of the Marshall
Space Flight Center, Cooley's "Birthday Boy," told from the point of
view of a cynical stripper offering to wipe the nose of the mama's boy
too nervous to know what to do with his hands, and many others. And
the band resists the temptation to squeeze a bunch of material into a
small space -- an hour for each disc is the perfect length. Sure, they
do tour to death -- I've had plenty of chances to see them myself. But
I work retail five nights a week, and I don't get out much. Hood and
Cooley, who've spent their entire lives singing the working class
blues they know so well, would understand.
A MINUS
Future: DS2 (A1/Freebandz/Epic) Boy, am I
naive. Supposedly a sequel to his download-only Dirty Sprite mixtape,
Atlanta's Nayvadius Wilburn shortened the title of this blockbuster
sequel to a three-character acronym because he was nervous Coca-Cola's
legal team might force him to blow some commas, apostrophes, umlauts,
and various other bits of punctuation on trademark violation. Why, I
thought -- doesn't "sprite" refer to the elfish, mythological
creature? Nope, he's really alluding to his boy Drake's favorite
product endorsement -- which Wilburn and other junkies mix with the
purple-hued cough syrup Actavis, supposedly discontinued because of
its rampant abuse, but findable if, like Wilburn, you've got
connections. Some muse whether or not the unrelenting monkey on his
back might be digging harder into his shoulder blades because of his
painful breakup with Ciara, especially since the first track candidly
boasts "I chose the dirty over you" as he pisses and sees codeine
coming out. But there's a serious chicken-egg paradox in effect here
-- Wilburn's slavish devotion to the "M.O.E." code ("money over
everything") reveals a more twisted pathology, particularly in a
deep-seated paranoia not only toward outsiders to the perceived
loyalty of his friends, a theme that appears often enough that
suggests a level of self-awareness. Mind you, after repeated
listenings I'm still not sure how many layers of consciousness this
troubled man has -- when he needs therapy turns not to Steve McQueen,
the director of 12 Years a Slave, but Alexander McQueen, the late
fashion designer, and his disturbing shout-out to overdosed rapper and
friend A$AP Yams is: "Love live A$AP Yams/I'm on that codeine right
now." With his spare music and tuneless delivery reinforcing his
anomie, this is the sound of a black hole sucking everything in its
path -- drugs, pussy, a false sense of security -- into the event
horizon. That Wilburn knows the cycle won't end until he's dead or in
jail only makes it more compelling. A disquieting glimpse into one
man's season in hell, here are a few pages from the diary of a damned
soul. A
Jlin: Dark Energy (Planet Mu) Jerilynn Patton's
unnerving music is often described in the context of Chicago's
"footwork" subgenre, a form of electronica related to street contests
in which quick-stepping dancers showcase their best moves. This is
useful, but I'm more fascinated by the fact she hails from Gary,
Indiana. Located in the state's northwestern Lake County, the "City in
Motion" is most famous for being the birthplace of the Jackson clan,
but it's also one of the the centers of the American steel industry,
and much like Flint, Michigan, fell apart economically when the
industry shifted much of its operations overseas. Currently, the
city's demographic is eight-five percent African-American,
disproportionately high compared to the national average, which is
about thirteen percent. Patton, who is both black and works at a steel
mill, firmly denies her churning, industrial backdrops have anything
to do with the disquieting music of conveyor belts and blast furnaces,
describing her music to Fact's Laurent Fintoni as coming from
an emotional place, "the belly of the beast." Yet there's something
coldly mechanical even in the subtle Afro-Cuban influence, which
juxtaposes 6/8 figures over 4/4 rhythms to nerve-wracking effect. I'm
also struck that she limits her samples to the stray disembodied
voice, and that two of them address a daughter's relationship to her
mother: one from the horror movie The Ring ("You don't want to
hurt anyone," "But I do, and I'm sorry"), another from Mommie Dearest
("I am not one of your fans!"), and neither played for camp or
ho-hum shock horror. It may be a minor record, but she's a major
talent, and either way someone needs to send her demos to Beyonce or
Kanye pronto -- this is one woman who needs to get the hell out of
town. A MINUS
Peaceful Solutions: Barter 7 (free download) For comedic
purposes, let's do a quick recap. L'il Wayne, known to his mama as
D'wayne Carter, releases a string of numbered albums titled The
Carter. While his sequel to the lukewarmly-received The Carter
V languishes in legal and label limbo, his shameless idolator
Jeffrey "Young Thug" Williams considers christening his first release
for Atlantic Records The Carter VI as an homage, but because
Wayne can afford better lawyers, at the last minute alters its title
to Barter 6 because Bloods find any word that begins with the
letter c a "burseword" (what silly bunts!). Meanwhile,
somewhere in Brooklyn, the alt-rap duo Peaceful Solutions name their
