Sleater-Kinney’s Finest Hour

Sleater-Kinney disbanded or went on indefinite hiatus or whatever in 2006, after releasing and touring in support of The Woods, one of the most ferocious and indisputably badass rock albums of the last fifteen (or more) years.  Though it should go without saying that they were one of the greatest bands to emerge from the fertile northwest music scene, they never got the press that your Nirvanas, Pearl Jams, and Soundgardens did, despite the fact that these three women could hold their own with any of those bands any day of the week. In fact, in an album-to-album comparison, I would have to say that Sleater-Kinney has wound up my favorite. Combining razor sharp guitars and vocals from Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker with the thunderous (and criminally underrated) drumming of Janet Weiss, Sleater-Kinneys music transcended both the Riot Grrrl and grunge movements while holding onto the best bits of both. In case you’ve never listened to them or if you’ve only heard The Woods, I have compiled a list of their best hour of music below. Turn it up!

Early Sleater-Kinney stuff is pretty raw, but well worth hearing, especially “A Real Man” from their self-titled debut. When Corin Tucker screams, “I don’t wanna join your club,” you can hear Kathleen Hanna’s influence loud and clear. Tucker’s copped to imitating Hanna when she started singing and I’m not gonna fault her for it; as vocal inspiration goes, Kathleen Hanna is a pretty badass model. The song itself is pretty straightforward and aggressive mockery of dudes who think their cocks are something that all women (or any women) covet.

As Sleater-Kinney continued to grow as a band, I think their greatest asset became the interplay of Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s voices. “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” is a fine early example of that, with Brownstein singing the verses (and supplying yips and yells during the chorus) and Tucker howling the chorus about a couple of male rock heroes – the titular Mr. Ramone and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” is also indicative of a tremendous pop sensibility that informed a lot of Sleater-Kinney’s best music.

As Zac mentioned the other day, the question of what it’s like to be a girl in a band is fucking stupid, but it’s one that’s dogged every great female band ever, along with tired comparisons to male rock stars. Sleater-Kinney addressed this on “Male Model,” from 2000′s All Hands On the Bad One. “Male Model” isn’t just an encouraging anthem for aspiring girl rockers everywhere, it’s a warning shot to the cavemen who think that men have some larger claim to rock ‘n’ roll than women do.

“You’re No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun” treads similar thematic ground to “Male Model” (“the best man/ won’t hang out with the girl band!”) but is a little more of a straightforward pop song, with one of the best melodies Sleater-Kinney ever played. Prepare to have this song stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

“One More Hour” is one of my favorite Sleater-Kinney songs and – according to the not always reliable internet – the Dig Me Out tune is about the dissolution of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s romance. Whether or not that’s true is immaterial to the fact that the song is a devastating break-up song; the way Tucker sings, “Oh, you’ve got the darkest eyes” makes me really happy that I don’t need breakup songs anymore.

If I were feeling lazy, I could’ve made this whole post about The Woods, which is my favorite Sleater-Kinney album (I love them all a great deal, but The Woods… I mean… just listen to it). It’s hard for me to pick a favorite song from that record, but for today, let’s go with “Entertain”, which I think is probably Carrie Brownstein’s greatest vocal performance. The song opens with Weiss pounding the shit out of her drums and then Brownstein starts to snarl and when she asks, “Where’s the ‘fuck you’?,” she’s actually delivering a healthy dose of it herself. When you add in Tucker’s vocals on the chorus, you’ve got one of the best rock songs recorded by anyone in the last… oh fuck it, whenever.

Speaking of awesome rock songs, “Words and Guitar” is certainly one of those. I know I’ve mentioned this before but this song embodies the primal spirit of rock ‘n’ roll and makes me want to rock out until I break myself.

Sticking with Dig Me Out (which is probably destined for a Great Fucking Albums write-up soon) for a second, “Little Babies” is a mid-1990s update to the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper” and, like “Words and Guitar,” this song makes me involuntarily jump around and grin like a fool, even if I’m seat-belted into my car on the freeway.

What’s not to love about “Combat Rock” from One Beat? It’s named after a Clash album and it’s a pretty vigorous assault not just on the invasion of Iraq itself but also the national mindset that allowed it to happen – “If you hate this time/ Remember we are the time!”

“The Size of Our Love” is a ballad about death but it’s delivered in a lovely package of late ’90s Northwest grunge. The song features a great Brownstein vocal and it is particularly striking for anyone who’s ever spent time in a hospital waiting for a loved one to live or die. Every time I hear this song, I get a little fucked up by the memories it brings to mind but I think the best songs should do that to you.

One Beat’s closer, “Sympathy” is a bluesy number that is also about death and how its imminence (in this case, I think Corin Tucker is singing about a child dying) can force even the most irreligious of us to fold our hands. The vocals on this track are pure blues in a way that probably every white person who sings the blues wants to sing them.

Who wants to keep talking about death? Check out “Jumpers” from The Woods. It follows the last day or so of a person who has decided to take a leap off of the Golden Gate Bridge (there was a documentary about this phenomenon about a year ago, but I don’t have the heart to watch it). I just typed that sentence and got so depressed that I had to stop and figure out how to proceed. Here’s the thing: “Jumpers” does – I think – a pretty good job of getting inside the head of someone who decides to end their life and Brownstein & Tucker sing it like they really want to understand but just can’t. That sounds about right to me.

