We Were Promised Jetpacks. We Got A Shitty Band Instead.

What if I wrote a review that simply repeated one or two lines? What if I wrote a review that simply repeated one or two lines? It would get old really fucking fast, right? It would get old really fucking fast, right? It would…. okay, you get the idea. And now you know what We Were Promised Jetpacks are all about. I’m not even kidding here. Their entire M.O. is having “vocalist” Adam Thompson repeat lines over clanging guitars and crashing drums. Problem is, Thompson doesn’t always bother to stay in tune and he does always bother to be unbearably emo.

We Were Promised Jetpacks, whose name is far cooler than their music, is a Scottish band, you know, like Frightened Rabbit, Franz Ferdinand, and my beloved Delgados. However, the difference between those bands and We Were Promised Jetpacks is that those bands are good. That seems harsh, right? Well, let’s give WWPJ (Who Wants Pearl Jam?) a fair shake, counting up their parts and see if they are greater or less than the sum of said parts. First part: clangy guitars. Not bad in and of themselves, but they’re an oft-beaten dead horse on These Four Walls, the debut album from WWPJ (Willy Wonka Prune Juice). And that’s still not all bad. After all, Frightened Rabbit’s excellent The Midnight Organ Fight was rife with clangy guitars. Second part: crashing drums. Hardly a bad thing. And again, used to great effect by fellow Scots Frightened Rabbit. (See a pattern here?) Okay. Third part: vocals wanna be Bono when they don’t wanna be Scott Hutchinson, the guy from (I think you can guess) Frightened Rabbit. Except Adam Thompson’s vocals, while tolerable in their lower register, are offensive and embarrassing when he tries to reach for the rafters. So that’s a big strike against them. Fourth part: the songwriting. Well, WWPJ (Wilma Wants Peter Jackson) seems to write about three lines per song. And then they let Thompson repeat those lines in his tune-hating, histrionic wail. So that part sucks. And the lines aren’t even clever (you know, like Frightened Rabbit lines. Listen to “Keep Yourself Warm” from The Midnight Organ Fight if you don’t believe me). They’re usually things like “Stay calm” or “your body was black and blue,” and shit that Thompson bellows over and over, really striving to let you know how fucking epic this stuff is.

But it isn’t epic. It’s annoying.

These Four Walls practically begs to be compared to The Midnight Organ Fight, and not just because both WWPJ (We Wear Polyester Jeans) and Frightened Rabbit are from Scotland. I’m not that shallow. If you take away the shitty singing and cringe-inducing songwriting (leaving the drums and guitars) and WWPJ (Winters With Porno Jesus) is Frightened Rabbit. And I realize Frightened Rabbit isn’t well-known on the scale of a band like, I dunno, U2 (another band We Were Promised Jetpacks egregiously aspires to be), but the similarities are striking enough to be infuriating.

I guess. I mean, everyone else seems to love this record. Pitchfork said that opener “It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning” would be “gratingly emo” if sung by an American band, claiming that having a Scottish accent somehow earns you a free pass for being an emo douchebag. I beg to differ – “It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning” is gratingly emo no matter who sings it. In fact, many of the songs on These Four Walls are gratingly emo. That doesn’t stop the Onion A.V. Club from teasing their review of this album by calling it an “instant classic.” Have our standards really slipped so far? (Clearly mine haven’t. I do this for you, dear 10-13 [on average] readers.)

These Four Walls manages to hit nearly every one of my sweet spots… my sweet hate spots. First off, I hate guys who strive for drama by wailing all off key and stupid. If you wanna be Mariah Carey, put the dress on and I’ll see you at the drag show. Otherwise, fuck off. This album even features a pointless instrumental called “A Half Built House,” (Pitchfork insists that this clunker “smartly breaks things up”. Whatever drugs the P-fork kids get, I’d like some. Except I’m afraid they’d turn me into a pretentious halfwit), that drones on over three or four chords for nearly three minutes. You know the part at the end of Wilco’s “Poor Places” where shit goes all crazy and the radio lady says, “Yankee… Hotel…Foxtrot” over and over? Yeah, imagine if you dumbed down the musical bits of just that part and then made an entire song out of it. And, while I’m hating (and hating I am – the more I listen to this album, the more it pisses me off. I’ve been through it eight times now in a vain search for something nice to say about it), I’ll point out that WWPJ (Wind-Worn Pewter Jug) fails to build the dramatic tension they’re longing for because lyrically, the songs go absolutely nowhere. On “This is My House, This is My Home,” Thompson snivels on about something happening in the attic. I’m guessing he’s going for some sort of ominous, haunted vibe here, but since he doesn’t bother to color in enough of the song with, you know, words, it’s hard to say. Take note, aspiring songwriters. Here’s how you get shit done in a song: in “Georgia Lee,” Tom Waits tells about a girl who is out playing on her own and is subsequently murdered; and then Mr. Waits pointedly asks why God wasn’t watching when that shit went down. God, who is there for (apparently) every Super Bowl winning quarterback ever, couldn’t be bothered to be there for Georgia Lee. And Tom Waits calls him out for it. See, shit happens in Tom Waits songs and that helps the listener feel the tension or pain or whatever Tom Waits damn well tells ‘em to feel. Thompson and WWPJ (We Want Pretzel Jelly) make the Killers’ Brandon Flowers look like… well, Tom Waits. And if I ever praise the (ahem) songwriting of Mr. Flowers again, feel free to put a bullet between my eyes.

