Best Albums of My Life #22: Combat Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 29 Best Albums of My Life: #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to Pretend

All right, goddammit, I’ve put off talking about MGMT for as long as I possibly can. I was at this party where a completely drunk douchebag was telling me that Oracular Spectacular is the album of the year. He told me this a million times and kept saying it “one musician to another.”

That was 6 months ago.

The same guy turned me onto The Whigs, a band I actually like a lot more than MGMT. So meeting the dude wasn’t a total waste and, in the interest of fairness, he was more than plenty drunk and might not be a complete douchebag when he’s sober. That said, though, there’s no way that Oracular Spectacular is the album of the year, unless it’s the only album that you heard this year.

You’ve probably heard “Time to Pretend.” I don’t listen to the radio (not being an elitist here, I just don’t do it, at least not that often), but it sounds like the sort of song that is probably fucking everywhere. And that’s actually not a problem for me. “Time to Pretend” is a bombastic pop beauty, the sort of thing The Scissor Sisters would do if they weren’t so infuriatingly awful. It’s the kind of song that should be everywhere so that shittier songs cannot be everywhere. MGMT, which is really just two dudes (Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser), smartly sticks “Time to Pretend” at the front of Oracular Spectacular, allowing its awesomeness to resonate through the next few tracks so that it takes you a while to realize that the album never reaches those heights again. This is a combination of “Time to Pretend” being so awesome and the other songs just not being that awesome.

Still, Oracular Spectacular does have its moments. I really dig “The Youth,” where they sing, “This is a call/ to live and love and sleep together” and “Electric Feel,” which is obviously BeeGees disco pastiche, but it’s a helluva lot of fun and that’s pretty much what Vanwyngarden and Goldwasser are shooting for. They, like girls, just wanna have fun.

For the first five tracks, I had a fucking blast. Then I hit “4th Dimensional Transition” and collided hard with the law of diminishing returns. I’m not the kind of guy who can deal with the disco-pop good times for long- it’s a matter of personal preference. I will never get sick of listening to Tom Waits and I know people who can’t even deal with him for a song (I am madly in love with one of these people). It’s a matter of what you like and MGMT generally doesn’t traffic in the kind of music I like. That’s what made Oracular Spectacular such a pleasant surprise initially – I really dig the first five tracks, listen to them pretty regularly, I just get bored after a while. This is probably because I want my dancey good-time music to ascend to LCD Soundsystem levels and so few dancepop groups can do that. I can’t really hold it against anyone for being less amazing than James Murphy. God knows I’m not that amazing.

“Pieces of What” is the last song on this album that doesn’t completely bore me and, despite how that sounds, I really do recommend Oracular Spectacular, especially people who like this sort of thing more than I do. It’s a fun album to throw on at parties and make people nostalgic for when Beck had fun making music.

Santogold and the Kind of Pop Album I Like

You might get the idea, given how many times per week I make a reference to 1) The Clash and/or London Calling, 2) The Hold Steady and 3) Tom Waits, that I don’t much care for pop music. Few things could be further from the truth (some things are definitely further from the truth, like believing that the planet is younger than some civilizations). I’m actually a big fan of pop music, but I apply to it the same high standards I have for all other music (this is why I write hip-hop reviews for Atmosphere and not Eminem.). Obviously, I love The Beatles and I’ll even argue for the timeless pop goodness of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. But, like R&B, pop music has largely taken a giant fucking nosedive in the last twenty years or so, such that some our best artists in the pop style (namely The New Pornographers and Fountains of Wayne) are comparitively unknown (“Stacy’s Mom” notwithstanding, Fountains of Wayne is a completely awesome and clever band.).

So this is the climate in which I found Santogold, better known as Santi White to her friends (not least of whom is M.I.A., to whom Santi will no doubt garner comparisons). Well, in the interest of full disclosure, my friend Zac pointed me to “L.E.S. Artistes” and I was hooked. And rightfully so.

Santi White has written songs for Ashlee Simpson. White’s eponymous debut as Santogold is proof that she’s keeping her best stuff for herself. Santogold is a genre-hopping pop masterpiece full of funk, hip-hop, and even a little punk swagger. It’s the kind of album that people will either love or hate; Santogold is very good at being provocatively obnoxious, a trait she shares with M.I.A.