How do we cheer up now? How about another track from The Woods? It’s a love song. Well, okay, it’s more like a song about ferocious sex. Of course I’m talking about “Let’s Call It Love,” the eleven-minute epic in which Corin Tucker threatens, “You better be my bloody match.” The guitar on this song alone proves that Carrie Brownstein belongs in any serious discussion of badass current guitar players – her six-string snarls, smolders, and soars over the back end of the tune and Weiss’s drums throb and pound every measure into submission.

Having immersed myself in Sleater-Kinney’s entire canon the last few days, I have discovered, to my undying delight, that they were frequently preoccupied with fire. On Call the Doctor‘s “Stay Where You Are,” Carrie Brownstein sings about a girl who is “bad because she wants to set things on fire” and the fire on “Burn, Don’t Freeze!” from The Hot Rock was lit by an amorous young woman who admits that “arson is no way to make a love burn brighter.” Both tunes illustrate the wisdom of having to vocalists as talented as Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker in your band.

I’m only going to include one more song from The Woods and it’s another great Brownstein vocal performance: “Modern Girl,” if I had my way, would be the theme song for Keeping Up with the Kardashians (did I misspell their last name? I don’t care). Just listen to it, you’ll get where I’m going with this.

“Let’s Call It Love” probably has my favorite guitar part of any Sleater-Kinney tune, but I love the sound of Tucker and Brownstein’s guitars on the (sadly) Weiss-less “Buy Her Candy,” a pretty little ditty about a heroine of whom “no can say, ‘she is mine.’”

If I was compiling more than an hour’s worth of music, I could probably list a ton more Sleater-Kinney songs that are worth your time but I’m gonna wrap things up with “One Song for You” from The Hot Rock. I like the angular guitar lines and the vocal melodies and – bonus – there’s yet another mention of fire.

So last week Zac told you to get your teenage dude friends into Le Tigre’s debut as a gateway drug to bands like Sleater-Kinney and here I am giving you a perfect hour of Sleater-Kinney songs to help them on their way. What can I say? We here at Bollocks! know about awesome fucking music and we’re all too happy to tell you about it. You’re welcome.

The Lazy Friday Mix: Girls to the Front

Since this summer marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Riot Grrrl movement, we here at Bollocks!  want to spend the next few months (and maybe beyond) celebrating awesome women in music. We’ll feature profiles of some of the coolest women we can think of in the history of music (prepare for a lengthy post on why you owe it to yourself to listen to Nina Simone) as well as several Great Fucking Albums entries featuring female performers. But to kick off our Summer of Badass Women, I thought I’d prepare a nice Lazy Friday Mix of great songs by some of my favorite women in music.

Behold:

Since summer is basically upon us (it comes around the end of May here in Los Angeles), it’s time for me to clean out the two massive CD wallets that live in my car and stock them with excellent driving music. One of my favorite driving albums of the last few years is Fantasies by Metric, a massive pop record that’s stuffed to the gills with catchy melodies and huge choruses. One of the best choruses on the album comes on “Sick Muse,” a song that cruises into its chorus like a little kid flying down a water slide. Fantasies will sustain me for another summer, but I think the world deserves more awesome Metric music soon.

Speaking of perfect pop songs: It seems like just yesterday that I was extolling the virtues of Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes album. It’s been stuck on repeat in my car (I replaced it last night with the new Steve Earle record; I’ll get back to  you on how that’s going next week) and one of my current favorite songs on it is “Love Out of Lust.” It starts out pretty sparse, with Li singing over softly beaten drums but then the chorus hits and you’re suddenly awash in shimmering cymbals and beautiful harmonies. Also: “Dance while you can” seems like pretty goddamn good advice to me.

This post’s subtitle, “Girls to the Front,” is taken from an awesome book by Sara Marcus, so I’m bound to include some Riot Grrrl music in this mix. I sought out as much of it as I could find and/or afford while I was reading Girls to the Front, and that allowed me to amass most of Bikini Kill’s recorded output. “Rebel Girl” is their best known song, but that’s not the one I wanna talk about right now. No, I think you need to hear “Double Dare Ya” on this lazy Friday. Why? It’s the song that started it all, and it starts off The CD Version of the First Two Records with Kathleen Hanna shouting, “We’re Bikini Kill and we want revolution Grrrl-Style now!.” At this point in their career, Bikini Kill’s passion far exceeded their musical style, but “Double Dare Ya” exemplifies in just under three minutes pretty much everything the band was about: “Dare ya to do what you want/ Dare ya to be who you will.” It might sound hard to some ears, but it sounds like liberation to mine.

I didn’t know before I read Marcus’s book that Kim Gordon was something of a goddess to young Riot Grrrls back in the 1990s, but it wasn’t exactly a surprising revelation. Most of my favorite Sonic Youth songs feature Kim Gordon on vocals, and my favorite performance of hers is “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream,” a little ditty in which Gordon spends five minutes mocking Mariah Carey. The way Gordon growls, “How was your date with Eminem?” makes me maybe a little too happy. She sounds like a lioness who is laughing at a fallen gazelle as she devours it and she deserves a fucking medal for this song.

