How to Cringe for Forty Minutes Straight

I’m going to be 30 next month. I wasn’t quite a teenager when Pearl Jam’s Ten came out and their music resonated very strongly with me. At the time, I thought, “This is my music. I will love this music forever.” And I still love a lot of Pearl Jam’s early stuff (Vs. is flawless), but I’ve approached their last few records with a mixture of trepidation and skepticism. Early reviews of Backspacer (their new album, available semi-exclusively at Target. They made a deal with the indie shops to release the album as well, which has muddied the debate over whether or not the Target deal was a 100% dick move, but I know this much is true: 1992 Eddie Vedder would never have done that, and was probably missing more meals than 2009 Eddie Vedder) seemed to suggest that Pearl Jam had begun to rock again. My hopes, because they’re stupid, soared.

I think one question can help us narrow down whether or not you’ll like Backspacer. At first, the question will seem unrelated, but I’ll tie it all together with, to borrow a phrase from my (dead) hero George Carlin, my usual flawless logic. Here’s the question: Are you going to watch the Who perform at the Super Bowl halftime show? Subquestion within a question: are you going to watch it enthusiastically? Sub-subquestion within in a question: Really? Everyone in their right mind loves Who’s Next and would love to have a time machine so they could go back and see the Who play live. But do you really want to see Roger Daltrey (whose hopes were clearly dashed – he didn’t die before he got old) and Pete Townshend stumble about on stage in front of… of who, exactly? They sure as fuck won’t be playing with Keith Moon and John Entwistle, so why should I care? Pearl Jam is not quite that advanced a case (i.e., all of Pearl Jam’s most stable lineup is still living), but here’s what I’m getting at: the great albums of our youth may be great forever, but the bands that made them might not be (might not be. Some bands/artists can age amazingly gracefully – I’ve trotted out examples all over this blog in the last year and a half, so I’ll let you fill in the blanks on your own) and we’re doing ourselves a disservice to pretend that they are.

Backspacer makes me cringe from start to finish, resulting in a roughly forty minute frowny-face. Pearl Jam still sort of recognizes the essential elements of rock ‘n’ roll, but Vedder’s lyrics have gotten at least half-stupid (“I’m gonna see my friend & make it go away”?! Also, he rhymes “everything” with “friend” by pronouncing it “every thin”) and it feels like Pearl Jam has devolved into awesome guitar solos surfacing in the middle of a sewage leak. Yes, Pearl Jam’s two guitar players, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, are still the best part of the band. It’s just not enough any more.

Over the last several albums, Eddie Vedder has relied more and more on what I call his Screamy Voice. Vedder has a pretty nice baritone but these days, he’s singing like he resents it. Even the croony tunes on Backspacer are now augmented by a reedy, nasal twang – the kinda thing coffee house dudes add to their notes to let you know that they’re being soulful (this absolutely ruins “Just Breathe” for me by belaboring its rather obvious melodic hook. It’s a shame, too, because “Just Breathe” is one of the two songs on this album that I could nearly like). Seems to me that Vedder used to have a better grasp of when to growl and when to actually sing.

I’d be remiss in my disappointment with Backspacer if I didn’t devote some attention to its lead single, “The Fixer.” It’s Pearl Jam’s poppiest single to date (maybe “Last Kiss” comes close), which wouldn’t be so bad if “The Fixer” wasn’t so…well…dumb. “When something’s gone/ I wanna fight to get it back again” sings Vedder, like a guy who just wants to help you out, man. The intention is laudable but the phrasing is lazy and here’s why: you should be specific about what you’ll fight to get back when it’s gone. For instance, the Third Reich is gone. I wouldn’t fight to get it back but, within the context of “The Fixer”, Eddie Vedder will. “Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,” (that’s the chorus!) sing the dancing Nazis. Am I really suggesting that Eddie Vedder would fight to bring back Hitler? Of course I don’t think he’s a fascist, but I agree with George Carlin’s assertion that “the quality of our thoughts is only as good as the quality of our language” and the quality of Vedder’s language on “The Fixer” is somewhere between poor and embarrassing. Please see me after class, Eddie.

Vedder and company sound like they’re having fun on Backspacer and I don’t want to begrudge them that – in the past, they’ve had a tendency to sound like they weren’t enjoying the hard work of being rock stars. But the fact remains that, if Backspacer is Pearl Jam letting their hair down and having a good time, maybe some sticks need to be reinserted in some asses – I mean, Ten was nothing if not a Very Serious Album (honestly, some of it was melodramatic) but the music was kick ass. I just listened to “Alive” a minute ago (I need to take breaks from Backspacer at this point) and it still works wonders for me. But I’m not having a helluva lot of fun listening to Backspacer. Instead, I’m having doubts about why I ever liked this band in the first place. Of course, I still have their old stuff to remind me of the power they used to have. I’m not sure where Pearl Jam lost it, but it’s definitely gone now. (Will you fight to get it back again, Eddie Vedder? I sincerely hope so.)

So what now? There are plenty of people out there who will watch the Who on Super Bowl Sunday and tell everyone how amazing their performance was (probably some of the same misguided souls who dug the epic fail parade that was the Cream reunion concert). But there are people like me who will listen to their recordings of “Baba O’Reilly” and recognize that the guys performing on the TV are merely a joke about a formerly amazing band. And there are people out there who can still defend Pearl Jam no matter how bad they get (these people are enablers of Pearl Jam’s worst tendencies and I wish they’d stop) and those people will find some way, dog knows how, to love Backspacer and call it a triumph. This Rolling Stone review (and the comments below it) will give you a picture of what I’m talking about. Not that Rolling Stone can be considered credible these days. Any publication that will list fucking Stadium Arcadium as one of the best albums of the decade is not to be trusted.

Not Really a Review of the New Bob Dylan Album (Mostly an Excuse to Praise Tom Waits Effusively)

Why is this not really a review of Bob Dylan’s new album, Together Through Life? Because I’ve listened to that album several times now and I cannot connect it to any of the things that I associate with Bob Dylan. It almost seems unfair to review Together Through Life because album reviews tend to compare the new stuff to the old stuff and, in Bob Dylan’s case, that’s a trap you’d chew your leg off to escape. Can you really imagine pitting Together Through Life against Highway 61 Revisited and comparing notes? It’d be a musical Tiananmen Square where Highway is the tank and Together is the lone dude bravely facing down said tank. But this time, everyone is kind of embarrassed by the lone dude and will be (only somewhat) secretly thrilled when he’s reduced to a gooey paste beneath the tracks (pun!) of the mighty tank (album).

