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?)

This Maudlin Career is Over?

I was going to say something about how Camera Obscura makes old stuff sound new, but that’s not really accurate. Nothing on My Maudlin Career sounds new to me at all. What Tracyanne Campbell and company do is make old stuff sound awesome, which is usually a better thing to do with old stuff anyway.

Granted, not too many people are doing the kind of orchestral pop that Campbell is so adept at, although My Maudlin Career could be seen as a close cousin to She & Him’s also-lovely Volume 1, but that’s hardly a point against it when you consider what it means: both albums feature women with incredible voices and clearly deep record collections. And Tracyanne Campbell could probably mentor Zooey Deschanel in the broken-hearted songstress department. She’s an old pro and she shows it, singing as she does on the title track, “You used to kiss my forehead/ now your kisses give me a concussion” and later adding that she doesn’t want to be sad anymore.

Which is really a shame because Campbell is very good at being sad and not being emo; there’s a sense of sarcasm to her most heartbroken barbs and it actually reminds me of what good blues singers used to do (I say “used to do” because the blues has mostly been co-opted by Midwestern white kids like Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd and they are probably the white people George Carlin was talking about when he observed, “White people fucked up the blues”), which is convey a sense of laughing to keep from crying. Am I connecting Tracyanne Campbell to Robert Johnson? Why the fuck not? Listen to some of his tunes – the dude knew that sometimes, when shit is really really bad, you have to laugh a little. Campbell would add that, if you laugh a little and make your heartache catchy, you can share it with the world without sounding like an emo twat. By which I mean, of course, Billy Corgan.

My Maudlin Career is a musically bright album, bursting with horns and strings and drums, making Camera Obscura sound like the house band on the emotional equivalent of the Titanic. But it’s a brilliant tactic because (are you getting this, emo kids?) if lines like “if the blood that’s pumping through my veins could freeze/ like the river in Toronto/ then I’d be pleased” were delivered in a mopier context, this album would be unlistenable and, indeed, infuriating. As it is, Campbell’s romantic trail of dead is strewn across bouncing, indelible arrangements making My Maudlin Career simultaneously one of the catchiest and saddest albums you’ll hear this year.

Assuming Campbell isn’t bullshitting her audience (and I don’t think she is), she’s clearly been romantically fucked over and its led her to shield herself from what might be productive relationships (on the catchy-as-hell album closer “Honey in the Sun,” she sings, “I’m in training to become as cold as ice/ I’m determined to protect my feelings disguise” before launching into the chorus, which states that no matter how hard she tries to be cold, she’s all heated up for whoever. Good luck to that guy) and I’m not gonna attempt to go into the psychology much here because 1) I’m not a psychologist and 2) from a musical perpsective, it’s really goddamn fascinating.

For all of the musical ideas packed into every second of My Maudlin Career, its best track is the austere “Other Towns and Cities”, which is mostly a quiet electric guitar and Campbell’s incredible voice singing, “These words are weak/ and to your dislike/ but you’ll never believe them/ so I guess it’s all right,” the kinda thing that, again, would be dangerous in less capable hands. But rather than wailing about how she’s not okay, Campbell earnestly pours her sorrow into the song and then ends it with the kiss-off of “you mean nothing to me tonight.”

Camera Obscura is, at the end of the day, a blueprint for the kind of pop that ought to be on the radio.  I know I take this particular drum out and beat the shit out of it fairly frequently, and it’s not like I’m saying I want everyone in the world to listen to everything that I love because then idiots would like the things I like and that would really damage my sense of cultural superiority. But – on the other hand – I sometimes think that, if the pop stations were more Camera Obscura, more New Pornographers and the rock stations were more Hold Steady and more My Morning Jacket, it would be some kind of signal that humanity had achieved some much-needed revolution in consciousness and I really would be willing to sacrifice my sense of cultural superiority (much as I love it) if it meant that I could also shed, brick by brick, the wall of misanthropy I’ve erected to shield myself from people who refer to Dave Matthews by his first name only or people who tell me that a band is great because it sold a lot of records, and/or people who think John Mayer is good. Although one could make a compelling argument that the Misanthropy Shield is as much for you as it is for me.

Bitch, Please! A Review (and Response to a Review) of The Hazards of Love

First off – sorry about the brief hiatus there. Had a busy week. Working lots, getting engaged – these things can take up your time.