I mentioned earlier that you should prepare yourself for a lecture on Nina Simone this summer and you should. But for now, you should just check out her version of “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” a song that Led Zeppelin most certainly did not write. Simone’s version is simple: her voice and a piano. But what the fuck else do you need?

One of the things my wife has learned about me in the last few years (we’ve been together seven years and married for not quite one yet) is that I like depressing movies. Or movies that she finds depressing, anyway. I also like certain kinds of depressing music and those two things came together beautifully when Magnolia was released. It featured a ton of Aimee Mann songs, the most gorgeous of which was “Wise Up.” Not only is the chorus devastating, but the song ends with the following advice: “So just/ give up.” I don’t always think of this song when I’m asked about my very favorite songs, but I would like to state for the record today that “Wise Up” is definitely one of my very favorite songs. Ever.

Since we’re on the topic of depressing songs, I think it’s fitting to talk about The Mendoza Line, a now-defunct band that featured Shannon McArdle on vocals. Their final album, 30 Year Low, opened with the über-depressing “Since I Came,” a song about a widow (her husband died under shady circumstances) who laments, “I haven’t had a name/ since I came.” It’s a wonderfully haunted tune and one of many reasons I miss this totally underrated band (they’ll not be getting back together any time soon, however: McArdle and bandmate Tim Bracy divorced in 2007, leading her to make one great solo album that remains un-followed up as I write this).

If you’re making a mix of awesome female performers and you don’t include Neko Case, you are just a damn fool. Pretty much all of her songs are awesome, but I am at this moment particularly enamored of “Porchlight” from her Furnace Room Lullaby album. It’s a countryish number, like many of her tunes, but it shows her astounding vocal range and her ability to break your fucking heart in about five words: “I long to be forgiven.” If you only learn one thing in all your time reading Bollocks!, it had damn well better be that Neko Case is a fucking goddess.

There were two massive particles of bullshit information that were conventional wisdom when I was in college. They were basically this: 1) If you are a dude and you take a Women’s Studies class, you will have your balls removed and 2) pretty much only lesbians and hippie chicks listen to Ani DiFranco (this was often appended with the assertion that DiFranco hates men, which must come as a shock to the father of her child). I took a Women’s Studies class and it was awesome; I was even asked to come back and T.A. it the next term, but my schedule didn’t permit me to do so. I also listened to Ani DiFranco in college. A lot. Two things you need to know about Ani DiFranco: she’s a vastly underrated guitar player (probably the most interesting acoustic guitarist working right now) and she’s a great singer. One of my favorite songs of hers is “Falling Is Like This,” which is kind of a love song that questions what people are talking about when they talk about love (“love is like falling/ and falling is like this”). It has one of her best melodies ever and doesn’t mention hating dudes even once (I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s funny sad how frequently dudes become defensive when they talk about women that they think hate dudes without ever considering the fact that there are dudes who deserve hating. I mean, who loves Pol Pot?).

Okay, this is a lazy Friday mix and I’m officially too lazy to write anymore right now. So remember, kids: Neko Case is a goddess and it’s totally okay to hate Pol Pot.

Great Fucking Albums #19: The Woods

You don’t have to take a very broad survey of rock ‘n’ roll history to get the creeping feeling that rock ‘n’ roll has been a bit of a boys’ club for much of its existence. Elvis Presley was crowned the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll (black people apparently weren’t allowed to vote in the South at that time. If they were, I’m pretty sure Leadbelly or Robert Johnson would’ve taken the crown) but there wasn’t ever a queen (Presley dated the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson. Before you ask, no, Prince was not their son. As far as I know. I’ve never really done well with monarchies). There have been some amazing female rockers, but many of them don’t get the credit they deserve. Last I checked, no one’s touting Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, or the Slits as Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame candidates (I mean yeah, Patti Smith got in, which proves that there’s hope; the right people win sometimes, albeit rarely). Even the Seattle scene of the 1990s, which was supposed to represent some Bold New Direction for rock, didn’t really elevate a lot of women when it was busy making Eddie Vedder a star and pushing the once-great Chris Cornell toward the increasingly steep downward spiral his career has taken of late (although, to Vedder and Pearl Jam’s credit, they did take Sleater-Kinney on tour a few times in the 90s, which is pretty badass).

The early 2000s have been a little better and, as a creature of the internet, I’d like to think the internet has been helpful in that. Bands like the Screaming Females and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are making some of the best rock music out there and both bands are fronted by exceedingly powerful women. But I choose to believe that a more powerful force has shaken the foundation of the rock ‘n’ roll boys’ club, and that force came back in 2005 in the form of a ten-song assault called The Woods by Sleater-Kinney.

The Woods ended up being Sleater-Kinney’s last album (technically, the band is on “indefinite hiatus,” which sounds far too much like “broken up” for my liking) and I’m of two minds about that fact. On the one hand, it sucks that they stopped making music together after recording the best rock album of 2005 (by a long shot), but on the other hand, they went out at the height of their powers. The Woods is intense, loud, obnoxious, alienating, and probably among the top five rock albums of the last ten years. And I know it’s meaningless to call an album one of the best rock albums of the 21st century when it’s only 2011, but your great grandkids, if they have any fucking taste, will agree with me on that point in 2099 (you and I probably won’t be around then, so you won’t have to hear me say, “I told you so.” Unless there really is some kind of afterlife, in which case I will make a point of finding you on January 1st, 2099 and saying, “See? I told you so. Your great grandkids are smarter than you”).