Bob Dylan apparently won’t cop to it (this is rumor only, because I’m too lazy to read his book), but there was a time when he was not only capable of getting down to the real shit, he was the real shit. He didn’t have to cut right down to the bone because he lived there, carved his home out of the marrow, and used the shavings to build his songs. That’s how you become the voice of your generation (not by giving yourself the job, Kanye West). Blonde On Blonde, Blood On the Tracks, and Highway 61 Revisited are still killer albums, resonating as clearly with me today as they ever did with anyone who heard them when they were new. Those albums still shake people to the core because Dylan was so utterly on top of his game when he recorded them.

But if we’re being honest with ourselves, really laying it all out there for everyone to see (is that what Dylan used to do? Sometimes yes and sometimes no), we have to admit that the artist formerly known as Robert Zimmerman has fallen far from the top of his game and has not aged gracefully at all. I know Modern Times got good marks from the critics, but they were ignoring the fact that it was largely a cringe-inducing, corny affair. Love and Theft was pretty all right, but that was more than 10 years ago and still doesn’t hold a candle to his earlier work.

There is an art to aging gracefully, especially in rock ‘n’ roll. Tom Waits has mastered it, but he started early (about the time he realized that being a boozed-up lounge singer was a dead end). Waits turned his music inside out and when that wasn’t enough, he ground it in the dirt with his boot heel, mixed it with some other dust and blood, and sculpted an entirely new beast out of it. I’m not just saying this to plug my favorite musician – Waits and Dylan have a lot more in common than you might think. They’re both (at their best) unrivaled songwriter/poets with a unique view of the American experience and a (formerly, in Dylan’s case) unique way of presenting it. I’m not just talking about their supposedly “bad” voices either. But if we wanna talk voices, I’ll take Tom Waits or Bob Dylan over Josh Groban any day of the week – sure, Groban can hit all the pretty notes but his music doesn’t tell you a goddamn thing about life, love, or where to buy pornographic playing cards in Singapore. In other words, Josh Groban doesn’t tell you anything you need to know. On the other hand, if you listen carefully to Tom Waits, he will tell you everything you need to know. I feel the same way about Blood on the Tracks, which makes it really hard to listen to Together Through Life.  And, in case you couldn’t tell, it makes it hard to stay on task when merely discussing this album.

The whole album consists of songs I’ll classify as Clean White Blues* (not a compliment), which might almost – almost – be bearable if the lyrics sounded like they came from Bob Dylan. But I refuse to believe that the same guy who wrote “Desolation Row” penned the godawful “It’s All Good” that closes Together Through Life. There’s just no way. Dylan’s legacy is so solid right now, he could literally do anything he wanted. I’m not saying he has to starting aping Tom Waits, but he could take a page  from the Waits playbook and try to push his sound beyond its limits. Instead, Dylan has crafted what might as well be a Jimmy Buffet record with fewer laughs (it hurt me more to write that, Bob Dylan, than it will hurt you to never read it). The instrumentation is almost always the same (Clean White Blues standards – soft drums, maybe an accordion and/or piano, and clean – always clean – electric guitar) on every song which, again, might be bearable if Dylan were saying anything worth repeating.

Dylan has certainly earned the right to record whatever kind of album he wants (he’s also earned the right to legally murder My Chemical Romance for their blasphemous cover of “Desolation Row” that showed up on the Watchmen soundtrack earlier this year) and, if Together Through Life is what he wants to be doing right now, bully for him. But I don’t want to hear it. Dylan used to be strident and funny and obnoxious and whimsical and weird,  but Together Through Life is dull and predictable and lifeless and, because it is those three things, also depressing as hell. To cope, I’m pretending Bob Dylan died in 1978 and will henceforth refer to him as the late Bob Dylan.

*What do I mean by Clean White Blues? This might hurt some people’s feelings, but – in the immortal words of George Carlin – fuck ‘em. Clean White Blues is what tends to pass for regular blues today. Its main purveyors are Eric Clapton, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, John Mayer, and B.B. King. That’s not a joke. For the last few years, King has been playing some serious CWB. Now, “Clean White Blues” is merely a descriptor – I’m not saying you have to be black to play the blues well (although, being a form of music born out of slavery, it does kinda help). There has never been a moment in Rock ‘n’ Roll’s lifetime where it wasn’t borrowing something from the blues (to quote George Carlin again, “All music is the blues”), but somewhere in there, probably toward the end of the 1970s, people (mostly white people) started exhibiting a disturbing tendency to clean up their blues, to water it down, to scrub the dirt, grime, sweat, blood, and sex right off of it (if you doubt the heavy element of sex in all great blues, listen to the way Elmore James played slide guitar and tell me he wasn’t thinking about fucking with every note he picked). This paved the way for people like Jonny Lang and other would-be blues guys (and gals – looking at you, Susan Tedeschi) who could play the notes but were otherwise soulless. The blues is an endangered beast nowadays, and we’re running out of people to whom we can turn to save it. Tom Waits has probably done it the best of late; he tucks little bits of the blues into the dark spaces of his songs, as if he’s trying to smuggle them to safety, like a crafty Alexandrian librarian stashing scrolls away from the fiery wrath of Theophilus. Waits mutated the blues to save it, a trick he’s also turned with folk music. Some time after the late Bob Dylan vacated his home down amongst the marrow, Tom Waits moved in. He knocked down all the walls, blew the roof off the joint, and found a way to go deeper than anyone else dared.

Goddammit, Elvis Costello

Musical ambition is, on the whole, a good thing. I much prefer artists who want to challenge themselves and expand their sound over artists who want to cash in on the same thing over and over again (is that understood, Coldplay?). However, proving the breadth and depth of your record collection doesn’t mean you’re going to make great music.

Elvis Costello is (was? is?) one of the greatest rock songwriters ever but the last twenty years have seen him attempt to prove that he’s So Much More. And I tend to agree with him in theory, but in practice he’s chosen to do so with a series of “genre” albums, the latest of which is Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane, Costello’s second country album (he released King of America in 1986 and it is a phenomenal album, perhaps the best genre exercise ever – but more on that in a minute).

