Simple Pleasures Strike Like Lightning

If I were the sort of smug-fuck reviewer who likes to call everyone who likes bands I’ve never heard of (or just don’t like) a “hipster,” I’d probably suggest that, by producing Thurston Moore’s new Demolished Thoughts, Beck has achieved some sort of “old hipster” singularity. Surely, I might say, Demolished Thoughts will suck in all the kids who wear those clothes I hate and they’ll collapse under the weight of their own perceived coolness.

But I’m not that kind of smug-fuck reviewer; I’m an entirely different kind of smug-fuck reviewer, the kind who really really likes the three or four Sonic Youth albums I own, but mostly because I think Kim Gordon is a total fucking badass and I would listen to her shout her grocery list at me over a blender full of i-Phones. And if loving Daydream Nation is smug, I don’t want to be whatever is the opposite of smug.

I suppose there are people who might get their expectations way up for Demolished Thoughts because it pairs Beck and Thurston Moore, but my only expectation was that it would be mostly good and have a few songs that were too goddamn long. My expectations in this case were about three-quarters correct – Demolished Thoughts is a largely beautiful album with really only one song that’s too goddamn long. Each of the nine tracks is over four minutes long, but “Orchard Street” is too long at seven minutes because it spends a lot of time at the end just being noisy (how much is “a lot”? Three fucking minutes, that’s how much). But honestly, I don’t mind it all that much – “Total Trash” is one of my favorite Sonic Youth songs and it gets inexplicably noisy right in the middle. It’s just that you have to know you’re going to get that from a Thurston Moore album (Beck is not immune to wallowing in unlistenable dissonance either – check out Stereopathic Soul Manure if you don’t believe me. It’ll send you begging for your Mellowgolds and Midnight Vultureses).

I have to admit, the word “beautiful” isn’t something I associate with even my favorite Sonic Youth songs (okay, “Do You Believe in Rapture?” is somewhat sort of beautiful. Sort of), so it’s a bit of a surprise to hear Moore craft an album of nine songs that are all at least a little bit beautiful. Demolished Thoughts is an acoustic affair, with lots of lovely string bits here and there. For some reason, it strikes me as the sort of album lots of elder statesmen of rock are inclined to make, but I don’ t think anyone will mistake it for, say, Johnny Cash’s American series.

Opener “Benediction” showcases Moore’s guitar playing skills, which are formidable (if anything, Thurston Moore is a bit underrated as a guitarist), and it sets the tone for the rest of the album. Yes, the guitars will drone here and there, but the overall album is actually really straightforward and – like the best Sonic Youth stuff – gets better with repeated listens. There are lots of subtle textures to take in and if the phrase “subtle textures” turns you off when used to describe music, I suspect I’ve just saved you the twelve bucks you might’ve spent on Demolished Thoughts. You’re welcome.

I suspect some Sonic Youth fans might balk a bit at Demolished Thoughts, but that’s okay with me. I guess I’m the kind of smug-fuck reviewer who doesn’t care if other people like an album or not. I like this record and that’s all that matters here at Bollocks! (awesome new contributors notwithstanding). There are some really nice melodies and it’s nice to hear Moore’s voice in such a simple setting. I’ve always liked him as a singer and his voice fits wonderfully around all the flitting string bits and softly brushed drums.

Lyrically, Moore keeps his Demolished Thoughts pretty abstract and occasionally abstractly pretty (I like the line “Simple pleasures strike like lightning” from “Benediction” – hence the title of this post), but it plays better to me that way. A lot of your standard acoustic folkish music is “I love my baby” or “my baby left me” or “I have a burgeoning social consciousness.” For Thurston Moore, “In Silver Rain with a Paper Key” is his “My baby left me” song, but the leaver in question sort of disappears the way things do in dreams. In fact, a dreamlike quality permeates Demolished Thoughts and it would probably wear thin if the album were any longer.

Was anyone worried that Demolished Thoughts would sound like a Beck album just because he produced it? I can’t imagine someone would have been, but if the Thurston Moore album does sound like a Beck record, it’s Mutations, which is my favorite Beck record. I read a review (I think it was the Onion A.V. Club’s review) that thought Sea Change was the obvious analogue to Demolished Thoughts, but it actually reminds me more of Mike Doughty’s Skittish than any Beck album. Doughty’s solo debut was probably a little more lyrically direct, but there’s a sense in both Skittish and Demolished Thoughts of two singer-songwriters stripping their aesthetic down to the bare essentials. In Doughty’s case, it’s something he kinda had to do in the wake of Soul Coughing’s acrimonious demise. Moore might just be taking a nice vacation from Sonic Youth and everything it means – both to the band and their longtime fans – to have been in that group for the last thirty years. Whatever his aim, Demolished Thoughts is a pretty lovely listen when you’re seeking something a little softer around the edges than, say, Goo.

A probably fair(ish) criticism of Thurston Moore (and Sonic Youth in general) is that he too often experiments for the sake of experimenting. I can see how you’d arrive at that conclusion, but I offer Demolished Thoughts and the rest of his body of work as evidence that perhaps the dude just has an amazingly diverse record collection and the synthesizing of all of these sources of inspiration can occasionally be a bit obnoxious. But I’m far more interested in someone who tirelessly seeks to push their sound than I am in someone who just quietly strums out the same few chord progressions and sings about their myriad romantic misadventures. See, that’s my biggest beef with strummy, acoustic singer/songwriter stuff – a lot of it tends to sound exactly the same to me. If Thurston Moore’s relentless experimenting (if that’s even what it is) occasionally leads him to make something terrible, it also led him to make Demolished Thoughts, which is a fairly sublime departure from the usual acousti-troubadour stuff.