One of the most fantastic things about all the noise on The Woods is that it was made by three women: Janet Weiss, Carrie Brownstein, and Corin Tucker made enough racket for five people and packed it like gunpowder into every measure of every song. Brownstein plays the guitar like she’s trying to fight her way through a sea of zombie College Republicans and Corin Tucker’s voice… well, let’s not kid ourselves. From “The Fox” right through “Night Light”, Tucker’s voice is cranked up to 11. I never saw a review of The Woods that said, “Corin Tucker’s vocal performance is fucking epic,” but that’s what it is (Brownstein’s vocal contributions are also excellent, but Tucker’s voice on this album is like the recurring thunder crack in Finnegans Wake – it is disruptive in the very best way). And then we have Janet Weiss, beating the living piss out of the drums on every track. Weiss is criminally underrated as a drummer, but she makes a very compelling case for herself on The Woods. Though “loud” is a good one word description of the album, it has a lot of dynamic playing on it – again, Sleater-Kinney were at their best here and their best could kick the shit out of pretty much every dude-fronted rock band you hear on the radio today.

Which brings me to “Entertain”, a zeitgeist-throttling anthem (well, it is to me) which asks the question I’m always asking about music these days: “Where’s the ‘fuck you’?” Apparently, Sleater-Kinney looked around when they were writing The Woods and saw a lot of magazine-cover posing and not much meaning. So they wrote a five-minute ditty that calls out pretty much everyone who makes or listens to music and demands better of them. The song articulates, both lyrically (“Nostalgia, you’re using it like a whore” and “make it sweet and syrupy with rhyme”) and with the primal awesomeness of its music, what could basically be a mission statement for Bollocks!. You are free to consider “Entertain” the unofficial theme song of this blog if you wish.

As big a part as Sleater-Kinney played in the northwest riot grrrl scene (see, this is why I love the northwest and long to return to its damp, evergreen bosom. I live in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Where Valley girls come from. Fucking riot grrrls, who do not have the time to fool around with trifling things like vowels, come from the northwest), the ultimate triumph of The Woods is not just that it stands as an excellent artifact of that movement (both Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were in other bands within that scene before starting Sleater-Kinney together) but that it transcends the niche from which it emerged. Like London Calling some twenty-odd years before it, The Woods dabbles in punk, pop, and rock (“Let’s Call It Love” is a punk song that is either fucking a Jimi Hendrix song or fighting it. Maybe a little of both) and is really best described as a “Super Kickass Record” (and if you’ve read Bollocks! at all, you know I don’t hand out favorable comparisons to London Calling lightly). If your local music store had a “Super Kickass” section, I should think it perfectly reasonable for that section to prominently display The Woods (and, not to sell others short, pretty much every record on my list of Great Fucking Albums) on a stand with a sign that says, “If you don’t own this album, your life rocks significantly less than it could.”

Annie-itis and Some Thoughts on Year-End Lists

Check it out: my numbers have gone up. I started out averaging about 6-8 readers a day and somehow, I’ve managed to get up above 20 readers a day in the last couple of months. That’s not shit for other blogs, I’m sure, but it fills me with the warm-and-fuzzies. Much gratitude to the folks who’ve found something fun to read here over the last year and a half. And I want to ask a question of those readers who have been around for a while (new readers can attempt to answer this question too, but it helps if you’ve read several posts). What are the odds, based on your reading, that I will like an album laden with synthesizers, programmed drums, and chirping girlie vocals? I think we can all agree that the odds are extremely long that I will enjoy such an album. Extremely.

The thing is: I think I have some sort of infection (let’s call it Annie-itis), and I think it was caused by Annie’s Don’t Stop album. It has wormed its way into my brain and is stuffing my synaptic clefts with sugary pop songs – if their is a musical equivalent to diabetes, I’m going to get it for sure. And I should fucking hate this album. As an experiment, my second time through, I tried to hate this album. I can’t do it.

Maybe I shouldn’t hate this album. I’ve never disliked good pop (like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson’s Thriller album – astute listeners have been pretending that Jackson died after making that album and experienced no great shock this summer. It’s been a real time saver for me), but I do hate bad pop and our culture is inundated with really awful pop. Now, a lot of pop (even some of the good stuff) can still be lyrically dumb but it usually features a melodic hook that pulls your brain out through your nose and replaces it with sugar, sunshine, and orgasms. These days, a lot of pop is reliant on pre-progammed/sequenced music and beats. Of course, there are exceptions, like the New Pornographers who still play pop with actual instruments. But because the technology is so readily available, it’s now easier than ever before to make a really shitty pop record (“buy yourself a sequencer/ and let the games begin,” Annie sings on “I Don’t Like Your Band”).