new opus Barter 7, because, why not? "Peaceful Solutions" is
the new handle of the former Kool and Kass, appropriated from the
title of their highly amusing 2013 mixtape. Confused? Isn't that the
idea? Guys like these don't have neat and tidy discographies -- their
output is akin to magazines in a dentist's office, stray issues lying
across a white plastic cube table, bent and thumbed-through, arranged
in no particular order, entire weeks and months missing. But to those
of us who have been following Kool AD's scattershot and somewhat
repetitive post-Das Racist career, 2014's Right OK served as a
kind of summation, an anthology of his choicest jokes, forcing him to
start from scratch. In other words, no more jokes about Justin Bieber,
Drake's pathetic beginnings on DeGrassi, or the Maybach Music
mixtape assembly line, but plenty of new yuks, my favorite being a
parody of Trina's "Real One" in which he rolls out an uproarious
Auto-Tuned marathon of minutely-varied and often muddled brags about
his authenticity: "First verse I said 'I'm deep like a Navy SEAL'/I'm
a real one/So then I was about to rhyme that before the hook came I
was about to say/'At the club like a baby seal'/Cause I'm a real
one/Cause I used to club baby seals." If that doesn't make you
chuckle, consider once again Club Bandcamp isn't charging a two-drink
minimum. Although when Kool requests several times in a breakdown for
silent partner Kassa to "spit some boars," make sure you're not
sitting in the front row. A MINUS
Honorable Mentions
The B-52's: Live! 8-24-1979 (Rhino) Ricky's so on
fire you'll wish Kate and Cindy had stayed in tune on "Rock Lobster"
("52 Girls," "Devil in my Car") ***
Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home (Hardly Arts) From digging casual sex to finding it wanting -- not much of a story arc, is there? ("Cool Slut," "Time to Go Home") **
Motorhead: Bad Magic (UDR) If the devil's in your
rear view, put the pedal to the metal ("Fire Storm Hotel," "Sympathy
for the Devil") *
Trash
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings
(Universal) Previous Nirvana exploitations have been notable for
not being especially exploitative -- from 1994's MTV Unplugged in
New York to 2009's Live at Reading, one gets the sense that
no matter how much Courtney Love and Dave Grohl squabbled, they knew
they had an important legacy to protect. Conceived as the "soundtrack"
to Brett Morgen's documentary (also in quotes, perhaps?) of the same
name, this ragtag collection of fragments, noodlings, and endless
stretches of mental masturbation is a greater transgression than the
dribs and drabs on the With the Lights Out box set, which at
least offered, you know, songs. Here we have stoned ramblings,
Roarschach blobs, varispeed experiments, juvenile stabs at
improvisational comedy, and a skin-crawling version of the Beatles'
"And I Love Her" that would have made me call Child Protection
Services. Its most accomplished piece of music is a painful spoken
word piece about false bravado and sexual humiliation more revealing
than anything else here, especially when you can hear Cobain turn the
page solely to get to the final sentence ("I hated everyone, for they
were so phony"). It's followed by the grunge version of "We Three
Kings" -- out of tune, of course. E
Lana del Rey: Honeymoon (Interscope) My Lana del Rey
problem is similar to my Melissa McCarthy problem. Some argue that for
a heavy-set woman to garner leading roles in films constitutes a
sociocultural breakthrough, others counter that every single comedic
role she has taken has been written specifically for an overweight
woman, and that her girth figures into the punchline of many of her
jokes. For my own part, neither of these two points of view are
relevant, because McCarthy's movies offend me only on one basic level:
they aren't funny. A woman who falls over on a motorbike because her
heft throws off her balance -- how is that remotely witty? Similarly,
I don't care whether the florid, romantic fatalism of Lizzie Grant's
alter ego is good for feminism or sets women back to the dark ages,
whether she's "sincere" or "ironic." Quoting Goffin/King's "He Hit Me
(And It Felt Like a Kiss)" or bemoaning how she fucked her way to the
top fails creatively both ways -- if she's sardonically role-playing
she's not saying anything particularly new or compelling, and if she's
writing from heartfelt personal experience, she's pathetic, and her
Marilyn-Monroe-Goes-to-Julliard vocalizations and Julie London-styled
arrangements of her collaborators only make things worse. 2011's
Born to Die at least had the benefit of coming first, while
2013's Ultraviolence boasted two undeniably seductive tracks:
"West Coast," which incorporated an actual tempo change, and "Brooklyn
Baby," which hooked me because I'm a sucker for songs that romanticize
Lou Reed. The tempos here are unbelievably turgid, while the
references are perplexing, and arbitrary when they're not ridiculous:
A History of Violence, "Ground Control to Major Tom," "Rapper's
Delight," "Lay Lady Lay," T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the oral sex
conceit of "Like a Prayer," and in the dire "God Knows I've Tried,"
two Eagles titles. Rhyming "ghetto" with "Art Deco" -- is that a joke?
