Unknown and Beautiful (The Virtues of Broken-Ass Music)

There’s a kind of music that I love, that is sometimes rock and sometimes blues and sometimes both. I call it Broken-Ass Music. Tom Waits is probably the current reigning king of Broken-Ass Music, but it has its roots in stuff like “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson. Johnny Cash was also a master of Broken-Assness, and you can hear a more rock ‘n’ roll side of Broken-Ass Music on the first Hold Steady album and tracks like “Lord, I’m Discouraged” from 2008′s best album, Stay Positive. I heard a band called the Gaslight Anthem that I think deals in diet Broken-Ass Music, for kids who want to ache a little but don’t want to get any dirt on their new H&M shirts (I just made up that stereotype, so let’s not read too much into it. Also, I have purchased at least two shirts from H&M in my life. But I got them dirty).

And then there’s Lucero.

There is no better phrase I can think of to describe Lucero’s music: if any music is Broken-Ass Music, Lucero’s music is Broken-Ass Music. Their 2005 album, Nobody’s Darlings, was a nearly perfect slice of Broken-Assitude and last year, they reached new heights with 1372 Overton Park, an album that occurs at the collision point of southern rock, Memphis soul, and incredibly Broken-Ass Music. Lucero wanted to pay tribute to the Memphis music scene (a scene which just lost Jay Reatard, whose music I didn’t really enjoy, but the dude died at 29 and, having just turned 30, that shit freaks me right out) including the titular loft where, at one time or another, all of the band lived. Singer Ben Nichols was the last band member to occupy the space, which he vacated upon finding out it was slated for the wrecking ball. Such is the life of a Broken-Ass musician – if they can’t break your heart anymore, I guess they tear down your house.

1372 Overton Park is lyrically not that different from other Lucero albums – there’s drinking, gambling, women, and all of the above in random order (“Sixes and Sevens” features the line, “Drinking women/ chasing whiskey”, showing that even Nichols can’t keep it all straight sometimes). But the album is helped – nay, it is elevated – by the sumptuous horn arrangements of Memphis legend (and saxophone ninja) Jim Spake, who has played with a wide range of awesome people, including Levon Helm, Toots Hibbert, and Buddy Guy. The horns infuse every song with a soulful warmth that perfectly contrasts Ben Nichols’s shredded vocals.

About that voice: having a gravelly voice does not necessarily mean you are capable of performing Broken-Ass Music, but, if you do have a facility for BAM, a mangled voice doesn’t really hurt either. Ben Nichols can still carry a tune, but his voice has the sound of years on the road, drinking too much, smoking too much, and sleeping too little. But it fits Lucero’s songs like a velvet glove wrapped in barbed wire. He clearly pushes himself to the limit on album opener “Smoke”, but the rewards are well worth it. Even at it’s crooniest (“Hey Darlin, Do You Gamble?”), Nichols’s voice is still somewhere between Rolf the dog and Tom Waits. If you read that sentence and thought, “Awesome!”, you will probably love Lucero (or you probably already do). If you read that sentence and thought, “Who would want to hear that?,” you are probably someone’s girlfriend/wife/mother and possibly my fiancee, my stepmother, or pretty much every other woman I know. That’s not a sexist thing, it just happens to be true. I will bet you every dime I make from writing this blog that more women own albums by Coldplay, Norah Jones, and the Dave Matthews Band (admit it, folks – you know at least one girl who refers to Dave Matthews on a first-name basis, despite the fact that they’ve never met him). I’ll bet you the same amount that more guys own albums by the Clash, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, and Lucero (and if you know a guy who refers to Tom Waits as simply “Tom” despite having never met the man, you are legally allowed to kick him in the balls until his eyes change color).

Getting back to 1372 Overton Park, Jim Spake certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on musicianship here. Keyboardist Rick Steff (who co-arranged the horn parts with Spake and Marc Franklin, who is credited with trumpet, trombone and flugelhorn duties) contributes some badass organ work and more than his share of honky-tonk piano (see the afore-mentioned “Sixes and Sevens”) and Brian Venable supplies some literally gnarly guitar work. Overall, Lucero sounds tighter as a band than they’ve ever sounded (no mean feat, as they’ve always struck me as a somehow simultaneously shambolic and tightly wound group) and I can only hope Spake and Franklin come out on the road with them for some live hornage (also, I can hope they come to Los Angeles. Please?)

