Pumped Up Kicks and Petty Theft

I first heard Foster the People when I was up in Portland in June, doing orientation for grad school, interviewing for a job (not bragging, but I totally got it), and looking for places to live. One day, I was borrowing me ma’s car and listening to good ol’ 94.7 KNRK when I heard a song called “Pumped Up Kicks.” I wasn’t blown away on the initial listen (I don’t think “blown away” describes how I feel about the song now, but I do like the hell out of it), but it damn sure got stuck in my head. After a few more times hearing it (KNRK is a great radio station, but even they are not entirely immune to the pressure to repeat popular stuff infinity times a day), I found that I liked it a lot, although I consistently recalled the lyric as “all the other kids with the scuffed up kicks/ better run, better run/ faster than my bullets,” and I wondered why a dude would wanna shoot people with dirty shoes.

As far as I know, “Pumped Up Kicks” is the lead single from Foster the People’s debut album, Torches. I say “as far as I know” because the way singles work in my head and the way they work in the real world are drastically different. In the real world, you release a single and someone puts it on the radio somewhere and at some point, if all goes according to plan, you are playing Coachella and spending each night up to your neck in the sex parts of whichever gender you prefer to enjoy your naked romps with. In my head, any song I like and want to listen to a lot becomes a “single” and nothing much happens after that except maybe my wife gets sick of hearing it.

I think that it’s both a great strength and a great weakness of Torches that, between its beginning (“Helena Beat”) and its end (“Warrant”), you can hear basically every halfway decent indie-dance/pop song of the last ten or fifteen years. On the one hand, it’s instantly familiar, even if you haven’t heard any of their songs before. For folks who feel less musically adventurous in the summertime and just want to throw something on and commence the booty-shaking, Torches has your back. But there are moments when it apes MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular so hard that it would feel monumentally pathetic if you weren’t so busy enjoying the head-bopping beats and indelible melodies. There’s even one track (“I Would Do Anything for You,” which is dangerously close in title and theme to one of the worst songs I have ever heard) that deftly steals a bit of the melody from a Kylie Minogue song (I don’t know the name of it. I know it only as “the only Kylie Minogue song I know”). So that familiarity is a double-edged sword, especially if you’re the holder of the copyright to certain songs.

But for all its petty thievery, I have to admit that I find Torches almost bafflingly enjoyable. I found it using my newly fired-up Spotify account, so I’ve invested absolutely zero dollars in the record. For music that I’ve spent no money (and very little effort) on, Foster the People (presumably named for singer Mark Foster. Pitchfork thinks he sounds like Jamiroquai and the dude from Mercury Rev, but I think they’re deliberately dancing around the fact that Foster sometimes sounds a whole lot like Maroon 5′s Adam Levine, especially on the verse to “Houdini”) have crafted something pretty decent, if not mind-blowing, life-changing, or even slightly original.

The case for the defense is that old chestnut that “all music is derivative of something” and I don’t disagree. But my concern isn’t the fact that Torches is derivative, it’s the degree to which it’s derivative. Some of these songs give me the feeling that Foster the People should be sending out royalty checks. Plenty of bands that I adore are blatantly derivative but most of them stop short of the wholesale (unattributed) assimilation of other songs that I already own.

I know I sound like I’m bagging on Torches pretty hard, but the album is fine, musically speaking, although “Don’t Stop” feels longer than it is, largely because the chorus is way too repetitive for my taste. “Pumped Up Kicks” is still my favorite song (by a long shot) and the rest of the album is okay but not amazing and I’ve made that distinction twice now because it bears repeating. Why? I’ll tell you: I have this sinking feeling that someone is going to come up to me at a party sometime in the next six months and tell me I just have to listen to this new band, Foster the People, because they’ve made the best album of the year and it’s just so great and I’ve never heard anything like them and so on and so forth and blah blah blah barf. I’m trying to preempt that uncomfortable conversation while still giving Torches exactly the amount of praise that I think it deserves (it’s a great summer pop album and I’m sure that many of your parties and barbecues will be enhanced by throwing it in your mix) because it is deserving of some praise. Just not as much as I suspect it will get.

As I listen to Torches for the ninth or tenth time now, I can’t help thinking of the Dandy Warhols’ 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia, an album that was, in terms of originality, utter hackwork (it goes well beyond a mere pastiche of the Velvet Underground and early Rolling Stones). But it’s also, by a landslide, the best Dandy Warhols album and it’s a really entertaining listen that I still like to throw on every once in a while. I happen to believe, perhaps because I’m an optimist, that Foster the People are more talented than the Dandy Warhols so it’s my hope that Torches will be followed up by something that borrows a little less liberally from its contemporaries. As it is, I can listen to it to my heart’s content for free on Spotify and by the time we disconnect our internet for the move to Portland, my wife will be goddamn tired of hearing “Pumped Up Kicks.”

