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?)

Best Albums of My Life #22: Combat Rock

I’ve realized two things recently: 1) I’ve been neglecting my sporadic countdown of the 29 best albums released in my lifetime. I’ll be 30 in a couple months, so I should probably wrap this up before then; 2) Combat Rock, the last real Clash album, is fucking awesome (I know, I know: Bernie Rhodes pushed through Cut the Crap after the band ousted Mick Jones, but if you think that’s a real Clash record, we’re gonna have words. Fighting words).

After being one of the first punk bands to actually say stuff with their music (I sometimes think “White Riot,” “Career Opportunities,” and “White Man at Hammersmith Palais” say it all), the Clash headed out into new territory, whipping up delightful mixtures of their influences (one such recipe became London Calling, the best album ever. Of course, one of them also became Sandanista!, an album that has its moments but is about three times longer than it needs to be. Yes, like Shakespeare before them, the Clash were capable of cranking out the rare bad work) and serving them up as piping hot records of rock, reggae, punk, and even early hip-hop. In the process, they went from Best Punk Band Ever to one of the best bands ever in any genre.

Even as Mick Jones’s ego and Topper Headon’s drug use (and, to be fair, the ego and drug use of the rest of the band too – to quote Joe Strummer, “We were always a drug band. Always.” If you read Return of the Last Gang in Town, you’ll find that he wasn’t too proud of that fact) began to tear the Clash apart, they managed to cobble together (not without some internal strife) Combat Rock, which would feature two of their biggest commercial hits (“Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” which – I’ve read – Mick Jones wrote about Ellen Foley, a.k.a. the girl who sang on Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Apparently, Mick enjoyed a romantic affair with Foley and even produced her solo debut, which tanked like a Kevin Costner movie with a score by Steven Seagall’s country band) and a host of other awesome songs. In fact, here’s a little history lesson for you kids who heard “Paper Planes” on the Slumdog Millionaire trailers last year: “Paper Planes” actually samples “Straight to Hell” from Combat Rock. So if you’re diving into M.I.A.’s catalog because of that song, do yourself a favor and listen to the Clash while you’re at it. In fact, I don’t care if you have no idea what I’m talking about right now – listen to the Clash.

Combat Rock is the Clash’s poppiest album, but that’s hardly a bad thing. In fact, it only proves that, had they stuck together longer (an impossibility which will discuss further in a minute), the Clash would’ve dominated the 80s with awesome pop goodness. Combat Rock also points to where Strummer and Jones would eventually end up post-Clash: “Overpowered by Funk” and “Red Angel Dragnet” point toward the work Mick Jones would do with Big Audio Dynamite, “Death is a Star,” and “Straight to Hell” indicate the direction that Joe Strummer would explore with the Mescaleros. Of course, Strummer’s death in 2002 (at the tender age of 50) means that we’ll never really know the impact he could’ve made with his second great band (have you heard Streetcore? It’s awesome). Jones is still running around producing various albums (including the first Libertines record, which owes a not-tiny debt to the Clash) and even recently collaborated with Topper Headon on a re-recording of “Jail Guitar Doors” for a prison charity in the U.K..

Originally titled Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg, Combat Rock had a long struggle to even see the light of day. It was originally 15 tracks, 65 minutes, and growing. Mick Jones was happy with this situation, Joe Strummer was furious with it, and from there, you can see that this was a band not long for the world. In a 1984 interview with Creem, Joe Strummer pointed out, “I don’t believe anyone is that great they don’t write crap sometimes.” In Strummer’s opinion, the album that would be Combat Rock was in bad need of an editor and an outside producer – things I think would have benefited Sandanista!. When CBS heard the Rat Patrol tapes, they were not happy and suggested Glyn Johns to mix the record. Johns hacked the album down to twelve tracks with a decidedly pop bent (Strummer was on a mission to make a pop album that wasn’t all “Stuff ‘er on the bed and shove it to her” in an ambitious attempt to lure meat-heads away from the burgeoning hair metal scene), a move that led Jones to abandon the sessions, apart from re-recording his vocal on “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”  Clash biographer Marcus Gray (author of the aforementioned Return of the Last Gang in Town, a must-read for fans of the band) accuses Strummer of perhaps going too far toward a mainstream sound on Combat Rock, but Strummer biographer Chris Salewicz (whose Redemption Song is also a must-read; taken together, Gray’s book and Redemption Song paint portraits of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones as two very gifted men with strong wills, strong egos, and maybe an even stronger need to be loved by a wide audience) points out that Strummer kind of stuck his neck out, “having seized the reins” for the album, and was understandably nervous about how it would be received.

Combat Rock was, of course, adored both in the U.S. and in the U.K., but that would not be enough to keep the Clash together. Topper Headon was out of the band before they went on tour in 1982 and Jones was kicked out at the end of the tour. On its musical merits alone, Combat Rock is easily one of the best albums of the 1980s and it holds up well to this day. And, if we’re being honest, we must admit that its musical greatness is due to the talents of all four members of the Clash: from Give ‘Em Enough Rope to Combat Rock, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones, and Joe Strummer matured together as musicians and made some of the best rock music ever recorded.