Sad Man Happy Man Makes Me a Happy Man

Here’s what I’ve decided (just now): everyone gets to pick one strummy-hummy acousti-troubadour to like for free. You don’t have to justify it to anyone (not that you have to justify what you like to anyone anyway), you can pick any one you want – and we all know the kinda guys I’m talking about here. Anyway, you pick your guy and then you root like hell for that guy until he’s the last guy standing in the coffee house (you can also root for a female acousti-troubadour, but they seem harder to come by. I think the equivalent is the twenty-something street corner chanteuse). You buy his albums, go to his shows, and basically support the dude with your whole heart. Share his music with others, but don’t be a missionary prick about it – if people don’t like your guy, that’s their business and their right. They’re probably just rooting for a different guy.

I chose Mike Doughty a long time ago. Like the first time I heard Skittish. I think Doughty is the best at what he used to call “small rock” (although he upgraded to “medium rock” around the time he made Haughty Melodic, I still like describing his stuff as “small rock.” If you are Mike Doughty and you’re reading this, I’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in Los Angeles, and we can discuss) because, as he showed on Skittish, he has an earnestness about him that dovetails nicely with his innate weirdness and produces more interesting small rock than that of, for example, Jason Mraz (yeah, I’m gonna pick on Jason Mraz. You know why? The thing I hear underlying every Jason Mraz song I’ve ever heard – and I’ve sat through more than one of his albums – is a sense that Jason Mraz thinks that Jason Mraz is really fucking clever and he needs you to know that he knows he’s clever. And he’s not. He’s insipid. Sorry, Mraz, but I’m definitely not yours).

Two albums separate Skittish from Doughty’s brand spanking new Sad Man Happy Man and the early buzz is that Sad Man Happy Man is some kind of long overdue trip back to the Skittish well. I guess I can see that, but I’m not one of these people who has been sweating every Doughty release since Skittish waiting for another “Sweet Lord in Heaven” (although that will forever remain my favorite Doughty tune. It’s just too fucking beautiful). I liked Haughty Melodic a lot; I didn’t like Golden Delicious a lot, but I gave Doughty a pass on that one because I want him to keep making music and, as I said, he’s my guy. I’m rooting for him. I figure that I’ll love about 90% of his stuff and Sad Man Happy Man probably bumps that up to 96% (it’s a complicated formula I used to determine that Golden Delicious is equal to precisely four percent of Mike Doughty’s solo output and I won’t bore you with the details. Just trust that the numbers don’t lie).  It’s really awesome, really basic, and occasionally silly – everything I want a Doughty album to be.

I often get the feeling that Doughty records all his stuff in a small apartment, and the cover of Sad Man Happy Man does nothing to convince me otherwise. It suits the feel of the album, which opens with the Doughty-folkish “Nectarine (Part Two)”, a great little ditty that should hopefully shut up the “Make another Skittish” crowd. The truth of the matter is that Sad Man Happy Man synthesizes all the stuff Doughty’s done right since Skittish with the brevity-is-the-soul-of-awesome aesthetic that dominated that record. There are drums and weird cello bits on many of the songs and Doughty even gets his scream on at the end of “Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On”, which is something I’ve never heard him do before.

Doughty has always been one of the best phrase makers in music and he’s not lacking in that department here: on “Lorna Zauberberg”, he says, “At breakfast, we get by on charm alone.” Later, he has a girl who “treats me like a parole officer” (“I Want to Burn You Down”) and later points out that “time tells butter-fat lies/ sweet lousy cupcakes of lies.” (“Year of the Dog”). Butter fat lies, I surmise, are like normal lies but they give you heart attacks. The other thing I love about Mike Doughty is the way he plays freely and fearlessly with word pronunciation and vowel sounds – his prowess here is best exemplified on “Pleasure On Credit” (where he pronounces “persuasion” to rhyme with “smart girl/ not the crazy one”), “Diane” (where the name that is the chorus sometimes sounds like “Diane” and sometimes sounds like “dyin’”) and “(He’s Got the) Whole World (in His Hands)”.

“Pleasure On Credit” (also features “John Paul Jones/ bustlin’ the hedges”) and “Whole World” (Sorry, Mr. Doughty – I already overuse parentheses on this blog and I can’t have you cramping my style) are two great examples of something that I will only let Mike Doughty get away with: half-assed speak/rapping. It’s too rhythmic to be simply talking but also not facile enough to rival, say, Atmosphere. Doughty has done this off and on since back in his Soul Coughing days and I guess I have to chalk it up to how much I like the wordplay because I know if, say, Jack Johnson did it, I’d fucking hate him (more).

Of course “Pleasure” and “Whole World” are a couple bits of comic relief on an album that has plenty of beauty to offer. “Year of the Dog” is one of Doughty’s finest moments, and “Diane” is also a steaming hot cup of lovely. I don’t know if Sad Man Happy Man will win Doughty any new fans because I feel like you either like him immediately when you hear him or you’re not going to like him. His style is singular and won’t appeal to the broadest audience, but that’s part of his charm (to me, anyway). Doughty is a treasure that will be found and adored by a lucky few and I’m just happy to be one of ‘em.