Best Albums of My Life #6: Separation Sunday

Anyone who has read more than one post on this blog is certain of two things. 1) I love the Clash and 2) I love the Hold Steady. So it should surprise no one at all that a Hold Steady album would make it onto my list of the 29 Best Albums Released in My Life (a list which was supposed to be completed by the time I turned 30, but better late than never, right?).

Separation Sunday was the very first Hold Steady album I heard. And for those of you who think it was love at first sound, it wasn’t. I thought this Craig Finn fellow might be shouting about something worth hearing, but I wasn’t that interested in finding out. My favorite song upon first listen was “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” (still one of my favorites) and I didn’t really think much of the other ones. I got that the album was trying to tell me a story, but it took me a few months of owning the album (I got it for free – one of the perks of working for the now-defunct Tower Records) to really sit down and try to listen to that story.

Once I did, though, I was duly impressed. Not only was the story of Hallelujah’s disappearance and “resurrection” a compelling listen, but Tad Kubler’s guitars and Franz Nicolay’s keyboards had wormed their way into my brain, creating a boiling soup of classic rock and literature, two things I would not have thought to combine on a regular basis (largely because some of the most offensive Led Zeppelin songs are the ones where you can tell Robert Plant had been getting high and reading Tolkien).

That was 2005 in Boston and now, five freaking years later, I still love this album. I listen to at least one Hold Steady album a week and lately, I’ve been coming back to Separation Sunday a lot. Not just for the mind-blowingly badass guitar work on “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and “Banging Camp” (I ask you: what kind of world are we living in where people think John Mayer is a great guitar player but only a fistful of lucky souls know and recognize Tad Kubler’s mad skills? Kubler is like  a dragon who breathes awesome riffs instead of fire) or the lyrical awesomeness of “The Cattle and the Creeping Things” (“I guess I heard about original sin/ I heard the dudes blamed the chick/ I heard the chick blamed the snake/ I heard they were naked when they got busted/ and I heard things ain’t never been the same since”), but because of the feeling that I get from Separation Sunday. Like the feelings I have toward a lot of albums, I get a very specific feeling from this album.

When I was a supervisor at Tower, I opened the store on Saturday mornings (a good shift – I was off by 6pm and able to go to shows or out drinking with my friends, most of whom worked at the same store), which meant getting to work by 9am. So I was on the train by 8:30. So every Saturday morning, I’d walk through my little Boston suburb and I loved the way the town felt that early on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It was like the whole city was sleeping off a hangover and I was tiptoeing through the house, trying not to wake anyone up. I’d march from my awesome basement apartment with my headphones on, listening to Separation Sunday more often than not, and sip coffee while I waited for the train. I’d get to work to be greeted by Baby Boomers with too much disposable income waiting to purchase tickets for whatever shitty show was going on sale that day (part of the joy of being a supervisor at Tower, you see, was running the Ticketmaster – or Ticketbastard, as I called it – counter). And when I look back at my time at Tower Records in Harvard Square (best retail job I ever had – among the top five jobs of any kind that I’ve ever had), the whole thing is soundtracked by Separation Sunday.

The album itself tells the story of a girl named Hallelujah (“the kids, they call her ‘Holly’”) who gets strung out on the Twin Cities drug and party scene and disappears for a while, only to crash into an Easter mass some months later (“Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?”). She has a junkie boyfriend who cheats on her with her little hoodrat friend (Hallelujah is a hoodrat too, but you don’t find that out until the end of the album), and she finds some junkie revivalists camped on the banks of the Mississippi River who will give you a full-immersion baptism after a hit of nitrous to give you that “high as hell and born again” feeling. Along the way, she has visions of St. Theresa, sings a song to St. Barbara, and gets involved with a sweat-pants clad drug-dealer named Charlemagne (who, like Hallelujah, is a recurring character in many Hold Steady songs). The combination of the story and the hard-charging rock music that propels it serves to solidify Craig Finn’s underlying musical thesis: that you’re as good a savior as you’re likely to get and that, at the end of the day, rock ‘n’ roll is historically the least disappointing religion you can join. Though Separation Sunday depicts a druggie scene in all its puking glory, the album never becomes a morality play about the dangers of drug use. For Finn, drugs are just another self-made obstacle on Holly’s way to her self-made resurrection. Being high isn’t the problem, it’s why you get high that’s the problem (“I’m gonna tell it like a comeback story/ because when we left, we were defeated and depressed/ and when we arrived, we were rippin’ high”).

Finn’s voice is not great – most people know this. But, like Bob Dylan’s voice (yes, I did just make that comparison), Craig Finn’s voice strikes me as uniquely suited to telling the stories he has to tell. The ongoing story of people fucking themselves up and redeeming themselves is not a story to be told in the clean, polished, octave-scaling timber of a Josh Groban; it’s a story meant to be told by a guy who has lived through something. Finn sounds like he’s lived through a war – hell, like he’s sung through a war – and come out the other side. But his voice (and myriad references to early punk, early hardcore, the Bible, and John Berryman) might be a deal-breaker for a lot of people and that’s just fine by me. I can’t say for certain that I’d like the Hold Steady as much if I thought they were for everyone.