Genre albums puzzle me; if you dig some style of music, why not synthesize it into your own sound and expand things that way rather than just choosing to write an album in particular genre (I don’t write individual songs in a particular genre, they just sort of end up how they end up)? You’ll still probably piss of the Pitchforkers and you can show everyone how you are more than the sum of your parts or whatever it is Elvis Costello is trying to prove. Or maybe he isn’t trying to prove anything; maybe he’s just doing what he likes. And that’s great too – for him. Just as I said about Condo Fucks, I don’t care that you record whatever you feel like, but I do care that I’m expected to shell out between twelve and twenty bucks for it. I know you think I can get the album cheaper if you make an exclusive deal with Target or Walmart or Best Buy, but fuck you if you do that: I’d rather pay more for an album at a real record store. You know, where they have selection? Also, I think I’m going to start openly encouraging people to pirate albums by artists that ink “exclusive” deals with non-record stores.

In case you can’t tell by my many digressions from the topic at hand, I’m not very impressed with Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane. It’s not just the unwieldy as hell title, nor is it that I generally have no regard for the genre album; I loved King of America, but there’s something organic about that album that is completely missing on Secret, Profane, and Billy Zane. Costello’s new country album smacks of what his ill-advised My Flame Burns Blue (Elvis singing with an orchestra and trying to be all pretty) smacked of a couple years ago – forced beauty. We’re supposed stand by and applaud Costello’s grasp of old-school country, especially since he hired some of that genre’s best living musicians to back him on the album. But Costello ruins the otherwise tolerable opener “Down Among the Wines and Spirits” by ending it with a Mariah Carey-esque attempt at a vocal flourish that is irritating, embarrassing, and hilarious all at once. The whole album feels like Costello really wants you to know that he gets old country music, and I don’t doubt that he gets it. But that don’t mean he should do it – I get hip-hop completely, but you won’t catch me attempting a collaboration with Mad Lib any time soon.

Throughout Secret, Profane, and Zombie John McCain, Costello seems to be lyrically imprisoned by his chosen style. Songs like “Hidden Shame” and “Complicated Shadows” (which is also actually kinda tolerable if you pretend Johnny Cash never lived and/or never recorded Live at Folsom Prison and why the fuck would you do that?), among many others, are country cliches about guns, gals, love, death, heartache, et cetera. Not the sort of thing I’m looking for from a guy who once wrote, “It’s the force of habit/ if it moves, then you fuck it/ if it doesn’t move, you stab it”, which comes from “Suit of Lights,” one of the many highlights of King of America. In case you haven’t gathered, I would recommend you check out King of America over Secret, Profane, and Searing Pain – it’s the first time Costello went down this road and it’s about forty times more satisfying.

The whole album isn’t awful, but I certainly don’t give a fuck about it either. There’s nothing wrong, as I said, with trying to broaden your musical horizons, but there’s better ways to go about it than by slapping together an overlong (the slow songs on Sneakers, Propane, and John Coltrane feel like they’re 90 minutes long, especially the plodding “She Handed Me a Mirror” which makes me wish she’d broken one over Costello’s obstinate head), pretty bad country record. Imagine if My Morning Jacket had just made a one-off R & B record instead of allowing their love of Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye to inflect their awesome, guitar-rock sound. The result would’ve been far less satisfying than the exemplary Evil Urges, an album that pretty much frees MMJ from any genre tags you could apply to them. Also, Evil Urges just kicks ass. That’s the real point here. Got it? Good.

Or, to use a more classic example, The Clash were always a punk band in spirit, even as they blended rockabilly, reggae, and jazz into London Calling, an album that, admittedly, almost no one even listens to anymore, much less reveres as some sort of sacred blueprint of How to Do It Exactly Right. And, when Joe Strummer started working with the Mescaleros, he blended all of his favorite styles (all of them) into their sound, creating songs that were spiritually consistent with his status as The One True Punk but sonically, they were wonderfully varied. Perhaps, then, Elvis Costello needs to take a page from the Joe Strummer Guide to Aging Gracefully; it’s not that Costello shouldn’t find other genres to like and incorporate into his music, it’s that he needs to remember from whence he came.

And here’s the thing that galls me more than anything about Elvis Costello’s genre exercises (Pitchfork alluded to this in their review of Sucrets, Throat Pain, and The Hill of Dunsinane and I’m big enough to admit they were right) is that he’s awesome at rocking. If you like Elvis Costello, I guarantee you that your favorite of his albums is either Armed Forces, This Year’s Model, My Aim is True, or maybe When I Was Cruel (which is my favorite). And they’re all rock albums. Some of the best ones ever recorded, where Costello isn’t afraid to sneer a little and let his wonderfully snarky voice be a bit obnoxious. There’ s room to expand on that palette without abandoning it, but over the last few years, it’s as if Costello has morphed into one of the snobs who turned their noses up at his early shit – as if he’s ashamed to have bothered us with that so-called “pub-rock,” which includes classics like “Pump It Up”, “Radio, Radio,” and “Oliver’s Army,” among many others. I’m not usually given to telling musicians what to do, but: goddammit, Elvis Costello, go find an electric guitar, an amp, a drummer, and get back to doing something you kick ass at.

Chinese Dumb-ocracy: The Bollocks! Review, Part Fucking III

A palate cleanse is required while I let my Ommegang Abbey Ale settle. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to piss (gee, I wonder why so few people read this blog – this is quality shit, yeah?). Again with the water while I sniff the fruity and earthy notes that make up the head of an Ommegang Abbey Ale. This beer ain’t for amateurs – it’s a full on Belgian-style Dubbel that didn’t come to make small talk. I first heard of Ommegang Brewery (Belgian style brewery in Cooperstown, NY) in Beer magazine (you don’t subscribe? What the hell is wrong with you?) and I keep meaning to try their Hennepin Ale, but I always end up with the Abbey Ale. It’s win-win. Starting to feel the buzz now, and I’m wiping my sonic palate clean with Sonic Youth’s “Total Trash.” Hooah.

10:00PM: Free Association Songwriting: “I.R.S” makes no fucking sense. Axl makes references to various government offices but doesn’t really say what it is he wants them to do. Gee, maybe he’s a Republican (buh-dum tish). He also asks, “Would it even mattered/ The things that I’d say”. Well,  I think he asks that. That’s a question, right?

Here’s the thing. My band (Radical Edward – we had our first gig last night, but enough about me) has seven original songs right now. I’ve written or contributed lyrics to all of them. I recognize that you fuck with syllables to make the meter work, but I’m pretty goddamn diligent about making the lines make sense. You know, so people can comprehend them?  Axl is wandering around in a grammatical wasteland on Chinese Democracy and he took a decade and a half to cough up the shittiest lyrics this side of My Chemical Romance (who can at least string together a coherent line – it’s just gonna suck when they do it).