Earlier in 2009, I discussed Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight album as having the mood of a night on the town: starting with all the promise that brings and ending with drunken half-disaster. If that’s the case for Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight, Lucero’s 1372 Overton Park is the feeling of several nights on the road, in clubs with no dress code (look at the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album – those guys are going to much better clubs than you and I are), starting with waking up in a strange town sometime after noon, and ending after a raucous rock ‘n’ roll show and a night of drinking with a band that, though vastly underrated in this reporter’s opinion, is one of America’s finest.

My 13 Favorite Albums of 2009 13-6

Well, here we are in 2010, the year we make contact. For those of you who don’t know, a new federal law went into effect at midnight on New Year’s Day: if you hear any of your fellow citizens call this year “oh-ten”, it is legal to punch them in the face exactly one time.

Having safely seen 2009 out the door, I think it’s time to start talking shit about it. Everyone loves a list, especially one that doesn’t include Animal Collective or Phoenix, so I compiled a list of my 13 favorite albums of 2009. I don’t know if they’re the best albums of the year or not and I don’t care. They’re the ones I like the best and, honestly, I think that’s all anyone can say. Also, my list contains 14 albums (well, technically, 13 albums and an EP) because there was a tie. Anyway, feast yer eyes on this here list (helpfully rendered in a distinctly non-slide-show format):

13. Lord Cut-Glass, Lord Cut-Glass. I’ll just assume everyone knows that Lord Cut-Glass is really former Delgado Alun Woodward. And I know that my review of this record spent a good deal of time bitching about how the Delgados ought to just reunite, come to the U.S. and play shows in the courtyard of my apartment complex. But the fact remains that Lord Cut-Glass is a really beautiful record; Woodward lilts over plucked acoustic guitars and low brass, quietly issuing some of the best melodies of his career. Highlights include “Picasso,” “Even Jesus Couldn’t Love You,” “Holy Fuck,” “A Pulse” and “Big Time Teddy.”

12. Mike Doughty, Sad Man Happy Man. Last year, Doughty put out an album called Golden Delicious that I liked well enough at first. And then it kinda grew off of me with a stunning quickness. Just wasn’t feeling it, I guess. However, because I love Mike Doughty, I’m always willing to listen to his stuff. This year, he put out the superb Sad Man Happy Man, which I nabbed from Amazon’s digital store for five freaking bucks (gargle my balls, I-Tunes). SMHM is driven by Doughty’s chunky guitar strumming and absurd humor, and it’s my favorite album of his since Skittish (which has to be one of the most underrated albums I’ve ever heard). It opens with one of its best moments, “Nectarine (Part Two)” and also includes the coolest prayer ever (“Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On”) and “Year of the Dog,” which might be Doughty’s best tune since “Sweet Lord in Heaven.”

11. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz. 2009 was a great year for some of my favorite female vocalists, not least of whom is Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not only did I get to delight in an affordable deluxe edition of It’s Blitz! (Amazon’s mp3 store has not yet let me down in the cheap goodies department), but I got to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play a kickass set at Coachella (one of the best sets I saw at that festival). The album is filled with awesome turbo-pop (starting with a pair of aces in “Zero” and “Heads Will Roll”) and a few pretty ballads (“Hysteric” splits the difference between the two types of song and is, in two words, fucking awesome). It’s Blitz! firmly established the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as one of the best bands in America and their live shows will back that claim up for the doubters.

10. Brother Ali, Us. I could make a joke about how Brother Ali is the king of white rap (ha ha, because he’s an albino, ha ha), but, taking Us as exhibit A for the prosecution, it’s more accurate to place Ali near the top of the hip-hop heap, regardless of skin pigment. Jay-Z has never, in my estimation, done anything to rival  “Tightrope” or “The Travelers.” To my knowledge, he’s never even tried. With Us, Ali threw down a gauntlet of new rules for the hip-hop community, chief among them: no skits and fewer songs about how badass you are (Us has ‘em, but they’re matched pound for pound by songs of real substance and at least one tune wherein Ali shows gratitude for his good fortune, saying, “I’m the luckiest sonofabitch that ever lived”). Us is a truly refreshing album, and it stays fresh with every listen.

9. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career. Speaking of refreshing, Camera Obscura released one hell of an orchestral pop album last year. My Maudlin Career, despite its potentially emo-sounding name, starts and ends with a bang (“French Navy” and “Honey in the Sun”, respectively) – in between, Tracyanne Campbell drops lines like “when you’re lucid, you’re the sweetest thing” and “drinking has never been the same again”, the latter from the stellar, mournful ballad “Other Towns and Cities”. My Maudlin Career is so good that I think almost anyone who likes music will like it. But some people who like music like Wavves, so I could be wrong.