Incidentally, the “countdown” (it’s not really a countdown, since I do it in the order of my choosing whenever I feel like adding an album to the list) is not even half way over. If you want to catch up, you can find the entire list right here. I’ll try to update it more regularly, since I was supposed to have this all done by the end of 2009.

Hommebug

It seems like just yesterday I was doggedly resisting and then falling utterly in love with the first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. I believe the line, “over there/ there’s broken bones/ there’s only music/ so that there’s new ring tones” is what eventually won me over. It also seems like just yesterday that I was defending Franz Ferdinand against the charge that their latest album, Tonight, was the dreaded “More of the Same.” Like the last Franz Ferdinand effort, the third album by the Arctic Monkeys, Humbug, has seen the young Brits accused of not trying to surprise us anymore. Those are, in fact, pretty much the exact words used in the Onion A.V. Club review. I guess it’s my duty as a curmudgeonly asshole to point out that bands shouldn’t make music to try to “surprise” people – they should try to make good music. I mean, it might be surprising if, in the middle of your song, you recorded yourself taking a particularly difficult shit over a drum beat, but it wouldn’t make the song good.

And Humbug, though not as immediately indelible as their debut (which is still their best album), is pretty good. It’s not a radical shift for the Arctic Monkeys but almost no band makes a radical shift, ever. People who think London Calling is a million miles away from the first Clash record need to listen to “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” and “Police and Thieves” again. On the other hand, Tom Waits shifted from being a boozed up, cabaret pianist to being the greatest folk weirdo in the history of American music. Other than that, I can’t think of a lot of really big changes any band has made between albums. Even Radiohead, despite what the P-fork cultists tell you, has made steady and not-that-surprising progress in their sound from album to album (before anyone’s ironically retro looking sweaters come all unraveled, I’m not saying Radiohead isn’t good. They’re awesome. I’m merely pointing out that the steps between Pablo Honey and In Rainbows make sense to me.). Hang on… just thought of another big shift: Chris Cornell’s Scream is a radical departure from his usual solo mediocrity to actively and impressively sucking. My point here is that maybe we could not judge a band on how much they change between albums and judge them on whether or not the music is still good (since the Radical Shift in Sound – RSS from now on – is not always a good thing. See the above poop-taking reference for just one colorful example of why).

For Humbug, the Arctic Monkeys drafted (or he volunteered? I really don’t know) the king of the Queens of the Stone Age, Josh Homme (rhymes with “Tommy”) to produce. Mr. Rhymes-with -Tommy definitely left his mark on the record, pulling out murkier and heavier sounds than the Arctic Monkeys have made on their previous albums. Alex Turner still delivers his vocal lines with a cocky sneer (which helps when he’s delivering babble like the bulk of “Crying Lightning”, which is a catchy song with nonsensical lyrics. Note that nonsense lyrics are not necessarily a point against you – Bowie spouted nonsense through much of the 1970s and I will fight anyone who thinks Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust are anything less than genius. Including you, Glenn Beck) and Matt Helders still pounds the hell out of the drums, but Homme’s musical aesthetic is all over Humbug. Guitars squall up out of the musical murk on the slower songs and they sound a lot like they’d sound on a Queens of the Stone Age album. This is hardly a bad thing, as the Arctic Monkeys are exceedingly capable musicians and it’s nice to hear them play out a little more (the songs on Humbug tend to be around four minutes, as opposed to the previous two albums which kept everything around two or three minutes).

Humbug is, to my mind, the biggest grower album of 2009 so far. The first time I heard it, I was bored stiff. This doesn’t (obviously) guarantee that I’m going to hate an album, but it doesn’t bode well either. The curious thing is that I still wanted to listen to it after I’d been bored stiff by it. I can’t really explain that, but there was something in there that was grabbing onto me and I only just now realized (literally as I’m typing this – I had no idea how this sentence was gonna end, but now I do. Bully for me) what it is: it’s gonna sound daffy at first, but I think the Arctic Monkeys have picked up the ball that Elvis Costello mostly dropped in the early 80s (sometime after Armed Forces). Think about it: Elvis Costello was annoying, brash, and completely didn’t give a fuck for his first three glorious albums (to be sure, My Aim is True, This Year’s Model, and Armed Forces form a mighty triumvirate). He took some of the worst excesses of the 70s, like the electronic organ, and turned them into things like “Pump it Up” and the intro to “Radio, Radio” (which is still one of the most awesome songs ever). On Humbug, the Arctic Monkeys engage in some of the habits of music’s most annoying artists – pointless tempo shifts, nonsense lyrics, and spelling in song (seriously, nothing pisses me off more than spelling words out in a song and Fergie is mostly to blame for this) – and it still comes out okay in the end. The spelling song in question is “Dangerous Animals” in which (you guessed it) Turner spells out the two titular words as if doing that somehow makes a chorus.  I hated “Dangerous Animals” the first time I heard it, but now I kind of like it. Why? For the same reason I imagine a friend of mine made fun of Elvis Costello’s “Alibi” (which is not from the Holy Trinity of early Elvis albums but is on 2002′s stellar When I Was Cruel) the first time he heard it and then, about two months later, asked me to burn it onto a mixed CD for him. I don’t know if this is a British thing or not, but it seems that Elvis Costello (when he wants to) and the Arctic Monkeys share an ability to subvert the tactics and tropes of far worse musicians (not to suggest that she is a musician, but Fergie misspells “tasty” in a song about how great she is. I’m positive I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Fergie should be locked in a room somewhere and given a crash course in the English fucking language. Or maybe she should just be locked in a room somewhere) and spin them into gold.