So if I could sum up my disdain for this sonic turd, I’d do so thusly: These Four Walls is an album that strikes me as having been calculated to feel big and dramatic, though it is mostly melodramatic and hollow. So if empty melodrama is your thing, why not crank up We Were Promised Jetpacks while you wait for the fucking Vampire Diaries to come on?

How to Please Sniveling Indie Kids, Featuring The Rural Alberta Advantage

A few years ago, over roaring guitars and pounding drums, Craig Finn (he of the Hold Steady, whom you might know as the best rock band in America), shouted from the rooftops, “All the sniveling indie kids: Hold Steady!” I don’t know if he was proposing his band as an antidote to sniveling indie music or not, but I’d like the people at Pitchfork and Radio Exile to listen to the Hold Steady’s “Positive Jam” and start holding steady soon because the boner those two sites have for the Rural Alberta Advantage is gonna put someone’s eye out (it has also, by my count, lasted longer than four hours. Get these people a doctor!).

Both Pitchfork and Radio Exile (who are usually better than P-fork, in that they at least have a sense of humor) have been creaming their jeans over Hometowns, the Arcade-Fire-meets-Neutral-Milk-Hotel debut from the Rural Alberta Advantage. Now, there are bands that compare to, say, the Arcade Fire, but to my ears, the RAA is Arcade Fire instruments mashed up with Neutral Milk Hotel vocals (and less awesome lyrics). It’s a formula designed to lube up the loins of kids who are pining away for the next Sufjan release or smoking weed to Wavves. For me, it goes beyond “if you like the Arcade Fire, you’ll like this band” and ends up somewhere along the lines of, “Wow. Win Butler and Jeff Mangum should sue these guys.” The formula can be broken down thusly: How to Ensure that Indie Sites Will Love Your Band in Five Easy Steps.

Step 1: Be from Canada. Obviously, we can’t all be from Canada. The Fat Albert Advantage are from Canada, so that’s a point in their favor (in terms of the indie sites, remember). If you’re not from Canada, try being from Williamsburg in NYC or Portland or Austin. No disrespect to any of these locations (I love bands from all of these places and more – in fact, Portland is producing some of the best bands around right now), I’m merely pointing out that with some indie kids (as with real estate), it’s location, location, location!

Step 2: Get Signed to Saddle Creek. I know some people think that Matador and Kill Rock Stars and Sub-Pop are the sniveling indie labels, but that’s not correct. Those labels actually feature good bands (and Sub-Pop has a fucking sneaker now!). Saddle Creek, on the other hand, features some of the snivelin’-est indie you’ll ever come across, from Bright Eyes to the Rural Albert Collins Advantage to the infuriatingly named UUVVWWZ (I don’t actually know if this last band is “sniveling” indie or not, but that name pisses me off almost as much as Wavves). So if you want an instant 8.0 on Pitchfork, sign yer ass to Saddle Creek and start whining.

Step 3: Emotive (but Not Necessarily Good) Vocals. Again, there are good indie bands with not-great singers. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips (a band that, though signed to a major label, certainly embodies more indie spirit than almost any other band I can think of) will never be mistaken for one of the Four Tenors, but the guy makes soul-crushingly beautiful music. Win Butler from the Arcade Fire can sing pretty well, but to guarantee success with the indie kids, it’s best to go for the clenched-jaw, I-really-mean-this-shit style of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. To be fair, the Rural Alberta Advantage’s Nils Edenloff (sounds like a fancy German food, doesn’t it? “Waiter, what’s the special today?” “Well, sir, we have some poached salmon and steamed rice or why not try our Nils Eden-Loaf – it’s a blend of meats from the Alsace region on the French-German border, served with a cold Weiss-bier.”) doesn’t really do this, but his Jeff Mangum-aping is irritating as hell, especially on “Luciana” which is so blatant a Neutral Milk Hotel ripoff that I almost removed the disc from my car player and chucked it out the window. You see, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal treasure to me and to hear someone do a cut-and-paste job on that music is downright offensive.

Step 4. Synthesizers, computers, blips and bleeps, oh my! Again, to be fair, there are bands that can use technology to awesome effect (LCD Soundsystem, Franz Ferdinand, Postal Service, et cetera), but you don’t have to use technology well to get the sniveling indie vote. You simply have to use it. In fact, if your whole album can be recorded on a laptop in your bedroom while you buttfuck an amplifier (where is an amplifier’s butt? Ask that dude from Wavves), you can expect an invite to the main stage at the Pitchfork Festival.

Step 5. Profit! Well, maybe. You’ll certainly enjoy some hype from people who vigorously over-intellectualize music and philistines like me will probably still hate you. So enjoy that.

