Romance is Boring

Well, let’s see if the soft spot in my heart for Los Campesinos! (the Welsh band with the Spanish name) has grown any since they dominated my 2008 with not one but two totally awesome albums.

Nope.

The soft spot is about the same size that it used to be, which is still reasonably large-ish. The new Los Campesinos! record, Romance is Boring (I disagree with the assertion, but that’s a great title nonetheless), is probably my first big Expectations Test of 2010 (it will be followed shortly by second albums from both She & Him and Titus Andronicus). Their first album, Hold On Now, Youngster, made me pretty giddy, with its acerbic lyrics and bouncy, twee-pop music (I personally wouldn’t call it that, but a friend of mine used it to deride the band not long ago and I’m stealing his words because I confess I’ve never known what people meant by “twee”. My friend went on to compare Los Campesinos! to the Go! Team [on exclamation points alone, he's got a point] in a way that suggests he has about as much regard for both bands as he would have for a grilled shit sandwich with a side order of deep-fried herpes). Of course, it caught me in the early part of 2008, when I was feeling like I didn’t have much besides a Hold Steady album (Stay Positive, which turned out to be the best album of that year) to look forward to.

So what, exactly, is the trouble here? Romance is Boring isn’t bad. It’s certainly not boring. It’s got the clever lyrics (so far, my favorite is “we need more post-coital/ and less post-rock”, a sentiment with which I heartily concur, “post-rock” being right up there with “twee” on the list of Bullshit Styles that I Think Pitchfork Made Up), the music is actually better (more guitars, fewer chimey bits) than in the past. And yet…

And yet…

Well, I’m kinda stunned that I don’t like this album more than I do. And don’t get me wrong (or do), I do like it. It’s just… hmm… Here: have you ever had a friend talk up a favorite dessert or something – say, tiramisu – and they take you to this place where they think the world’s best ever, you’d-kill-your-mom-for-a-slice, perfect tiramisu is made and you try the tiramisu and it’s got all the essential elements (for you non-culinary types, any good tiramisu has, in my estimation, two essential elements: coffee and rum), but it just doesn’t quite deliver for you the transcendent, orgasmo-religious (how’s that for a made-up word, Pitchfork? I can do this shit too) experience that it clearly does for your friend? Well, replace your friend with “me”, yourself with “also me” and the tiramisu with Romance is Boring. I think I’ve reached a point where I no longer believe my own rhapsodizing about how fucking awesome Los Campesinos! are. This probably won’t create a problem for other listeners of their music, but it’s kinda bumming me out.

To prove that I was still inexplicably ga-ga over Los Campesinos!, I revisited their debut. Hold On Now, Youngster is still awesome, but I’m now skeptical that I would list it among my favorite albums of 2008. It’s still good, but it doesn’t grab me the way it used to. Fearing the onset of some kind of complete desensitization to great music, I decided to test myself on another band, Titus Andronicus. I was pretty awestruck by their debut, The Airing of Grievances. In anticipation of their second album, The Monitor (which is coming out next month and which can’t come out soon enough for me), I listened to Grievances again. Funny thing: I probably love The Airing of Grievances more now than I ever have. It’s a great album, still one of the more cathartic records I’ve ever heard (when you feel like beating the shit out of the whole world, put on “Joset of Nazareth’s Blues” and “Titus Andronicus” and you’ll feel better in no time. Or at least you’ll have an invigorating soundtrack for that steep climb up the book depository stairs).

So what’s changed between me and Los Campesinos!? Was I so eager for Romance is Boring that I ruined it with my own admittedly high expectations? No. I think it is exactly as good as I expected it to be. Los Campesinos! are doing what they do best, and they’re doing it pretty well. I think I’m just less excited by what they do best than I used to be. Now, bear in mind that I’ve only had this album for a couple of weeks and I could be orgasming over it by year’s end, but I don’t feel that way now. I felt sort of obligated to listen to Romance is Boring and that’s never a good sign. Having fulfilled the obligation, I don’t regret anything, but I do feel like I was just going through the motions a little (yes, I realize I’m dangerously close to a “faking it” analogy). 2010 is a weird year so far – there’s stuff I’ve been sure I would hate that has blown my mind and stuff I’ve expected to blow my mind that has been… well, so far, merely adequate. That I haven’t been utterly disappointed by anything yet is actually a rare and encouraging sign.

At the end of the day, I think the problem I have with Romance is Boring is that I expected it to blow my mind and it didn’t. It was merely good, possibly even great (maybe. Nah, probably not), but entirely unsurprising. I’m not gonna sell the album back or anything and I’ll probably keep listening to it, but I feel like I might end up feeling like I’m in love with an image of this album that exists only in my mind. In which case, I guess I will have proven that my romance with Los Campesinos! has become boring, at which point I will wait until they are dying of cancer to cheat on them. (Too soon?)