8. The Minus 5, Killingsworth. Killingsworth is the album that elevated Scott McCaughey from Person of Interest to Folk Hero in my estimation. It’s basically a dark country rock album, but it’s so fully realized and wittily rendered (“your wedding day was so well-planned/ like a German occupation”) that it cannot be denied. Backed by an excellent chorus of women, McCaughey sings of lurking barristers, broken love, and crowded urban apartment life (“Big Beat Up Moon”) with a drunken weariness that is deeply appealing to young curmudgeons like myself. He also takes the time to satirize fundamentalist Christianity on “I Would Rather Sacrifice You”, a song that never fails to but a big smile on my face.

7. The Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another. I have said many times that, all appearances to the contrary, I like more music than I dislike. A small subsection of music that I like is nasty, noisy stuff that almost no one else I know likes. Titus Andronicus comes to mind here, as does the Future of the Left, whose Travels with Myself and Another beat its way into my skull and won my heart last year with its pounding drums and Andy Falkous’s snarling vocals. Subjects range from girls who get off on hitting people (“Chin Music” will only be appropriate at a very small number of weddings:  “I only hit him ’cause he made me crazy/ I only hit him ’cause he made me mad/ she only hit him ’cause it gets her wet/ yeah, she’s one of a kind/ she’s got chin music”) to the practical concerns of Satanism (“You Need Satan More than He Needs You”). Travels with Myself and Another pretty much kicks ass, though it’s not for the faint of heart or the humorless.

6. Andrew Bird, Noble Beast. I guess #7 and #6 on my list are a study in contrast. Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast is an understated, mellow, and completely lovely work – his finest to date, if I may be so bold. It blends Bird’s myriad musical talents (no one on earth – no one – can whistle like this motherfucker) into quirky pop (“Fitz and the Dizzyspells”), old school folk (“Effigy,” which is nothing short of stunning), and whatever you’d classify “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” as. Some of the songs have unique movements, but they never seem to wander, even on the seven minute “Souverian.” Bird is a musician’s musician, a guy you can study as well as enjoy, and Noble Beast is the textbook for aspiring musical ninjas.

I know. It’s taken me four days into the new year to even start counting down my favorite albums of the old year and now I’m doing it in two parts. Pitchfork took a week to do their list and they still fucked it up, so maybe it’s better that I’m taking my time. I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse every choice I’ve made so far. Tune in tomorrow or Wednesday for albums 5 through 1, which are bound to include demure rodents, plenty of references to whiskey, a rant about shitty record labels, the best pop album of the year, the word vagina, and plenty of weather.

Best Albums of My Life #2: Mule Variations

There are a couple of things that even Pitchfork and I can agree on. #1: the Hold Steady is awesome. #2: you won’t “write a song as good as Tom Waits’ very worst song. Sorry, you just won’t.” They wrote that about the first Tom Waits album I ever heard, 1999′s Mule Variations. And, to this day, it’s the one sentence in all of Pitchfork’s history with which I agree word for word.

I first encountered Mr. Waits on an episode of VH1′s Storytellers and I was immediately struck by how awesome his stories were and how little they had to do with the songs he was performing. And the songs! Sweet Jesus, the first time I heard “House Where Nobody Lives”, I think I had an experience like the Mormon missionaries try to sell you about divine revelation. Here was a dude who was speaking the truth in a way I’d never heard anyone speak it before. I ran out and purchased Mule Variations immediately. That was ten years ago and my copy has seen better days, but it spins just fine and still resonates just as deeply.This album, like many Tom Waits albums, is the real shit – the deep down, bloody, muddy, messy, broken, gospel of sinners, whores, bums, ruffians, ne’er-do-wells, and basically everyone else.