Humbug is probably not going to win many screaming teenagers to the Arctic Monkeys’ shows, but they may not want it to (who the fuck would?). Maybe, after all the hype that their first album received (some of it deserved), they just want NME to back the fuck up a minute and let the music speak for itself. Either way, there’s a dearth of really clever, true rock bands out there (since the Libertines are no more) and it’s nice to see the Arctic Monkeys asserting their place in the pack, especially when the rest of the U.K. seems to want to ride Franz Ferdinand’s coattails wherever they may go.

It’s the Facts of Life, Sunshine

I’m really glad that Journal for Plague Lovers is my first exposure to The Manic Street Preachers. There’s apparently a lot of baggage surrounding this album because most of the lyrics are old songs & poems by departed (and presumed dead) guitarist Richey Edwards and the claim has been made that the Manics are exploiting this fact to create some kind of return to form. Well, I don’t think it’s exploitation if they’re still setting aside royalties for a guy who, however much his band and family loved him, pulled a disappearing act on them 14 fucking years ago. But my ignorance here is truly blissful because I don’t know what form it is they would be returning to, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard them.

And, judging it on its musical merits, it won’t be the last. Journal for Plague Lovers is a lyrically dark, melodically awesome platter of what sounds like some perverse combination of 1990s radio alternative and 1980s hair metal, the latter charge due in large part to the fact that James Dean Bradfield’s voice is somehow both histrionic as hell and not at all infuriating. There’s tons of guitar on Journal and Bradfield screams and bellows the choruses, while Nicky Wire (who edited some of Edwards’s lyrics) and Sean Moore hold down the rhythm. Bradfield’s voice is probably your biggest obstacle to enjoying Journal and I’ll admit that it gave me some trepidation on the first listen.

But, happily, Journal for Plague Lovers isn’t a true grower of an album – by the second spin through, I was fully into it and I now find myself with one of these songs stuck in my head a couple of times a day. It’s not Bradfield’s fault that he sounds, at times, like the dude from Queensryche (Bob Mould, formerly of Husker Du, can sound a little 80s too sometimes, but nobody’s bagging on Zen Arcade, are they? ) and the fact is, his ability to hit the vocal melody out of the ballpark earns him a ready supply of goodwill from even my picky-as-hell ears. The guy is, whether anyone likes it or not, one hell of a singer.

There are hard hitting highlights galore, especially in the early going. The album opens with “Peeled Apples,” in which Bradfield sings about “Noam Chomsky’s Camelot,” a phrase which sounds nice, but I’m still not sure what it means. “Peeled Apples” is followed by the best track on the album, “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time,” a song ostensibly about the theological implications of adultery that asks the pressing question:  “Oh Mommy, what’s a Sex Pistol?” If you don’t know, ask your neighbor(‘s wife).

Over my last several listens, I’ve realized one of things I like best about The Manic Street Preachers is that they make good music by doing several things that I usually don’t like. First, there’s Bradfield’s super-dramatic voice, rescued by the catchy melodies. Then, there’s the pretent0us song titles like, “Me and Stephen Hawking,” (best song about cloning ever) “All is Vanity,” and “This Joke Sport Severed.” There’s also a lot of fiddly guitar bits. On paper, not only should I hate The Manic Street Preachers, but they should be a shitty emo band.

I’m noticing (I plan to talk about this at greater length later, probably in the context of the new Death Cab EP) that one of the big things that allows a band to walk that razor thin highwire between awesome emotional music and My Chemical Emo is intelligence (did I just call My Chemical Romance stupid? Yes. Yes, I did). There’s an intelligence to Manic Street Preachers (how many bands do you know of who use words like neophobia? Spellcheck doesn’t even think it’s a word, but it means “a morbid fear of novelty,” which, as definitions go, is fucking awesome) coupled with a sense of humor (“Me and Stephen Hawking” talks about the narrator and Hawking missing the sex revolution “when we failed the physical”) that’s never forced. Sure, emo bands make pathetic, often calculated stabs at being clever, but it’s analogous to conservatives trying to be funny. You get what they’re trying to do, but you would still rather set them on fire than listen to them say another word.