I realize I’m being pretty hard on the Rural Alberta Advantage, so to be fair (’cause life is nothing if it ain’t fair, right?) I’ll point out that, like a lot of stuff I’ve been listening to lately, there are good elements on Hometowns but most of those elements can be found on the two Arcade Fire albums (which I love with all my heart) and on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. If those three records didn’t exist, I could probably embrace the Rural Alberta Advantage more fully, but I suspect that the RAA wouldn’t exist without those three records.

I seem to have fallen into a musical rut lately; I’ve listened to a lot of stuff that runs the gamut from “bad” to “mediocre” and I fear I’m starting to sound like a broken record of the snarkiest, snobbiest motherfucker ever, but I’ve just had a hard time finding stuff the last couple of months that genuinely puts a smile on my face (the new Modest Mouse EP notwithstanding; sweet Zombie Jesus, I love that record). Later this week, I’ll get to We Were Promised Jetpacks and Green Day, but I’ll try to slip something in there that I genuinely enjoy. I’m often accused of hating more music than I love, and that’s not true, so we’ll strive for a little more balance in the future (I have a trip to Amoeba slated for this weekend, and that should help).  In the meantime, apply the 5 steps and someday, if you’re really good at it, you could find your band being ripped to shreds on this blog. You lucky bastard!

Now We Can See

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but whether or not you like the Thermals may well depend on how willing you are to put up with Hutch Harris’s voice. I am more than happy to put up with it (I know he’s dramatic, sometimes Shatner-esque, but goddammit, I can’t help liking the guy. Maybe it’s because part of me thinks that punk music should be obnoxious and the Thermals are probably the best punk band going today. Hell, throw in Titus Andronicus and I’d say they’re among the only real punk bands going today) and so I can sit back and enjoy Thermals albums as much as the next guy and, often, more than the next guy.

Histrionic vocals notwithstanding, Hutch Harris wields verbal razor blades (listen to The Body, The Blood, The Machine if you don’t believe me: “God reached his hand/ out from the sky/ he flooded the land and set it on fire/ He said ‘Fear me again/ know I’m your father/ remember that no one can breathe under water’”) and also has wicked awesome guitar tone, with minimal effects. The newest Thermals record, Now We Can See is packed with melodic guitar solos, pounding drums, and Harris’s lyrics are still sharp as ever. Those virtues come together nicely on the title track when Harris points out “Now we can see/ Now that our vision is strong/ we don’t need to admit we were wrong” before bouncing into a positively Beatles-ish chorus and a lilting guitar solo that may be his best since “Ear for Baby”.

But enough about Harris – there’s another Thermal who plays bass and drums on Now We Can See and also adds her vocals to the mix. Of course I’m talking about Kathy Foster, whom you may have heard on last year’s All Girl Summer Fun Band album Looking Into It (which took over the niche that Dressy Bessy used to fill in my life). The Thermals always seem to find a drummer to tour with but the last two albums have been entirely recorded by Harris and Foster. What we learn on Now We Can See is that Kathy Foster is a badass drummer and that her backing vocals help to offset Harris’s more strident moments.

I have seen people on the interweb accuse critics of not liking an album before they’ve given it a fair shot and while I don’t dispute that this happens (come on kids, I was never gonna like Chinese Democracy. But I’ll admit it surprised me…. ’cause it sucked even more than I thought it would) but I find it funny that it’s treated like some sort of crime. You see, critics – especially internet critics – don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing. We’re spitting our dumbass opinions into a void here and, as I’ve said before, the fact that anyone ever reads it is astounding to me. But thanks. And, it goes both ways: Axl Rose doesn’t owe me a goddamn thing, which is why I’m not personally offended that his music sucks and why he shouldn’t be personally offended that I think it sucks. On the flip side, I will cop to being predisposed to liking certain things. If Tom Waits or The Hold Steady or the Thermals release an album, they’ve already built up a lot of goodwill from me and I’m probably gonna like what they do. The interesting thing is that this hardly ever provokes the strong reaction that not liking something does. The bulk of negative comments (probably all of them) I’ve received in the last year and a half (ish) of doing Bollocks! have come in defense of some album that I thought was bad (or, usually, terrible). People seem to want to come rushing to the defense of their favorite bands, but they don’t come rushing to assault me for liking their least favorite bands. I acknowledge people’s right to hate me for not liking the shit they like but I don’t apologize for not liking things. If I did, I’d be willingly putting myself in the position of feeling like I have to like everything. Or make everyone happy. And let’s face it: that ain’t gonna happen. I’m just saying it would crack me up to see a comment some day that’s like, “The Thermals are the shittiest band on earth, how can you possibly like them? You are teh s uck!” or something like that. As it is, people seem generally okay with me liking things.