My first trip through Don’t Stop was a sugary haze; I rode the first six tracks all the way to Heaven. To quote the late Captain Murphy, it was “like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain.” Subsequent trips through the album have had similar, if diminishing, results. Don’t Stop definitely falls off toward the end, but it’s still better than, say, anything Chris Brown can muster. Throughout, Annie displays an uncanny ability to knock out a memorable, danceable pop tune. Even her bad songs (and there are a few here – “The Breakfast Song” is the most offensive to my ears) are still catchy, and that gives the listener some encouragement to wade through them to get to the good stuff. Because Annie’s good stuff is fucking perfect, as pop music goes. “Hey, Annie” opens the album gloriously and the first half of the album is amazing and unrelenting, right up to “Marie Cherie,” which begins its slow decline. The album never really makes it to Awfultown, but it’s definitely loitering around Mediocreville by the time “Heaven and Hell” closes things up.

And maybe what really hamstrings Don’t Stop is the fact that Annie’s good stuff is so good. Songs like “The Breakfast Song” and “Heaven and Hell” sound all the worse for sitting next to songs like the title track and “I Don’t Like Your Band” (which may be the year’s most perfect pop tune).” I’m not suggesting Annie should repeat herself (a trap many pop artists fall into), but she’s definitely at her best when the tempo is up and she’s being playful.

Apparently, a copy of Don’t Stop leaked last year – when the album was originally supposed to be released – that had a different track listing. This blog offers a correction to the final version of Don’t Stop and it suggests to me that the dropped tracks might indeed be worth checking out (which would mean obtaining them through less-than-legal means. Bollocks! doesn’t officially encourage stealing from anyone except for EMI. Fuck those clowns), especially if they are a little less of a slog than “Marie Cherie”, which is (unsurprisingly) the longest track on the album. Other down-tempo tunes on Don’t Stop work just fine (“Take You Home,” which immediately follows “Marie Cherie,” is excellent. Best line: “I don’t love you/ I want to take you home”), so it’s not that Annie can’t pull off slower tunes. Even “When the Night” has its merits, except that it’s followed by “Heaven and Hell,” which is an aimless and unfitting closer to such a sumptuous pop feast.

Overall, though, Don’t Stop is still a must-have for fans of dancey pop music. Even without the dropped tracks, you can improve the disc by skipping “Marie Cherie” and stopping the album after “When the Night”, leaving you with ten songs that range from good to superb.

Well, kids, I’m off to Seattle tomorrow morning to celebrate the birth of my good buddy Jesus with my future in-laws. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be updating much between now and the 28th, but I’ll probably cough up some year-end listy goodness upon my return, for those who are interested in that sort of thing. Year-end lists are always arbitrary so I’ll be calling my list(s) “my favorite” whatevers of 2009. I don’t presume (despite accusations to the contrary) to know the absolute best of anything. Music is a subjective art form so trying to pretend there are objective criteria for ranking albums is a fool’s errand. There are lots of albums from this year that I have listened to and not reviewed (early trips through Lucero’s 1372 Overton Park are proving fruitful), but I’ll get to ‘em eventually, I promise. If you like to list stuff, feel free to post a comment with your favorite few albums from the year (I’m probably going to do 13 albums because 13 is a nice arbitrary number and I feel it suits the arbitrary nature of the exercise). Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they’re merry/joyous/alcohol-fueled.  So Bollocks! to all and to all, a good drink.

Paint the Black Hole Blacker

Dropping out of Boston’s Berklee School of Music is sort of a badge of honor. It’s almost as if making it through the program is a signifier of some disturbing lack of music business acumen. John Mayer is probably Berklee’s most famous dropout to date (should’ve stuck around for songwriting classes, Mr. Mayer. You need ‘em), but he is also but one in a line that extends as far back in time as the school itself. My current favorite Berklee dropout, however, is Annie Clark, who left Berklee to join The Polyphonic Spree and then play in Sufjan Stevens’s live band and then began choosing her own musical adventure as  St. Vincent.

The Polyphonic Spree? Sufjan Stevens? Oh boy. I’m gonna hate St. Vincent. Right?

I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of judging a book by its cover here on Bollocks! and that’s because I don’t. And the same goes with people’s musical associations, for the most part. If you hang out with my various musical nemeses, I might tread cautiously around you, but I probably will still give you a listen (in fact, many of my favorite acts kick it with Sufjan, but that’s because everyone loves him but me) This is, hopefully, one of the key differences between being a snob and being an asshole.

And, one of the key differences between Annie Clark and Sufjan Stevens is that she isn’t trying to impress us with her compositional skill (I can here some besweatered Pitchforker out there fortifying themselves with a quick hit of their inhaler and preparing to tell me that Sufjan is so not trying to do that, but when one of your “songs” is a thirty second horn part, you’re either 1) showing people you know how to write horn parts, 2) an asshole, or 3) some combination of 1 and 2). Come to think of it, that’s one of the key differences between Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens… which must mean (follow me on this circle of logic, won’t you?) that St. Vincent and Andrew Bird should tour together so nerds like me can go and nerd out.

St. Annie Clark Vincent is a composer worthy of comparison to Mr. Bird, but her compositions, for those of you who find Bird a little inaccessible, are much poppier. This is not a bad thing, just a difference. Actor is a breezy listen where Noble Beast takes some time and a little more willingness to follow Andrew Bird wherever the songs take him. Clark tends to hover round the three minute mark (the uber-catchy title track is less than three minutes) for the most part, infusing each song with layers of instruments and vocal parts that all dance in and out of the outstanding melodies.