Unknown and Beautiful (The Virtues of Broken-Ass Music)

There’s a kind of music that I love, that is sometimes rock and sometimes blues and sometimes both. I call it Broken-Ass Music. Tom Waits is probably the current reigning king of Broken-Ass Music, but it has its roots in stuff like “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson. Johnny Cash was also a master of Broken-Assness, and you can hear a more rock ‘n’ roll side of Broken-Ass Music on the first Hold Steady album and tracks like “Lord, I’m Discouraged” from 2008′s best album, Stay Positive. I heard a band called the Gaslight Anthem that I think deals in diet Broken-Ass Music, for kids who want to ache a little but don’t want to get any dirt on their new H&M shirts (I just made up that stereotype, so let’s not read too much into it. Also, I have purchased at least two shirts from H&M in my life. But I got them dirty).

And then there’s Lucero.

There is no better phrase I can think of to describe Lucero’s music: if any music is Broken-Ass Music, Lucero’s music is Broken-Ass Music. Their 2005 album, Nobody’s Darlings, was a nearly perfect slice of Broken-Assitude and last year, they reached new heights with 1372 Overton Park, an album that occurs at the collision point of southern rock, Memphis soul, and incredibly Broken-Ass Music. Lucero wanted to pay tribute to the Memphis music scene (a scene which just lost Jay Reatard, whose music I didn’t really enjoy, but the dude died at 29 and, having just turned 30, that shit freaks me right out) including the titular loft where, at one time or another, all of the band lived. Singer Ben Nichols was the last band member to occupy the space, which he vacated upon finding out it was slated for the wrecking ball. Such is the life of a Broken-Ass musician – if they can’t break your heart anymore, I guess they tear down your house.

1372 Overton Park is lyrically not that different from other Lucero albums – there’s drinking, gambling, women, and all of the above in random order (“Sixes and Sevens” features the line, “Drinking women/ chasing whiskey”, showing that even Nichols can’t keep it all straight sometimes). But the album is helped – nay, it is elevated – by the sumptuous horn arrangements of Memphis legend (and saxophone ninja) Jim Spake, who has played with a wide range of awesome people, including Levon Helm, Toots Hibbert, and Buddy Guy. The horns infuse every song with a soulful warmth that perfectly contrasts Ben Nichols’s shredded vocals.

About that voice: having a gravelly voice does not necessarily mean you are capable of performing Broken-Ass Music, but, if you do have a facility for BAM, a mangled voice doesn’t really hurt either. Ben Nichols can still carry a tune, but his voice has the sound of years on the road, drinking too much, smoking too much, and sleeping too little. But it fits Lucero’s songs like a velvet glove wrapped in barbed wire. He clearly pushes himself to the limit on album opener “Smoke”, but the rewards are well worth it. Even at it’s crooniest (“Hey Darlin, Do You Gamble?”), Nichols’s voice is still somewhere between Rolf the dog and Tom Waits. If you read that sentence and thought, “Awesome!”, you will probably love Lucero (or you probably already do). If you read that sentence and thought, “Who would want to hear that?,” you are probably someone’s girlfriend/wife/mother and possibly my fiancee, my stepmother, or pretty much every other woman I know. That’s not a sexist thing, it just happens to be true. I will bet you every dime I make from writing this blog that more women own albums by Coldplay, Norah Jones, and the Dave Matthews Band (admit it, folks – you know at least one girl who refers to Dave Matthews on a first-name basis, despite the fact that they’ve never met him). I’ll bet you the same amount that more guys own albums by the Clash, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, and Lucero (and if you know a guy who refers to Tom Waits as simply “Tom” despite having never met the man, you are legally allowed to kick him in the balls until his eyes change color).

Getting back to 1372 Overton Park, Jim Spake certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on musicianship here. Keyboardist Rick Steff (who co-arranged the horn parts with Spake and Marc Franklin, who is credited with trumpet, trombone and flugelhorn duties) contributes some badass organ work and more than his share of honky-tonk piano (see the afore-mentioned “Sixes and Sevens”) and Brian Venable supplies some literally gnarly guitar work. Overall, Lucero sounds tighter as a band than they’ve ever sounded (no mean feat, as they’ve always struck me as a somehow simultaneously shambolic and tightly wound group) and I can only hope Spake and Franklin come out on the road with them for some live hornage (also, I can hope they come to Los Angeles. Please?)

Earlier in 2009, I discussed Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight album as having the mood of a night on the town: starting with all the promise that brings and ending with drunken half-disaster. If that’s the case for Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight, Lucero’s 1372 Overton Park is the feeling of several nights on the road, in clubs with no dress code (look at the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album – those guys are going to much better clubs than you and I are), starting with waking up in a strange town sometime after noon, and ending after a raucous rock ‘n’ roll show and a night of drinking with a band that, though vastly underrated in this reporter’s opinion, is one of America’s finest.

Glitter and Doom

Sixty years ago today – the day after Leadbelly died (for those of you who believe in reincarnation, this could be regarded as auspicious), right here in southern California, lightning struck a bottle of moonshine, shattering it into thousands of tiny shards, one of which pierced the pregnant belly of a school teacher, opening her up wide enough for her newborn son to step out into the light. He was born walking – he made a bedroll from his umbilical cord and set off on the road that very day, bumming smokes, bread, and beans as he went. He got a few gigs here and there crooning country/jazz in shitty little bars; no great shakes, but it kept him in cigarettes and whiskey until the early 1980s when he took folk, jazz, rock, beat poetry, Kurt Weill, and everything else, threw ‘em in a blender with some stale beer and train smoke, and became one of the foremost songwriters in American music history.