When she rhymes "ciao amore" with -- I'm not kidding -- "cacciatore,"
is she referring to the chicken dish, or is she aware that word
translates into Italian as "hunter?" Who cares? Opening line of the
year: "We both know it's not fashionable to love me."
B MINUS
Grimes: Art Angels (4AD) Though this is more fully
formed than 2012's Visions, I'm a little alarmed that from her
pre-pubescent squeals to middle school epiphanies the art angel of
Claire Boucher's better nature is a j-pop princess gunning to cross
over. Especially since her twee electropop negates the possibility
she's playing this role for irony, I have no idea what strong-minded
female critics see in her -- the popularity of an act like Tokyo Girls
Style could only be possible in a country where middle-aged
businessmen sneak off to Akihabara sex shops to grab a pair of used
panties from one of those creepy vending machines. Is this
philosophically akin to that demonstration I once saw on television
about young Muslim-American women choosing to wear or not wear the
hijab -- that when it comes down to it, it's "her choice?" Beats
me. As for what male critics might see in her, that they spend too
much time wanking to anime porn presents itself as an all too-real
possibility. B MINUS
Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (Rhythm Nation/BMG) From
"Let's Wait Awhile" to "Throb" and cupped breasts on the cover of
Rolling Stone was quite a fascinating journey, but this snoozy
reunion with Jam/Lewis ponders what she doesn't know much about --
"The Great Forever," or something like that. In other developments, if
you ever wanted to know what Michael would have sounded like with
botox injections in his larynx, you now have your
answer. B MINUS
St. Germain: St. Germain (Nonesuch) Ludovic Navarre's
idea-- admittedly a great one -- is to do for African music what Moby
did for blues and gospel on Play. Now if only his highest
aspiration wasn't to land a spot on the next Buddha Bar
compilation. B MINUS
The Mantles: All Odds End (Slumberland) Initially, I
warmed to this because its mild glow recalled the naivete of the great
New Zealand bands. Except this ain't 1986, this quartet hails from San
Francisco, and their "naivete" isn't quite organic or willful to
justify what it really signifies: they can't write or
play. C PLUS
Trust Fund: Seems Fair (Turnstile) American-inspired
British indie rock has always seemed a little too neatnick for my
tastes, but the right singer and songs might compensate for
that. Ellis Jones' squeaky tenor is a little too appropriate to
someone who describes his bedtime piss as "doing as wee."
C PLUS
Neon Indian: Vegas Intl. Night School (Mom + Pop) A
few weeks ago, my boss informed me that Indians "always" seemed to
fill out customer surveys. Wondering how scientific his data was -- if
he had tracked every single Indian customer in the store, divining
their DNA through security cameras and whatnot -- I asked him if he
meant Native-Americans or those who hailed from the country of Gandhi
and Bollywood. Part of his reply involved breaking out into what I
assumed was an authentic rendition of a rain dance ceremony, his open
palm striking his pursed lips as he emitted a low, monotonic hum. So
for the purposes of clarity, I should probably tell you what kind of
Indian this Mexican-born electropop dude is: the kind that really digs
Howard Jones. C
Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (Warner Music Norway)
If you call "compositions" that split the difference between Frédéric
and Kate Chopin "love songs" this lyric: "Here I stand with a gun in
my hand/Waiting for the water to calm." Wouldn't it be ironic if Kate
Bush pushed her in? C
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