The Worst of 2009

Well, I’m back after a restful week in Seattle and it seems to be that wonderful time of the year when everyone arbitrarily quantifies all their favorite whatevers – I’m not immune to such behavior. But before I tell you what I thought was so great about 2009, I wish to – in the interest of balance, of course – point out the very worst that 2009 had to offer. I’m limiting this to music because, if you expand the Worst of 2009 list to, say, news stories, you can get depressed fast. I should hope the image of a vomiting clown suggests we’re here to have a good time.  So, without further et cetera:

Worst song of 2009: “Desolation Row” (Bob Dylan cover) by My Chemical Romance. Now, I didn’t like the new Bob Dylan album. I do, however, enjoy much of his early work. It just so happens that “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61 Revisited, is my very favorite Bob Dylan tune. Of all time. When I heard that My Chemical Blowmance was going to cover the song for the Watchmen soundtrack, I knew it was going to be bad. I just had no idea how bad. This band truly pioneers shittyness. Fortunately, My Chemical Toilet didn’t bother to cover all 11 minutes of the original. Still, they put together a painfully awful three minutes. I was doing pretty well at ignoring MCR’s evil up to this point. But now, I want them destroyed. Fuck this band.

Worst album of 2009: Scream by Chris Cornell. I should think this is unsurprising to Bollocks! readers. Scream was a perfect storm of really bad ideas (Timbalind producing a dance-pop record by a grunge icon? I thought there were laws against shit like this) and, somehow, the whole manages to be far worse than the sum of its parts. Cornell has been slipping since Soundgarden broke up (I know, that’s putting it mildly), but Scream was the point where I completely lost my faith in the man. With dull, misogynist hooks like “No, that bitch ain’t a part of me,” and vocal performances that could charitably be described as “lackluster”, Scream is terrible enough to be a dark horse candidate for worst album of the decade.

Worst person of 2009: Chris Brown. Oh, I know. He apologized and he wants our forgiveness and wants us to buy his terrible new album, but I don’t feel like letting him off the hook just yet and here’s why: I was able look the other way while Brown became an inexplicably famous adolescent pop star with a swimming pool full of money and a stunning girlfriend. It happens all the time in this country and I don’t begrudge Brown his success, up to the point where, in a sports car that costs more than I make in a year, he smacked around said stunning girlfriend. You don’t get to be an inexplicably famous pop star and an abusive cocksucker, Chris Brown. Fuck you. If you want my forgiveness, here’s what you can do: purchase a Yugo, four bottles of Old English, drive out somewhere in the hills, drink the malt liquor, and then beat the shit out of yourself. You do that, and I’ll run out and buy your shitty new record. I promise.

Worst Live Act of 2009: Ghostland Observatory. I saw these assholes open for the Flaming Lips. They looked like a Ren Fair crashed into a Star Trek convention and sounded like a sack of kittens and a laptop in an industrial-sized blender. At first, I thought this was some kind of Andy Kaufman thing where they were fucking with my perception of what a “good” band should be. But then I realized that no, they’re just no-talent ass-clowns with a pretty good light show.

Most Pathetic Comeback of 2009: Creed. Hey, even Jesus hates these guys. And his word is Gospel.

Worst New Band of 2009 (and Possibly of All Time): Wavves. I guess they’re not technically “new,” because they put something out last year too. But I just wanted to take another opportunity to point out that Wavves is a god-fucking-awful band. How awful? I shit you not, I’d rather listen to My Chemical Blowmance’s Black Parade album at top volume while Gerard Way bad-touches me and reads aloud from the My Chemical Romance Saved My Life Site than listen to Wavves even one more time. If I’ve already doled out a “Fuck this band” to Way’s MCR, I reserve the (much more severe) Triple Dog-Fuck This Band for Wavves. No… Quadruple Dog-Fuck This Band.

Worst Record Label: EMI. And Sextuple Dog-Fuck EMI for not putting out Dark Night of the Soul. It’s ironic to me that labels often assume you would buy an album that you downloaded if you couldn’t get it for free. This is definitely not always the case. But, with Dark Night of the Soul, EMI is putting me in the position of having to steal an album for which I would gladly have paid. Way to keep the kids from getting what they want, EMI.

That’s about the worst stuff I can think of for this year. Later this week (starting tomorrowish – we don’t have hard and fast schedules here at Bollocks!), I’ll tell you some of my favorite songs of the year and 13 of my favorite albums.

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown‘s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown‘s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

Cass McCombs < Jason Mraz? A Discussion of Strummy Songwriters

While this is, ostensibly, a review of Cass McCombs’s new album Catacombs, it will end up being a rundown of the guy-with-guitar-and-heart-on-his-sleeve genre, a genre that’s getting a little too bloated of late. Someone needs to sift the wheat from the chaff, and, unfortunately, Cass McCombs is firmly in the chaff.