I’m talking, of course, about Tom Waits. Happy birthday, Mr. Waits. You are an American hero; you are, in fact, both a folk hero and a maker of folk heroes and not even Bob Dylan is that anymore. And, in all seriousness, thank you, sir, for the music you’ve been making for most of my life. Thank you.

But to get down to business: live albums, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are almost always treats for diehard fans and no one else. You don’t generally put on a live album as a way of introducing someone to your favorite band. The live album is typically “Greatest Hits with Cheering” but every so often, you get a live album that is a treasure for fans and newcomers alike. Glitter and Doom, by our Birthday Boy Tom, is one such album. There is everything Waits fans love on this album and an energy that is only adequately described as a force of nature. One spin through Glitter and Doom and you will understand why the man doesn’t go on long tours anymore. He puts everything he has into every show he plays, and Tom Waits has a lot. I can confidently say that, if you’re going to like Tom Waits, you’re going to like Glitter and Doom. If you love Tom Waits, you’ll love the album’s second disc, which is Tom Waits bullshitting for half an hour. I know I love it.

One of the bigger problems live albums face, in my humble (ha!) opinion, is that the songs sound like the recorded versions, but there are more assholes singing along. Waits is not content to leave his songs alone, and that creates a very compelling argument for seeking out his live shows. Ideally, you’ll get to see the man in concert but, if you’re like many people who cursed the ill luck of living in a city that Waits didn’t visit on his “Glitter & Doom” Tour last year, you’ll grab a live Waits album and revel in its awesome weirdness, its blustering theatricality, and its distorted beauty.

Tom Waits avoids the pitfall of sounding like “Greatest Hits with Cheering” because he doesn’t have any hits. The radio is not ready for Tom Waits (except for National Public Radio, which is just college radio for college-educated grown-ups – and that’s clearly not driving our culture right now. If it were, you’d hear more Waits and Flaming Lips on American Idol and Sarah Palin would have no supporters) and he steadfastly refuses to let people use his music for commercials. Despite being the only guy I know of to win both the Best Alternative Rock and Contemporary Folk Grammys, Waits has what I consider an extremely healthy disdain for awards. Having said all that, Glitter and Doom does cover some familiar territory to Tom Waits fans. But the songs do not remain the same. “Singapore” ends with Waits simulating a bombing, while “Such a Scream” becomes a chugging funk number (it’s like a Bizarro Prince tune) and “Goin’ Out West” becomes a twisted homage to T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”

Waits was surrounded by incredible musicians (all the bass on this album is upright bass, played by Seth Ford-Young) for this tour, including his son Casey on drums and percussion (Casey also played the ass-beating drum part on Waits’s cover of “The Return of Jackie and Judy”), but Waits’s voice remains the most versatile instrument in the ensemble. Whether whispering, howling, or growling, Tom Waits has one of the most distinctive voices in music, and he uses it to inhabit his characters fully. On “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down,” Waits brings William the Pleaser to life as a wounded, terrified, and haunted man who “left Texas/ to follow Lucinda/ Now I will never see Heaven/ or home.” Glitter and Doom tends to mine from Waits’s darker stuff, relying heavily on Blood Money, Bone Machine, and Real Gone for the bulk of its material. The only song that is a repeat from Waits’s other live album, Big Time, is “Falling Down” which was a studio track on that record. It’s nice to see Waits take that tune back after that uber-dilettante Scarlett Johansson mangled it on her ill-advised album of Tom Waits covers (it’s called Anywhere I Lay My Head, for those of you who think I’m making it up. Johansson commits the cardinal sin of thinking that prettying up Tom Waits songs will somehow 1) pay fitting tribute to them and 2) please fans of Mr. Waits. Her album, of course, does neither. I listened to the album shortly after starting Bollocks! and hated it so much that I couldn’t find the words to give it a sufficient review).

Though the album is cobbled together from the fistful of dates Waits played across the American south and parts of Europe last year, it’s sequenced like a proper Waits concert, with all the roaring loud moments (“Lucinda,” “Metropolitan Glide”) and low-moaning soft moments (“Trampled Rose,” “Fannin Street”) that entails. It’s surely no substitute for an actual ticket, but Glitter and Doom is still a nice bone to throw me for not making the road trip to Phoenix to see him in person. I can’t really blame Waits for not wanting to come to L.A., but if he can make it as far as Bakersfield, I’ll be the first in line to see him and I’ll even bring him dinner.

Best Albums of My Life #2: Mule Variations

There are a couple of things that even Pitchfork and I can agree on. #1: the Hold Steady is awesome. #2: you won’t “write a song as good as Tom Waits’ very worst song. Sorry, you just won’t.” They wrote that about the first Tom Waits album I ever heard, 1999′s Mule Variations. And, to this day, it’s the one sentence in all of Pitchfork’s history with which I agree word for word.

I first encountered Mr. Waits on an episode of VH1′s Storytellers and I was immediately struck by how awesome his stories were and how little they had to do with the songs he was performing. And the songs! Sweet Jesus, the first time I heard “House Where Nobody Lives”, I think I had an experience like the Mormon missionaries try to sell you about divine revelation. Here was a dude who was speaking the truth in a way I’d never heard anyone speak it before. I ran out and purchased Mule Variations immediately. That was ten years ago and my copy has seen better days, but it spins just fine and still resonates just as deeply.This album, like many Tom Waits albums, is the real shit – the deep down, bloody, muddy, messy, broken, gospel of sinners, whores, bums, ruffians, ne’er-do-wells, and basically everyone else.