In essence, Journal for Plague Lovers should come with a warning to other bands: do not to try this at home. The Manics are playing with dangerous stuff here and, in the wrong hands, it could really hurt someone’s ears. They have a broad enough sensiblity (though the album is lyrically unrelenting, there are some quieter moments like “Facing Page: Top Left,” and “William’s Last Words,” which is sung by Nicky Wire. Pitchfork didn’t like that tune, but we’ve already established that they’re brain damaged, so you can trust me when I say the song is a nice sendoff for Richey Edwards and a nice way to settle things down before the hidden track, “Bag Lady,” asks, “to be morally good, are you ready to love/ a devil pretending to be a god?”) that the album is a lot more dynamic than a lot of three-piece bands tend to produce. Though Journal traffics in heavy topics (there’s a very catchy tune about the Virginia State Epilieptic Colony), the music itself provides catharsis, which is something rock ‘n’ roll should do (and another thing that emo doesn’t really do – it tries to calculate cathartic moments, but that’s not the same thing). Sadly, it would seem that catharsis, which the Manics are so capable of producing, wasn’t enough for Richey Edwards, whose car was found near Severn Bridge (an apparently renowned suicide spot) a couple of weeks after he disappeared. His family had him legally presumed dead late last year and, while no body has ever been found (and inconclusive “sightings” have occurred around the world since his disappearance), it seems pretty likely the dude is not only gone for good, but wanted to be that way. That his band has been able to carry on so long without him is a testament to their abilities not just as musicans but as people (and seriously, they still set aside royalties for the guy – that’s awesome). So the question, from where I sit, is not, “Are The Manic Street Preachers exploiting Richey Edwards’s lyrics and disappearance to recapture the spirit of the band when he was with them?” The question is, “When they run out of stuff that he wrote, did he leave them enough fire to keep things going?” I haven’t listened to their other albums, so I can only judge from Journal for Plague Lovers, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and give them a fighting chance.

Perhaps They’re Quickening Hearts on the Metric Scale

Let’s take stock of the music coming from the U.K. these days, shall we? We’ll include Scotland and Wales in this little status report but probably not Ireland unless I mistakenly assign Britishness to an Irish band in which case all none of my readers across the pond can dismiss me as the ignorant, morbidly obese yankee that I am statistically likely to be.

At any rate, Wales has been doing all right the last couple of years, giving us quality entertainment from Los Campesinos! as well as a pretty good new record from Manic Street Preachers. So well done, Wales. The Scots, however, have had it going on ever since The Delgados, and adding last year’s great Frightened Rabbit album and a great disc apiece from Franz Ferdinand and Camera Obscura – well, let’s just say the Scots are kicking plenty of arse right now. Keep it up, Scotland, and don’t let Mel Gibson make any more movies about you. Come to think of it, don’t let Mel Gibson make any more movies.

But what about all these British bands? You’ve got your Futureheads, your Arctic Monkeys, your British Sea Power, your Kaiser Chiefs, your Brakes, your Muse, and that’s not even mentioning your Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, and Radiohead.

Oh, and Maximo Park. And literally a billion others.

I really dug the sort of angular, twitchy guitar pop that I found on Maximo Park’s A Certain Trigger. Then I drifted away from them for a while and missed Our Earthly Pleasures entirely, which filled me with a sense of duty toward what I believe is their third album, Quicken the Heart. Quicken the Heart is a dancey, poppy, British pop album circa 2009.  Which means, like other albums by other bands that traffic in similar stuff, it’s mostly trying to carve a niche for itself in the burnt out crater left from Franz Ferdinand’s rocket to superstardom. They had some promising stuff on A Certain Trigger, a romantic cynicism that was as refreshing as Franz Ferdinand’s committed heathen/hedon-ism.

But Quicken the Heart kinda sounds like it could be early Maximo Park demos, you know, where Paul Smith is aping The Cure’s Robert Smith (no relation?) a little too closely. And, unless I’m failing to convert something from the metric system here, there’s not a lot of quickening going on with my ticker, which is really sad because said lack of quickening inclines people like me to dismiss albums like Quicken the Heart on about the third listen. I’m on listen number three as we speak, but I’ve got a review to do, so I’m plowing ahead. I do these things for you, dear reader(s?). And, incidentally, if there are any international Bollocks! readers out there, I’d like to state – just for the record – that I’m not an ignorant, morbidly obese yankee. At least I’m not morbidly obese.

The thing is, British guitar-pop bands today are cranking out mediocrity at an alarmingly prolific rate. There are new bands all the time and they sound just like the new bands that were coming out in 2005, putting out music that isn’t offensively bad, or really bad at all, just really… samey. And all these bands are somehow making a living over there, perhaps because NME is willing to declare anyone the greatest British band ever at least once.

So I’m picking my battles from now on, Britain. I will listen to the next Arctic Monkeys record. I will always listen to Los Campesinos! records, and I’ll keep my Scottish bands (if The Delgados get back together, I may have to schedule my honeymoon in Scotland around that glorious event), but no more guy-bands doing the dance-pop thing. I’m over it. To quote my beloved Campesinos!, “four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life.” And I am gonna go ahead and be sexist and say that I will still follow female British bands and performers. (For those of you who might call that “reverse” sexism, you’re stupid. Discrimination against anyone based on their gender is sexism – the sex of either party involved is secondary to the discrimination itself and I know there might be one or two enlightened individuals out there who totally get that, but after sitting through the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and listening to right-wing pundits make charges of “reverse racism”, I feel the need to point out what a stupid fucking phrase that is. Racism against white people isn’t reverse racism, it’s just plain old racism. Ironically, prejudice doesn’t discriminate. It’s fine coming from the mouths of any moron, regardless of their race, sex, or religious background) Why am I favoring the ladies? Well, the answer’s all over this post – there are so goddamn many groups of guys doing the same kind of music that I’ll reward any woman for getting her voice heard over there. Except for Tori Amos. My god, she’s terrible. And even then, I’m not promising to like everything I hear from British women, I’m only promsing to listen to it in the first place. Let’s face it – me promising to like anything would be the death of Bollocks!