10:09PM: Jesus Monkeyfucking Christ: I know I just said “I.R.S.” makes no fucking sense, but then I heard “Madagascar.” Axl, waxing Jesus-like, sings “Forgive them that tear down my soul.” And then there’s a bunch of mismatched samples, including the one from Cool Hand Luke that famously introduced “Civil War,” a song I thought was Axl’s biggest descent into Bullshit until I heard “Madagascar.” Axl Rose samples Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech on this song. Why? Is Axl worried about his civil rights as a white man with corn rows? Does he even realize that King was fighting for the rights of black people (from whom Axl didn’t wanna by a gold chain when he sang “One in a Million” – if you ask me how I know that song, I will scream like a girl and run away from you so fucking fast it will make your head spin) and that he fucking died for it? It seems beyond outrageous to me that Axl “My Engrish is So Suck” Rose would compare his struggle for… whatever the fuck he’s struggling for… to MLK’s struggle for racial goddamn equality. Christ, Axl, have you left no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Wow. I got so pissed off during “Madagascar” that I missed half of “This I Love.” Let’s start it over, shall we? Here we go: “This I Love” is a piano-y ballad where Axl whines, “Please God you must believe me/ I’ve searched the universe/ and found myself in her eyes.” It might be Rose’s best lyrical turn of the album (yes, folks, it’s that fucking bad), but still: please, God, don’t believe him.  “This I Love” is a schmaltzy ballad and yet, there still seems to be room for an annoying guitar solo. Anyone who knows me knows I have nothing against guitar solos, by the way. I just compare most of them to Tad Kubler’s solo on “Most People Are DJ’s” and find them sorely lacking.

The last song on Chinese Democracy is called “Prostitute” and I’m confused why it doesn’t include a parenthetical “I Am a”.  Axl sings, “I’ve done all I should,” with which I must immediately disagree – you, Mr. Rose, should go into a state of hiding that makes J.D. Salinger look like Ryan Seacrest.

Rose also asks, “Why would they/ tell me to please/ those that laugh in my face?” and I don’t know the answer, but I’m one of those who would definitely laugh in his face. The dude has lived in this country his whole life and speaks English like an aphasia patient. Axl kinda sounds like a hair metal Peter Cetera when he sings, “Ask yourself/ why I would choose/ to prostitute myself/ to live with fortune and shame” and while I’m not gonna take time out of my busy drinking schedule to ask myself why Axl Rose is a whore, I’ll concede that he is one. Also, the thought of a hair metal Peter Cetera is really fucking terrifying.

10:26PM: In summary… Chinese Democracy is actually about what I’d expect from an egomaniac locking himself in a studio for 15ish years – it’s a fucking mess. Overproduced, underwritten, and overperformed, it’s a testament to a man who crawled really far up his own ass and decided to make a home there. There are so many half-assed musical ideas on Chinese Democracy that it comes off as schizophrenic and, lyrically, it should be considered an act of literary (if not auditory) terrorism. I hereby authorize anyone in my band (or anyone who hears my band) to kill me (fucking kill me) if I ever write anything as fuck-awful as what Axl Rose has penned (in his own feces, as I understand it) on Chinese Democracy.

Final Palate Cleanse: I recommend more beer (I’m still working on the Ommegang Abbey Ale, and I have a dry Irish stout in reserve – it only took me three beers to get through Chinese Democracy, which I guess makes it slightly better than Chris Cornell’s Scream. That, for the record, is like saying you like the shit sandwich when the chef had corn the previous day as compared to when he or she had asparagus. It’s still a shit sandwich) and listening to Joe Strummer’s cover of “Redemption Song.” Twice.

Well, folks, I’m drunk. I’m gonna listen to something good and play video games. You’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to your music, and I’d like leave you with this bit of advice: none of them should be Chinese Democracy.

Chinese Democracy: The Bollocks! Review Part II (This Time It’s Personal)

One beer down, three to go. We’re getting heavier now, not musically, but I’m pouring a nice glass of Stone IPA right now and it’s a lot hoppier than the polite, mild mannered Morimoto. Stone IPA is one of my favorite IPAs, and 22 ounces of it might lead us to more typographical mishaps later in the evening. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. I did a palate cleanse with some water to make way for the Stone IPA, so how about a musical cleansing as well? I’m dipping into Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” (seemed appropriate) for a second before picking up the Chinese Democracy again.

9:07PM: Back to the Grind: “There Was a Time” has Axl at his most martyred: “I was the one who gave you everything,” he sings. Way to toot your own horn there, Axl. Chicks dig confidence. As a guitar player (a decent enough one, I’m told), I can confidently say that, despite most of these songs having five guitarists on them, the guitars are uniformly annoying. Where the tone doesn’t suck outright, whichever guy is playing is just squirreling away a million notes a minute that mean exactly fuckall. On “There Was a Time,” there’s a little interlude that sounds like a Kenny G lick. Kid you not. Axl seems to lament, “There was a time/ I would do anything for you” as if now, after all you’ve put him through, Axl just can’t do anything for you anymore. So you’ve fucked that up for yourself, whoever you are. The song could be about Slash or some chick or… who really cares? All you need to know is that it’s Axl Vs. The World and gosh, he’s just tried so hard to be nice and give you so much and this is how you repay him? For shame!

I mentioned to a friend today that I could forgive how far up his own ass Axl is on this album if the music was halfway decent. The odds are looking better for Mousavi to win the election in Iran at this point (big ups to the protesters there; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an Islamic Sarah Palin and the good folks of that country deserve better). “There Was a Time” is overlong, features finger-tapping (hey, guitar players: you wanna piss me off? Engage in finger-tapping), and is, so far, the low point on an album I would be complimenting by calling a shit sandwich.

9:14PM: Why JD Salinger Doesn’t Talk to Us Anymore: Ooooooooh… a literary reference from a guy whose grasp of English is worse than my dog’s, and she’s got a pretty good excuse. “The Catcher in the Rye” must have been inspired by J.D. Salinger’s book, right? Axl sings, “If I thought that I was crazy/ guess I’d have more fun” and there’s really nothing in the song that indicates to me that Axl read the book. There’s little on this album to convince me that Rose can read. Salinger is currently suing someone who wrote a sort of sequel to Catcher in the Rye. Maybe he should sue Axl over this instead. This song also has a guitar solo that sounds almost like it was patched in from an entirely different recording session. This song takes the taco for infuriating lyrics (the Taco of Lyrical Fury): “Cause what used to be’s/ Not there for me/ and ought to for someone/ That belongs/Insane/ Like I do.” Despite my drinking, kids, I didn’t mistype a single word there. What…the fuck… does it mean?