Opener “The Strangers” is one of the best examples of what I’m talking about. It starts out with strings and a soft beat, followed by Clark’s voice in both the fore and background (catchiest background vocal of the year: “paint the black hole blacker”) and the song builds to fuzzy guitar spazz outs and drums straight out of a Delgados album. And the whole thing is barely four minutes (one of only four songs on Actor that eclipses the four minute mark, and it doesn’t feel that long to me).

In fact, on melodies alone, perhaps Camera Obscura would be a fitting tour partner for St. Vincent so that those of us who like melody (and realize that Phoenix mostly sucks at it) a whole bunch can be satiated. I realize that this review is becoming one long solicitation for St. Vincent to pair up with some of my other favorite acts and come to Los Angeles, but so what? The odds are more favorable that someone will actually participate in my National ticket contest than they are that Annie Clark will read this post and say, “Shit, I gotta call Andrew Bird and get us both to L.A. forthwith!”

Actor, like some Andrew Bird albums (I thought this was true of Noble Beast, but it’s actually only really true of Armchair Apocrypha), can tend to sag a little after the first six tracks, but the more I listen to it, the more I find that it’s a product of stacked sequencing. Clark put the six cathiest tracks on the album right up front and the other five are good, they just can’t match the fire of their predecessors. On the other hand, it does give Actor a sort of made-for-vinyl feel, with Side A ending on “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood.” If anyone out there has this album on vinyl, drop me a line and let me know where the split is – it’d be a damn shame if it was anywhere else.

I Like Fever Ray. I Don’t Like Fever Ray.

The internet is a harsh mistress. She’s a place where nerds have an inherent upper hand over the masses, often displayed through sophomoric disses spelled with some kind of jumble of letters and numbers (someone told me once that this is called “Leet” or “L33t” or some fucking thing. I don’t care if I misnamed it here. Do you hear me, nerds? I…don’t…care.) . Of course, I myself am a nerd of at least one or two varieties, which brings me to my next point – the internet is a breeding ground for several different types of nerd, some of whom fancy themselves less nerdy than the rest. This can be particularly true of music critics and other cultural cognoscenti, who think that because they’ve never felt the awesome power of confirming a critical hit with a twenty-sided die they’re some how better than the rest of us. Well, they’re not. (And don’t knock D&D until you’ve tried it – you can be just as stuck in the basement sans girlfriend with dice and dry-erase dungeon maps as you can with Fassbinder and Duras films or My Bloody Valentine records.  In fact, I don’t want to make any generalizations here but it’s a scientific fact that people who listen to My Bloody Valentine never ever get laid. Ever)

I bring this up because there is a tendency among internet nerds to get a little smug; we may, on occasion, try to make you feel stupid for not liking the things we like. And then we’ll be mad if too many people start to like the things we like. Readers of Pitchfork.com know what I’m getting at here. They seem to like a band until said band reaches a wider audience (admit it, P-forkers: you don’t like it when fratties listen to the same shit you do) at which point the collective Pitchfork nose is turned up, emitting a tiny snort of disregard for the band’s new work (am I referring to Evil Urges? Yeah, probably), and the review will accuse them of 1) trying to reach the Starbucks crowd (as if nobody at Pitchfork has ever tasted a marble mocha macchiato before) and/or 2) trafficking in “dad rock” or some other perjorative term aimed at older people, teenagers, or non-pitchforkers. Then they’ll go to someplace (say, San Diego) and dig up some cadre of unlistenable douchebags with too many pedals and a laptop (say, Wavves) who they’ll then trumpet as orgasmically awesome. It’s almost like some perverse defense mechanism where the sniveling indie kids get mad when someone else starts to dig the same stuff they do so they either denounce it entirely or snatch it back with a Golemesque, “you cannot has!” For the record, I’m not accusing Pitchfork of not really liking the things they like. I’m just saying they can be smug twats sometimes, like when Ian Cohen (perhaps their biggest perpetrator of smug douchebaggery) suggested that the reason lots of dudes took in Ida Maria’s set at Coachella was because she nearly came out of her dress at one point and sang a song called “I Like You So Much Better when You’re Naked”. For Mr. Cohen, apparently, it is impossible that the men at Coachella might genuinely have liked Ida Maria’s music (that song is ridiculously catchy); no, for Cohen, we were all their to get boners and nothing more. To sum up, as much as is possible (it’s impossible), the Internet breeds self-anointed tastemakers, anonymous name-callers, and an entire ocean of verbally retarded haters. Also porn.

Which brings me (well, not really, but what the hell? We’re almost five hundred words in here and we’ve gotta talk about Fever Ray sooner or later) to Fever Ray, the solo album from The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson. I never listened to The Knife, in part (I admit) because the critical jizz heaped upon them scared me right off of ‘em. Fever Ray, Andersson’s sort of eponymous album, has, if nothing else, convinced me to give The Knife a try.