I don’t want to come across as some sort of jingoistic American elitist either. We here in the states are xeroxing shitty emo bands by the sewerful (“sewerful” is the correct unit of measurment for amounts of emo bands. You can look it up), so it’s a case of same shit, different genre. We also hand a record contract to every pubescent fuckwit who has a show on the Disney channel and promises not to have sex until they’re married, so I don’t want people thinking that America is somehow doing something right where Britain is doing something wrong. The larger point here is that, in both countries, we are inundated with musical choices that fall all over the spectrum from bad to mediocre to good and life is just to fucking short to ever choose mediocre. If you’re deeply moved, or fired up, or in anyway excited (that is, har har, if your heart is quickened, har har) by the new Maximo Park record, hey, great for you. You’re (possibly) a zombie.

Also: abstinence pledges are pointless failures. What would Jesus do? Apparently, every girl in his high school. Hoo-ah!

Goddammit, Elvis Costello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Brut vs. the Theory of Diminishing Returns

If you’ve heard Art Brut, you’ve already made up your mind about their shtick. You either love or hate the fact that the band capably bashes out standard rock riffs while Eddie Argos drops sometimes clever verbiage about whatever minutiae are drifting through his mind at the moment. Coming from a country where the Streets are considered hip-hop, this might go over well in the U.K. And people this side of the pond like it too, not least of them being Mr. Frank Black, who produced Art Brut’s new Art Brut Vs. Satan.

If you didn’t like Art Brut before, you still won’t and if you did, you still will. It’s the exact same modus operandi that they’ve employed on every single album they’ve ever made and, one gets the feeling, they’re not apt to change any time soon. Thing is, when I listened to their first album, I could kinda get behind “Formed a Band,” and that whole thing. It sounded ridiculous, but it was refreshing in its own right. Now, it’s just old. Eddie Argos is sometimes compared to Craig Finn because neither guy is known for their tunefulness , but what separates the two is that 1) Finn at least tries to sing and, indeed, on The Hold Steady’s last couple albums, he’s made great use of his very limited vocal range and 2) Finn doesn’t just write songs that are winking references to other rock albums or being in a band or being immature. Finn can actually write and there’s something other than superficial pleasure to be had from his work. Argos, on the other hand, is never gonna give you anything better than, “The record buying public shouldn’t be voting,” a good line to be sure, but you get the sense that he thought of it and went, “Oy, that’s a clever line. Better put that in a song.” And that’s it. You get nothing else from Art Brut… or, if you do, please explain in detail because I can’t see what all the fuss is about.

Granted, Art Brut Vs. Satan, like its two predecessors, offers one or two pretty decent songs (on Bang Bang Rock ‘n’ Roll, there were three tracks: “Formed a Band”, “My Little Brother,” and “Modern Art”; It’s a Bit Complicated gave us two gems in “Direct Hit” and their best song ever, “St. Pauli”) “Demons Out!” contains the line about the record buying public and “Slap Dash for No Cash” chides bands that wanna sound like U2, but they’re surrounded with the same old shit that Art Brut has always done. It’s just that Frank Black produced this one and someone else produced the other two.

But don’t get me wrong – I don’t hate Art Brut. I don’t even really dislike them. I don’t want to listen to their albums all the way through, and Art Brut Vs. Satan didn’t change that, but I dig where they’re coming from. After all, it’s not as though Argos & company ever promised us Morrisseyish intensity (thank dog) or psychedelic Pink Floyd jams a la “Echoes” – in fact, they pretty much always promised us the opposite of that, and so I raise my glass to ‘em on ethos alone. But liking everything about a band except their music pretty much means I’d hang out with these guys as long as we didn’t talk about their music. And, should Eddie Argos ever hear Radical Edward, he can decide the same thing about my band. And then we’ll go get hammered and listen to The Hold Steady.

Argos has said time and again that Art Brut is 100% unironic and not a joke band at all (which, yeah I know, the Darkness said too, but that didn’t change the facts on the ground, did it?) and while I agree on point A, I’m not entirely with ‘em on point B. I don’t think Art Brut is a total joke band and I don’t think they’re having a wank at their audience’s expense: I think that they’re a rock band about how easy it is to be in a rock band these days (using “Formed a Band” as a blueprint). It’s almost like they’re daring you to start a band and do better. So it’s not really a joke, but a hilarious dare – I think Pavement had a similar thing going at times (and I don’t like all their albums by any means, but Malkmus shit-talked Smashing Pumpkins before it was cool to shit-talk them, so again, points on the ethos there).