Anyhow, there are piles of albums to review and more coming out (like a certain live album and documentary about a certain best rock band in America, but we’ll get to that later) and I need to get back to work. But thanks to you, my 6 to 9 (on average) readers, for being patient.

The Decemberists are part of a music scene in my old stomping ground of Portland, Oregon, that has produced awesome punk music (like The Thermals), strummy goodness (like M. Ward), and whatever genre you would call the Decemberists.  I like to call it Novel Rock. And their new album is, naturally, a sort of “concept” album. Having discussed recently the pitfalls of the double-album, I feel I should take a minute to discuss the “concept” album with you. It’s usually a bad bet. The Wall was a concept album, but the concept is kinda loose and, if you can ignore the fact it carries a large subtext of Roger Waters hating his fucking fans, it’s a pretty good listen.  But you remember when Garth Brooks went all emo and did that Chris Gaines thing? Yeah, you don’t remember it because it was a fuck-awful idea. But, also a “concept” album.  So you can really hit with the concept album or really miss with it, depending on your abililties. If you’re abilities are unprecendentedly awesome, your concept album will be The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. But then you’d be David Bowie and, if you’re David Bowie and you read Bollocks!, I will totally by you a beer.  Or a tea. Or a whatever. You are awesome, David Bowie. That’s what I’m trying to say.

The Decemberists are ripe candidates to hit the mark with The Hazards of Love, and they do. After all, they’ve done epic songs before and even strung together the loosely conceptual The Tain EP, which was totally awesome (more awesome when performed in its entirety at the Hollywood Bowl, backed by the L.A. Philharmonic). But I feel, in order to properly review this album, I must respond to Pitchfork’s completely dumbassed review of it. My repsonse to their review should give you a good understanding of how I feel about it.

The Pitchfork review starts with some word-a-day calendar bullshit about how the Decemberists were always meant for an album like this, and that’s actually a valid point – and one I’ve made less pretentiously above. Then the reviewer apparently drops acid and decides that the blues-scale distorted guitar riffs on The Hazards of Love are “stoner-metal sludge.” Do they just have words in a hat over there, and they pull the words out and create new genres? Has this dude never listened to Led Zeppelin? Point being, there’s nothing remotely metal on this album.

But let’s set aside the music for a minute and talk about the plot of the album. Pitchfork says that, though it  “has some nice twists, it’s not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Excuse me, Pitchfork? Yeah, I have a degree in theatre. If your plots are “not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber”, it means that they’re “probably good.” As an example, here’s the plot of The Phantom of the Opera: an ugly (disfigured)  guy likes a pretty girl. That’s it. The whole fucking thing. And some asshole sings “Music of the Night.” Andrew Lloyd Webber is to theatre what Judas was to Jesus (since it’s Good Friday) – a pile of money and some nails through the wrist. Fuck Andrew Lloyd Webber and fuck Pitchfork for holding him up as some sort of master of the musical genre. Haven’t you assholes ever heard of Stephen Sondheim?

And – what galls me further – is that the P-forker goes on to whine about how following the plot is “too much work, not enough payoff”, which he then follows with a smug-as-fuck (I seriously want to slap the sweater right off this dipshit) parenthetical “Hmm, imagine that“. Poor P-forker; it’s so much easier to just crank up Wavves and be hip without having to think. Dipshit. Anyway, here’s the plot of The Hazards of Love, which I discerned from 2 listens without reading the goddamn lyric sheet: Margaret is this lady who wanders through the woods one day and finds a fawn caught in a trap. She frees him, he turns into this dude William and they fall in love. Here’s the catch – William was abandoned at birth and rescued by a magical queen who wants him to be a mama’s boy forever, which is why he’s hardly ever allowed out of the house in human form. So she gets pissed at Margaret for deflowering her little guy and hires a murderous Rake (whose song, like all good villain tunes, kinda steals the show) to kidnap Margaret and have his way with her. William tries to rescue his true love and, spoiler alert, everyone drowns. Not too fucking complicated if you ask me, and the songs tie it together pretty well. Unless you’re a Pitchfork kid who’s too busy  asphyxiating auto-erotically while fantasizing about a three-way with Sufjan Stevens and Dan Deacon, apparently.