So maybe y’all will forgive me for just liking the Thermals so goddamn much. Now We Can See, like it’s predecessor, is a catchy, raucous, melodic, and refreshingly brief album that takes simple tools (bass, drum, guitar) and makes joyous noise out of them. And I was gonna like it before I ever heard it, I’ll admit. So what? Some bands start with all the points and a good review is theirs to lose; other bands start with no points and a good review is a steep-ass, Sysyphusian ordeal. Is that fair? Of course not. But this idea that subjective criticism has to be fair is misguided at best. I would submit to you that any given Bollocks! review is more fair than an Iranian election. That’s as good as it gets. But, almost nothing in life is fair, except baseball – and baseball is fucking boring. (At least until Alex Rodriguez knocks up Willow Palin)

Thinly Veiled

Let us consider the dangers of front-loading your album: on the one hand, you might argue that putting your best stuff up front will lure the listener in seductively and sustain them through the more difficult (read: “boring” – and I know you think your favorite band has no bad songs and therefore can’t possibly front-load or pad out their albums in any way, but unless your favorite band is — no, you know what?  I don’t even have to say it, do I? If you’ve read more than one Bollocks! article, I want you to go back to the comma preceding “but unless” and prepare yourself to, by the time you reach the MLA-defying double-dashes, shout the name of my favorite band as loud as you can. Thanks) tracks. I think MGMT tried that on Oracular Spectacular, but “Time to Pretend” didn’t get me more than five tracks in before I got bored. So you could, then, make the argument that you want to put one pretty exciting tune toward the beginning and maybe end on a really strong note (no artist I can think of concludes an album like Tom Waits. He has it down to a science, and if you would utter the slightest skepticism toward this remark, listen to the last tracks of Rain Dogs, Frank’s Wild Years, and Mule Variations and then sit down to a steaming plate of your words.). But then you risk boring people up front (please note: Tom Waits doesn’t disappoint up front either; he opens albums with awesome songs like “Big in Japan” and “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”) I would argue that you wanna grab people up front, but if you have only one song that’s really distinctive compared to the rest of your album, maybe you’re fucked either way. Let’s call it The Semisonic “Closing Time” Theory (the album, for those of you who think I don’t remember, is called Feeling Strangely Fine and it blows, even with – perhaps especially because of? – “Completely Pleased” and its explicit references to inducing orgasms. How can you write a song about wanting to make your lover come and make it so goddamn boring?). Or maybe we can call it The Veils “Sit Down by the Fire” Theory.

“Sit Down by the Fire” opens Sun Gangs, the new album from Finn Andrews and company, and it is a lovely, acoustic guitar-driven tune about not getting what you want. I’m totally down with that. What I’m not totally down with is every single song that follows, especially the 8 minute histrionic fit that is “Larkspur”. Remember the first time you heard Muse and you thought they sounded like Radiohead but not as good? Well, Finn Andrews doesn’t. “Larkspur” wants to be “Paranoid Android” and ends up being more like that Muse song that sounds like it was dropped from Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s got the video with the lasers and bullshit. And the rest of Sun Gangs sounds like a Poor Man’s version of, in no particular order: Frank Black, The White Stripes, and early U2. Like really early. Before they were good. (In case you’re wondering: no, they’re not good now. They pretty much quit that after Achtung Baby and everyone but Bono knows it).

I know what you’re gonna say: “Matt,” you’re gonna say, “all music is borrowed and recycled and yada yada yada. What matters is how each artist interprets the music they’re stealing.”

Go ahead. Say it.

Your point would be well taken if we were talking about how Elmore James claimed to have written “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” when we know Robert Johnson did (or mostly did. He probably lifted it from someone like Son House – old people, if you’re feelin’ saucy, help me out with a fact check). Both versions of that song are, on a scale of one to ten, fucking brilliant because Elmore James had the musical chops to put his own stamp on the song. The Veils’ pastiche is so hackneyed as to be offensive, meaning that they botched the key thing in your argument: the interpretation. On the surface, it doesn’t matter that Finn Andrews gets his Frank Black on for “Killed By the Boom.” It matters that it’s cringe-inducingly bad. Look, I know that astute listeners will point out the heavy debt Tom Waits owes to Captain Beefheart and I’ve recently addressed Craig Finn’s need to find Jim Carroll and buy him a beer (or better yet: they can meet in L.A. and I will buy them both a beer), but the key difference is that Waits and Finn take their inspirations and mutate them into something that no one else is doing nor could anyone else do it as well.

The best musical moment on Sun Gangs is the first one because its the only song that makes me say, “Oh, that’s what Veils sound like.” The others make think, “Oh. That’s what would happen if you played in a really bad cover band that didn’t know the words to White Stripes, Pixies, and Muse songs so they mashed ‘em all together into…whatever the fuck this is.” “Sit Down by the Fire” may be the only worthwhile track (hearing it on Lala was the reason I got this album) on Sun Gangs because it seems to try the least to be Big and/or Emotional. “Three Sisters” and “Larkspur,” two of the worst offenders, very obviously want to be Big and Emotional. And they’re embarrassing. “Sit Down by the Fire” doesn’t stress Andrews’s emotional intensity; he allows that track (and just that one) to breathe and to have its own space and exist for what it is. Actually, I’ll give “The House She Lived In” some props too and suggest that the album I wanted Veils to make was one that suits the mood of that track and the opener; that’s what I was in the mood for, and it’s a mood Finn Andrews set up me to be in by putting the simple and gorgeous “Sit Down by the Fire” first on the album. Sequencing is an art, kids, but it helps to have enough strong tracks to fill up an album. For examples of nearly flawless sequencing see London Calling, Okkervil River’s The Stage Names, Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope, Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, and (scoff if you want, but I hear scoffing causes cancer) the new Franz Ferdinand record. In fact, see any of those albums after you listen to “Sit Down by the Fire” and skip the rest of Sun Gangs.