So yeah, there’s the big, funky beats and the woman using her voice in fun and interesting ways on Santogold, but let’s put the M.I.A. comparisons to bed. Santogold is much more of a straightforward pop album than M.I.A. is capable of making. “Lights Out” is the proof in the pudding – it’s a pure pop-rock tune, the musical equivalent of a Pixie Stick, injecting sugar straight into your brain.

Santi White’s musical awareness and versatility are on display from the beginning of “L.E.S. Artistes” (that’s “Lower East Side” Artistes, a jab at NYC posers, of which, apparently, there are many) straight through the final remix of “You’ll Find A Way” (which is actually completely unnecessary). “L.E.S. Artistes” starts with a steady pop beat before White comes in singing a little bit like Cindy Lauper before diving into the catchy-as-fuck chorus, “I can say I hope/ it will be worth what I give up.” White’s voice is abrasive at times and seductive at others – a true instrument that she uses tremendously throughout the album.

“You’ll Find A Way,” follows the opener and is a rock song with reggae-tinged guitar on the verses and an awesomely overdriven bassline.  As I listen to it again, I can still hear some Lauperisms in the chorus (“Don’t lean too far/ you will fall over”), but the whole thing is just so… damn… catchy. You know, like good pop should be.

The biggest treat on Santogold is really that there’s something for everyone. There’s an underlying hip-hop vibe to a lot of the songs (the beats are bass-driven and heavy as hell) and White blends various styles over that foundation, synthesizing styles with a seamlessness I haven’t seen since The Clash (not just shilling here – listen to London Calling and Combat Rock and tell me how many genres you hear in there). In particular, White seems to have a better sense of when to nod to her favorite reggae sounds (on “Shove It,” for instance) and when to just let a pop song be a pop song (as on “Lights Out”). The only genre I don’t hear on this album is country, which is admittedly hard to blend with many styles outside of rock (blend country with pop and you get Faith Hill, which is bad. Blend country with hip-hop and you get Big & Rich, which is offensively terrrible. Blend country with rock and you get The Band, Uncle Tupelo, and early My Morning Jacket. Perfect!).

To the astute listener, songs like “Say Aha,” and “L.E.S. Artistes” might call to mind the tragically under-rated Res (pronounced “Reese”), whose 2001 album How I Do would’ve been a blueprint for sounds like Santogold’s if the world hadn’t been too stupid to notice that album. Seriously, How I Do was the only R&B album of the early 21st century. Sorry, you can keep your Alicia Keys and whoever else is dabbling in R&B these days. I’ll take Res and Sharon Jones. If you’re reading this, Res, please make more music now. Please?

Anyway, back to the album at hand – Santogold is a great record for music nerds who can spot the style and the reference, but it’s also not as elitist as that sounds. If you put this album on at a party, you’ll get a whole lot of, “Hey, that’s really fresh. What is that?” Or you’ll get a lot of “Is this the new M.I.A.?” You can throw those people out.

Furr is Murder (And by “Murder”, I Mean “Awesome”)

Hey. Do you remember the album? (If Bollocks! is ever awesome enough to have t-shirts, one of them will be “Remember the Album!” and it will shortly thereafter replace “Remember the Alamo” as a battle cry.) See, kids, back in the day, bands made entire albums of songs, meant to be heard from start to finish. You know, instead of five singles and five filler-songs? Well, Blitzen Trapper (from Portland like half of the awesome music I’ve heard this year) remembers the album. They also remember The Band, The Beatles, and 70′s David Bowie. And if you like 1)albums, 2)The Band, 3) The Beatles and 4)You see where I’m going with this, right? Well, get ready to fucking love Furr, Blitzen Trapper’s first album for Sub Pop and the follow up to their whacked-out, awesome, self-released Wild Mountain Nation.