Colin Meloy sings the parts of a Narrator, William, and the Rake. Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond sings the part of the Queen (and damn, does she have a great voice). Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark is Margaret. The songs, particularly “The Rake’s Song” and “The Wanting Comes in Waves,” are beautiful and some of the finest melodic work the Decemberists have done to date. In fact, The Hazards of Love is probably my favorite of their albums.

But I’m not done with Pitchfork yet – you know what the guy did that really pisses me off? This sentence: “As a turn toward metal, The Tain EP’s smaller portion was more satisfying– although, as mid-career change-ups go, this is still a fair piece more enjoyable than something like MMJ’s Evil Urges.” Fuck you, buddy. Evil Urges was a great album. Objectively speaking, you can’t gush over Wavvvvvvvvvvvvvves and say that Evil Urges sucks. Just because Pitchfork wants My Morning Jacket to be their Lynyrd Skynyrd (and Jim James has the temerity to want them to be our My Morning Jacket), doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate their besweatered dis of one of the best albums of last year. I don’t know how a writer of the caliber of Amanda Petrusich could stand to write for those fuckwits. Although, come to think of it, the last review of hers I read was for the Onion‘s AV Club. And, wouldn’t you know it, it was a positive review of Evil Urges. Suck it, Pitchfork.

As a bonus, a request my pal Zac sent to The Current, a radio station you definitely should listen to:

The 29 Best Albums of My Life: #16

While a lot of music criticism is not much better than a heated, tossed-off comment by a fictional character who sometimes attempts to have grown-up conversations while speaking into plastic cheeseburgers, I submit to you that Juno may have been hasty in her declaration that Sonic Youth is “just noise.” I also submit to you that there is no way that a Nirvana-loving, thirty-something hipster doesn’t know who Mott the Hoople was or how they had a huge impact on the hopes and dreams of one Mick Jones.

All that’s not to say that everyone will or should love Sonic Youth. Because, while they’re not “just noise,” they are often “a lot of noise.” It just so happens that I like a lot of noise, with a dash of melody and a hook that sneaks up on you and slaps you on the back “with a heavy rock,” to quote “Total Trash” from Sonic Youth’s 1988 masterpiece Daydream Nation.

See, you might fool someone into thinking Sonic Youth is for them by playing Rather Ripped or Nurse, but Daydream Nation is the test. It has all the melody and noise and squally guitar jams and the long songs and the weird titles and Kim Gordon yelling fake orgasms. It’s the album you play to test someone’s Sonic Youth mettle, not because it’s hard to listen to but because it has the most buried treasure of any Sonic Youth release. It’s hard to get passed “Teenage Riot” as an amazing opening song, but each successive listen reveals more to love on the other tracks. Daydream Nation is the album for people who are really ready to sit and listen, start to finish, to a Sonic Youth record.

I bet it’s a great bullshit detector too. Try this at your next party – find the biggest hipster/poser in the room and go name-drop Daydream Nation near them. They’ll probably nod and say something safe like, “Yeah, that’s a cool album.” That’s your cue to crank the album up at top volume.

Party (probably) over.

If I sound like I like Daydream Nation because almost nobody else would like it, let me be clear: that’s not the case (and, in fact, plenty of people like this album, many of whom I disagree with about almost everything else). If I was going to do that, I’d be talking up Sonic Youth’s Goo album or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, an album I dearly love but which (I’m making a bet now) everyone else I know will hate with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I’ve always liked noisy, kind of ugly music not because of some bullshit contrarian philosophy but because, on some level, really noisy stuff appeals to me. It captures life’s true chaos in a compelling sort of way. This is why I liked the Titus Andronicus record more than everyone else I know.

And one of my all time favorite noisy albums, among my favorite albums ever is Daydream Nation. Under all the noise, it’s an indie-pop album, and the guitar playing is fucking amazing, from “Teenage Riot” right on through “Eliminator Jr”. And what’s not to like about Kim Gordon’s “Does ‘fuck you’ sound simple enough?” on “The Sprawl”? Yeah, five of the fourteen tracks are at or near the seven-minute mark, allowing for a lot of weird noise, that bane of the knocked-up fictional teenager. But Sonic Youth is really the only band I forgive for going beyond about five minutes (unless it’s on maybe one song every two or three albums) in any song and that’s because their songs need time to spread out; sometimes they pull you in with the hook (as on “Total Trash,” which has one of the most indelible guitar lines of all time) and then wander away from it, only to bring it back later and other times, they bury the melody back further in the song, letting it bubble up to the surface when it’s good and ready.