Never Better? (In Which I Compare Myself to Barack Obama and Make A Messy Metaphor)

Never Better, the new album from punk/rapper P.O.S. (also known as Stefon Alexander), has received a veritable bukkake bath of critical praise since its release, and the general approval lavished upon his mixture of punk/rock and hip-hop certainly got my attention. It was what persuaded me to listen to Never Better and while I’m not going to entirely despunk his Minnesota mug, I’m not gonna be adding many dollops of my own “acclaim” to the pile. This metaphor brought to you by stem-cell research. Deal with it.

I want you to participate in an exercise: think of any bands you can that have successfully combined rock and rap into something listenable. If you thought of Linkin Park, you’re an idiot. If you thought of Anthrax’s collaboration with Public Enemy on “Bring the Noise”, your heart’s in the right place, but if that’s the best you can do, it ain’t good enough. P.O.S. probably pulls it off better than most people, by which I mean he manages to make it actually good on one song, listenable on a couple of others, and basically like Linkin Park on the rest.

Part of the problem is that Never Better is intense and it wants you to know that it’s intense. Stefon Alexander knows everything that’s wrong with everything and he’s mad as hell about it (in opener “Let It Rattle,” he wastes no time calling his audience “Pfizer babies” and then asking, “Do you really think a President can represent you?” Let me answer: yes. Yes I do. Our current President isn’t perfect, and I’m not one of those people who thinks that all of our problems are gonna magically go away because of him, but let’s consider: he’s smart, devilishly handsome, in favor of ending the war in Iraq and closing Gitmo, he’s in love with a stunningly beautiful woman. Shit, this guy could be me. He even likes Wilco and The Decemberists. Granted, I never schooled John McCain in a debate, but I sure as hell could have). Now, I’m not some jingoistic, bible-thumping right winger, but one of my beefs with some political music is that it runs the risk of portraying the artist as the only enlightened person in a sea of… well, “Pfizer babies.” Granted, P.O.S. doesn’t do this on every song, but he does it enough on Never Better that I can’t ignore it. I want less “me” in my political music and more “we”. Take “Fake Empire” by The National – “We’re half awake/ in a fake empire”. Matt Berninger puts himself firmly on the hook with the rest of us because, all conspiracy theories aside, if your government sucks, you are partly responsible. Sage Francis often falls into the same trap as P.O.S., letting his anger out in a way that almost seems like he’s berating his audience.  If I give you my 20 bucks, I shouldn’t have to be called names. You know what I really want in a polticial song? Solutions. I want a song about how we should stop printing phone books; or how we should legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana and prostitution. Hold on — I think I’m gonna go write a song.

Okay, I’m back.

I realize I’m piling on P.O.S. here, but I should state for the record that the dude does have potential. “Purexed” is a perfect example of a fierce hip-hop flow wrapped around a beautiful melodic chorus. Unfortunately, Never Better also features three of the most cringe-inducing songs of 2009: “The Basics,” “Out of Category” (with a very annoying and repetitive hook), and the most Linkin Parkish of all, “Terrorish”, which features an embarrassing chorus that could very well be sung by that asshole from Linkin Park (yes, I know it was sung by some local punk icon, but it still sounds embarrassingly bad and I’m willing to be called all kinds of names by the guy’s fans for thinking so. If the singer in my band wanted to growl “Ee-oh-oh-oh” like that on somebody’s song, I’d tie him to a chair to prevent it).

As much as I had hoped that Never Better would disprove my theory that you can’t successfully combine rap and rock, it just doesn’t succeed on enough levels to make it work. It tries so hard to prove its intensity that it comes across as utterly humorless. Perhaps P.O.S. would benefit from listening to Pharaoahe Monch’s Desire album; Monch brought plenty of anger to the table but he also brought a ton of funk and was sure to include a couple of steamy tracks about fucking, which can be its own poltical statement. After all, no matter how bad things get, we will always have naked bodies to rub together and if your enemy thinks it’s a sin, why not do it and then sing about it afterwards?

Shit, I gotta go write another song.

Chinese Democracy: A Review of A Review (or, Where the Fuck is My Free Fucking Dr. Pepper?)

All right. The first issue I have with Chinese Democracy is that the folks at Dr. Pepper made a promise and then were not technologically equipped to deliver on this promise. The window for getting the free Dr. Pepper has closed with me on the wrong side of it, despite two solid hours of attempting to get the fucking site to work. See, I was gonna review that Dr. Pepper on this site today because I’m sure as hell not gonna give Axl Rose my money so I can tell you what you already know about Chinese Democracy. But we’ll deal with that later.

In the meantime, the Los Angeles Times has come to my rescue – their “pop critic”, Ann Powers, wrote a huge story on Axl Rose’s magnum dopus and I have chosen to critique her critique in lieu of actually paying money to listen to an album I know will be of less artistic quality than Death Magnetic. Probably.