I saw Blitzen Trapper open for The Hold Steady last year and I must confess, at the time, I had no idea what to do with them. They looked like hippies and it made sense to me that they were from Portland. But their music was all over the map. There were elements of heavy metal, folk, punk, and country. The dudes completely won me over by the end of their set and I ran out and picked up Wild Mountain Nation (which is tied with Grand Buffet’s King Vision for “Most Undeservedly Overlooked Album of 2007″) soon after.

On Furr, Blitzen Trapper has streamlined some of their weirdness (some) and highlighted their ability to sagaciously synthesize the Beatles’ pop sound with the broke-ass country of The Band. “Sleepytime in the Western World,” launches Furr and the album does not let up until the soft country closer “Lady on the Water.” These northwest hippies have slapped together something that simultaneously sounds like nothing you’ve heard before and everything you’ve heard before. Kinda like Beck used to.

“Sleepytime” is total Paul McCartney pop, the kind of thing that would come off as a novelty song if Blitzen Trapper weren’t so naturally, earnestly weird. “Gold for Bread” follows, showing that Blitzen Trapper really has picked up something that’s been lost in the last couple of Beck records. And then we get to the title track. “Furr” is a folk/country ditty with a beautiful melody that smacks of evangelical lycanthropy with lines like “You’d better be sure/ if you’re makin’ God a liar.” The song is about a guy who turns into a wolf and then back into a human, but don’t worry: vocalist Eric Earley handles it very well, again with that off-handed weirdness that keeps the song  from straying into Ronnie James Dio territory.

As with Wild Mountain Nation, Furr operates under a pretty strict desire for brevity. The title track is the longest at a breezy four minutes, which makes the album all the more impressive. This band can pack a lot of music into two to three minutes and they have an uncanny grasp of when a song is over. There are like six guys in this band who play multiple instruments and sing and yet they never seem to produce songs that sound overstuffed (you know, like The Polyphonic Spree). Furr rides in on a summer wind and blows right back out again, with nothing really to skip over, although “Love U” is an outburst of utter weirdness toward the end of the album, it’s still kind of endearing.

An album this well thought-out and flawlessly executed has numerous highlights but a few the tracks stand out among the stand-outs, so to speak. “Furr” is, as already discussed, an excellent tune. “Black River Killer” is a murder ballad that would make Johnny Cash proud and it’s followed with “Not Your Lover,” a piano love song with the simple/sweet refrain of “In my sleep/ I’m not your lover anymore”. The song also features the awesome, “I’m a moon-walking cowboy/ dusty riding/ and I don’t know what’s in store,” which wouldn’t at all be out of place among Yoko Kanno’s songs for Cowboy Bebop. If you don’t know who Yoko Kanno is or what Cowboy Bebop was, I’m actually kind of surprised you know what Bollocks! is. My last favorite (for now – I’ve been listening to this album on a rotation that is only exceeded by Dear Science and the new Hold Steady album) is “War On Machines,” which features the line “I’m gonna catch you by the tail/ and teach you how to live,” and remains awesomely dubious about whether or not Blitzen Trapper is making war on machines in the sense that they are fighting machines (perhaps alongside The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi) or in the sense that they are creating war using machines. Either way, good song.

Furr has the feel of a so-called “breakthrough” album, the kind of thing that might lead more people to Blitzen Trapper; if it’s the right kind of people, that’s all right with me (yeah, I know that’s elitist, but have you read this blog before?). But it might also attract people who like one or two songs, buy a concert ticket, and are completely weirded out at the show. Which, come to think of it, is also all right with me.

Dear TV on the Radio

Dear TV on the Radio,

I am employed in the service of Chorpenning, the iron-fisted ruler of Bollocks!. I think it is safe to assume that you are not among the 6 to 9 people (on average) who read Bollocks!, but it’s a blog about music. Chorpenning is the owner and head writer (only writer) for the site and he is a big fan of your work.

That’s why I’m writing to you, TV on the Radio. You see,  a few days ago, Chorpenning acquired your new album, Dear Science and, as is his wont, he listened to it straight through a couple of times. He likes to really wrap his head around an album before he writes about it. I, as his Imaginary Secretary, have to hear a lot of albums more than once, but it’s part of the job. Some of the albums are pretty nice (I really like that Hold Steady band, which is good – I think my job depends on it) so the repetition is usually bearable.