What is it about Waits that’s so goddamn impressive? His songs are journeys, for starters. And, though they are full of specificity (including street names and weather, things Waits views as essential to good songs), they strike a universal chord. Take “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, for example: you don’t have to have actually been somewhere where no one speaks English and everything’s broken to understand exactly how he feels. Right? Waits intuitively understands broken-hearted, busted-ass loneliness and the anguish he howls from the rooftops is our anguish – a friend of mine in college said that Waits is crying so that you don’t have to. You couldn’t do it that well anyway. And that’s due in large part to his voice. I know, I know, a lot of people are all “Tom Waits can’t sing” or “his voice sounds funny” or “he sounds like Cookie Monster” but what they don’t understand is that for what Tom Waits is trying to tell you (about you, about us, about nasty, brutish, and short fucking life), ordinary voices are useless. I’d go so far as to say that they are insultingly inadequate. For the heartache and, yes, the joy that Waits is bringing on his tunes, you need a voice that’s a still-beating heart being tossed into a wood chipper in the middle of a nuclear war. You need a voice that took a stiff shot of whiskey and chewed up the glass. You need exactly the voice that only Tom Waits has. Do you really wanna hear Josh Groban inviting you to come on up to the house when “the only thing that you can see/ is all that you lack”? No. No, you don’t.

Mule Variations is full of some of Waits’s best busted-ass moments, too. On “Get Behind the Mule” (this is how Waits encourages perseverance – he’s not gonna tell you you’re beautiful no matter what they say and that words can’t bring you down; there’s no time for that in the Tom Waits universe. You’ve gotta get up and get to work, just like the rest of us), he gave me a line that resonated through pretty much every failed romance of my life since I first heard it: “Big Jack Earl was 8 foot one/ and he stood in the road and he cried/ he couldn’t make her love him/ couldn’t make her stay/ but tell the good lord he tried.” Again, a lot of people have probably stood in poor Jack Earl’s giant shoes. On “Cold Water”, Waits feels the pain of “pregnant women and Vietnam vets/ out there beggin’ on the freeway/ ’bout as hard as it gets”. That’s a line Bruce Springsteen would’ve sold (and/or had sex with) his mother to write.

But Mule Variations isn’t all gritty, bone-tired heartache, either. It also features a fair amount of that magical Tom Waits weirdness. “What’s He Building?” reads like a list of rumors Waits’s neighbors might cook up about him. “Eyeball Kid” is a circus-freak anthem complete with a telling autobiographical element: the Eyeball Kid was born on December 7, 1949, the same day as Thomas Alan Waits. Like the Eyeball Kid, Waits came here to show us how to really see. And “Filipino Box-Spring Hog” is a recipe for awesome disaster and possibly also a terrible dinner.

The thing (if there is indeed only one thing, which I kinda doubt) that makes Mule Variations a masterpiece (in a career full of them) is how easily the oddball tunes sit along side some of Waits’s finest ballads: “Picture in a Frame” features a line that I find so honest and so simply romantic that it has caused me, upon reflection, to give up writing love songs myself: “I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off.” Maybe that doesn’t grab y’all the same way it grabs me, but when the radio is crowded with people singing about how someone is their whole life or their everything or whatever, Waits’s lyric cuts me to the quick. I want to love someone till the wheels come off and, luckily, I get to. Sorry, Portugal. The Man fans, someone out there really loves terrible ol’ me. No one said life is fair.

And then there’s “Georgia Lee”, a piano ballad about a girl who was murdered. I love that Waits doesn’t just make a tug for your heart strings here. He does nothing less than call God out for dropping the ball: “Why wasn’t God watching?/ Why wasn’t God listening?/ Why wasn’t God there/ for Georgia Lee?”  It’s clear, then, that Tom Waits doesn’t just understand romantic loss. He understands the feeling of being massively, cosmically fucked over, and he can howl that pain for you too. Is it overstating it to suggest that Waits is out there, strolling the universe, absorbing some of the hits for all of us? Maybe; but when I listen to his stuff, I’m not so sure. This is my gospel music, kids – and Mule Variations closes with a kick-drum stomping spoonful of raw spirituality called “Come On Up to the House,” where Pastor Tom tells us to “come down off the cross/ we can use the wood” and reminds us “the world is not my home/ I’m just passing through.” Is that corny? So be it; after my sister died last year, this was one of the songs that picked me back up, that let me laugh and cry at the same time. So for me, Tom Waits’s music has real healing power, the kinda stuff some people find in church and other people find in a bottle.

If a major criterion for being the voice of your generation (or any generation) is being able to tap into the hopes, joys, loves, and fears of that generation with a profound understanding (is that a major criterion? I should hope so), then it might be time to consider that Tom Waits is the true voice of at least one generation and probably of many generations. Sure, he’s not as glamorous as Kanye West and he doesn’t want the job nearly as bad as Kanye does, but his music is 9000 times more honest. In my lifetime, Tom Waits has made some of the most heart-wrenchingly meaningful music I have heard and Mule Variations is my favorite of his albums not just because it’s amazing, but also because it was my gateway into the man’s entire body of work. It has shown me the way to songs that have seen me through pretty much every high and low point of my life for the last ten years.

