moonbeam and I Discuss the New Twilight Singers Album

The last time I heard Greg Dulli, it was on the Gutter Twins’ 2008 album Saturnalia, which was, to say the least, a pretty banal affair. So I approached Dynamite Steps, Dulli’s new album with the Twilight Singers, with some hesitation. In fact, I didn’t really want to review it at all. But then I will have wasted all this time listening to it (and a little cash purchasing it). What’s a guy to do?

“I know,” I thought. “I’ll trick my friend moonbeam into reviewing it for me.” I thought I could get away with that because Ani DiFranco makes an appearance on Dynamite Steps and you could lure hippie chicks into a burning building with the promise of Ani DiFranco music.

Turns out moonbeam is a lot smarter than I give her credit for. When I offered her this new assignment, she asked, “do you really think i’m going to listen to some album i’ve never heard of just because ani difranco is on one song?”

I couldn’t lie. I said, “Well, I was kinda hoping so.”

“you’re an idiot,” she said. “sorry, that was a little harsh. but why don’t you want to review the twilight singers album?”

I was cornered and felt like a total pussy admitting this, but I told the truth: “I’m scared. The last time I listened to something Greg Dulli recorded, it literally bored me to tears. And I just got done sleep-sobbing my way through the new Lucinda Williams album.”

moonbeam, who is much nicer than I am, took pity on me. Sort of. “okay,” she said. “put the album on and we’ll listen to it together.”

“What… like, right now?”

“yeah. you’re clearly not doing anything else right now, and i’ve got some time to kill before the rally.”

“What rally?”

“some of my friends and i are going to protest at peta.”

“You mean with PETA?”

“no, at them. we’re protesting the fact that they euthanize nearly 85% of the dogs they rescue. if you’re going to put this conversation on the blog, you should link to the 2008 newsweek article about it.”

“Will do.”

she smiled. “good. so let’s listen to this twilight singers album, huh?”

“Sure.”

“and remember not to use capital letters when typing stuff i say.”

“Done and done.”

So we put the album on, drank some coffee (moonbeam opted for tea. When I asked her if she wanted something to drink, I swear to dog she said, “tea. earl grey. hot.” She must be part nerd), and let it play a couple of times.

Afterward, moonbeam asked, in as condescending a tone as I’ve ever heard her use, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

I was impressed. “Are you mocking me?”

“only a little,” she said. “why? are you upset? jesus, i’m sorry.”

I laughed. “No, it’s cool. I’m proud of you. Bollocks! HQ is powered almost entirely by sarcasm and smart-assery. It’s a green energy alternative.”

She kind of looked at me blankly for a second, so I changed the subject: “That was… I mean, it was really kind of good. Maybe even beautiful in a way.”

She nodded. “yeah. i really liked it. greg dulli’s voice kind of reminds me of everything i liked about the 90s. it’s dramatic but never emo. that’s pretty cool.”

“I know. Where was this guy on the Gutter Twins record?”

“maybe you need to listen to it again.”

“Maybe I do. Later. When we first started listening to Dynamite Steps, I was in full eye-roll mode. I thought, ‘Great, here comes more of that plodding, minor-chord bullshit…”

“…but then the first chorus hits you…”

“And I’m done. It seems like all of these songs build so carefully to these epic climaxes. “She Was Stolen” kind reminds me of a Menomena song.”

She put on “Blackbird and the Fox” again. “i love this song,” she said. “the way the guitar just cuts loose for a minute at the end there. there aren’t a lot of guitar solos on dynamite steps. i like that.”

“What else do you like about “Blackbird and the Fox”?”

she smiled. “okay, the ani difranco duet is pretty awesome.”

“I knew it! Hippies love Ani DiFranco.”

“you love ani difranco.”

“You’ve got me there. And I have to admit, her voice complements Dulli’s extremely well.”

She finished her tea. “didn’t you say a while ago that 2011 might be the year of the pleasant surprise? it’s really starting to look that way, isn’t it? you thought you were going to hate this album.”

“It is and I did,” I answered. “It was kind of daunting, given my limited experience of Greg Dulli’s music. When I previewed it at Barnes and Noble, their little listening station only played snippets of each song and I started to feel like the whole album was gonna kinda sound the same. Plus, the title track is nearly seven minutes long.”