12 Songs of Desire

Anyone who has heard one Eels song should not be surprised that Mark Everett (known as E to his fans) gave his new album, Hombre Lobo, the subtitle 12 Songs of Desire. Pretty much every Eels song you can think of is a song of desire: desire for love, desire for good times, desire for E’s loved ones to not be dead (this is not a joke – dude found his dad dead in bed in 1982, his sister died in 1996, and his mom died of lung cancer in 1998. If there’s a dude who’s entitled to some musical grieving, it’s Mark Oliver Everett). In that respect, then, Hombre Lobo‘s subtitle isn’t setting a bar too high for E to reach.

The last few Eels records haven’t done much for me – I’m still living in the past with Daisies of the Galaxy, the stellar Eels release from way back in 2000. And I’ve gotta be honest with you: the thing that gave me a lot of hope for Hombre Lobo is the fact that Pitchfork rated it a 4.6. First off, you need to know that their numbering system is 1) pretentious, 2) lame, and 3) completely fucking arbitrary (you can put those in the order that suits you).  But you also need to know that, on many occasions, an album that rates between about a 4 and a 7 on Pitchfork’s little scale has a good chance of being loved by me. Once you get above 7, there is an increasing chance that I will loathe whatever it is they love (although they are smart enough to routinely score Tom Waits above an 8. Even Pitchfork isn’t all stupid all the time). So, by at least one metric, I was ready and willing to love Hombre Lobo.

And I don’t not like Hombre Lobo, but I’m starting to realize something about every Eels album I’ve heard since Daisies (with the exception of the Live with Strings album, which is fucking gorgeous): I’m no longer listening to Eels primarily because I like their music. I’m listening to them now to see how Mark Everett is doing. I want him to be okay and I check in with him every so often to ensure that he is. He seems to be doing all right on Hombre Lobo, although he’s still better than a lot of people at doing the heart-on-sleeve-loneliness thing (especially since he does it without sounding unbearably emo). And Hombre starts with some real life to it, opening with one of its best tunes, “Prizefighter.” Three of the first four tracks are, in fact, actually good. And the rest are, well, only mediocre, but that’s not the point. I’m not here to listen to quality songs. I’m on the Mark Everett Suicide Watch and I’m happy to report that, for a guy who had 12 whole songs of desire in him, the guy seems to be coping pretty well with life. Good on you, Mr. Everett. You are still on the list of people I would totally buy a beer.

Eels diehards will possible take issue with my characterization of Everett as a mopey loner who tends to do the same thing musically at every outing, but I would remind them that this didn’t used to be the case. Though I stopped caring about the music after 2000, the albums that precede Daisies of the Galaxy are all deeply enjoyable (“Last Stop, This Town” is amazing and I wish he would do more things like that), but the ones that follow it range from mediocre to bad, although Everett manages to craft at least one real gem per album. Most of Hombre Lobo is a cut above mediocre (there are maybe 5 or 6 gems on this one, but I’m still not going to give the guy a pretentious, arbitrary number score) and I’ll probably keep this album around because I like half of it so much.

I think what Mr. E really needs is a good collaborator. His music is deeply personal (if I didn’t like the guy, I’d accuse him of crawling up his own ass and building a house there, but I do like the guy and, as I’ve said, he’s been through some shit) and it usually has the feel of being made by a dude in his basement studio, surrounded by instruments. What made his live album so enchanting, in part, was the sense I got that he was finally getting out of the house. Also, the arrangements for the live album were robust and beautiful – they showed E’s musical chops. So maybe Everett should phone up Danger Mouse, make an album with him, and then let EMI refuse to put it out. Or he could work with the Flaming Lips or someone else who’s lively and weird. Really, he just needs someone who will inspire him out of his comfort zone (notice I didn’t say “rut” – because I like Eels, remember) and let him explore his everydude loneliness in new and creative ways.

The aforementioned Eels diehards (and they do exist, and I’m glad they do) will probably like Hombre Lobo just fine, just as they like every Eels record just fine. If you’re new to them, you’re still better off with Daisies of the Galaxy. And, if that album rocks your world entirely, you could do lots worse than following it up with the purchase of Hombre Lobo.