What is it about Waits that’s so goddamn impressive? His songs are journeys, for starters. And, though they are full of specificity (including street names and weather, things Waits views as essential to good songs), they strike a universal chord. Take “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, for example: you don’t have to have actually been somewhere where no one speaks English and everything’s broken to understand exactly how he feels. Right? Waits intuitively understands broken-hearted, busted-ass loneliness and the anguish he howls from the rooftops is our anguish – a friend of mine in college said that Waits is crying so that you don’t have to. You couldn’t do it that well anyway. And that’s due in large part to his voice. I know, I know, a lot of people are all “Tom Waits can’t sing” or “his voice sounds funny” or “he sounds like Cookie Monster” but what they don’t understand is that for what Tom Waits is trying to tell you (about you, about us, about nasty, brutish, and short fucking life), ordinary voices are useless. I’d go so far as to say that they are insultingly inadequate. For the heartache and, yes, the joy that Waits is bringing on his tunes, you need a voice that’s a still-beating heart being tossed into a wood chipper in the middle of a nuclear war. You need a voice that took a stiff shot of whiskey and chewed up the glass. You need exactly the voice that only Tom Waits has. Do you really wanna hear Josh Groban inviting you to come on up to the house when “the only thing that you can see/ is all that you lack”? No. No, you don’t.

Mule Variations is full of some of Waits’s best busted-ass moments, too. On “Get Behind the Mule” (this is how Waits encourages perseverance – he’s not gonna tell you you’re beautiful no matter what they say and that words can’t bring you down; there’s no time for that in the Tom Waits universe. You’ve gotta get up and get to work, just like the rest of us), he gave me a line that resonated through pretty much every failed romance of my life since I first heard it: “Big Jack Earl was 8 foot one/ and he stood in the road and he cried/ he couldn’t make her love him/ couldn’t make her stay/ but tell the good lord he tried.” Again, a lot of people have probably stood in poor Jack Earl’s giant shoes. On “Cold Water”, Waits feels the pain of “pregnant women and Vietnam vets/ out there beggin’ on the freeway/ ’bout as hard as it gets”. That’s a line Bruce Springsteen would’ve sold (and/or had sex with) his mother to write.

But Mule Variations isn’t all gritty, bone-tired heartache, either. It also features a fair amount of that magical Tom Waits weirdness. “What’s He Building?” reads like a list of rumors Waits’s neighbors might cook up about him. “Eyeball Kid” is a circus-freak anthem complete with a telling autobiographical element: the Eyeball Kid was born on December 7, 1949, the same day as Thomas Alan Waits. Like the Eyeball Kid, Waits came here to show us how to really see. And “Filipino Box-Spring Hog” is a recipe for awesome disaster and possibly also a terrible dinner.

The thing (if there is indeed only one thing, which I kinda doubt) that makes Mule Variations a masterpiece (in a career full of them) is how easily the oddball tunes sit along side some of Waits’s finest ballads: “Picture in a Frame” features a line that I find so honest and so simply romantic that it has caused me, upon reflection, to give up writing love songs myself: “I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off.” Maybe that doesn’t grab y’all the same way it grabs me, but when the radio is crowded with people singing about how someone is their whole life or their everything or whatever, Waits’s lyric cuts me to the quick. I want to love someone till the wheels come off and, luckily, I get to. Sorry, Portugal. The Man fans, someone out there really loves terrible ol’ me. No one said life is fair.

And then there’s “Georgia Lee”, a piano ballad about a girl who was murdered. I love that Waits doesn’t just make a tug for your heart strings here. He does nothing less than call God out for dropping the ball: “Why wasn’t God watching?/ Why wasn’t God listening?/ Why wasn’t God there/ for Georgia Lee?”  It’s clear, then, that Tom Waits doesn’t just understand romantic loss. He understands the feeling of being massively, cosmically fucked over, and he can howl that pain for you too. Is it overstating it to suggest that Waits is out there, strolling the universe, absorbing some of the hits for all of us? Maybe; but when I listen to his stuff, I’m not so sure. This is my gospel music, kids – and Mule Variations closes with a kick-drum stomping spoonful of raw spirituality called “Come On Up to the House,” where Pastor Tom tells us to “come down off the cross/ we can use the wood” and reminds us “the world is not my home/ I’m just passing through.” Is that corny? So be it; after my sister died last year, this was one of the songs that picked me back up, that let me laugh and cry at the same time. So for me, Tom Waits’s music has real healing power, the kinda stuff some people find in church and other people find in a bottle.

If a major criterion for being the voice of your generation (or any generation) is being able to tap into the hopes, joys, loves, and fears of that generation with a profound understanding (is that a major criterion? I should hope so), then it might be time to consider that Tom Waits is the true voice of at least one generation and probably of many generations. Sure, he’s not as glamorous as Kanye West and he doesn’t want the job nearly as bad as Kanye does, but his music is 9000 times more honest. In my lifetime, Tom Waits has made some of the most heart-wrenchingly meaningful music I have heard and Mule Variations is my favorite of his albums not just because it’s amazing, but also because it was my gateway into the man’s entire body of work. It has shown me the way to songs that have seen me through pretty much every high and low point of my life for the last ten years.