But first, I wanna tackle this “exclusively at Best Buy” deal that Axl made. I know Guns ‘n’ Roses is not the only band that has gone the exclusive release route (AC/DC originally put their new album out exclusively through Wal-Mart and Smashing Pumpkins released a special Target-exclusive version of their last shitty record). But, by releasing an album exclusively through a store that does not exclusively sell music, Axl Rose has helped put a nail in the coffin not just of independent record stores but in the experience of buying albums. Now look, I know we’re all digital nowadays and I’ve certainly got an expansive mp3 collection (don’t worry Axl and Lars, I didn’t steal your shitty records), so you may be thinking, “Matt, who gives a shit about the record buying experience?” Well, motherfucker, I do. When I walk into a music store and see the rows and rows of discs, aisles of musical wonder, usually sorted by genre, I get a thrill unmatched by any other feeling. It’s like Jacques Cousteau must’ve felt before jumping in the ocean. I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna find in there most of the time, but I’m usually gonna walk away with a treasure (I even, on my last trip to Amoeba Music, scored a $7 used copy of Redemption Song, the excellent and definitive biography of Joe Strummer). Or, more precisely, a pile of treasures. When I ask the flunky at Target about a band I like, I get a blank stare, as if I’ve switched a light off in his brain or spoken in some long dead, dark language. Sure, I can get Smashing Pumpkins and Kanye “Self-Declared Voice of His Generation” West at Target but, like all thinking people, I don’t give a shit about those two particular artists. Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy can sell albums cheap because they make money by selling a lot of other products. Amoeba Music sells music, books, and DVDs while still managing to donate some of their proceeds to preserve the rain forest (I shit you not); so who’s exclusively releasing through them? Well, everyone who releases a Live at Amoeba EP, such as TV on the Radio did. Or The Hold Steady, who released a live acoustic EP exclusively through members of the Independent Music Retailer network (not sure I got the name of the organization right, but Amoeba is part of it; basically, it’s a large group of independent music stores across  the nation). Bands that are exclusively releasing through Wal-Mart and companies like them are making the implicit argument that they care about making the most money possible. Obviously, that’s their right and obviously, if you took 14 fucking years and millions of dollars to make your shitty little record, you might be a little bit more concerned with your profit margins. But the fact is, I reward bands that want to make music, not bands that want to make money (Honestly, who wouldn’t want to make money playing rock ‘n’ roll? But there are bands that are focused on their music first – bands like Wilco who have gone so far as to say that they don’t exist to make CDs per se but to create music. Bands that put music ahead of money make better music and thus, deserve my money. Bands that simply want my money – like Kiss, who can definitely go fuck themselves – do not deserve it and never get it). TV on the Radio and The Hold Steady make their livings off of their music. I’ve read that Matt Berninger from The National didn’t quit his day job until right before they started work on Boxer. I guess what I’m driving at here is a question of hunger. Young, hungry, independent acts do what they have to do to make music, including hanging on to the day job a little longer (I work two jobs so that I can pull my weight launching my little band). Old, tired, washed up acts, apparently ink exclusive deals to pump out their crap through giant chain retailers and then have the gall to blame the death of the record industry solely on downloading.

One of the (many) flawed arguments of the no-downloading crowd is that every downloaded album is money out of the artist’s pocket. This assumes that everyone who heard the album for free would have purchased it if only they couldn’t get it for free. Slash, one of Axl Rose’s former pals, lamented that Axl would lose a lot of money on Chinese Democracy because some jackass streamed seven or nine leaked tracks on his blog. Of course, at the time, there was no guarantee that those were finished tracks from a finished album, no guarantee that those tracks would appear on a finished album, and no guarantee that people who downloaded those leaked tracks would automatically skip out on buying Chinese Democracy. Unless, of course, they discovered from those tracks what I intuitively understand – that this album, like its creator, is a bloated mess. Smart bands adapt to the downloading phenomenon in various ways – Bloc Party offered a 10 dollar download of Intimacy a month before it came out and then gave me a total of four bonus tracks for free later. Radiohead famously let people decide what to pay for In Rainbows. The Hold Steady (I love those guys, but you knew that) streamed Stay Positive in its entirety on their MySpace page and then slapped three bonus tracks on the physical release. The Flaming Lips have released the coolest deluxe version of a movie or CD I’ve ever seen – the Christmas on Mars deluxe release includes a T-Shirt and a bag of popcorn!

So anyway, Ann Powers apparently went to the Best Buy and got a copy of Chinese Democracy. She went on to not only compare the album to Citizen Kane but also to compare Rose to Orson Welles (in personality, not physical stature). She later credits Rose with “Brian Wilson-style beautiful weirdness.” You might get the feeling that Powers really fucking loved Chinese Democracy, but, at the end of the day, Rose’s “lyrics, like the songs’ musical twists, are hard to praise”. So after a long article that makes an interesting attempt to capture the magnitude of Chinese Democracy’s release (many writers have already focused on how much of a fucking farce the whole process has been; genuine kudos to Powers for trying to give it more of a fan perspective. The problem is, the farce crowd is right on this one), Powers is forced to admit that the actual music, the thing people have been waiting 14 years for is hard to like. That’s not exactly album-of-the-year material.