Perhaps They’re Quickening Hearts on the Metric Scale

Let’s take stock of the music coming from the U.K. these days, shall we? We’ll include Scotland and Wales in this little status report but probably not Ireland unless I mistakenly assign Britishness to an Irish band in which case all none of my readers across the pond can dismiss me as the ignorant, morbidly obese yankee that I am statistically likely to be.

At any rate, Wales has been doing all right the last couple of years, giving us quality entertainment from Los Campesinos! as well as a pretty good new record from Manic Street Preachers. So well done, Wales. The Scots, however, have had it going on ever since The Delgados, and adding last year’s great Frightened Rabbit album and a great disc apiece from Franz Ferdinand and Camera Obscura – well, let’s just say the Scots are kicking plenty of arse right now. Keep it up, Scotland, and don’t let Mel Gibson make any more movies about you. Come to think of it, don’t let Mel Gibson make any more movies.

But what about all these British bands? You’ve got your Futureheads, your Arctic Monkeys, your British Sea Power, your Kaiser Chiefs, your Brakes, your Muse, and that’s not even mentioning your Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, and Radiohead.

Oh, and Maximo Park. And literally a billion others.

I really dug the sort of angular, twitchy guitar pop that I found on Maximo Park’s A Certain Trigger. Then I drifted away from them for a while and missed Our Earthly Pleasures entirely, which filled me with a sense of duty toward what I believe is their third album, Quicken the Heart. Quicken the Heart is a dancey, poppy, British pop album circa 2009.  Which means, like other albums by other bands that traffic in similar stuff, it’s mostly trying to carve a niche for itself in the burnt out crater left from Franz Ferdinand’s rocket to superstardom. They had some promising stuff on A Certain Trigger, a romantic cynicism that was as refreshing as Franz Ferdinand’s committed heathen/hedon-ism.

But Quicken the Heart kinda sounds like it could be early Maximo Park demos, you know, where Paul Smith is aping The Cure’s Robert Smith (no relation?) a little too closely. And, unless I’m failing to convert something from the metric system here, there’s not a lot of quickening going on with my ticker, which is really sad because said lack of quickening inclines people like me to dismiss albums like Quicken the Heart on about the third listen. I’m on listen number three as we speak, but I’ve got a review to do, so I’m plowing ahead. I do these things for you, dear reader(s?). And, incidentally, if there are any international Bollocks! readers out there, I’d like to state – just for the record – that I’m not an ignorant, morbidly obese yankee. At least I’m not morbidly obese.

The thing is, British guitar-pop bands today are cranking out mediocrity at an alarmingly prolific rate. There are new bands all the time and they sound just like the new bands that were coming out in 2005, putting out music that isn’t offensively bad, or really bad at all, just really… samey. And all these bands are somehow making a living over there, perhaps because NME is willing to declare anyone the greatest British band ever at least once.

So I’m picking my battles from now on, Britain. I will listen to the next Arctic Monkeys record. I will always listen to Los Campesinos! records, and I’ll keep my Scottish bands (if The Delgados get back together, I may have to schedule my honeymoon in Scotland around that glorious event), but no more guy-bands doing the dance-pop thing. I’m over it. To quote my beloved Campesinos!, “four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life.” And I am gonna go ahead and be sexist and say that I will still follow female British bands and performers. (For those of you who might call that “reverse” sexism, you’re stupid. Discrimination against anyone based on their gender is sexism – the sex of either party involved is secondary to the discrimination itself and I know there might be one or two enlightened individuals out there who totally get that, but after sitting through the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and listening to right-wing pundits make charges of “reverse racism”, I feel the need to point out what a stupid fucking phrase that is. Racism against white people isn’t reverse racism, it’s just plain old racism. Ironically, prejudice doesn’t discriminate. It’s fine coming from the mouths of any moron, regardless of their race, sex, or religious background) Why am I favoring the ladies? Well, the answer’s all over this post – there are so goddamn many groups of guys doing the same kind of music that I’ll reward any woman for getting her voice heard over there. Except for Tori Amos. My god, she’s terrible. And even then, I’m not promising to like everything I hear from British women, I’m only promsing to listen to it in the first place. Let’s face it – me promising to like anything would be the death of Bollocks!