And that’s the problem: you get the feeling that Axl doesn’t know either. He’s just singing shit and playing around in a studio and the result is this  jam-packed mess. Rolling Stone, proving they’ve lost touch with reality, called Chinese Democracy “a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record.” Audacious, yes. Great? Hardly. Not even good. Kinda outside the ballpark of listenable.

“Scraped” follows “Catcher in the Rye” and it’s Axl getting back to what he does best: talking about how fucking great he is, shrieking in his whiniest voice, “Nothing’s impossible/ I am inconquerable.” Again, Axl, you’re not “inconquerable.” Nobody is “inconquerable.” It’s not a word. Dick. “Scraped” does throw a bone to any fans gullible – er, “faithful” – enough to have made this journey with Axl through these long years. He tells his listener(s?), “You know you’re stronger/ than the lies they tell you.” But I’m confused. Because he also says, “Don’t you try to stop us now”. Is he talking to the same “you”? That would seem kinda inconsistent, but since the song seems to be about how Axl is a word he made up that he thinks means “unstoppable”, I guess it doesn’t matter.

9:24PM: Ah. There’s that New Low. “Riad N’ the Bedouins” is the worst song on the album so far. Apparently, Axl is referring to someone named Riad (although, as it’s spelled, the word is derived from, I believe, the Arabic “Ryad”, meaning “garden.” ) and his or her semi-nomadic followers. He opens the song with this turdworthy verbiage: “Riad N’ the Bedouins/ Had a plan and thought they’d win/ But I don’t give a fuck ’bout them/ Cause I am crazy.” I’m pretty sure if you gave my niece dog meth, she could write better lyrics than that.  “Garden and the Bedouins” is the most egregious offender in the Holy Shit, This Song is Fucking Meaningless category. Is Axl really enemies with some semi-nomadic folks and a dude (a chick? I don’t know) who was named for Moroccan gardens? He sings about not bending his will to “nomads and barbarians”, the sort of thing you’d write about a far off land (say, the Middle East) if you’ve never fucking seen the region on a map.  Will more beer help this? Maybe, but the effects-driven guitars at the end are giving me a headache. Another palate-cleanse coming soon, though I’m still on my Stone IPA.

“Sorry” is, so far, the most unintentionally hilarious (and that’s saying something) song on Chinese Dumb-0cracy so far. “You like to hurt me/ you know that you do,” sings Axl in his “tender” tenor. I would like to hurt you, Axl. A lot. The song is a slow-burner that seethes with disdain for… well, somebody. Maybe this song is about ex-bandmates or gilfriends or… Christ. I’m not drunk enough to consider that a megalomanical, dipshit white boy with corn rows gets laid.

The hilarity continues: Axl just sang, “I’ll kick your ass like I said that I would.” Does he mean physically or musically? Either way, I have my doubts. “Sorry” continues Axl’s trend of knowing more than everyone else about how to behave and how to treat people. When, oh when, will we stop hurting poor Axl?

Part III coming up next. I think we’ll finish this thing up then: I’m going full Belgian on this bitch in a minute.

Chinese Democracy: The Bollocks! Review Part I

I said, a while back, that if a legit copy of Chinese Democracy ever fell into my lap, I’d give it a fair hearing right here on Bollocks! Well, my pal Jacques threw down the gauntlet this Christmas when he gave me 4 tall bottles of Ninkasi beer and promised a copy of Axl Rose’s magnum dopus to go with ‘em. Well, the disc got lost for a while and the Ninkasis helped me through the new Chris Cornell album. And then the disc was found. So I decided to recruit four new beers and keep to the spirit of my Christmas gift. So tonight, I’m gonna drink my way through Chinese Democracy and tell you all what I think of it. If you read the Chris Cornell review, you know what you’re in for. Don’t worry, friends: I’m drinking plenty of water tonight as well.

8:16PM: First Beer, First Impressions: The first beer of the night is a saucy little variation on the wheat beer, a Rogue invention called Morimoto Ale, made from soba wheat. It’s a cool, crisp customer and it’ll ease me into what is sure to be a long night with the new Guns N’ Roses album. Incidentally, I’m gonna rant for a minute on the way Axl apostrophizes his “N” there. See, it’s supposed to be short for “and”. So if you took away the letters that aren’t “N”, you’d be better off abbreviating it like so: Guns ‘N’ Roses. Doing otherwise doesn’t make you unconventional, it makes you a fucking moron.

Am I stalling? Maybe I am. I’ve listened through this album once already, and I’m going to plow through it mostly track by track here tonight, but I need to pace myself. This monster is 14 tracks, most of which run well past the four minute mark. Also, I know I’ve bitched about it before, but I feel like I have to remind you that the first strike against Chinese Democracy is Axl’s exclusive deal to sell it through Best Buy. I’m glad it didn’t sell for shit, but I’d like to say (probably not for last time tonight) a big fuck you to Axl on that point anyway.

8:23PM: These Are the Lyrics that Took 17 Years to Write? I like that the album starts off with its title track, but I don’t like the nearly full minute of bullshit that leads up to the slickly produced guitar lick that starts it off. Axl banshee-wails, “It don’t really matter/ Gonna find out for yourself” and then he makes a reference to the relatively new practice of Falun Gong. Is this a song about democracy in China? It wouldn’t seem to be. It seems to be about nothing, like Axl’s other pseudo-political song, “Civil War,” which is one of the most meaningless songs ever recorded. The guitars on this song album are overproduced, and annoying. They squall here and there and add nothing to the song at all. This is what you get with (reportedly) $13 million and five fucking guitarists on one song?

The second song is called “Shackler’s Revenge” and it, like its predecessor, is a lyrically ambiguous affair wherein Axl doesn’t want someone to tell him that they care for him. Well, Axl, I don’t. So we’re even. I just think, you know, if you take a decade and a half to record an album, you might come up with lyrics that are a little less… “prosaic,” would be a charitable term. “Shitty” is the term I’ll use.  “Shackler’s Revenge” starts with a riff that is right out of Your Favorite Korn Song or latter day (read: bad) Marilyn Manson and then, by the final chorus, there’s some noodly, Eddie Van Halen-aping bullshit. If you wanna know how I feel about that, read the last sentence again.