Dark Night of the Soul: The Album EMI Doesn’t Want You to Hear

I may have mentioned once or twice that I am not fond of EMI’s recent business strategies, which seem to be calculated to irritate the music-buying public. You know, the very people they should be trying with all their might to win back in this age of the digital downloading and whatnot. Certainly, EMI is making a more compelling case that stupidity (as opposed to piracy) is what’s really killing the music industry. And while we’re on that cheery subject, you know what I’ve never heard? I’ve never heard a single musician that I care about or respect say that they’ll stop making music if the kids don’t knock off all the downloading. Billy Corgan can testify to Congress all he wants about needing to get paid, but let’s face it: if I thought downloading Billy Corgan’s shit would make him stop producing music and go get a job at  Arby’s, I’d be pirating that shit on a 24/7 basis.

One of the things I was bitching about (and will continue to bitch about at every opportunity. If I could get a meeting with the assholes in charge at EMI, I’d say all this & more to their doughy fucking faces) was EMI’s refusal to release Dark Night of the Soul, an album-length collaboration between Sparklehorse (Mark Linkous) and Danger Mouse (you know, the guy who is half of Gnarls Barkley; the guy who did the fucking Grey Album; the guy who breathed new life into the Black Keys last year… that guy) meant to accompany a book of visual goodies from none other than David Lynch. I should mention that Dark Night of the Soul features guest performances from such indie luminaries as Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas, Jason Lytle, Frank Black, and Iggy Fucking Pop. In other words, this album is full on, mind-blowing indie bait. This thing should’ve sold a billion copies for its list of contributors alone. But it was not to be; Danger Mouse let the good folks at NPR stream the album as an exclusive “First Listen” and the babies at EMI pissed their wrinkle-free khakis, despite the fact that what NPR and Danger Mouse were doing was essentially getting the indie kids (myself included) to respond to the album in a way that can only be described as Pavlovian. As of this writing, Dark Night of the Soul still does not have a release date, and it looks like EMI has no intention of releasing it.

Which is too bad, because it turns out that Dark Night of the Soul is worth every bit of the hype it has received and then some. It’s a moody, funky, grumpy, gorgeous record. I mean, this album is so awesome that it strikes me as statistically impossible that Tom Waits didn’t have some hand in it. Wayne Coyne is the first guest to appear, opening the album with “Revenge”, a song that admittedly sounds like it could be a Flaming Lips tune, but if that’s the worst thing someone can say about your song, what they’re really saying is, “Goddamn, that song is really awesome.”

The album has a freaky, psychedelic, middle-of-the-night feel to it that fans of Sparklehorse will recognize from 2006′s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, which also featured some production from Danger Mouse, a guy I can’t stop praising for his ability to hear exactly how a song needs to sound and making it sound that way. So Dark Night of the Soul would have been musically worthwhile even without the high-profile collaborations, but having Iggy Pop shout, “et cetera, I quit,” on your album (as he does on the awesome “Pain” – if this is what Iggy’s new record sounds like, sign me up) is certainly an entertaining bonus.

I could go on and on about each track’s individual loveliness, but that’s hardly the issue anymore. It’s a great album, and I’d tell you to run right out and get it, but you can’t because EMI is dumb. The book is still for sale and it comes with a blank CD. So maybe you should go download the sucker and burn it to disc and then, if you ever meet Mark Linkous and/or Danger Mouse, buy them a round of their favorite beverage as a way of saying thanks. Although it’s not like EMI has put the lid on every opportunity you have to hear Dark Night of the Soul; search any torrent engine and you’ll find it (EMI is probably too busy keeping their music out of independent record stores to sue you anyway. Hell, given all the ways they’re finding to not sell music, they’ll probably be handing out pink slips to their legal department in a matter of days). Or, if you want to hear it completely legally and for free, the damn thing is still available here at the NPR website. That’s right – EMI put the brakes on the only way they have to make money off of Dark Night of the Soul without ever stopping NPR from basically giving it away. So either EMI has been infiltrated by anti-industry moles who are tearing it apart from the inside or it is entirely staffed by people who are so stupid that any just society would prohibit them from breeding.

In any case, Dark Night of the Soul is a pretty great album and, since there are so many ways to hear it without giving EMI a dime, you really can’t afford not to listen to it.

It’s Blitz!