So here’s what you do: find a friend who loves Art Brut (you probably have one) and borrow their CDs. Find the songs you like (and you will), rip ‘em to your computer, and rock out to them when you need to do that.

Lest anyone feel like I’m bashing Art Brut too heavily, I’m gonna relate an awesome story about Eddie Argos. I saw Art Brut open for The Hold Steady in Los Angeles last year. Before Art Brut, there was a horrid band called The Blood Arm. The singer seemed to think he was some hybrid of Neil Diamond and Jim Morrisson (if such a creature should come to earth, we are, every one of us, legally allowed to chop off its head and set it on fire) and he went down into the audience on literally every song. And the audience wasn’t that into him, but there were a few people who faithfully mobbed around him every time he’d do it. So when Art Brut got up there, Argos one-upped the Blood Arm douchebag considerably – he went into the audience, started jumping up and down with all the kids and then disappeared in the crowd, heading back to the bar for a beer before returning to the stage. Also, they had a big projector that blasted the lyrics to their songs on the wall behind ‘em, eight feet tall and luminous. It bears repeating: Art Brut, if nothing else, always gets the “A” for ethos.

The Boy Least Likely To Impress Me

Admittedly, a large portion of the music I like could be, maybe possibly, filed under the header “Indie.” And here’s why I hate that: it’s meaningless as a genre, for starters. It’d be better to call it “music the radio doesn’t play because the radio sucks” (unless it’s Minnesota’s 89.3 The Current). The Boy Least Likely To is another reason I try to just list bands I like instead of saying I like “Indie” music. Because I’m afraid, deathly afraid, that someone will hear that I like indie stuff and think I like Sufjan Stevens and The Boy Least Likely To.

I can’t even remember why I thought I would like The Law of the Playground. Because I really don’t. It’s actually almost everything about indie I hate. Childlike innocence I can deal with, but The Law of the Playground is so prancingly aw-shucks that it makes me want to puke. It’s an album that would scream, “Look at me! I’m innocent and cute!” except that it doesn’t scream anything ever. It just whispers everything to you and waits for you to find it precious. Well, I don’t.

I was discouraged by album opener “Saddle Up,” because it made me ask, out loud when only the dog could hear me, “Are they serious?” Who is this music for? My niece might dig this shit, but I’m guessing it’s too cute even for her (kid likes pirate movies and Wolf Parade for dog’s sake). By the time I got t0 “When Life Gives Me Lemons, I Make Lemonade,” I stopped.

That’s right. I stopped. I know I say that I listen to every album a bunch of times before I write about it and that’s almost always true. But I couldn’t get past the third track on this record. I’m afraid if my friends hear me listening to it, they’ll pinch my cheek and call me “Sport.” It’s what I’d do if I caught any of them listening to it. I’ve only just made it to Track 4 right now because I’m too busy typing to change the album. It’s a song called “I Box Up All the Butterflies.” I’m going to box up this album and throw it off a bridge.

The Pitchfork review tried to convince me that there was some kind of underlying darkness or tension to The Law of the Playground, but all that little argument did is remind me of the Patton Oswalt bit about trying to convince people in Sterling, Virginia, that Phil Collins is really dark and out there. No…fucking…dice.

This is not to say that I’m immune or somehow enraged by cute things. It’s nearly universally agreed that my fiance is cute as hell, and I love her. Okay, fine, if you wanna pin me strictly to music, let me ask you this: did you read just the other day when I was all gooey about the new Metric album? Of course you didn’t, but that album is pretty fucking cute. Dressy Bessy makes cute music and doesn’t piss me off. I’d even say that there are one or two Sigur Ros tunes I would describe as cute and I definitely don’t want to assault them.

The trouble is this: the guys in The Boy Least Like To Impress Me (Jof Owen and some other guy I don’t care about) give me the sense that this child-like cuteness is their thing. It reminds me of the scene in Adaptation where Donald announces, “My genre’s the thriller, what’s yours?” The Boy Least Likely To Ever Get Laid has staked out sounding like innocent children as their little niche and indie kids who pay too much for old-looking sweaters and think that this review is just plain mean might just eat up this OshKosh-sporting bullshit, but I don’t. If you want a lesson in the childlike wonder department, listen to, I dunno, almost any Flaming Lips song. Wayne Coyne’s wonder isn’t preciously innocent, it’s hard-won and the better for it. The Boy Least Like To Keep His Milk Money strikes me as a band who is marketing their music to my inner child. Well, guess what? My inner child just downed two pints of Guinness and is riding down a hill on bicycle with no helmet while shouting Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” at the top of his little lungs. My inner child doesn’t need The Boy Least Likely To Read Bollocks! and neither do I.

And there are two songs on this album with the band’s name in them. That’s another too-cute for words gimmick that I won’t tolerate. Unless your band is called Fuck You and every song on your album is called “Fuck You”, I’m not interested in your coy incorporation of your band name into song names. Fuck you.