8:31PM Now We All Know Better: “Better” starts like a teen pop song and only gets worse. Axl “should have known you’re crazy” on this song and bridges his way into the chorus with “All I wanted was” followed by the line “Now I know you better.” I’m confused. Did he want Now I Know You Better? Is that a product of some kind. Perhaps the booklet has a misprint and he means he wants Now I Know You, Butter – which I can only assume is some kind of luxury brand of butter that you get at the Whole Foods or something. Rose’s delivery is as histrionic as ever – you either love it or hate (I kinda cringe when I hear it) but the lyrics are incomprehensible at best and insufferable at worst.

“Street of Dreams” follows “Better” and, so far, it features Axl’s worst singing of the album (and it’s the one where his voice sounds the least processed, oddly enough). Also, it starts like an REO Speedwagon song. Lyrical gems include “But that’s not stardust on my feet/ It leaves a taste that’s bitter sweet/ that’s called the blues.” So Axl stepped in something – not stardust, I guess – and then tasted it. And apparently, he stepped in the blues.  I’ve never been a big fan of Axl’s singing, but when he strives for soul on “Street of Dreams,” he ends up sounding whiny and strident. So he ends the song by doing that a lot. Oh good.

8:41PM: Look at Me, I’m Worldly: “If the World” starts with this Spanish guitar style thing, which is in keeping with what Axl has tried to do with this album: his adorer(s?) will tell you he’s innovating and proving his worldliness or some shit, but the international-sounding flourishes on Chinese Democracy are, so far, completely incidental to the songs in which they appear. They feel tacked on. Still, I like the intro to “If the World” much better than Axl’s high-pitched squealing. I guess this is a love song, because Axl sings, “You’re the only one/ I’ve ever loved that has ever loved me”. That’s a big theme on Chinese Democracy, kids: loving Axl Rose.

Stay tuned for more live blogging of the Bollocks! Chinese Democracy review. In Part II, we’ll hear a few more tracks and drink another beer while trying to parse Axl’s “poetry”: “Nothing’s impossible/ I am inconquerable” (the word should be “unconquerable”, Mr. Rose. Can this asshole even read?)

I Drink My Way Through the New Chris Cornell Pile of Shit Pt. 3 (In Which I Implore Neko Case to Kill Chris Cornell and Raise A Toast to St. Joe Strummer)

This is a tattoo someone got of a monkey looking at its own asshole. If that doesn’t sum up Chis Cornell’s Scream, I don’t know what does. This should, dog willing, be the last installment of my live (drunk) blog experience of this Chris Cornell/ Timbalind partnership in ruining everything that is good about life. Word.

11:06 pm: Almost out of Red Ale – But that’s okay. I saved the best for last. I’ll take on the last three tracks of Cornell’s monumental piece of shit while drinking Ninkasi’s oatmeal stout. Right now, I’m on track 12 (of 14), which is called “Climbing Up the Walls.” That reminds me of a Radiohead song on OK Computer. You know what OK Computer has in common with Scream? Fucking nothing. OK Computer is a magnificent album and Scream is dog shit personified. What can I say about this song? It’s bearable, in the context of this wholly unbearable album, but again, the chorus is just Chris Cornell (in Megatron Voice) repeating the title of the songs. Did he pick the song names first and then try to figure out ways to make sure that no one forgot them? I’m thinking of the (I think) four songs I’ve written for my band. I think one of them mentions the  song title in the chorus. Maybe two of them. Too drunk too care.

11:11 pm: A Note about Jamming all the songs together - So little Double Red Ale left. What the fuck am I listening to? Oh yeah. “Watch Out.” This song, like all the other songs on Scream, is impressively terrible. Seriously. If you set out to write the worst pop song you could think of, it probably wouldn’t be as shitty as anything on Scream. Jesus God, this album blows. Cornell is still content to let his digitized Megatron voice sing all the choruses for him. Hey, Chris Cornell! I’ve got an idea. A duel: your album cover (you jumping and pretending to smash an expensive guitar) vs. Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone cover (her, car surfing with a goddamn motherfuckin’ broadsword). Neko Case disembowels Chris Cornell for the win.

11:?? pm: It’s motherfucking Oatis time – Out of Ninkasi Believer Double Red. I’ve moved on to the grand finale: Ninkasi Oatis Oatmeal Stout. It’s got a sweet but pungent bouquet, probably like the cologne Tom Waits wore on his wedding day. I’m responding to this beer in way that can only be considered Pavlovian. A taste, perhaps?  Oh… my… god. This beer… this beer is… hold on. Look: if you love dark beer, you need this. Now. I don’t care where you are; drive to Eugene, Oregon and get you some Ninkasi Oatis Oatmeal Stout. Holy mother of god, this is a dark beer that comes right up to the Holy Guinness Line of Greatness and says, “You’re good. But I’m motherfucking Oatis.” This… this is a great goddamn beer. So great, in fact, that I’m going to take a minute to savor it whilst I listen to a good song. Perhaps… um… okay. There is only one song that matches the unsurpassed Awesomeness of Ninkasi Oatis Oatmeal Stout.  Not surprisingly,  it is “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen”) by Mr. Thomas Alan Waits. Holy fuck. This. Is. Great. Beer. It is perfect. Smoky. Roasty. Hoppy. Beautiful. Sweet Zombie Jesus, I love this beer. Do I really have to finish listening to Chris Cocksucking Cornell?

11:33 pm: Yes. Yes I do – I’m on the bonus track now. “Two Drink Minimum.”  It starts like a bad Audioslave song (trick assertion – there are no good Audioslave songs) I think this is supposed to be a bluesy song. It still sucks.

Okay. I’m done with Scream. If you could not surmise, from these live, uncensored entries, my feelings toward Chris Cornell’s new album, let me just say that I would rather shit razor blades than listen to it again. In fact…

A List of Songs I have to listen to, while drinking Ninkasi Oatis Oatmeal Stout, to cleanse my palette after listening to Chris Cornell’s Scream album:

“Tom Traubert’s Blues” by Tom Waits. ’nuff said. It’s Tom fucking Waits. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you.

“Redemption Song” – the Joe Strummer version. Meaning, “the definitive version.” Jesus Christ. I miss you, Joe Strummer. And I never fucking knew you. But you’d love Ninkasi’s Oatis.