It’s hard for me to imagine a band that has changed as radically from one album to the next as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And yet, The YYY’s have a unifying spirit that goes through all of their albums and all 3 are bound together by Karen O’s intensely versatile vocals. While the hard copy of It’s Blitz!, the new phase of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is headed to stores next week, they graciously released a digital copy (with acoustic bonus tracks) last week so that people like me could scarf it up like the greedy little piggies we are.

The title and that splattery album art might lead one to believe that It’s Blitz! is a return to the shouty, distorty days of Fever to Tell, but you don’t have to wait long to find out that’s incorrect. TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (perhaps my new favorite producer) had a hand in the production this time out and the YYY’s have taken some of the poppier stuff from 2006′s Show Your Bones (it’s been three years between Yeah Yeah Yeahs albums and the same amount of time between Neko Case albums. Usually, such a long wait would be infuriating but, if the quality is on a par with Neko Case and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I’ll wait three years for every album from now on) to even greater heights, opening It’s Blitz! with the insanely catchy “Zero,” and following it with the dance hit of 2009, “Heads Will Roll.” So you start to think it’s a dance-pop record (like, say, LCD Soundsystem) but then you get to the soft middle of  “Soft Shock” and “Skeletons” (which is, by the way, the most TV on the Radio-esque of these tracks). So what the hell is It’s Blitz!?

Well, it’s a fantastic pop album by a band that has reinvented itself for the better on every outing. There are more synthesizers and fewer buzzing guitars than on past YYY’s records – and, usually, I’m a big champion on behalf of buzzing guitars, but Karen O and company have been there and done that. (If you’re hungering for buzzing guitars, though, check out their cover of “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” on the War Child Heroes comp) Ms. O’s voice is a tremendous asset here because she can coo and wail better than almost anyone in rock music, so the softer, more spacious tunes (like “Skeletons” and album closer “Little Shadow”) are appropriately vulnerable and the snarl and bite of songs like “Dull Life” (which does feature some electric guitar, but the riff sounds eerily like Blink 182′s “Dammit,” which admittedly caused me some discomfort at first. I notice it less on each listen, but check out the track for yourself and see if I’m lying) and “Zero” (which is stuck in my head in those rare moments when something from Middle Cyclone is not stuck in my head. Or Pavement’s “Silence Kit,” which has been lodged in there a lot lately) are executed with the full force of Karen O’s considerable power.

It’s Blitz is a brief offering at only ten songs (you can nab the version I got on Amazon with four acoustic tracks, but they’re all acoustic versions of album tracks – not unreleased goodness) but that can hardly be a knock against it since I find myself listening to the album again and again.  In my review of Vetiver’s Tight Knit album (did you read that one? Me either), I mentioned that if one were inclined to call 2009 “The Year of the Whatever”, one might dub it “The Year of the Singer-Songwriter.” It’s Blitz! might lead you to amend that and call 2009 “The Year of the Woman,” but I’m happy just to have the good music. Calling a year “The Year of  the _________” is the kind of bullshit labeling that I’ll leave to the folks at Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone or whatever magazine your parents read. What 2009 has been is a year of pretty great music from artists whom I expect to make great music. I would have been shocked – shocked - if the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had, in fact, turned out a terrible album. Just as, for example, U2 is incapable of radically altering their stadium pop sound, I submit to you that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are incapable of making a truly dreadful album. They’re too good at using every ounce of their musical talents to create fresher, better versions of things lesser bands have attempted (there are several tracks on the Radio Broker radio station on Grand Theft Auto 4 that make me miss the Yeah Yeah Yeahs tremendously. I forgive GTA 4 though because 1) it’s an awesome game and 2) it has a killer jazz station. You haven’t enjoyed GTA until you’ve run over pedestrians to John Coltrane).

And that’s what really occurs to me as I enjoy It’s Blitz! for the nth time, with no diminishing returns in sight. Like TV on the Radio or Tom Waits, they are able to synthesize their vast record collections and unique talents into music that blows right past good and crash lands in Essentialdom. They process the music that came before them and warp it into a fantastic New Something that’s at once familiar and infectious. America’s standards for pop music have crashed harder than the stock market ever dreamed of and now the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have come with a potent attempt to recalibrate our senses and point the direction in which pop should travel for the second decade of our young century. Of course, given the Billy Corgan-approved direction the music business has been heading over the last few years, you can expect fewer albums like It’s Blitz! and more like Chris Cornell’s new shit sandwich, which I’ll be drinking my way through this weekend.

So until then, I’m gonna crank up “Zero” a few thousand more times.