Dear Science was like that at first. And, actually, at second. I started to worry around the time Chorpenning locked the doors to the office, turned up the volume, and announced loudly, “I can’t stop listening to this record! It’s fucking amazing!” I cannot tell if he was drunk at the time; it’s often safe to assume he is. As we work in an Imaginary Office (cheaper lease!), there is no worry that he’ll drive home in such a state and cause injury to himself or others.

That was Tuesday, TV on the Radio. Today is Saturday. I haven’t been home, and neither has Chorpenning, since your album came out. I’ve been here, with him, listening to Dear Science over and over and over again. His dog and girlfriend (not imaginary, believe it or not) miss him. I have plants that need watering.

I am not saying that your music is bad or that you should have, somehow, made Dear Science less awesome. I’m simply alerting you to the situation caused by listening to your new album. I’m concerned that other people will hear Dear Science and, like my boss, never want to stop hearing it. How many people are stuck in their offices, their cars, wherever, right now, doing the same thing they’ve done since they first heard the enchanting first notes of “Halfway Home”? They could number in the millions. Millions of people, TV on the Radio, who get all the way through to “Lover’s Day,” and, rather than going home to their lovers (“Lover’s Day”, for my money, is one of the ten best songs about fucking I’ve ever heard) and loving them, they just let the disc whirr back around to “Halfway Home.” Your production is so lush, your harmonies so great, your beats so enormous, that they may well be dangerous. If it’s not too late, you may consider a warning on the next pressing of Dear Science. Something like: “Warning: the music you are about to hear is infinitely awesome and highly addictive. You may find yourself wanting to listen to it over and over, so much so that you neglect responsibilities and basic hygiene. Please have a friend stop the disc for you after every three rotations so that you can shower and let your employees go home.” Or something like that. I’m just spitballing here.

Again, I don’t mean to offend you or in anyway suggest that it’s your fault that my boss reacted so strongly to your album. To tell the truth, I can sort of see why the stirring songs like “Family Tree” and “DLZ” would warrant a second listen. And that dancing song, the one with the “foam-injected Axl Rose” (I Googled the lyrics), is pretty catchy too. But this is ridiculous.

Oh god. He’s just started it up again.

Look, I know you’re probably on tour or doing something very important and musical or whatever, but if you happen to actually receive this letter in the next week or two, could you please send help? Or maybe if you came here yourselves and explained to Chorpenning that he has responsibilities outside of the office that he should see to? I think he might need to hear it from you that, while you’re no doubt glad that he loves Dear Science, it was never your intention for him to imprison his employees (real or imaginary) and force them to descend into madness with him.

Although, in fairness, I suppose I should have known that a descent into madness and/or alcoholism was inevitable with this job.

In any case, TV on the Radio, if you can find it in your hearts to send help, please do so at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Imaginary Secretary

My Morning Jacket at the Greek

What’s that you say? You’ve never listened to My Morning Jacket?

Fine. I’ll wait. Go get yourself a My Morning Jacket album based on the following criteria: if you like guitar-rock, get It Still Moves; if you like spacey, Flaming Lips-esque stuff, get Z; if you like strummy country rock, get At Dawn; if you like all of the above, get Evil Urges.

If you’ve followed the above prescription and you live in Los Angeles, you have just a taste of what you missed last night at The Greek Theatre.

The show was billed as “An Evening with My Morning Jacket.” Meaning there was no opening act for me to fret over (opening acts are always a delicate thing – sometimes they’re awesome like when Band of Horses opened for the Decemberists, and sometimes they’re fuck-terrible like when Sean Na Na opened for The Hold Steady) or drink my way through. My Morning Jacket took the stage at 8pm while some zany-ass music played over the PA. Jim James, Flying-V strapped over his shoulder, was already jumping up and down (dude gets ridiculously fired up to play live) as Patrick Hallahan (best drummer in rock right now) beat the opening of “Evil Urges” into the night air. And we were off. MMJ followed “Evil Urges” with “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1″ and then, without saying a word to the audience at this point, they jumped right into the best song of 2005: “Off the Record” (it’s from Z. Are you listening to it right now? You should be.).