Is it prog-punk? Is it pretentious indie gobbledigook? Is it just rock ‘n’ roll, evolved into some sort of crazed, J.  Mascis-worshipping (Thurston Moore has copped to “Teenage Riot” being an imagining of the Dinosaur Jr. frontman – and Rain Man of the guitar – as President of an alternate universe) beast? Who knows? Who cares? Daydream Nation is a hard album to describe – you have to give it a day in court and actually listen to it. If it pisses you off (and it will piss off a lot of people), well, then, it pisses you off. Try Juno’s precioius Moldy Peaches (but I’m warning you – other than that slightly heart-warming tune from Juno, they suck. They suck bad, they seem kinda proud of sucking, and they want you to pay them for it. So fuck them) or something else entirely. But, if you wade into the admittedly noisy waters of Daydream Nation, you may find, as I have, that rather than being “just noise,” Sonic Youth is Noise Plus: noise plus awesome guitars, noise plus the anthemic sounds of “Teenage Riot” and “Kissability,” which leads us to Sonic Youth being noise plus one of the most awesome female performers in all of rock ever, Ms. Kim Gordon.  If you liked the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, maybe send a thank-you note to Kim Gordon. ‘Cause she sang like that first.  “Kissability,” and “The Sprawl” are but two great entries in the Kim Gordon canon, along with Nurse’s “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream,” Gordon’s masterful fuck-you to Mariah Carey.  (I am adamant that there was a name-change at some point, becuase when Nurse first came out, I recall this song being listed as “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream”)

If you asked me what’s so great about Sonic Youth, I would put Daydream Nation on for you and let you decide for yourself (Note: no one has ever asked me “Matt, what’s so great about Sonic Youth?” and don’t expect they ever will, but one can always dream). Now, there are those people out there (whose opinions can often be found on websites whose names rhyme with “snitch pork”) who will turn their nose right up at you should you not immediately be blown away by Sonic Youth’s awesomeness. They will have a similar reaction if you say you don’t see what’s so great about Radiohead (or if you suggest that not everything Radiohead does is a complete reinvention of the human ability to perceive sound). In both cases, you can’t blame the bands for fans like that. Sonic Youth is an amazing, noisy band and Daydream Nation is an amazing, noisy record. You don’t have to like either, and when you post the 29 best albums released in your lifetime on your little blog that between 2 and 6 people (on average) read, I won’t feel the least bit cheated to find Daydream Nation absent from the list. You wanna go get a beer?

Tonight: Franz Ferdinand vs. The More-of-the-Samies

While the reviews of Franz Ferdinand’s new album, Tonight, have mostly been laudatory, many have complained that Tonight is more of the same from everyone’s favorite Glaswegians (everyone but me – The Delgados will always be my favorite Scottish band). Meaning more catchy, dancey pop with the occasionally subversive lyric from Alex Kapranos (see You Could Have It So Much Better’s “The Fallen” for lines like “Walk among us/ if you judge us/ yeah, we’re all damned”). I want to get the More-of-Same thing out of the way before we truly begin discussing Tonight, because it’s important to start with the right context. So first off, Franz Ferdinand never promised nor did they indicate in any way that they would shake their sound up much from album to album. No, one gets the feeling that all they ever promised you was a good time. They’ve delivered consistently over the years and maybe you don’t want to shack up with a guy who can only ever promise a good time and not much else, but the good times are good, aren’t they? So if you dismiss Tonight on the grounds that it sounds like their first two albums, I have to ask you if you liked their first two albums. If you didn’t, hey, it’s fair game to say it sounds exactly like two other albums that you didn’t like (An example, yeah? I didn’t like John Mayer’s first two albums. I think they sounded like shit. And I think his recent work sounds exactly the same: like shit. So I can claim “more-of-the-samies” on John Mayer and all’s fair). But, if you did like their first two albums and now don’t like Tonight because it sounds just like the first two, what you really mean is, “Tonight sounds like their first two albums, but I’ve decided that I only want two albums that sound like that, so I’ll be trading Tonight for something different at my local used CD shop.” Or something like that. (Note: this is different than saying an album is more of the same and lavishing a shrugging indifference upon it; for instance, I’m fine with Placebo, but I don’t necessarily give a shit when they release an album. I already own two of their albums and that’s all I need. But I’m glad they make their living making music even though I get the feeling that Brian Molko is the world’s biggest drama queen.)