Best Albums of My Life #27: Doolittle

Do you believe in Mr. Grieves? Do you like songs inspired by Surrealist films from the late 1920s? Are you searching for music that could possibly redeem the 1980s? If you answered any of these questions, you need to check out Doolittle by the Pixies. If you already know all about the Pixies, then you already know that Doolittle is a unique entry in rock history to say the least. For the neophytes, let’s find something to compare it to, shall we? Here goes: Doolittle is like a Tom Waits, Salvador Dali, and… well, I dunno what else… Husker Du, maybe? – inspired punk album. Before pop/punk became a pejorative term to describe bands like Blink-182 and whatever else your 8th grade sister likes, it would’ve been an apt way to describe what the Pixies were doing (in addition to  inspiring a certain Mr. Kurt Cobain. Depending on who you ask, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was either inspired by “Gigantic” or “Debaser.” It was a sad day for music when Cobain shot himself, reportedly after having a vision of the future in which he saw himself being used as an avatar in a video game where players could force him to sing songs by Bush and Bon Jovi. This theory is not without controversy, however: some experts believe Cobain shot himself one morning after realizing he was married to Courtney Love, an incoherent heroin vacuum whom – thankfully – no one has heard of since).

A lot of people dig 1988′s Surfer Rosa and they’re not wrong to do so. Along with “Where is My Mind?” (a.k.a. “the Pixies song everyone knows” or “that song from Fight Club“), Surfer Rosa features such classics as “Bone Machine,” “Broken Face,” and – a candidate for the Best Song Ever – “Gigantic.” It is a good album, and I’ll not dispute that here. But Doolittle… it’s fucking… Doolittle. Again, it’s hard to describe if you’ve never heard it, but it’s a masterpiece – a twenty-year-old masterpiece as of this year.

Doolittle opens with what may well be another candidate for Best Song Ever (a contest for which you gain as many entries as you earn. The Clash has… well, a lot of entries), “Debaser,” which was apparently inspired by Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (written by Salvador Dali), a film that features the sliced up eyeballs that Black Francis is howlin’ about (“Got me a movie/ I want you to know/ slicin’ up eyeballs/ I want you to know”). I took the GRE this week and to psych myself up for it, I listened to Doolittle a lot and “Debaser” even more than that. Somehow, it didn’t help me much on the math portion. Along with “Gigantic” and “Here Comes Your Man,” “Debaser” forms a holy trinity of Pixies songs that make me wanna jump around the room screaming like a goon. It’s really hard to type when you’re doing that.

For a long time, I had this prejudice against 80s music because so much of it was absolute crap and I will neither attempt to disguise nor apologize for my prejudice against crappy things. But as time has passed, I’ve found the hidden (deeply hidden beneath piles of bad hair, synthesizers and cock rock) gold of that era: early R.E.M., the Clash’s Combat Rock, Jim Carroll’s Catholic Boy, early Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and the Pixies. You won’t be seeing that shit on I Love the 80s. No, you won’t. But that’s okay because that music isn’t for everyone. In fact, I can easily imagine Doolittle upon its release in 1989, coming out with a scream and announcing its presence as a late-80s album for people who think the 1980s can mostly go fuck themselves. I largely get that feeling from “Tame,” don’t ask me why.

Despite Frank Black’s gnarly howl, which will no doubt turn some people off of the Pixies (your loss), the Pixies are (I was gonna write “were” but they’re touring again this year, playing Doolittle in its entirety to celebrate its 20th anniversary) an inherently tuneful band. Most of their songs have a strong pop undertone that makes their albums complete bliss to people like me who adore beautifully ugly music. Doolittle offers several strong opportunities for the Pixies to showcase that strength: Kim Deal’s background vocals on “Debaser,” the entirety of “Wave of Mutilation” and the positively sublime “Here Comes Your Man” and “La La Love You.” The feel of these songs may have resulted from the tension between producer Gil Norton, who wanted to lengthen the tracks and polish up the sound a bit, and Frank Black. Black told Rolling Stone, that Doolittle “is him trying to make us, shall I say, commercial, and us trying to remain somewhat grungy.” It would appear Norton and Black split the difference because the album is a grungy poppy pile of awesome, an album that was awesome in a way that neither grunge nor pop may ever be again. Even so, the songs on Surfer Rosa proceed logically toward the more developed sound of Doolittle, so it’s not as though there was a radical tonal shift for the Pixies on their sophomore effort. You could say the Pixies were destined to make oddball, grungy pop like you find on Doolittle, but I won’t say that because I flatly refuse to believe in destiny.

Part of the charm of any Pixies album is the delightfully odd lyrical sensibility that Black brings to the proceedings. I’m not gonna go off on some pretentious comparison of the Surrealism Black clearly studied with his approach to songwriting (this isn’t Pitchfork, after all), but I will commend the dude for making a song called “Monkey Gone to Heaven” that is essentially about the effects of pollution on the planet (“there was a guy/ an underwater guy who controlled the sea/ got killed by 10 million pounds of sludge/ from New York and New Jersey”) or making people sing along with a song whose only real verse is about slicing up eyeballs (by the way, “Debaser” is the number one Pixies song I want to hear a Modest Mouse cover of). Doolittle is Frank Black at the height of his lyrical power and the band at the height of their musical power; it’s 15 tracks in 38 minutes and when you get to the end, you just wanna start over and grow up to be a debaser.