The best concert I’ve ever seen was The Hold Steady in Portland, back in 2006. My Morning Jacket at the Greek is a close and easy number two. They were workman-like to say the least (James only said about ten words to the audience all night, basically thanking everyone for coming out to “participate with all your brothers and sisters” – I’m guessing Mr. James smoked a little something before the show, but he’s a mellow enough dude), and, yeah, they got a bit jammy throughout the night but my pal Tim and I came to a realization watching Jim James and fellow-guitarist Carl Broemel exchange guitary freakouts last night: the thing that separates My Morning Jacket from jam bands is that it’s interesting when My Morning Jacket takes off on an instrumental rant. A lot of jam bands play fifteen minute versions of their songs and there’s no reason – they’re meandering, feeling for the next dull note in a long line of dull notes. With My Morning Jacket, their songs grow in length because they simply cannot stop rocking out. The outro to “Off the Record,” is kinda tedious on Z. In concert, it’s filled with squalling guitars and, last night, Jim James fleshed it out with an extremely nasty solo at the end. Unlike most jam bands, My Morning Jacket is not determined to play long, stoned versions of their songs – they’re determined to rock out as fully as possible on each song. While that added length to songs like “Off the Record” and “One Big Holiday,” it actually shortened “I Will Sing You Songs” and “Phone Went West.” James and company exhibit an impeccable instinct for exactly how much rock a song needs and a flawless execution in providing it.

At every concert I attend, there are songs that I pretty much need to hear in order to go home happy. With My Morning Jacket, they were, in no particular order: “Evil Urges,” “Off the Record,” “The Way that He Sings,” “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” (both parts!), “Dancefloors,” and “Mahgeetah.” Of those, MMJ only denied me “Dancefloors,” but they’re forgiven because they threw in “Phone Went West,” an older, reggae-tinged chestnut that I totally didn’t expect them to play. The best part about “Phone Went West,” is the free contact-high I got from the people next to me sparking up a joint; on top of the few Newcastle Browns I’d imbibed and coupled with the song itself, I was teetering on the edge of some sort of awesome spiritual vision. Or something.

My Morning Jacket played for two solid hours before departing (closing the show with the awesome 1-2 punch of “Smoking from Shooting” and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2″). Then they returned for a 45 minute encore that ended with a completely raucous version of “One Big Holiday.” I’ve been a huge fan of this band since I first heard them back in ’05, but last night’s show solidified them as among my five favorite current artists (before you even ask, here they are in – as always – no particular order: The Hold Steady, My Morning Jacket, The National, Tom Waits, and The Flaming Lips. List subject to change every five minutes) and easily one of the best rock bands in America right now. If this band is coming to your town, go fucking see them.

Evil Urges

Would you laugh along with me on something? Okay, cool. The Pitchfork review of My Morning Jacket’s Evil Urges says the album, “threatens to squander some of the widespread goodwill” the band has been building throughout their career. So, according to the Pitchfork people (who, by the way, are getting awfully predictable – play me five bars of your favorite band and I will tell you whether or not P-fork likes it. Or, put another way, “Is it Radiohead? Is it Dan Deacon? Is it Sufjan fucking Stevens?” If the answer is yes, P-fork likes it. If not, well, they probably don’t.), My Morning Jacket’s new album is so bad that not only will people not like it, but people will actually have ill wishes towards the band because of it.

Fucking madness. The Pitchfork review of Evil Urges is all, “hurr, no ‘fiery guitar freakouts,’ not enough reverb, too much falsetto, blah blah blah sellouts blah blah blah ‘yacht-pop’”. I feel it’s necessary to address this because Evil Urges is a fucking awesome album. If you’ve listened to My Morning Jacket since The Tennessee Fire and especially up through 2005′s stellar Z, you might see Evil Urges as a further synthesis of My Morning Jacket’s myriad influences. Pitchfork is pre-bristling at this album because someone somewhere said (I think it was in Blender or some equally shitty music rag) that this album was supposed to take MMJ to the “next level.” Read the interview with Jim James over at the Onion AV Club for his take on that (great interview, by the way).