I’m not arguing that you should like Tonight (let’s be clear: Bollocks! is about what I like and why I like it, not about what you should or shouldn’t like — I report, you decide, and I’m continually amazed that anyone really reads this shit), I’m merely saying that “It’s the same as the other two” is a weak argument against it. Yeah, on first listen, there’s a lot on Tonight that sounds like the first two albums, and I realize that to some people, having a favorite Franz Ferdinand album is like having a favorite Black Keys album (which I do – last year’s Attack & Release) or a favorite Placebo album (okay, I admit that it’s pointless to have a favorite Placebo album), but I say to you now with no hesitation that Tonight is my favorite Franz Ferdinand album and their best work to date.

Tonight is the first Franz Ferdinand album that sets up and consistently executes a mood. Beginning with “Ulysses,” straight on through “Katharine Kiss Me”, Tonight is a long night’s journey into day, “Ulysses” the tune that ushers in a night of drunken carousing about town, the middle tunes tracing the night hopping from pub to pub, searching for Mrs. Right (or Mrs. Right Now, har har) or Mrs. Maybe, and the album winding down through the transition from happy-drunk (“Turn It On”) to morose drunk (“What She Came For” and “Live Alone”)  to hangover (“Lucid Dreams”) and ending with Kapranos serenading a woman named Katharine drunkenly in the morning, perhaps sitting on her front stoop with a half-empty bottle at his foot, a six-string in his lap, and a cigarette clinging to his bottom lip for dear life. And through the whole thing, these ersatz Archdukes are tuneful sons of bitches, augmenting their normally jangly guitar pop with some synths, a little more falsetto from Kapranos, and an honest to god rocking out guitar solo at the end of “What She Came For.”

So there are indications of growth on Tonight, though not as much as the band probably sees nor as little as their detractors would claim. Franz Ferdinand has always been a pretty tight band (especially for a pop group), but Tonight reveals a heretofore unseen cohesiveness in both music and theme that is actually pretty refreshing. While I’ve enjoyed previous outings by Franz Ferdinand, Tonight is the only album of theirs that I would regard as truly compelling.  Perhaps this is because, my college days not being that fucking far behind me, I can recall nights of (mis)adventure where I thought I was never going home. And I’ve definitely been to parties where I can see “What She Came For” (it was never me, for the record). You start these kind of nights feeling every ounce of your youth – you’re invincible and then, by the end of the night, you’ve got, to borrow from Tom Waits, a bad liver and a broken heart. (Or, if you’re me, you’re drinking with one or two pals in your room listening to Tom Waits and/0r Wilco, knowing with every fiber of your being that those dudes are dead fucking on about whatever it is they’re singing about.)

There are way too many enjoyable moments on Tonight for me to dismiss it as just another Franz Ferdinand album. It has all the stuff I liked about the first two albums without the feeling that I’m listening to a dozen consecutive singles. The only place where Tonight really bogs down is the electronic self-indulgence at the end of “Lucid Dreams,” a moment that has a bit too much of a hard-on for Broadcast (if you don’t know who Broadcast is, I demand you check out Tender Buttons immediately) without the chops to back it up. Still, this is the album I expected Franz Ferdinand to make back when everyone was coming in their pants about “Take Me Out” (I know there are people out there on the internet who would argue for spelling it “cumming,” but they can go fuck themselves until they cum).

Noble Beast

Face it: you probably weren’t excited about the new Andrew Bird album. It’s just not a thing one does in relation to Bird’s music. You may have been keenly interested to hear it (as I was), you may have awaited its release with deep, even forbidden desire, but the word “excited” probably didn’t really come up, did it? Bird’s just not that exciting. Which is not to say he’s bad – far from it. But you don’t line up at midnight to buy his albums at a store that’s staying open late specifically to sell them to you.

Nope. You walk in, quietly, you find Noble Beast on the shelf, and you buy it. Then you go home, not in any  particular hurry, and you maybe throw it on now or maybe you wait. You should certainly wait until you can hear the whole thing from start to finish.

So far, Noble Beast is the most accurate album title of 2009. Like all of Andrew Bird’s work, there’s a certain regal grace to the thing. And it’s a big, dense, odd, beautiful beast of a record.

