No Life On the Horizon

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2′s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2′s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80′s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.

Making Sense of Deerhunter

Deerhunter is one of those bands that I want to like more than I actually do like them. They make sprawling, noisy albums, the kind where the really good melodies float up from the murk and, if you blink, you miss them.  For me, that means I wade through 12 or 14 tracks on one of their albums and come away liking about half of them. With most bands, that would simply not be enough. But with Deerhunter, as with (yeah, I’ll admit it) Broken Social Scene (though not any of their sleep-inducing solo projects), I will always listen to their albums for that fistful of tracks that really please me.

Because those tracks are usually really great.

So for me, Deerhunter’s lastest effort, Microcastle is a real treat. Sure, the first track is a throw-away instrumental, but the rest of the album is actually fairly straightforward, Pink Floyd-infused pop.  Microcastle is, as I make my way through it once again, turning out to be a lot like last year’s offering from The Besnard Lakes – a massive, noisy, harmonic, and beautiful piece of work.

For people who were put off by Cryptograms, Deerhunter’s more-than-mildly schizophrenic debut, Microcastle might appear to be more like what you wanted from Cryptograms. It’s a 12 song album and I like more than half of it, which makes it a total win for me. That’s due in no small part to the more cohesive sound on this album.

You have to be willing to wait for bands like Deerhunter to grow on you and, while that’s less true of Microcastle than it was of Cryptograms, it’s still the case. It took me about five trips through the album to realize that I like a majority of the songs on it. Now, I realize that the national attention span is not that long nowadays and listening to an album from start to finish even once is rare; multiple trips for some people are unheard of. I’m not gonna wax curmudgeonly and blame it all on the I-Pod either; Apple (and makers of lesser known but infinitely better mp3 players) recognized this trend in our country and simple created a means of exploiting it. If you wanna pin the tale of No American Patience for Good Music on any one particular donkey, tack it firmly to The Radio. Somewhere along the line, The Radio started playing about twenty songs day, over and over again, until the songs became an anesthetic to the national soul. Singles became increasingly important (singles used to be a means of getting people to salivate over and then buy albums; now they’re a means of getting people to buy singles) and albums became sets of five singles surrounded by five really terrible songs. Yes, I’m generalizing here, but my rant holds for a large percentage of music these days. I offer as proof Blender‘s recent list of the hundred greatest American albums ever recorded which featured a greatest hits comp as it’s number one (Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, which tells you all you need to know about Blender‘s understanding of good music). And if you really think that the new double-disc Beyonce album is going to be a perfectly sequenced, articulate album from start to finish – all killer and no filler, as the enlightened refer to it – you might be suffering from some sort of debilitating head trauma. The internet, far from intensifying this problem, has served as a counterweight to it. Bands that might never be noticed otherwise are able to distribute their music online (in many various ways) and the public is able to find out about it by reading things like Bollocks! and some other, probably less shitty (sometimes more shitty) sites that do nothing but talk about great music.

Deerhunter makes pretty great music (thought I’d lost the thread there, didn’t ya?) and no, you’re not gonna hear it on Ryan Seacrest’s fucking countdown show, but for those who are willing to let it grow on ‘em, it’s easy to find. As much as I bag on Pitchfork (and I will continue to do so), there’s plenty of music (most of which they hate) that I wouldn’t know about without them. There are bands that I wouldn’t know about without The Current, America’s best (and in my humble opinion, only) radio station. There are bands I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t have at least one friend who was as obsessed with music as I am.

So what about Microcastle? It’s a pop album, as much as Deerhunter is able to make one. The songs that aren’t that great (“Cover Me” and “Activa”) are brief and easy to ignore, while the great songs (“Agoraphobia,” “Never Stops,” “Microcastle,” “Nothing Ever Happened,” and “Saved By Old Times”- see the ratio there?) are really great and get better with every listen.  Microcastle is the sound of a band getting their shit together and is, I hope, I  prelude to even greater albums.

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.

With A Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly

There’s not a lot I can say about the new Sigur Ros album. I can’t even spell the name of it using the keys on my keyboard and the modest tools provided by the good folks at WordPress. It translates to “With A Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly,” which is a pretty badass thing to say. I think from now on, when rehearsing with my band (name to be determined), I will start every practice with: “With a buzz in our ears, we play endlessly.”

By now, you’ve probably made up your mind about Sigur Ros and, if you’re smart, you’ve decided to like them. Yeah, no one knows what the fuck that positively elvish fellow is singing about; sure,  the songs can be a bit melodramatic at times, but at the end of the day, Sigur Ros cranks out uniformly beautiful music.

The new record, which I’ll just call Gobbledigook (that’s the name of the first track), continues their trend of making beautiful music and, though I (as previously stated) have no clue what the dude is singing about, the songs have a bit more of a pop feel than the tunes on Takk, Sigur Ros’s best record (and the one before this one). “Goobledigook” and “The Second Song” (Not it’s title, but again, my limited tools prohibit me from spelling it out. It’s, roughly, “Inni mer syngur vitleysingur.” Clears it right the fuck up for you, doesn’t it?) signal the ray-of-sunshine feel of this album and it doesn’t really let up after that. Sure, there are some traditional Sigur Ros tunes on Gobbledigook; “Festival” (that’s really its name! Thanks for throwing me that bone, Sigur Ros! You guys are swell!) is a nine-minute, slow-building epic of the type you’re used to from these dudes who hail from the sunny shores of Iceland.  But most of the album is more concise than Sigur Ros’s previous output.  It’s their pop album, or as close to one as they’re ever gonna make. I don’t think Sigur Ros will ever approach “radio-friendly,” or even all that “accessible” but if they were ever gonna get close, this is the album that does that.

There’s not much else to say about this album; it’s really fucking good, you’ve not heard anything like it, and you should be listening to it right now. Go. Listen. With a buzz in your ears.

Oh, one last thing: It would be impossible to regret getting super high and seeing this band live, outdoors, in the summertime. Impossible.