The album opens with the title track which is heavy on the reggae and Prince influence, and features James singing in a wicked falsetto about how loving people is not evil, no matter what certain other parties might tell you (I take “Evil Urges”, at least in part, as Jim James’ declaration that consenting adults ought to be able to fuck and marry other consenting adults of any and all flavors without the government or church raising a fuss – it’s a highly enlightened stand to take).

“Highly Suspicious” is another song that P-fork takes issue with, calling it “eye-poppingly annoying” (P-fork, in fact, seems to blame “Highly Suspicious” for what they perceive as this album’s failure to live up to its predecessors). And it’s a pretty obnoxious song, but I kinda like that about it. What can I say? “Free Radicals” is one of my favorite songs on The Flaming Lips At War With the Mystics, an album and song that similar drew the ire of the P-fork kids. “Highly Suspicious” has some dumb lyrics, but the guitar freakout (apparently unnoticed by Pitchforkmedia) at the end is priceless and maybe it’s the times in which we live, but there’s something appealing to me about Ol’ Jim giggling “I’m Hiiiiiiigh” while the background vocals say, all military-chant style, “Highly suspicious”. It creates the suggestion that one must be high to believe we should be as paranoid as our current administration would have us be.

Where genre is concerned, Evil Urges skips around a lot more than previous MMJ outings. Z was their Flaming Lips record, all spacey and weird, and “Evil Urges” and “Highly Suspicious” fit well with the songs on that album but songs like “Librarian” have no precedent in the My Morning Jacket canon. Taken on the whole, Evil Urges is something I’ll call “Kentucky Fried Space Soul” – it draws heavily on Jim James’ impeccable taste in R&B (read the AV Club interview – he sings the praises of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and their influence on this record is obvious). Perhaps, then, what is baffling to the Pitchfork crew about this album is that it would be (as many MMJ albums are) a great soundtrack for getting it on. I’m assuming here that Pitchfork people are too busy loving themselves and Radiohead to ever actually copulate.

There’s been some talk in the early reviews about the music obscuring (or, according to Pitchfork, mangling) Jim James’ super awesome voice. This is a criticism I don’t fully understand, perhaps because I have ears and can hear. True, his voice is not drenched in the traditional reverb (and don’t get me wrong, I love the reverbtasticness of “Off the Record” and basically everything on At Dawn) but I think it’s a great choice – his voice is naked on “Sec Walkin’” and “Two Halves” and it’s something I’ve never heard from them before. Jim James has one of the best voices in music and it’s nice to hear it stand on its own – especially on “Librarian,” where James gives us a hint of what a solo album might sound like from R.E.M.’s Mike Mills (the greatest background vocalist in rock).

Don’t misunderstand – I love this album, but it is not perfect. “I’m Amazed” gets stuck in my head but I’m not sure I like it; though I don’t doubt the earnestness of James’ asking “Where’s the justice?” it still sounds a little tossed-off and radio-friendly. But on balance, this album is a lot leaner and tighter than most of their other records, with the exception of the ten-track masterpiece Z. Pitchfork dings James for using the word “interweb” in “Librarian,” which only shows that they’ve never read a post on MMJ’s website; James talks funny and “interweb” is perfectly acceptable to me but then I’m not prone to hating albums because they might be popular (cop to it, P-forkers – you guys actually said David Bowie’s Low was the best album of the ’70′s, a ballsy contrarian move to be sure, but if you look at things honestly you’ll see that either Hunky Dory or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was the best album of the 1970′s. It’s okay to like things that other people like).

So to recap this dual review: My Morning Jacket’s Evil Urges is a beautiful new album from one of the best rock bands in the country and Pitchfork’s review of Evil Urges is a middling review at best, coining inappropriate phrases like “yacht-pop” and accusing one of the most stalwartly individual bands in recent memory of “aiming for the Starbucks carousel with rootsy New Age romanticism.” For some less pretentious reporting on My Morning Jacket, pop over to the Onion’s AV Club and read their interview with Jim James and their review of Evil Urges. Also, lest I be accused of hating, Pitchfork actually wrote my favorite album review of all time, for Jet’s Shine On album:

You can find it here, but you might get in trouble for “reading” it at the office.