Now, I will admit that I have not listened to the final product. And I’m not going to download it either. I will, however, give Chinese Democracy a fair hearing on Bollocks! as long as I don’t have to pay for it. If you bought the album and will let me borrow it or if I get it for Christmas (by some strange magic), I will give it an honest musical critique. I am, at the end of the day, a music lover and I’m willing to have my mind changed – I used to hate hip-hop until I found some artists that opened my eyes to the potential of that genre. So I’ll make a promise to those of you out there who pre-hate me for pre-hating Chinese Democracy: if a copy of this album, a legitimate copy, falls into my hands in some manner that keeps me from putting money in Axl Rose’s pocket, I will:

1) listen to the album and judge it on the music, keeping my hatred of Axl Rose separate from my appraisal of the music he makes

2) render that verdict on this blog with my usual literary zest

And

3) if Chinese Democracy manages to please me more than it displeases me, I will purchase a copy of it and a copy of Metallica’s Death Magnetic and give them away to the first two people who can convince me they deserve them. I’ll find some fun way of determining that.

The odds that a) a copy of Chinese Democracy will come to me for free and b) I will like it more than not are about 1 billion to 1 against. But I’m willing to keep an open mind, despite the fact that I have no free Dr. Pepper to enjoy while I do it.

Shortest Bollocks! Review Ever

Recently, we here at Bollocks!were accused of creating (and foisting upon an unsuspecting public) “overwrought prose.”And by “we”, I mean “me”.

So in an effort to be less overwrought (more underwrought, or just wrought, I guess), I thought I’d sum up 4:13 Dream, the new Cure album, as succinctly as possible:

This album is a fucking mess.

God Dammit, Ryan Adams

Some day, I’ll sit my grandkid(s) on my knee and tell ‘em all about a brief, shining moment in American history. Being so recent, I know it’s fresh in your memory as well.

Of course, I’m talking about the moment in our history (Gold) when Ryan Adams was actually awesome. Hold onto it as long as you can, kids, ’cause that moment is long fucking gone. And it ain’t coming back.

Adams is a dangerously prolific songwriter, which means you can expect at least one album from him pretty much every year. Last year, it was Easy Tiger, an embarassingly adult-contemporary offering that was the sort of album for which the phrase “shit sandwich” was invented.

His latest with The Cardinals is called Cardinology. You like that? See, it’s a pun on his band’s name. Fucking hell, Ryan Adams. What have you wrought this time?

To be fair, Cardinology is not as ear-splittingly awful as Easy Tiger but it also doesn’t come anywhere close to the pleasant-enough mediocrity of his three 2005 albums. It starts off with “Born into a Light,” which is Adams’ attempt at assuring you everything is gonna be just hunky  dory. How anyone can sing shit like that these days is beyond me. Look: I’m not against singing about how life is beautiful, because it often is. But asserting that everything is gonna be great is 1) way too general to mean anything and 2) patently false. There’s no possible way for everything (think about everything. Fucking everything.) to work out all right. So sing about how you think a person’s life is gonna be okay despite the fact that it sucks now or something; don’t traffic in platitudes, Ryan Adams. You fucking wrote “Cannonball Days,” although I’m starting to think it was someone else.

Overall, Cardinology commits two egregious crimes. First, most of it sounds ready to be spliced into a fucking montage on Grey’s Anatomy. Second, the parts that aren’t ready for your girlfriend’s favorite TV show sound just as bad as the adult-contemporary shit on my parents’ favorite soft-rock station. There’s nothing wrong with being mellow (Sam Cooke proves this) and it’s not as though you can’t rock as you get older (Tom Waits, Wayne Coyne, and Joe Strummer prove this). But Cardinology is lacking in vitality from start to finish. Half-distorted guitars play zippy little white-blues licks in and around Adams’ new-found pseudo-Bonoisms (he does the soaring vocal thing on this album more than anyone ever should and the real bonus is he sucks at it).  The singer-songwriter “genre” is overcrowded with this kind of shit and Ryan Adams used to be above it.

“Magick” is one of the only attempts at a straight-up rocker on the whole album and it’s two-minutes of utter shit (“You’re like a rain cloud/ if it rained mushroom clouds”). It does feature a reference to zombies, which usually goes a long way with me but the bridge is a repetition of “what comes around goes around” which is a phrase that should be banned from the earth along with the words “maverick” and “socialist.” For a better zombie song, try out Jonathan Coulton’s excellent “Re: Your Brains.” You’ll be glad you did.

Lyrically, Adams stuffs Cardinology full of some of the worst writing I’ve ever heard. This is probably a product of recording every fucking song he writes, which is really just a manifestation of seriously unchecked ego. I’ve written literally hundreds of songs in my life. As of right now, there are about three that I would play for anyone. And I’m not saying that I’m on a par with Ryan Adams as a song writer, but if Cardinology is any indication, I’m Tom fucking Waits next to “I was waiting around for someone to die/ nobody did/ but a part of me died I suppose/ from all that waiting.” Seriously, to my current and future (and past!) bandmates, if I ever write or suggest that someone sing something that stupid, I expect to be punched in the face and nutsack until I pass out.