I don’t want to come across as some sort of jingoistic American elitist either. We here in the states are xeroxing shitty emo bands by the sewerful (“sewerful” is the correct unit of measurment for amounts of emo bands. You can look it up), so it’s a case of same shit, different genre. We also hand a record contract to every pubescent fuckwit who has a show on the Disney channel and promises not to have sex until they’re married, so I don’t want people thinking that America is somehow doing something right where Britain is doing something wrong. The larger point here is that, in both countries, we are inundated with musical choices that fall all over the spectrum from bad to mediocre to good and life is just to fucking short to ever choose mediocre. If you’re deeply moved, or fired up, or in anyway excited (that is, har har, if your heart is quickened, har har) by the new Maximo Park record, hey, great for you. You’re (possibly) a zombie.

Also: abstinence pledges are pointless failures. What would Jesus do? Apparently, every girl in his high school. Hoo-ah!

I Blame You, Obits

I Blame You is one hell of a name for song or an album. In fact, They Might Be Giants released a very lovely song called “I Blame You” (for a film soundtrack, I believe) a few years back.  And now Obits, the new band from Rick Froberg (he was in Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes, neither of which have I listened to)  has released an album called I Blame You that features a song called “I Blame You.” My excitement about the title track diminished immediately upon hearing that it is, in fact, an instrumental. The overwhelming feeling I get that Obits squandered an opportunity there is, in retrospect, illustrative of my general attitude toward Obits, a band that very obviously loves two things: Dick Dale and the Stooges.

So Obits’ I Blame You is ostensibly a guitar record and one that has those surfy guitar runs but still tries to have the shambolic edge of, say, Raw Power. But Obits don’t have a James Williamson. And Froberg’s voice is high and screamy, not quite the wounded howl of Craig Extine  or the cocksure snarl of early Iggy Pop, but not really an emo wail either.  There’s a lot of potential on I Blame You, but it never quite manages to get beyond its influences; if you like Raw Power (and you should if you like rock ‘n’ roll at all), you’ll probably want to listen to that more than you’ll want to listen to I Blame You. If you like Dick Dale, well, I guess you see where I’m going with this. Although I have to say that surf guitar and surf music in general is baffling to me. Never dug it. I get that the Beach Boys had outstanding harmonies and stuff but I just don’t give a shit about anything they sang about. And yeah, “Miserlou” is pretty interesting the first time you hear it, but I would never want to listen to a whole album of that. So if you think I’m committing some act of blasphemy by saying Dick Dale and the Beach Boys are overrated, maybe you’ll like Obits. And maybe you thought the Cream reunion was something other than a powerful embarrassment.

It’s hard to make out what Froberg is up to lyrically because he pronounces words in unusual ways. I didn’t know, for instance, that he was singing “two-headed coin” on the song “Two Headed Coin” until I read the title of the song.  I get the sense that these songs are about being an outsider and about being in trouble romantically. Or something. It all seems like very generic classic rock, the sort of stuff that was handled well enough for me between Exile on Main Street and Raw Power. I don’t need another album’s worth of what Obits has to offer. I mean, “Talking to the Dog” is a pretty all right song, but it reminds me of the Rolling Stones’ “Rocks Off.” Which I would rather listen to. “Light Sweet Crude” is sung in a way that makes me want to listen to last year’s Old Haunts album, particularly “Hurricane Eyes.” And so on.

It’s not that I Blame You is a terrible album, or even all that bad. It’s just… a thoroughly middling record. Nothing on this album gets me excited; although I suspect the guitar work is supposed to, me being a guitar player and all. And I like heroic riffs as much as the next guy, but Obits don’t blow the roof off the joint in that respect either. Not like, I dunno, The Hold Steady.  And I’m also not one of those guitar players who thinks that the only good rock music features loud guitars and noodly solos through every single second of every single song. I like some nuance in my guitar playing, which is why Mick Jones and Peter Buck are two of my favorite guitar players. I like guys who know what to play when, and who know when not to play.

There are good bits on I Blame You. “Lilies  in the Street” is a chugging little ditty that actually gets up somewhere near noticeable. It’s a late-coming high point for an album that is mostly, unfortunately, forgettable. “Back and Forth” is okay too, but it also makes me miss Exile On Main Street. So Obits are always either pushing me toward other, better albums or just boring me to the point that I tune them out. I literally drift off during this album, scanning my book shelf for something to read or thinking about which album I want to write about for my next installment of The Best Albums Released in My Lifetime (it may or may not be a little album by Neutral Milk Hotel. But here’s the problem – having mentioned it, I’m now thinking about Neutral Milk Hotel and not the album I’m listening to). I know there are people out there who think you don’t need to be completely absorbed by music for it to be good. But you know what? I fucking do. Why on earth would I write a music blog that 6 to 9 people (on average) read if I wasn’t completely consumed by a love of music? And, being a passionate lover of music, why would I want to listen to something that doesn’t fuel my passion? Obits doesn’t put the fire out, but it’s a damp, mossy log when I need a month-old Christmas tree – something that will go up in flames with little or no provocation. That’s not to say that all music I love has to be high-octane rock music – some of the most exciting music I own is by John Coltrane and Gustav Mahler. The point is, really, that I need albums that I’m excited to listen to and not albums that have me scanning the track listing to see how many tunes I’ve got left before I can listen to something really great.  When it starts to feel like work, I stop. And since I listen to every album I review while I’m writing about it (and several times before I write about it), I need to stop writing about Obits now.