No One’s First and You’re Next

I’ve had a curious relationship with Modest Mouse. The first time I heard them was in Eugene, Oregon, when I was in college at the good ol’ University of Oregon. I was browsing the racks at Face the Music (which no longer exists) and they were blasting The Moon and Antarctica. While I recognized and approved of the Tom Waits influence, I can’t say I was enamored of the music. In fact, I found it to be pretty fucking obnoxious, honestly. The first time I liked a Modest Mouse song was, oddly enough, when I heard “Float On” on the radio (those of you who tire of my constant bitching about how shitty the radio is might be tempted to cry “hypocrite” but I never said that the radio never plays good music. It mostly never plays good music). I was working overnight at Target, also in Eugene, and I swear “Float On” was the only good song we heard on the radio and we heard it almost every night. I was stunned to find out that it was  a Modest Mouse song and even more stunned when I ended up not just liking but loving Good News for People Who Like Bad News. In fact, I love that album more all the time.

And now I find myself in the odd position of being something of a Modest Mouse fan. I own all of their albums and most of their EPs and the stuff I used to find obnoxious is now really interesting to me (remember: I like Captain Beefheart) and my appreciation for Isaac Brock’s writing and ability to completely lose his shit vocally without going emo has only grown. I saw them live last year and, though the internet warned of vast inconsistency in the quality of Modest Mouse live shows, I found them to be an extremely tight and wildly entertaining band in concert. Lucky me.

Modest Mouse’s last two albums, Good News and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, have been their poppiest yet. Some would be inclined to say their best yet, but that would only be half right. Good News is their best, followed closely by The Moon and Antarctica. I’m one of those guys who like 99% of Modest Mouse’s output and while that may earn me the scorn of some, it really just means there’s more for me to enjoy than there is for them. To paraphrase The National, all the wine (where “wine” = “good Modest Mouse music”) is all for me.

So now Brock and his revolving cast of characters have released a new EP, No One’s First and You’re Next, made up of stuff recorded during sessions for their last two albums, though it might be misleading to dismiss these songs as mere cast-offs. They’re all high quality tunes, many of them are even excellent, including “Satellite Skin,” “History Sticks to Your Feet,” and “Autumn Beds,” which sounds like it could’ve made the cut for an album by Brock’s apparently one-off side project Ugly Casanova (whose album I also own and, yes, it is awesome).

People who love Isaac Brock’s voice are probably (definitely) a minority (of which I am a card-carrying member) so it’s more likely that people come to Modest Mouse songs for the music and Brock’s lyrics as much as anything else. Musically, No One’s First is great, pretty heavy on the electric guitar (this is, I think, the Johnny Marr influence. So if Johnny Marr wasn’t the boring part of The Smiths, who can we blame? Oh yeah – Morrissey was also in the Smiths) and banjo. There are a lot of great lyrical turns to be had, too – on “Satellite Skin,” Brock asks, “well how the heck’d ya think you could beat them/ at the same time that you’re trying to be them”;  offers “I drew a blank/ we put it in a frame” on “Guilty Cocker Spaniels”; and, in typical Isaac Brock fasion, he rips your rose colored glasses off and crushes them on the sidewalk on “History Sticks to Your Feet”: “optimism doesn’t change the facts/ just what you’re gonna see.”

It’s easy to see how a lot of this stuff didn’t fit the overall vibe of Good News and/or We Were Dead, but it would be laughably inaccurate to say it’s because they’re not good enough (earlier, I said it might be misleading, but I’ve listened to the album several times since I wrote that sentence and I’m now convinced that “laughably inaccurate” is more appropriate than “misleading”. Why did it take me so long between the composition of these two sentences? It’s been a long week, don’t ask. Also, I’ve been listening to this EP almost non-stop since I got it). Some of these songs are far superior, quality-wise, to stuff that made the cut on We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, but they don’t fit the mood of the record. And No One’s First features, back to back, two pretty compelling stylistic departures: “The Whale Song” (which centers around the haunting line, “I know I was the scout/ I should’ve found a way out/ so that everyone could find a way out”) and “Perpetual Motion Machine,” which is straight out of some bizarre musical starring Isaac Brock as… well, I dunno.  I’m not sure what role Brock would play in a musical, but I do know that if more musicals had people like him in them and music like his band makes on No One’s First and You’re Next, I would probably hate musicals slightly less than I do now.

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.”

The Shaky Hands Are Pretty Rad

There was a time when you might have been inclined to believe that Portland, Oregon, my old stomping ground, was merely the home of Art Alexakis, the shitsack in charge of Everclear, one of the worst bands ever. But, the fact is – and I believe I’ve mentioned this – there are some kickass bands floating around Portland nowadays. Sure, you’ve got your Decemberists, your Shins, and your M. Wards, but don’t forget Blitzen Trapper, The Thermals, and the All Girl Summer Fun Band. While you’re at it, add to the list The Shaky Hands.

The Shaky Hands are a great band if you like everything R.E.M. did before Green. But they’re also more than mere pastiche – there’s a primal, surging power to The Shaky Hands music and I offer, as primary evidence, their new album Lunglight. Yeah, it’s got a title that makes you think of phlegm, but its one of the best “grower” albums since The National’s Boxer (and those of you who read this site know that I would not make that comparison lightly). On my first trip through Lunglight, I liked the feel, but none of the songs really jumped out (except for “You’re the Light,” which is just… fucking… awesome. But we’ll get to that later). Subsequent trips helped me unearth the melodies underneath the pulsing bass (played by Mayhaw Hoons, the greatest name in the history of bass player names. He’s also one of the only individual band members photographed in the jacket for Lunglight; not surprisingly, he has long read hair and an awesome beard. Mayhaw Hoons, folks – you can’t make up names like this) and jangly guitars.  Nicholas Delffs provides the vocals, which might garner some comparisons to that guy from the Strokes, but that does him a real disservice. Delffs quivers and staggers between Murmur-era Michael Stipe, Bob Dylan, and Damon Albarn with a cold.