The only song on this album that mostly avoids either being skull-numbingly boring or riot-inducingly awful is the closer “Stop,” which is actually pretty nice. Except it just makes me want to listen to “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann, a far superior songwriter to Mr. Adams. “Stop” is a good way to sum up an album like Cardinology: “If you wanna make it stop/ then stop.” So I stopped the album. Good day, Mr. Adams.

I said Good Day, Sir!

The Inevitable Comparison: Loyalty to Loyalty vs. Robbers & Cowards

It’s nearly impossible and usually unreasonable to discuss one album by an artist in a vacuum. You should compare it to their previous output (unless it’s a debut album, obviously), bearing in mind that, just because it’s different, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. There can be good differences and bad, just as their are good similarities and bad ones. London Calling, for instance, is drastically different from The Clash, yet both are essential recordings.

I have not read a review yet of Loyalty to Loyalty, the new album from L.A.’s own (sort of)  Cold War Kids, that doesn’t conclude that Loyalty to Loyalty is an almost exact copy of Robbers and Cowards. So I did the inevitable comparison myself, listening first to Robbers & Cowards and then to Loyalty to Loyalty.

I kinda wish Loyalty to Loyalty were more like Robbers & Cowards.

For starters, you probably either loved or hated Robbers & Cowards and you probably either loved or hated it based largely on Nathan Willet’s histrionic singing. The problem is, on Robbers & Cowards, Willet’s vocals were surrounded by crisp, punchy pop music and he danced carefully and gracefully on the line between interesting and annoying. On Loyalty to Loyalty, The Cold War Kids have turned up Willet’s histrionics and turned down the other musicians. Result: on Loyalty to Loyalty, Willet is all over the wrong side of that line between interesting and annoying.

This is tolerable for a while, and album opener “Against Privacy” is actually all right – the guitar meanders about in the background while the drums and bass try not to intrude too much. Willet keeps his tenor sax voice (mostly) under control, and you get this sort of junkyard, Tom Waitsy feel from the album. You start to think this could be good, and a real departure from the polish of Robbers & Cowards.

But then Willet blows it and blows it hard on “Mexican Dogs” and many of the tracks that follow. You hear where the melody should resolve when Willet sings “Like Mexican Dogs/ no body gave us names” but he deliberately fucks up the resolution and I can’t figure out what he’s got to gain by doing so. Also, I think the lyric fails (spectacularly) under scrutiny: does Willet really think no dogs in Mexico have names? I mean, I’m sure there are stray dogs in Mexico just like there are here. But the lyric would work better if Willet sang “Like some Mexican Dogs/ and dogs in probably lots of other countries too/ nobody gave us names.” But that probably wouldn’t keep Willet from ritualistically slaughtering the melody. I know the guy is trying to sell the drama and I know he idolzies Thom Yorke (not a bad thing), but for fuck’s sake, man. Songs have notes in them. Try singing some. (This is especially annoying because Willet consistently proves that he can sing.)

“Every Valley is Not  A Lake” is a welcome respite from Loyalty to Loyalty’s worst excesses, starting off with a stomping little piano lick. But it only temporarily pulls the album out of its stubborn, Willet-driven nose dive.

“Something is Not Right with Me” starts off all right, lifting its bass-line from LCD Soundsystem’s “Tribulations”, but Willet, after singing the first chorus pretty well, turns into Freddy Mercury at his worst in the verse. And it gets worse before it gets better.

“Welcome to the Occupation” is the worst offender on the album, and maybe I’d like the whole thing better if this song wasn’t on the album, but it is. By the end of the song, Willet is shrieking “The Devil’s in the details” in such way that you’d think he was a fugitive on the run from the notes he’s supposed to be singing. Again, idolizing Thom Yorke is not a bad thing, but even at his most dramatic, Yorke is in control of what he’s singing. Willet seems to delight in not being in control, and that’s cool as a musical ethos, but – again, not to belabor the point here – tunefulness is nice too. The Clash were pretty out of control and yet, lo and behold, they had melodies. Strummer sang notes. You can look this up. It’s verifiable information.

So Loyalty to Loyalty spends three of its first five tracks digging a big fucking hole to crawl out of. The Cold War Kids mostly climb out with “Golden Gate Jumpers,” “Avalanche in B,” and “Dreams Old Men Dream.” So while you may think by what I’ve written here that I can’t stand this album (or, indeed this band), the truth is, I look at Loyalty to Loyalty like someone watching their favorite candidate in a debate: I like who they are and what they’re saying, but once in a while, they go on a run of gaffes that causes much cringing and shaking of the head (fans of Joe Biden will probably understand this analogy perfectly). Nobody’s perfect.

In terms of ideology and music, the Cold War Kids are doing something worth doing, something that might even be called important. They’re an obviously socially-minded band and they’re capable of chronicling the ills of society in a catchy, entertaining manner – and that’s what makes Loyalty to Loyalty‘s worst moments so disappointing. It’s worth a listen, but you’ll learn to skip through the chaff to get to the wheat, which you really didn’t have to do on Robbers & Cowards.