“so why did you buy it?”

“I don’t know! I needed some new music and it was on sale and I figured I could always trade it in at Amoeba or something if it sucked. And I’ve always wanted to like Greg Dulli, just like I want to like Lucinda Williams.”

We’d left Dynamite Steps on repeat while we were talking and about the fourth time through, about three minutes into “Last Night in Town,” moonbeam looked at me and said, “this is really good.”

And it was. Dulli displays some impressive vocal range on Dynamite Steps and the instrumentation is almost perfect – every guitar squall and swelling string bit is in its right place, serving the song, which is what I always want every musician to do all the time. Though I was reluctant to discuss this album at first, I am now fully a fan of Dynamite Steps. But I didn’t tell moonbeam all that stuff, because she didn’t need to know. She’d helped me out in my hour of need and I was determined to return the favor.

So I just said, “You know, it is really good. Isn’t it about time for that rally?”

She looked at the clock (we have a backwards clock at Bollocks! HQ that I’ve had for years. Baffles the shit out of other people, but it’s made it so I have a hard time reading your so-called “normal” clocks) and said, “yeah, I should get going.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“you want to come to the rally with me?”

“Sure. I’m feeling good, you know? Yelling at hypocrites sounds like the perfect way to end the day.”

A look of horror crossed her face. “oh, we don’t yell at anyone.”

“You don’t?”

“absolutely not. we get some puppies from a local no-kill shelter and sit out side the peta office, petting the puppies and looking disapprovingly at the peta people when they go in or out of the office.”

“That’s it?”

she smiled. “that’s it! peaceful protest at its finest.”

I regarded her quizzically. “Have you ever seen Do the Right Thing?”

“yeah. why?”

“I… it’s just… forget it.”

Conversation with a Musical Pathologist Regarding the New Portishead Album

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I, like many Americans, found myself drinking beer in an airport and watching the Seattle Seahawks dribble piss down their legs while getting mercilessly thrashed by the Dallas Cowboys (who, let the record show, I cannot stand. Especially Terrell Owens, the biggest douchebag in all of football). Obviously, the game wasn’t going to hold my attention (fortunately, my weekend football viewing was salvaged by the Oregon Ducks’ utter humiliation of the Oregon State Beavers in the 112th Civil War game. Nothing says “ass whoopin’” like giving up 65 points on your home field), so I started chatting with fellow travelers, as is my wont. Imagine my surprise when I found, sitting to my right and drinking a glass of red wine, none other than famed musical pathologist Rebecca Mellor. I have transcribed our conversation here and offer it to you now as a fruitful discussion of Portishead’s Third album.

Chorpenning: What the hell is a musical pathologist?

Dr. Mellor: Well, I analyze people’s listening habits and assess how their musical choices are impacting their physical and emotional health.

C: So you’re saying that listening to shitty music can be physically bad for people.

Dr. M: It absolutely is.

C: What’s the worst music a person can listen to and why?

Dr. M: Any of what I call the Diluted Genres: soft rock, smooth jazz, blues played by white mid-western teenagers. Accepting a watered-down musical experience trains you to accept watered-down emotional experiences and can lead to a mental breakdown if the cycle isn’t broken.

C: So Kenny G, say, dulls your senses? Like an opiate?

Dr. M: Exactly. But an opiate for your soul. It makes you care less about your music and soon, you won’t care about anything.

C: How would you place emo on that scale? I don’t think of it as watered down necessarily, but it’s so calculated and trite. It can’t be good for you.

Dr. M: You’re right. It’s a dilution of rock music – where a true rock artist might express social concern or any kind of awareness of the world around them, an emo “musician” is dangerously wrapped up in themselves. Mix that with the fact that the bulk of emo is targeted toward teenagers and you have a recipe for an epidemic of solipsism. Walk into any high school in America right now if you doubt that.

C: So what do you do about it? I mean, emo bands are huge. There are even emo bands now that claim to hate emo, like My Chemical Romance. And they’re not helping anybody.

Dr. M: They’re clearly emo.

C: Clearly.

Dr. M: The good news is that there are alternatives, if one is willing to find them. It’s important to have good music when you’re a teenager because that’s a very confusing time of life. You need to find music that not only reflects your confusion but offers some hope that it’s temporary, and it has to do that without sugarcoating everything in platitudes like “Everything is going to be all right.”