I can sum up Catacombs for you in one word: boring. Or two words: fucking boring. How about three? Really fucking boring. You get the idea. Moving on.

There are several variations on the dude/guitar/singer/songwriter formula, some of which are all right and some of which are annoying as hell. Jason Mraz, while still a more compelling listen than Cass McCombs (it pains me to say that), traffics in the gimmicky word-play, gee-look-how-fast-I-can-spew-semiclever-lyrics sort of singing/songwriting. So, needless – but still fun – to say, Jason Mraz really sucks. This doesn’t seem to stop people from adoring him, much like another strummy bum I know named Jack Johnson who is my generation’s Jimmy Buffet (those of you who have read Bollocks! even one time know there is no way that can be a compliment). Jack Johnson did a bunch of songs for the Curious George soundtrack and it still impresses me that he escaped playing the titular character as well.

And I’m not merely complaining about the genre here because there are good singer/songwriters out there. They’re just hard to find sometimes. M. Ward is pretty awesome, largely because he writes good melodies and has a deliciously old-school sound to him that I really dig. Elliott Smith was one of the best of the stummy bunch, and is probably largely responsible for people like Cass McCombs and this one uber-emo kid I saw at a small theatre in Sherman Oaks last week (I’m not gonna out the kid here, but he was hilariously, embarrassingly bad – I literally laughed through his set).

Technology has served to somewhat democratize the music business in recent years because we’ve reached a point now where anyone with a laptop and a halfway decent microphone can make an album. The one big downside to this is that anyone with a laptop and a halfway decent microphone can make an album. It doesn’t mean everyone should. I can’t speak for McCombs’s other albums, but with Catacombs, he’s crafted easily one of the ten most boring albums I’ve ever heard (and my parents listen to Kenny G for dog’s sake). So if you find your normal listening choices a little too exciting, why not try Catacombs?

McCombs’s biggest mistake is assuming that long and winding melodies will compensate for the one-dimensionality of the record as a whole. In his case, the melodies are all delivered at a near-whisper (I know Iron and Wine does this but the key difference is that Iron and Wine is, generally, awesome) and in half the songs, they’re repeated well past the five minute mark (incidentally, I don’t have a problem with songs being longer than five minutes. But, if you’re going over five, your song should be at least as awesome as The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” or LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”, which surpasses seven minutes and is still one of the best songs of the decade. Yes, the whole fucking decade). While Pitchfork finds this “aurally hypnotic,” I would like to suggest they’re confusing hypnosis with coma-inducing boredom.

Elliott Smith was one of the few singer/songwriters I can think of who could whisper his way through most of his songs and not sound like a tool, and that’s largely due to a lyrical skill that your McCombses, Mrazes, & Johnsons couldn’t touch in a lifetime of trying. Listen to “Say Yes” if you doubt that shit. In fact, listen to all of Either/Or and XO if you doubt that shit. And, if you doubt that shit after that, you’re quite possibly hopeless.

There’s a certain point where I feel like Cass McCombs is too committed to the shtick of being a lo-fi, quiet, “mysterious,” singer/songwriter and that’s a death trap for innovation. Tom Waits realized this in the early 80s  when he got tired of being the wisecracking, boozed up, jazz/country piano man and started making some of the most interesting (and awesome) music of that entire decade. And yet, I somehow doubt you’ll hear much about Frank’s Wild Years on I Love the 80s. Why? Because, as stated so many times before, VH1 knows fuckall about good music. (And, in a way, Tom Waits is the king of all the singer/songwriters – I’m not one to agree with the Pitchfork kids much, but I have a hard time disputing their assertion that “You will not write a better song than Tom Waits. Period.”)

Some of you may want to cry “sexist” at me for not including any women in this singer/songwriter rundown, but here’s why I didn’t: generally speaking, the women do it better than the boys. Neko Case would roughly fit the singer/songwriter mold here and Middle Cyclone is a fucking masterpiece. If Catacombs could compare to it, I’d give Cass McCombs an actual review instead of using his album as a springboard to complaining about his chosen genre.  (I just envisioned sitting the two albums on a table together and watching Neko leap off that car’s hood and chopping Catacombs in half. Kathleen Edwards is also superior to many of her male counterparts, though she seems to get a lot less press. Ani DiFranco is not only better than Jason Mraz but I’m pretty sure she could beat him in a fight (also, she’s one of the most truly, committedly, and successfully independent artists out there right now – so independent, in fact, that Pitchfork doesn’t seem inclined to review her albums). And I know she’s been quiet for a while, but I’ve got pleny of love for Beth Orton as well.