The album kicks off with “New Parade,” which features the great lyric “to all the peaceful/ please fornicate.” It’s a good track for people who are waiting forever (or until January) for the next Franz Ferdinand record. There’s the twisty, sinister guitar lick, the beating drums, and by the time Delffs is singing “No more man/ wicked man” on the chorus, the song is not the sum of its influences – it’s a Shaky Hands tune. At this point, it seems appropriate to point out that many Shaky Hands songs live up to the band’s name – there’s a certain shakiness to the tunes that lends them a lovely busted-ass quality.

Choruses emerge in the songs of Lunglight; they’re not telegraphed as they are in the music of less artful bands (think Coldplay or Keane – if you can’t spot the chorus in one of their songs, you’re deaf). Instead, Lunglight is full of tunes that function like crazy-ass storms – you may have been in the chorus for a while before you realize that’s what you’re hearing. But nonetheless, you’re probably bopping your head. Lunglight is a pop album for people who hate pop albums – it’s muddy, distorted, dirty, and jittery but it’s got hooks aplenty to reward your diligence.

The hooks are never more evident than on “You’re the Light”, a frantic, propulsive, old-school rocker with just the right touch of sweetness: “You’re the reason why/ I don’t want to lie” is a nice sentiment and Delffs doesn’t oversell it; it’s sung as a matter of fact and Delffs trusts it to stand on its own. This is a lesson that Nathan Willet from Cold War Kids could probably stand to learn.

Lunglight is particularly refreshing because of its relative brevity – only a third of the songs pass the four minute mark, and none of them reach a full five minutes. Among the 4+ minute numbers is the outstanding “Wake the Breathing Light,” which starts off with a stumbling guitar line and evolves into a mid-tempo number that wouldn’t be out of place on Exile on Main Street. The background vocals (“come back up/ just wake up”) are eventually buried under Delffs’ yowling and a pretty ferocious, squalling guitar solo before the song settles down again for its ending.

If you get the sense from this that The Shaky Hands sound like a lot of formerly-awesome bands when they were still awesome, that’s not an entirely incorrect conclusion to reach. These guys clearly have great record collections and every time I stumble through Lunglight, I find more awesome and disparate influences, ranging from Patti Smith to The Band to the afore-mentioned Exile-era Stones and Murmur-era R.E.M. And while I said before that Lunglight is a pop album for people who hate pop, it also manages to be an indie album for people who are leery of many indie bands’ tendency toward pretension and cringe-inducing seriousness. So it’s kind of a record for everyone, or at least for peaceful people to put on while fixing to fornicate.

The Titus Andronicus Blurb That Doesn’t Mention Bright Eyes

Patrick Stickles does not sing like the guy who we’re not mentioning in this “blurb”. And I’m not saying that ’cause Stickles wants someone to say it, I’m saying it because it’s true. He sings like an angry drunk dude in his 20′s and that’s a wonderful thing. He sounds kinda like Tom Stuart from Radio America (okay, Patrick, I’ll buy the Paul Westerberg thing too. And I’ll buy you a beer if you come to L.A. – for serious). Pitchfork doesn’t know who Radio America is and that’s their loss.

Ahem.

I’ll admit that I’d never heard of the band Titus Andronicus (I had heard of the play – it’s Shakespeare’s Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay collaboration, 400 years early. Did I spell Bruckheimer wrong? I don’t care.) before I read their interview with the Pitchfork kids at Pitchfork’s very own festival. I came to a conclusion after reading that interview and I can say without fear of contradiction: these guys are dope.  Example? They played fucking “Common People,” in their set because they knew Jarvis Cocker wasn’t going to play it in his (apparently, Mr. Cocker doesn’t play Pulp tunes at his shows. If that is true, law dictates that he must play “Running the World,” every night. People need that song, Jarvis. Give it to them.).

Anyway. Titus Andronicus are from New Jersey, just like Bon Jovi. The comparison pretty much ends there. Unlike Bon Jovi, Titus Andronicus have something interesting to say (sorry folks – “oh, oh; living on a prayer” = not interesting), they can play their instruments, and they are distinctly lacking the hard-on to be Bruce Springsteen that Jon Bon Jovi has walked around (one must assume painfully) with for the last 30 years. (Incidentally, this Springsteen hard-on is apparently contagious – the guy from The Killers got it just a couple of years ago with disastrous results.)