C: Because everything can’t possibly be all right.

Dr. M: Exactly. (There’s a pause; the bar watches as the Seahawks turn the ball over again. We order another round) How old are you?

C: I’ll be 29 in January.

Dr. M: So you were… fourteen when Portishead’s Dummy came out?

C: Yeah. Wow. I love that album.

Dr. M: Did you own it when you were fourteen?

C: Unfortunately, no. I was still weening myself off of shitty music back then. I did own the first Beck album though.

Dr. M: Imagine how much easier your adolescence would have been if you had Dummy.

C: I see what you’re getting at. That album has an earned sadness to it.

Dr. M: It provides a catharsis that isn’t as cheap as you might get from screaming about black parades.

C: No shit. Hey, have you heard Portishead’s new one?

Dr. M: (nods) I’m writing a book about Portishead; their music is crucial to addressing the emo epidemic that’s plaguing this country right now. Bands like Portishead and The Hold Steady are two sides of the same coin – the yin and the yang of a cure for the shallow listening that is leading so many of us to shallow living.

C: Well put. Portishead does provide a great soundtrack for brooding. But it’s still musically very beautiful.

Dr. M: Beth Gibbons is one of the most under-rated singers of the last 20 years. And you’re right, their music does create an atmosphere in which it would be appropriate to wrestle with one’s personal demons, but it never tries to provide an answer for the listener. Take “Nylon Smile” for example. The lines “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you” are delivered with a sad sweetness that no emo singer could ever hope to duplicate.

C: And that song is followed by “The Rip,” which is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard this year.

Dr. M: The whole album goes back and forth between Massive Attack-style electronic music and this sinister sort of psychedelic music; it’s a blending of genres that escapes many emo bands as well. It reflects a deeper understanding of music and gives the album a much richer texture than you’ll find on, say, a Panic at the Disco album. To return to your earlier example of My Chemical Romance – the highest they’ve ever reached musically was on that dreadful Black Parade album and it was still, stylistically speaking, somewhere between bad Queen and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

C: Whereas Third is somewhere between Dummy and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

Dr. M: Precisely. The organ parts on “We Carry On” and “Small” are absolute nods to 60s psychedelic music, not least of which is early Pink Floyd. Third reveals a musical intelligence that propels the listener on a much more satisfying and complex journey than any My Chemical Romance album ever will.

C: Don’t forget that wacky-ass saxophone part on “Magic Doors.” Is it a lack of weirdness that makes emo so harmful?

Dr. M: Not exactly. (sips wine, reflects) Not at all, actually. It’s merely a lack of depth. Not just in the lyrics, which are obviously awful, but in the music as well. Emo music as music acts as though no one has ever played a power-chord before. They don’t know where they’re coming from. Not to get off on a tangent here, but so-called power chords are not chords at all as played by many bands. They’re the root, the fifth, and the octave intervals of a scale and, since the octave is the same note as the root (just an octave higher), it’s not a chord at all. Where was I?

C: You were saying that emo music, not just the lyrics, but the actual music, is lacking in depth.

Dr. M: Absolutely. How mad do you get when someone compares an emo-punk band to The Clash?

C: Fighting mad, of course.

Dr. M: And you’re right to do so. The Clash’s music had many musical reference points – reggae, rockabilly, and The Ramones. Their music reflected those reference points to a T without ever sounding like they were merely copying them. Now, as a counter-example, consider Fall Out Boy. You can tell by listening to them that they like some good music, probably even The Clash, but their music doesn’t take in their influences and synthesize them into something wonderful. Fall Out Boy’s music partially chews its meal and then regurgitates back a mangled, saliva-covered and completely repulsive replica of their influence. The saying is usually “Garbage in, garbage out” but in this case, it’s “Gold in, garbage out.”

M: So obviously, liking good music doesn’t mean you’ll make good music.

Dr. M: Right. Now it just so happens that Beth Gibbons likes good music and makes good music, but I would imagine – and I’ll explore this more in my book – that if you were to sit down and have a conversation with Beth Gibbons it would be a lot better use of your time than spending an hour chatting up the goons in Fall Out Boy.