Fever Ray, if you didn’t guess it by the long preamble, got a lot of positive press (from Pitchfork and others) and, in an effort to overcome my instant skepticism of high critical praise, I decided to pick up Fever Ray and see what all the fuss was all about. And, while I don’t agree with all the kudos lavished upon this album, I can definitely see the point.

A funny thing happened to me today as I prepared to write this review. I’ve had Fever Ray for months and I’ve listened to it all the way through about five times and I was all set to sit down here and shrug my shoulders and say that Fever Ray is no big deal, no need to get excited, et cetera. So then I put the album on, as is my wont when writing about and album. “If I Had a Heart” still doesn’t impress me, but “Dry and Dusty” still does. A lot. I know I’m not going to listen to this album again after this review, but I also know that there are things that you could like about it, if you liked that sort of thing. So Fever Ray is a not-bad album that I don’t like. It may even be a good album that I don’t like. If you like Portishead, but wish they’d slow down and fuck with their voices more, Fever Ray is probably your bag.

Andersson’s voice is certainly versatile, I think. It’s often buried under all manner of digital manipulation, but it’s a lot more compelling than listening to Kanye West teabag Autotune for an hour. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of electronic music (I listen to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine with some regularity, Portishead here and there, and LCD Soundsystem a lot. This is the problem – I compare all electronic music to LCD Soundsystem and James Murphy has so thoroughly bested the competition that he is, for me, to his respective genre what Guinness is to other beers. I imbibe and enjoy other beers, but Guinness is a thing unto itself. It’s practically an event.), so maybe I just don’t get Fever Ray.

But that’s kinda bullshit, isn’t it? I mean, if you really don’t get some piece of music and you’re willing to cop to it, hey, good for you, but I’m not jumping on that bandwagon. Pitchfork used the phrase “committed listens” to suggest that Fever Ray will hit your sonic g-spot if only you want it bad enough. Well, a shit sandwich is still going to taste like shit, no matter how many times you eat it. Committing to it isn’t gonna change a damn thing. I try, and hopefully I succeed, to suggest that, when I’ve enjoyed an album after a few rotations that it’s just a personal thing. I’m not saying you should work extra hard to like an album at all. Certain people are willing to work harder to enjoy an album than others and you’re not better or worse for it. I took the time to like Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (okay, it wasn’t that hard – that album is awesome) but I don’t expect someone else to sit through it, say, seven times and argue with themselves until they’re convinced it’s good. I’ve worked as hard as I’m gonna to like Fever Ray and I still kinda like it and kinda don’t. It’s not that I don’t understand it – it causes me no puzzlement whatsoever. It’s simply that I like some of it and don’t like some of it, probably most of it. Anytime I’m trying to write a review of an album and I’m not intersested enough to talk about the album or the artist or really anything at all, that’s a bad sign.

On balance, I sense that people who really like mirky electronic music will like Fever Ray and think I’m ludicrous for not heaping more praise upon it, but I’ll think they’re all nuts for not like Trout Mask Replica and we’ll call it day. Unless they do like Trout Mask Replica, in which case, maybe I really do have a problem committing to Fever Ray. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go renew my vows to The Hold Steady.

The Little Honey EP

It’s interesting to note that Elvis Costello has now done two duets with Lucinda Williams (first on “There’s a Story” on his Delivery Man album and now “Jailhouse Tears” on her new Little Honey album) because the two artists have exhibited similar behavioral patterns over the last few years – namely, releasing some of their best and worst work, sometimes within a single album.

Anyone who heard West, Lucinda’s last album, was wise to just throw it out after the cringe-inducing “Come On” (the song is a dis to some ex-lover and rather than simply stating, “You couldn’t even make me come”, Ms. Williams tried to make it all cute and punny. Given the strength of her voice and songwriting, it should’ve been easy for her to be so boldly graphic, but what can you do? The song took the whole album down with it) and then you were probably stuffed up with trepidation upon the release of Little Honey. Well, like Elvis Costello’s most recent offering (Momofuku), Little Honey has both reasons to be encouraged and reasons to shake your head in disapproval.

The album starts off nothing short of awesome. The first 8 tracks of the album are really great, some of Williams’ finest work to date, not overwrought or given to her any of her worst excesses. And that’s when you get to “Knowing,” which starts off a long, steep plummet into the meandering, overlong stuff that sunk West. Literally every song after “Jailhouse Tears” is a stinker, especially the ill-advised (and slowed down! Why the fuck would you slow down a cover of an AC/DC song?) finale: a cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top”.

But there’s kind of encouraging news here: you can just pretend the album ends with “Jailhouse Tears,” making Little Honey an 8-song EP instead of the bloated 13 track half-monstrosity it is.  In which case, Little Honey is transformed from a mostly good album brought down to mediocrity by its last 5 songs into one of the best EPs of the year and a real return to form for Lucinda Williams. Well done!

“I’ve found the love I’ve been looking for,” she sings on EP-opener “Real Love.” And she found it “standing behind an electric guitar.” Now, anyone who has ever held an electric guitar and played one (assuming it was of any quality at all) knows exactly what she’s talking about here.  “Real Love” incorporates Lucinda Williams’ tendency to see no line separating country and rock, which is why her best stuff sounds a lot like early Rolling Stones stuff.  And, much like the Stones themselves, Williams would perhaps be best served by making sure she starts off every day listening to Exile on Main Street and then saying, “Oh yeah. I should sound like that.”