“Magpie to the Morning” by Neko Case. “He sings ‘I am for you special’/ He knows you’re afraid of the dark.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Middle Cyclone is a goddamn beautiful album. Listen to it. Now. In fact, I think I will…

“The Geese of Beverly Road” by The National. “We’re the heirs to the glimmering world.” Especially when we’re drinking Ninkasi’s Oatis Oatmeal Stout. I do not use these words lightly: Oatis is a perfect beer. A… perfect… beer. Perfect. “Hey love/ we’ll get away with it/ we’ll run like we’re awesome/ totally genius.”

“Anywhere I Lay My Head” by Tom Waits. Fuck you, Kanye West. Tom Waits is the voice of every generation. He cries so you don’t have to.

“Constructive Summer” by The Hold Steady. You know what? Our psalms are sing-along songs.

“The Slow Descent into Alcoholism” by The New Pornographers. That about sums it up.

“On the Road” by Tom Waits. For some reason, Tom Waits is the perfect compliment t0 dark beer.

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” by Wilco. I love Wilco. I was single for three years in college and Wilco was indispensable to me. Fortunately, I don’t need them for that now.

“Most People Are DJ’s” by The Hold Steady. What can I say? I’ve drank my way through a Chris Cornell album and I still feel pretty sweet. Thank you, Ninkasi Brewery. Thank you, Jacques. And thank you, Tom Waits and The Hold Fucking Steady.

That’s it. I’ve consumed 66 ounces of beer to get through Chris Cornell’s Scream album. It blows. I defy anyone to like this fucker. I posted, in part 2 of this review, a picture of Budweiser with Clamato, a photo that was not altered in any way. Why did I do that? Because, when I first saw Budweiser with Clamato, I wondered to myself, “What kind of asshole would buy this shit?” And now I know the answer: anyone who likes Chris Cornell’s Scream probably also likes their Budweiser with Clamato in it. Which means they are not to be trusted. Which means that, if you know anyone who likes one or both of these things, you should probably drive a stake throught their heart, just to be sure.

I Drink My Way Through the New Chris Cornell Album pt. 2 (in which I Take a Moment to Endorse Ninkasi Brewery)

That’s the same album cover, right?

9:52: “Take Me Alive” – If you’re just joining us, this is part 2 of my Live Blogging/Drinking through the new Chris Cornell album, Scream. Tim Balind produced it. And it sucks.  I’m currently listening to track 8 of this shit sandwich (is there something worse than a shit sandwich that I can call this album? I smell a Bollocks! contest coming up. Anyone wanna win a copy of Middle Cyclone?). The song is called… hold on, lemme check… okay. It’s called “Long Gone,” and it’s kinda balladish. The Chris Cornell/Megatron chorus effect is singing all sensitive like. I guess his woman is long gone. Can’t blame her though, he said that bitch ain’t a part of him. Beer update: Still working my way through the Tricerahops. It’s a great beer, like if you took your favorite IPA and turned it up to 11. So far, Ninkasi Brewery is winning and Chris Cromagnon is losing (did I misspell my caveman reference? I’m a little buzzed. Thank you, Tricerahops. Thank you so much). I’m editing the file info in Winamp. “Long Gone” is now labeled as “Long Song.”

Note – I have now begun staring longingly at my other, better albums. I could be listening to Regina Spektor or Pavement right now. Must be strong.

10:00PM: More beer – We’re on to the title track and I’m out of Tricerahops. Hold on a sec…

All right. I’ve moved on to Nikasi’s Believer Double Red Ale. These guys have an awesome habit of doubling things. Don’t let the name fool ya – this double red is dark brown like a good cup of coffee. Let’s take a smell while it’s still got the head on it – it has the nice roasted odor of good amber ale, though. Smells like a Fat Tire on steroids.  Let’s quaff this monster: Sure ’nuff tastes like a red. Slight sweetness, bit of a bite to it. Almost a coffee aftertaste like you’d expect in a porter. Ninkasi trades in heavy brews and I love them for it. The next time you’re in Eugene, Oregon, find some of this brewery’s beer and give it all of your love. All of it!

Fuck. I’m supposed to be listening to Chris Cornell’s new album. Where was I?

10:07 pm: Oh yeah. The title track – Chris Cornell, unsurprisingly, has the title and titular line of this album. We’re still trending pop-ballady here. Which means the beats are programmed slower. This beer is really good. Did I mention that? Oh. I think we’re to the chorus of the song. Something about “Messing with my brain when you wanna see me fall.” That reminds me – Psychonauts is a great video game. I guess this song could be considered ironic because he croons “Why you keep screaming at the top of your head?” on the chorus. This album is super shitty.  It’s the kind of thing you would think should be a joke, but it is (unfortunately) convincing me, slowly, that Joaquin Phoenix’s hip-hop career move might be legit after all.

Know what I hate? When a singer records one vocal track and then records another one echoing the lyrics they just sang. As on “Scream,” the title and titular song (do you get that reference? If so, send all of your ass-pennies to Bollocks! care of Rebecca Mellor, 705 Imaginary Office, Van Nuys, CA 91405) where Cornell echoes himself singing “Not my fault” or some shit. He also says he “used to think that silence was golden.” I still think that, Chris Cornell. Because of you, I think it so hard right now.

10: 13 pm: Douchebag Raver Bullshit – We’re back to the club beats on Scream. I really don’t get this. Chris Cornell used to be able to sing. Check out Temple of the Dog’s “All Night Thing” if you don’t believe that shit. But he hardly uses his voice on this album. He lets T.M.B. Lind digitize, autotune, and synthesize the life out of his voice. He rarely sounds human. Is this album some sort of weird cry for help? Scream is so shitty that I would rather listen to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak and that album is like nails on a goddamn chalkboard to me. (I am now looking at my Hold Steady albums the way my dog looks at me when she knows I’m going to leave for several hours.) I’m listening to a song called “Enemy” now and its chorus is similar to the chorus of “Time” in that Cornell thinks repeating one word over and over makes a chorus. Christ. Incidentally, my band is discussing doing a cover of “You’ve Gotta Dance (with Who You Came With)” by The Hold Steady. I’m gonna learn the guitar part tomorrow and it is thunderously awesome.

A break while Chorpenning listens to “You Gotta Dance (with Who You Came With)” by The Hold Steady.

10:52 pm: My girlfriend has called from Portland – so I have paused Scream for the last half an hour or so. It’s kinda nice. Also, she called during my Hold Steady break, so I’ll go back to them before I go back to Chris Cornell. The Double Red Ale is still amazing.

10:57 pm: Pee Break.