Even the album cover pisses me off at this point. It’s a terrified, cute little animal in a toy tank. Isn’t that precious? I realize I’m raggin pretty hard on the cuteness thing, but here’s the point: no band – no band – has any business worrying about being cute or innocent or tough or sexy or any fucking thing. If you’re in a band, your focus should be on making good music. Everything about The Boy Least Likely To Make A Good Album from the album cover to the song titles to the Blues Clues cuteness of Jof Owen’s vocal “stylings” is designed to make me tell my fiance (or some other hapless bystander) that The Boy Least Likely To Say “Shit” Even if He Had A Mouthful is just so gosh darn refreshingly cute. Well, I’m the boy least likely to ever tell anyone to listen to The Boy Least Likely To. And I’m apparently out of jokes about their name.

Do You Hate Excitement? Listen to Doves!

As you might’ve guessed, that’s not the cover of Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album. I’m listening to it right now, so if I nod off a bit here and there, then

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah. Kingdom of Rust. I fell asleep during the first track. Then I woke up. “Jetstream” just ended. “Kingdom of Rust” is starting. Nodding off again. 11 minutes of my life on the first two tracks of Kingdom of Rust. I feel like I’m at the DMV. Seriously, this album should come with a warning label: “High grade musical narcotic – do not operate heavy machinery while listening.”

Lest I be accused of cranking out overwrought prose (which seems to happen around here – the accusation, not the prose itself. You’ve never seen me in full overwrought mode, for I can assure you that if you did, it would put Byron Orpheus to shame. And if you don’t know who he is, stop reading this and go watch some Venture Brothers right now), the new Doves album isn’t terrible. It’s kinda like a Coldplay album – their singers even sound alike – so maybe your girlfriend will like it. I’m thinking of doing a Folgers Crystals-style switch on my fiance where I tell her I’m putting on a Coldplay album and I play Kingdom of Rust instead.

Every song on Kingdom of Rust seems like it’s an hour long, and it seems like they want me to feel like there are epic runs up to even more epic climaxes, but if Kingdom of Rust were a state, it’d be Kansas. Not only ’cause it’s flat, but because it doesn’t seem to believe in evolution. The guitars are out of Coldplay (whose guitars are out of U2) and the vocals that aren’t Chris Martiny (and they are few) sound like the guy from Muse who sounds like Thom Yorke. The Doves’ guy (Jimi Goodwin? Jez Williams? I don’t care) doesn’t do that annoying falsetto thing that Martin does, but neither does he write melodies that are as strong as Coldplay’s. Take note, readers – I’ll never say something this nice about Coldplay again. And it could only take something as frightfully dull as Kingdom of Rust to get me to say it.

But here’s the thing: Coldplay, for all their faults (and they are many) can at least cough up a melodic hook – they’re usually obvious and about as trite as music can get this side of Andrew Lloyd Weber, but they’re there. And I’ll even cop to liking “The Scientist.” Chris Martin is a bad lyricist who writes obvious melodies that your girlfriend will love. If you’re musically inclined, you probably won’t love them. But with Doves, there’s nothing to grab onto. This is not to say that bands should only write obvious melodies – I love Tom Waits and Sonic Youth, so obvious melody is clearly not a must for me – but some melody, something to pull you into the song would be good. It’s as if Doves have forgotten that other people will listen to their music and …

Hang on. A knock at the door.

Later, 9:15 a.m., Thursday, April 30th, 2009: You will not fucking believe what just happened. I started writing this review at about 8:30 this morning and around 8:45, I got a knock on the door. From ninjas. Or zombies. Or Pirates. Or some combination of the three. There were hundreds of them, stumbling around the courtyard of my apartment complex, lamely hurling throwing stars, growling “arrrrrr” and eating my neighbors’ brains.

Fortunately, I’ve been playing a lot of Dead Rising lately and was fully prepared. I grabbed up my baseball bat and went to town, obliterating head after head, enjoying the splatty, rotten-pumpkiny squish of their skulls caving in at the hard smack of my Louisville Slugger. Some of the more ninja-ish zombies attempted to engage me in hand to hand combat, but were easily dispatched with a kitchen knife (no plot hole here, readers – I tucked the knife into my belt when I grabbed my baseball bat. You can’t be too careful when pirate-ninja-zombies invade your tiny apartment complex). Lucky for me, even ninja zombies are kinda slow moving, and definitely not as stealthy as real ninjas. The pirate zombies lunged forward, clumsily brandishing their swords. My faithful dog, Asha, came to my aid here, biting the legs of the poor zombie bastards. As they toppled upon each other, my trusty bat and I made mush of their heads. And now I had swords. Seeing that more zombies remained, I picked up two swords, letting my bat rest. I struck a heroic pose indeed, in jeans, sandals, and a Hold Steady t-shirt. I held the swords at the ready, looked a zombie square in its dead-ass eyes, and finally had an excuse to say, “Come get some.”

The rest is really a blur. I remember putrefied flesh advancing upon me and the flash of blades cutting through dead skin and hollow bone. When it was all over, I waded through the pile of zombie parts and zombie guts, back into my apartment to complete my duty to you, my readers, and finish reviewing and – shudder – listening to Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sorry. Nodded off there again. I think “Compulsion” is playing. Can’t tell. Too bored. I know what you’re thinking, too: you’re thinking there is no way that pirate-ninja zombie thing happened. You can think what you want; I report, you decide. But you gotta admit that reading about pirate-ninja-zombies is a helluva lot more exciting than reading about the new Doves album or, dog forbid, listening to the fucking thing.