C: I couldn’t possibly disagree with that. Hey, I gotta get on a plane to Portland, but it was really great talking to you. In short, you’re saying Third is healthy listening for people, yeah?

Dr. M: That’s precisely what I’m saying.

C: Thanks! Can I interview you about other albums in the future?

Dr. M: Any time.

Wrecking Ball

Dead Confederate is a band from Georgia that sounds like a band from Seattle. Specifically, they kinda sound like Nirvana. Where that’s an affectation for a lot of really shitty bands, in Dead Confederate’s case, it’s a coincidence for a pretty good band. Hardy Morris just sounds (sometimes) like Kurt Cobain, especially on “Heavy Petting,” which is the first noise you hear on Dead Confederate’s plenty noisy debut, Wrecking Ball.

Wrecking Ball is a broody fucker of an album, taking its sweet time to stagger between maudlin and morose and burying its melodies deep under crunchy guitars, heavy bass, and Morris’s Cobainesque growl.  I’ve waded into the murky depths of Wrecking Ball many a time now and it gets better on each trip, but stand warned – you may not want to work this hard to like a rock album.

The problem is, nowadays, most people who traffic in broody rock stumble easily into emo-territory. Dead Confederate manages to keep the tension going without ever straying into My Chemcial Romance-style faux-anthems or the “getting dumped is just the worst thing ever”-isms of, say, Fall Out Boy.  Of course, I can only make out about half the words on Wrecking Ball, but I don’t detect the tell-tale stink of radio-friendly emo crap.  To get back to the album opener, “Heavy Petting,” seems to be about lying awake at night obsessing over getting that special someone to round third base and head for home, so to speak.

Wrecking Ball is but ten tracks long but clocks in close to an hour, meaning a lot of these songs build up for a long-ass time and then wander around a bit before finding the door. It’s the impenetrable shit that Hum used to do, which may sound like damning with faint praise, but it really means that I have hopes that Dead Confederate will one day produce an album as awesome as You’d Prefer An Astronaut.

Morris has a great voice to lend the proceedings and, like the dearly departed Cobain, he can go from a croon to a howl in a matter of seconds without sounding like a poser. Morris’s croony moments actually recall Paul Durham from Black Lab’s early days, especially on the ballad(ish) “It Was A Rose.”

Wrecking Ball, upon repeated listens, does manage to escape its “everything you liked about 90s alternative”-ness, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it probably doesn’t need to. I mean, The Smashing Pumpkins are a shell of their former glory, Pearl Jam is basically a Led Zeppelin cover band at this point, and don’t even get me started on the Foo Fighters (if you’re confused, hurt, or angry by the Foo Fighters output in the early 21st century, I suggest you pretend they turned into The Whigs, who picked up the ball Grohl & company dropped shortly after The Colour and the Shape); so it’s not really bad that a band has sprung up that can combine all that distorted guitar nastiness with the sprawling atmospherics of good Pink Floyd (before Gilmour started singing full-time; face it, kids,  A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a shitty album, except for “Sorrow.”). Dead Confederate, on their CrapSpace page, tag themselves as Rock/Psychedelic/Other and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of their style. I realize that I’ve just made Dead Confederate sound like a New Yorker comic of a rock band, but that’s for your ears to judge (plus, as I learned this weekend, the New Yorker has run one of the funniest comics I’ve ever seen in its pages).

The songs tend to get lost in their length, but some highly melodic and suitably heavy brighht spots emerge, especially toward the beginning: “Heavy Petting,” “The Rat”, and “Goner,” start off the album pretty well. Later, “All the Angels,” and “Start Me Laughing” bring more straightforward rocking before you descend into the two longest tracks on the album, “The News Underneath” (just over seven minutes) and “Flesh Colored Canvas” (12 fucking minutes. If you’re hitting the 12-minute mark and the song is not “Desolation Row,” just stop. Please. Okay? Stop.).  Both these songs have their moments, but I’m starting to think there’s little to no reason to ever eclipse the 7 minute mark in a song.

Dead Confederate is a good rock band that needs to balance their best bits (the ability to write solid melodies and deliver them in an impressively heavy manner) with their excesses (that meandering thing has got to go, or at least be reined in a bit) and Wrecking Ball is a compelling debut for people who have dreamed of trying to create mash-ups of Your Body Above Me and The Dark Side of the Moon. You know who you are.