So here’s the thing, I think: the solo singer/songwriter field is littered with mediocrity because it’s so easy to do. You buy a guitar, figure out some chords, and then pour your soul out onto a piece of paper. You weld the words to a melody you can repeat with your modest vocal range, you repeat it until someone listens, you make an album, and some asshole in Los Angeles spends a thousand words and the better part of a morning completely shitting on your precious art. On a long enough timeline, we can all be singers in cafes and, no matter how shitty our songs are, we can find at least one person who thinks we’re so deep. But let’s not do that, okay? Please?

The Best Albums of My Life #13: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Billy Corgan, America’s most defensive musician, once opined that nobody wakes up humming a Pavement song. This was in response to Pavement’s “Range Life,” wherein Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus says he “could really give a fuck” about The Smashing Pumpkins. Oh, and according to Wikipedia (they’re citing a biography of Pavement), Corgan threatened to yank Smashing Pumpkins from the headlining slot of Lollapalooza 1994 if Pavement was allowed to play. So Corgan has always been a good sport with a great sense of humor.

But enough about Billy Corgan – not just in this post, but in general. Enough about him. Let’s talk about Pavement, specifically Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. I have this habit with books, movies, and music where I take stock of shit that I’ve listened to/read/seen, and try to fill in the gaps,  i.e., I look at so-called “important” albums/books/films and try to judge them for myself. This yields terrific results sometimes (like with Citizen Kane - that movie is really fucking good) and horrific results other times (like with Lawrence of Arabia; it’s all right, I suppose, but it could be an hour and a half shorter and seeing Alec Guinness in olive-face to be an Arabian prince is really embarrassing), especially when it comes to music. Just the other day, I was checking out Black Flag and Minor Threat because they’re kinda important bands and I’ve never listened to them before. Let me tell you, if you’ve had a bad day, you can satisfactorily remedy it with Black Flag’s Damaged or Minor Threat’s Complete Discography.

So that’s how I found Pavement. A couple years ago, I was trying to satisfy my musical desires with an emusic account (an endeavor that ended in mega-frustration because I want a download service that lets me get whatever I want and Emusic wants to suggest shitty alternatives to bands I like) so I was trying to think of important bands I might’ve missed somewhere along the line. Behold, y’all, I found Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, one of the nicest slices of 90′s rock there is, though I’m pretty sure none of its stellar tunes made it on VH1′s 100 Best Songs of the 1990s. This could be an administrative oversight or (more likely) it could be VH1 actually knows fuckall about great music.

The album opens with the “Silence Kit,” which contains a line that is either “don’t take your grandmother’s advice about us” (I just looked that up) or “don’t take your grandmother’s advice about Usher” – it’s hard to tell and I prefer the latter interpretation because I like the idea that the world is populated with grandmothers who have lots of advice regarding Usher. Listen to the song and decide for yourself. But, either way, “Silence Kit” lets you know what you’re in for on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: loose and melodic guitar lines and catchy vocal melodies galore.

Oh, and an instrumental that is allegedly a tribute to Dave Brubeck. That’s what I like about this album, though – these guys were (and are) clearly capable musicians, despite being labeled as “slacker rock”, who could create catchy tunes that sounded a lot more effortless than they probably were.

And the lyrics are pretty good too. On “Elevate Me Later,” Malkmus sings, “I’d like to check out your public protest/ why you complaining?” and then later mentions that there’s “40 different shades of black”. “Stop Breathin’” features the line, “Write it on a postcard: ‘Dad, they broke me’” and of course, there’s “Range Life,” where he sings of Corgan’s band “I don’t understand what they mean/ and I could really give a fuck.” Apparently, that’s all it takes to get BC mad enough to risk disappointing thousands of his fans (as if his last few albums haven’t done that already – zing!). Although, lyrically, “Unfair,” might be my favorite song on the album because of this series of lines: “We got the hills of Beverly/ let’s burn the hills of Beverly/ Walk! with your credit card in the air/ swing it round just like you just don’t care/ this is the slow, sick sucking part of me”. For someone like me, there’s a lot to like about all of that.

I liked Crooked Rain a lot the first time I heard it and I only enjoy it more every time I listen to it. At the end of the day, that’s the criteria for any album to be considered one of the best released in my lifetime: how often do I really listen to it? Do I wake up wanting to listen to it? The reason London Calling is my favorite album ever is because I don’t pass a week without listening to it. That’s why some people might be irked by what’s absent from my list at the end of the year – there are a lot of “great” albums that came out in my lifetime that I never listen to (like Let It Be by The Replacements – it’s a good album, but I hardly ever listen to it). Since talking about the best anything is purely subjective to start with, I want to at least do people the favor of hyping albums that I really listen to; albums that form the soundtrack to my life, in a sense. I get songs from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain stuck in my head all the time (I guess that makes me nobody to a certain pretentious asshole Who Shall Remain Nameless), and I have days where I just want to listen to that album one or two times, and that ranks it pretty highly in my personal pantheon of awesome albums.