10:58: pm: Say a prayer for the cityscape skins… – Hold Steady break. God, this is great. I love you, Craig Finn. Tad Kubler, sir… what can I say? You are the last great guitar hero. Bless you sir.

11:00 pm: Back to this fucking Chris Cornell album – I’m listening to “The Other Side of Town”, where Cornell sings “there was a part of me that she didn’t know”, which I hope means this is a song about him being a werewolf.

Wait for it…

Nope. It’s not about him being a werewolf. It’s about how Chris Cornell hates women. Who knew? Three songs to go. The beer is holding up nicely. I think the Double Red is a bit better even than the Tricerahops, which is like saying that I like one Tom Waits song more than another Tom Waits song. They’re both infinitely awesome, but one is transcendentally awesome, like awesome that has to manufacture and then occupy entire new dimensions of space. Pretty much the opposite of Scream.

I Drink My Way Through the New Chris Cornell Album (or, What the Fuck is Wrong with Me?) Pt. 1

Okay. It’s Saturday night. The girlfriend is out of town, friends are busy, but I have a few tall beers from the Ninkasi Brewery in Eugene, Oregon. Might as well crack one open and listen to… the new Chris Cornell album. The one that Timbalind produced.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Well, you gotta make your own damn fun in the world sometimes so I’ve decided to get drunk enough to sit through Chris Cornell’s entire Scream album and write a review of it. Why would I do this? I do it for you, my loyal 6 to 9 readers (on average). For your entertainment. And edification.  I’m doing this more or less live, and I’ll go back and proofread it later. These are my unfiltered feelings on Scream.

9:19 pm. It Begins – My first beer of the night is the Ninkasi Tricerahops, their double – double – IPA. Special thanks to Jacques for the Ninkasi brews.

All right, Cornell, do your worst.

His worst is pretty bad, and damned if he hasn’t been trying to do his worst ever since Soundgarden broke up. I was a huge fan of theirs, especially Badmotorfinger and Superunknown. I know the radio made you sick of “Black Hole Sun,” but that album is straight up raucous from start to finish. But enough about that. Let’s live in the now.

Scream starts off with a synthesized horn fan-fare, the kind of obvious douchebag maneuver I’d expect from Kanye West. That introduces “Part of Me,” the chorus of which is “No, that bitch ain’t a part of me.” This all sung in Cornell’s whiny new R&B voice. Timbalind, in his infinite wisdom, decided to digitize Cornell’s voice on the chorus so that Cornell sounds like Megatron. Except I don’t recall Megatron ever being such a blatant fucking misogynist. If anyone in my band wrote a song this bad, I’d assault them. That is how bad this is. Ya know how Trent Reznor’s recent output has been kinda middlin’ lately? Well, upon hearing Scream, he Twittered (or “Twatted” as Stephen Colbert puts it) that he felt embarrassed for Chris Cornell. Me too, Trent. Me too.

“Part of Me” is waaaaaaaaaay too long. Tricerahops to the rescue! The song ends with a guitar flourish right out of 80′s Journey. Meaning it ends with a shitty guitar doodle.

9:25: MTV Party to Go – The songs seem to all blend together, as “Time” has started immediately from the Journey-esque shitstorm that ends “Part of Me”. You know, like those old MTV Party mix tapes they used to have? The chorus of “Time” consists of Cornell singing the word “Time” over and over in his Woman-hating Megatron voice and occasionally caterwauling “I wish we could rewind.” I think he means he wishes he could rewind time. I wish I could rewind time too, Chris. I’d go back to 9pm tonight and decide to listen to Middle Cyclone for the gazillionth time instead of taking  on this fool’s errand…. but no. I must not waver. It’s you or me, Chris Cornell/Megatron. And I have good beer on my side.

9:30: Chris Cornell Hates Your Girlfriend – “Nowadays I think like a woman/ I’ve been looking for blood,” Cornell sings on “Sweet Revenge.” Perhaps Audioslave broke up because the progressive chaps who used to be in Rage Against the Fact that We Sound Like the Beastie Boys grew tired of Chris Cornell’s constant misogynist tirades.  Wait. No. Audioslave broke up because they fucking sucked. Anyway… “Sweet Revenge” has a completely Auto-Tuned chorus. It’s as if Cornell and Timbalind set out to make a party album for douchebags who want to throw a theme party where the theme is “Proving the Utter Extent of Our Douchebaggery.” Scream is the Platonic ideal of douchebaggery.

9:36: Not nearly drunk enough – Fuck fuck fuck. I’m only four songs into this motherfucker. I’m listening to a song called “Get Up.” I used to think Chris Cornell had a good voice, but Timbalind apparently doesn’t think so because Cornell doesn’t seem to sing a single note on Scream that isn’t covered in digital jizz. “Get Up” has a guitar part toward the end that is exactly the kind of distorted guitar part you would use if you were an over-rated pop producer who has clearly never heard anyone play a real electric guitar.

“Get Up” has meandered into “Ground Zero.”  “Ground Zero” has less digital bullshit, but there’s still plenty of digital bullshit. This seems to be one of the platitude-filled, trite-ass (trite-cera-tops?) “positive” songs that Cornell has been coughing up lately (think “Be Yourself,” that really shitty single off the last Audiosuck album.  When I was a kid, he sang “I know I’m headin’ for the bottom/ but I’m riding you all the way.” That’s way more compelling than this shit)

9:42 p.m. Oh fuck. A love song – “Never Far Away” is next and the Megatron voice is back singing about how “You are the road I travel/ you were the words I write”. Wait a minute. Five songs ago, this asshole wanted “the girl/ but not what she’s going through.” We’re supposed to believe that this same motherfucker’s soul is saved by his lady love? (Not making this up. He sings, “I don’t have to pray anymore/ because my soul is saved”). The chorus of this song is unintelligible, but seems like it wouldn’t be out of place in a Nickelback song. Hey, Timbalind! You clearly hate music. Why not raise the stakes a little next time out and produce a Nickelback album? Can you make them worse?

Note: I’m gonna cap each part of this review at about 1000 words, so be sure to stay tuned for parts 2 through Whatever.

9:48 p.m. This is good beer – I’m halfway through. This song is called “Take Me Alive.” In the immortal words of J. Alfred Prufrock, I’d prefer not to (this beer is quite effective; not only is it delicious, but I’m buzzed enough that I can’t remember if the Eliot poem to which I’m referring is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or not. I may have added the “J.”)

No Life On the Horizon

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2′s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2′s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80′s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.