The 29 Best Albums of My Life: #1

I was released in the United States four days before London Calling, on January 11th, 1980. I’m not an especially mystical person, but I do have to love the fact that my favorite album ever (and the best album released in my lifetime) has been there for me almost every minute of my life.

Not that I knew it at the time. I didn’t hear London Calling until I was 23 and in college. My musical taste when I was young was embarrassing and ordinarily, I’d spare you the gory details. But, in this case, the gory details will lend an important context to what I have to say about what is (rightly) regarded as The Clash’s finest hour.

My dad was into whiny, 70s country and Neil Diamond when I was little. My mom had lots of Billy Joel and a Kiss 8-track. So I was swimming in shit (culturally speaking) for the first several years of my life. The first album I bought on cassette was Bon Jovi’s New Jersey and I had Def Leppard’s Hysteria on vinyl. Fuck off, I was eight. I indulged in all that hair-metal bullshit throughout the 80s (Mom was into this stuff as well and even once hilariously tried to convince her three children that she was cheating on my dad with Jon Bon Jovi. Believe it or not, this was not even close to the craziest thing she ever did.), never knowing what sort of awesome music was there for the enjoying if I could only go find it. Like many people, I have to credit Nirvana’s Nevermind with knocking (forcefully) some sense into me regarding the music I was listening to. Nirvana actually meant something and their songs weren’t just about rocking and getting laid. You youngsters today might not realize it, but at the time, that was a real revelation.

By the time I was in college, my musical taste had evolved many times over and I’d shed any trace of the shit music of my childhood. So my mind was ripe and open to what London Calling was and is: nothing short of a musical mission statement. It was punk, it was funk, it was jazz, it was reggae, it was… everything. It is the document of a band knowing their capabilities and playing to them with flawless execution.

Let me set the stage for ya – I walk into my roommate’s room and he’s playing the computer game Worms. His team is Clash-themed (characters with names like Jimmy Jazz and Sean Flynn, etc.) I realize that I haven’t paid as much attention to The Clash as maybe I should have. The technical know-how of my roommates was such that much music was passed back and forth between shared folders. So I grabbed somebody’s Clash folder and buckled myself in. I knew the reputation of London Calling, but even that first listen would not reveal to me the impact this album would have on my life.

You see, I’ve literally listened to London Calling at least once a week, every week, since 2003. You do the math. And it’s not getting old, it’s getting better. I used to shuffle my feet and try to equivocate when I was asked to name my favorite album ever but I realized about a year ago that pretending my favorite album changes every week or that I really don’t have just one favorite is engaging in a really unhealthy level of dishonesty: London Calling is it. I know, I know, what about the Beatles, what about the Stones, what about et cetera et cetera et cetera? Don’t care. I’ll take London Calling over all of ‘em.

Why? These guys were supposed to be a punk band (and they were a good one when they were one – The Clash is a great album and even Give ‘Em Enough Rope has some great stuff once you get past the hyper-polished production) and here they were doing rockabilly (“Brand New Cadillac,” with the Strummer sneer “I said, ‘Jesus Christ! Where’d you get that Cadillac?”), pop (“Lost in the Supermarket,”), and reggae (“Revolution Rock,”) in addition to the firebrand political punk (“London Calling,” “Koka Kola,” “Clampdown”) that they pioneered. You can say all you want about The Ramones (I adore them) and The Sex Pistols (Nevermind the Bollocks is a good album) being the first punk bands, but The Clash was the first band that tried to make punk actually stand for something. Joe Strummer sang this first in 1979 and it hasn’t lost a jot of resonance: “Kick over the wall/ cause governments to fall/ how can you refuse it?/ Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power/ D’you know that you can use it?” Joe Strummer was rocking his ass off while acknowledging a world bigger than his little life in a rock band and Mick Jones was setting that enlightened view to incredible music. That was the formula since the days of “White Riot,” but London Calling saw Paul Simonon’s first recorded shot in front of a mic on “Guns of Brixton” (a song that is admittedly better on the recent live album Live at Shea Stadium than it is on London Calling); it was The Clash performing at the peak of their considerable power with not one weak link in the 19-song chain.

I really have two musical heroes, and they’re obvious to anyone who knows me: Tom Waits and Joe Strummer. Strummer once defined punk this way: “In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.” He swore there would never be a Clash album that cost more than $5.99 and convinced CBS that London Calling was  single-length album with a free bonus record, thus making good on his promise. He was by no means a saint but he was by all accounts a decent man and one of the best songwriters in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. There are countless books (although Redemption Song by Chris Salewicz, whose name I undoubtedly misspelled, is the only one you need) that will tell you all you could want to know about the man. But if you want to know about his musical talent, and the talent of his mates Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon, you need only pick up a copy of London Calling. And then, should you chance upon any of the surviving members of the Clash, offer to buy them a beer and give them your sincerest thanks for what they gave the world at the dawn of the Reagan/Thatcher years.