The line between Awesome and Pretentious is hard to spot; some bands know how to handle the dangerous areas near the border. For instance, The Hold Steady (America’s best rock band) is awesome and Craig Finn steers them near the rocky shores of Pretension without ever cracking them up on the rocks. Fall Out Boy is lost wandering the ghettos of Pretension; they’re never gonna make it out of the harbor and if they do, they’ll drown, blinded and destroyed by what awaits the unprepared in the Land of Awesome. Titus Andronicus has some pretentious song titles (“Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ,” and “Upon Viewing Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’” come to mind. Well, really, most of their songs and their band name come to mind) but the delivery is just so… so… compellingly rad that the siren song of Pretension is drowned out by  Titus Andronicus yelling, “Your life is over.” From the shouted “Fuck you!” of “Fear and Loathing” to the final scream of “we only want what we’re not allowed” that ends “Albert Camus” (see? Pretentious titles!), this band means business. I’ve railed time and again against the stuff that passes for punk music now, but if ever a band oozed a truly punk ethos, it’s Titus Andronicus. These guys have the chops and they’re not afraid to sound dirty. Which is not to say they can’t play – at first blush, The Airing of Grievances sounds like a big fucking wall of noise – and it is – but underneath all the racket is a band that has clearly studied the Beatles (the Lennon tunes mostly) as well as the Clash, the Replacements, and The Et Ceteras. This melodic gift is never more humorously exploited than on “Titus Androncius,” where, amidst a pretty standard doo-doo-doodoodoo background vocal, Mr. Stickles croons, “Fuck everything/ fuck me.”

The Airing of Grievances is a record to put on and bounce around the room to, being not the least bit careful about breaking stuff (yourself included). Lyrically, it’s pretty dark (“no God of mine would put light in such unrighteous eyes,” “You’ll spend the rest of your life trying hard to forget/ that you met the world naked and screaming and that’s how you’ll leave it,” and the absolute death knell of “Titus Andronicus”: “No more cigarettes/ no more having sex/ no more drinking till you fall on the floor/ no more indie rock/ just a ticking clock/ you have no time for that anymore”). Musically, it’s fucking loud.  I’m not gonna lie – I’ve had a lot of excess anger in the last month or so, they kind that it’s hard to know where to put. The Airing of Grievances gives a pretty good voice to how that feels and, upon separating it from my own personal circumstances of late, I can still view it as one of the best debut albums I’ve heard in a long time, and easily one of the best albums of 2008.

Hurricane Eyes

Craig Extine could, somewhat reasonably, be compared to the following singers: Spencer Krug from Wolf Parade, Jack White, and Tom Verlaine from Television. But to boil his beautifully ugly (that’s not a contradiction, motherfucker, it’s a thing – see Mr. Tom Waits if you doubt me) voice down to mere imitation would be disingenuous to say the least. Extine lends a world-weary howl to Poisonous Times, the latest effort from his band The Old Haunts. While his fellow Old Haunts (including relatively New Haunt and former Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail) bash out this trippy-ass mixture of Marc Ribot, Dick Dale, and – yes – Television, Extine’s voice roars, howls, yelps, and shouts a sometimes downright angry (“Volatile”) and sometimes cautiously optimistic (“Sunshine”) lyric out into the big ol’ world.  The effect is an album with an edgy, paranoid vibe that is hooky enough to please fans of simple rock songs (for the record: “simple rock songs” here refers to things like “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges, not, say, Nickelback. Just so we’re clear about the comparison here.).

The Old Haunts pretty much piss indie-cred: they’re on Kill Rock Stars, they have a former Bikini Kill member (here’s a test: ask your local Dave Matthews, Blink-182, or My Chemical Romance fan if they’ve heard of Bikini Kill. They haven’t.), and they only play independent venues on their tours, which are, I’m told, lengthy and satisfying. A band so stalwartly independent might come across as super-serious, their music a perfectly coordinated noise of general disapproval with The Way Things Are. The Old Haunts, on the other hand, are a fun-as-fuck listen and less a dour, downer band than something Craig Finn might call “a sexy mess.”

The songs on Poisonous Times, starting with album opener “Volatile,” are all piss and vinegar, Extine’s wounded-dog snarl coming straight at you over bouncy, sloppy (in a good way) bass, drums, and guitar. The afore-mentioned Ms. Vail keeps the beat like clockwork while the guitar and bass bounce around jauntily from start to finish. There’s a definite punk spirit in this music, even if it sounds more like it came from someone smashing a stereo playing Dick Dale into a stereo playing a dogfight. Vail is the latest in a long line of drummers for the band, but she’s earned some tenure on Poisonous Times.

Though the whole album provides for an excellent listening experience (assuming you dig Extine’s voice, which will be a deal-breaker for some people), the two stand-out tracks are “Hurricane Eyes,” and “Sunshine.” “Hurricane Eyes,” is probably what the Rolling Stones always should have sounded like and probably never really did. It’s basically a pop song, but the squirrelly guitar lick in the intro sets up the catchiest chorus on Poisonous Times, which cannot be described but must be heard. It’s fucking awesome, trust me. “Sunshine,” is a little break in the overall angsty feel of the album, a little ode to the mass of incandescent gas around which our little globe orbits. It’s almost like a Velvet Underground song but Extine never manages to be as pretty as Lou Reed or John Cale would’ve been on the same tune. That’s a good thing, though – Extine’s voice and the tendency that he has to sneer most of his lyrics are the two things that really keep The Old Haunts from being a more run-of-the mill rock band. I can barely understand the lyrics on this album, but I get what he’s saying. And he’s backed by some seriously genre-hopping musicians that make Poisonous Times a really rewarding listen for people who are keen on Marc Ribot guitar solos. Lester Bangs often lamented, over the many years he was writing, the disappearance of really primal rock bands (though he was later turned on, and rightly so, by bands like the Clash who were, if not necessarily primal, fucking enthusiastic and bombastically loud). I’d like to think he’d put his cough syrup-addled stamp of approval on The Old Haunts.