Andrew Bird doesn’t really rock out, so there’s not much above midtempo on Noble Beast (Bird’s best song, “Fiery Crash,” from 2007′s pretty good Armchair Apocrypha, could be played at quite high volume in a room full of cardiac patients and not really thrust anyone’s blood pressure into the danger zone). No, the thrills provided here are of a much subtler nature. But they’re here.

“Oh No” opens and sets the tone for Noble Beast: lots of lush strings, some gentle acoustic guitar, and Andrew Bird’s stellar tenor singing about walking “arm in arm with all the harmless sociopaths”, the kind of rhythmic wordplay that Bird has perfected (and which he really shoots his load on in “Anonanimal” with some stream-of -consciousness spiel about his enemy seeing a sea anenome). Bird’s wit is sharp and dry, like Eleanor Roosevelt’s shin bones would be if you dug ‘em right now, though Bird’s wit is probably less brittle.

It took me a long time to get into Noble Beast, but now, having done so, I really can’t get out. This album is beautiful the way Pitchfork mistakenly thinks Sufjan Stevens’ music is beautiful. These 14 tracks are hyper-intelligently composed but never self-indulgent, absolutely saturated with complex melodies and played with an economy of instrumentation that the geography-crazed Mr. Stevens should probably look into. You may only hear an electric guitar for a few bars on a song, but it comes in, does its job, then clocks out and goes home. On Noble Beast, Bird has composed a pop masterwork; “Masterswarm” and the superb “Anonanimal” have tangible movements to them, making them pop songs composed like classical suites. It’s a feat that would seem pretentious in the hands of more assuming performers (I know I’ve bagged on Sufjan Stevens a lot in this review, but I’m going to continue to do so. His compositions are bloated. I don’t give a shit about a 23 track album where some tracks are 30 seconds of glockenspiel or whatever. Write a fucking song.), but it’s hard to think of a less assuming performer than Andrew Bird.

Because the songs are so tightly composed, they’re not what you’d call radio-friendly. If you need a hook in the first 30 seconds, you might not like Noble Beast, but if you have some patience, melodies like the chorus of  “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” will grab you from behind, spin you around, and plant a big ol’ kiss on your psyche. Am I gushing over this album? Maybe, but maybe Noble Beast is as good as I say it is. In the past, and with the exception of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, I’ve gotten tired/bored about halfway through Andrew Bird albums. I fully expected that with Noble Beast as well. What I did not expect was that, within two rotations in the car, I would find myself coming back to Noble Beast again and again, patiently awaiting the soft shower of beauty it is all too willing to rain upon me. If Mysterious Production of Eggs was Bird’s accessible, poppy album, Noble Beast is his coming-out as a music nerd’s music nerd. You don’t have to share my love of music theory to enjoy Noble Beast, but my love of theory and composition does add an extra dollop of whipped cream to the hot fudge sundae that is this album.

Call it the Boxer Effect. When that album came out in the early part of 2007, I heard “Fake Empire” and had an orgasm. But I didn’t really get into the rest of the album until much later, when songs like “Mistaken for Strangers” and “Apartment Story” crept into my skull while I wasn’t looking. Suddenly, Boxer was my favorite album of the year and The National became one of my favorite bands. Andrew Bird has sped up the Boxer Effect exponentially with Noble Beast. I’ve had this album for one week as of this writing and I’m going through it for possibly the 12th time.  And each time, I find new melodic treasures, so much so that I wonder now if I have suddenly understood Andrew Bird in an entirely new light. Perhaps I can go back and listen to the second half of Armchair Apocrypha without nodding off. Perhaps not.

If you’ve read other reviews of Noble Beast and find this one to be the most effusive, I can only hope that it is. Andrew Bird has completely won me over with this album, literally startled me with its beauty. If you’ve been reading Bollocks! regularly over the last year, 1) thanks! and 2) you might realize that I don’t easily go gooey over albums that aren’t by Tom Waits, The Clash, or The Hold Steady, and that might mean Noble Beast is worth some investigation on your part. That said, this album, like all Andrew Bird’s albums, will try the patience of a lot of listeners who might well write to me and tell me I’m full of shit (I have dear friends who will probably hate this album), but if you’re willing to bear with it for a while, it will pay off handsomely.