You can’t blame Lucinda Williams (or Elvis Costello for that matter) for wanting to expand her sound and try new sonic experiments but you also shouldn’t have to pay for the experiments when they go horribly awry. Perhaps the answer is for Williams and Costello to team up and just record an album together. They could check and balance one another into producing something of enormous quality. Or… they could enable each other into producing one of the most unlistenable pieces of shit in modern history (second only to whatever the Dandy Warhols do next).

It’s always more frustrating when an artist who has blown your fucking mind in the past produces embarrassingly crappy work. For example, when Fall Out Boy produces a shitty album (and they’ve produced nothing but shitty albums), I don’t sweat it. That’s a band that has never done anything but making infuriatingly awful music. But Lucinda Williams made Carwheels on a Gravel Road. That’s one of the best albums of the last twenty years. So when she makes stuff like West and the back end of Little Honey, it’s way worse than knowing that Fall Out Boy is going to release another album soon. I expect them to suck and I expect Lucinda Williams to rock. She still mostly does, especially if you ignore everything on Little Honey after “Jailhouse Tears.”

All Girl Action

Welcome, 6 to 9 (on average!) readers! And for those of you who found this post whilst searching for porn, I welcome you as well. We’ll just pretend you planned to come here today.

I listen to a shitload of music, most of which (but not all) I write about on this site. I try to write about music that interests me or that I know I will love or that I have a perverse (and sometimes masochistic) need to listen to, even if I know it will suck. Looking back on 2008 so far, I see that I haven’t reviewed too many albums by female artists. This is not because I’m a raging (or even “casual”) misogynist; I’m a staff of one man and an Imaginary Secretary, which means I find out about albums, try to hear them, forget about them, realize I haven’t written about them, and then write about them. Maybe. Every year there are many high profile releases by women that are utter rubbish but nonetheless get tons of attention. I’m talking about your Beyonces and Kelly Clarksons here – I’m not going to review those albums on this site because I know I will hate them and I’ve already committed to publicly despising Metallica. Taking on more outlets for my rage would be superfluous at this point.

Having said that, there are some great releases by women floating around right now: Dressy Bessy just put out a new album, Shannon McArdle (from the Mendoza Line) put out a great solo album, Ani DiFranco released one this week, and I’m pretty excited to hear the Leila Arab album, even though the style is not typically my cup of tea.

Usually, when Dressy Bessy puts out an album, I get it. I own three of their records and won’t apologize for liking them. But this year, something different(ish) caught my eye: Portland’s All Girl Summer Fun Band (featuring Kathy Foster from the Thermals!). Their new album is called Looking Into It, and it’s worth looking into.

Upon first listen, Looking Into It sounds a lot like anything Dressy Bessy has done (if you’re only gonna hear one DB album, it should be their self-titled album from 2003), but the trio of Jen Sbragia (bass), the afore-mentioned Foster (drums) and Kim Baxter (guitars – all three do vocals) have a more varied pop sensibility than Tammy Ealom and company. Looking Into It roars to life with “Not the One for Me,” and the deliciously ironic “Something New” (“Everyone wants something new/ what’s familiar just won’t do”  is a great line for an album as old-school as this),  and those two tracks don’t do much to dispel the myth that AGSFB is interchangeable with Dressy Bessy.

As with Dressy Bessy, All Girl Summer Fun Band’s fuzzy guitars and bashing drums are a blast on their own.  But in the middle of Looking Into It, AGSFB packs some surprises, adding some texture that is not usually present (nor frequently missed) on Dressy Bessy albums. There is one of the best pop songs I’ve hears all year smack dab in the middle of Looking Into It: “The Only Ones,” with its infectious chorus of “We are the only ones alive.” The guitars are cleaner, the cymbals crashier, and the hook is undeniable. “The Only Ones,” is The Beatles where most of Looking Into It is The Ramones (not a bad thing at all).  It’s crisp and refreshing like a good white wine, and it sets the stage for Kathy Foster’s lead vocal turn on “Rewind,” which I’m just gonna pretend is about Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps because it encapsulates – perfectly – how I felt when Vonnegut died: “Just what am I supposed to do now/ Where will I get all my answers from?” There’s also a line about “all the books that you left behind.” So I’m not completely off-base in my interpretation.  In any case, “Rewind” is a lovely balladish tune that doesn’t have time (at not quite 2 and a half minutes) to get sentimental in a stupid way.

If you’re going to basically take some of the most tried and true stuff in music (The Beatles and The Ramones) and make an album of stuff that sounds like that, you have to know that brevity is the soul of wit. Looking Into It is plenty brief and plenty witty. Take this winner from “Plastic Toy Dream”: “I know a recipe for making plastic toys/ It’s eight parts irony and two parts little boy”.  Looking Into It has the feel of three friends rocking out in a basement – it’s fast, loose, loud, and fun. But Sbragia, Baxter, and Foster elevate Looking Into It beyond merely a pretty-amusing lark. They have crafted a really great summer pop album… or, say, a good disc to pop in the rental car as I cruise I-5 in the dead of night, heading from Portland to Eugene for the bestest fest ever.