This Emo is Airborne

When I tell people that they should get off their asses and read Underworld and White Noise, I shit you not, the response I typically get is a frown and a question: “Oh. Is that the book that inspired the movie?” And part of me dies. Underworld, the only one that exists in my world anyway, is an amazing novel by Don DeLillo, a man whose literary gifts are unsurpassed. Literally every page of that book is a treat to read. Apparently, there is a horrid movie about werewolves or something that shares a title with DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece but anyone who knows me (or has talked to me for five minutes) knows I’d never tell you to read a book that could inspire such awfulness.

I get the same question about White Noise (awful Michael Keaton movie where he hears dead people). White Noise is another great DeLillo novel which prominently features an airborne toxic event but is not about that event.

Say you’re a band from L.A., one of music’s biggest talent vacuums (people here still care about Axl Rose and Motley Crue), and you glance through White Noise. I know what you’re thinking: “Dude! The Airborne Toxic Event would be a hella tight name for a band! We can give props to a good writer and let our listeners know that we know how to read!” So you name your band The Airborne Toxic Event.

The Airborne Toxic Event did grab my interest, but understand something here: if you name your band after anything written by one of my favorite authors, you had better be fucking amazing (if any band names themselves after something out of Kurt Vonnegut, they have to be Hold Steady awesome to impress me). It is not enough to me that you can prove you flipped through a book – your band’s awesomeness has to be directly proportional to the awesomeness of the book you’re ripping off.

From DeLillo’s White Noise: “Murray said, ‘I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostaliga, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.’”

Do you think, dear six people who read this, that there is anything even close to that awesome on The Airborne Toxic Event’s debut album? Not even close. Mikel Jollet is the smokey baritone who bleats out the songs – at his best, he sounds like Matt Berninger and makes me want to listen to The National and at his worst, he sounds like an emo version of Mike Ness and makes me want to punch him in the balls.

The Airborne Toxic Event, to be fair, is not a horrible album. But is by no means good. When Jollet screams “I’m such a bore” on “Happiness is Overrated” (that song title should warn you what you’re in for), I’m quite inclined to agree with him. You’ve heard this album before – the best bits and the worst. The best bits are The Arcade Fire meets Tapes ‘n’ Tapes and the worst bits are The Plain White T’s meets every other emo band on the planet.  Let’s do an experiment: listen to the first minute of “Wishing Well” from The Airborne Toxic Event and then listen to the first minute of “Neighborhood #1″ from The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Now multiply the feeling you get by 10 (the number of tracks on The Airborne Toxic Event). The feeling you end up with should tell you exactly how you’ll feel about The Airborne Toxic Event as a band. They’re sort  of a perfection of mediocrity, the sort of thing that L.A. would mistake for greatness (Los Angeles is also home to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that should just fucking stop… right… now.). They’ve even managed to trick a few reviewers here and there, but there is not a single track on this album that doesn’t make me wish I was listening to a band with a better singer (like The National) and/or a better lyricist (The Arcade Fire, The National, Okkervil River, and I could go on ad infinitum.) And repeated listens to The Airborne Toxic Event reveal something even more sinister – this music is emo, turned down and diluted by the Arcade Fire influence, but it’s emo none the less. I’m sure Mr. Jollet wants to tell you he’s inhabiting the characters of his songs or whatever, but take a lesson from Matt Berninger (does Mr. Berninger have the best voice in music right now? I think he might) – there’s no emo-quiver when Berninger sings “I leaned on the wall/ the wall leaned away”. His wariness is unfaked and unflinching, which is why he doesn’t need to scream very often (although, when he does, as on “Abel” and “Mr. November,” it’s pretty goddamn impressive).

Do you know what Mumblecore is? It’s this new movie genre (I guess) that likes to depict teenagers discussing somewhat deep things and bemoaning their lackluster love lives. It shoots for a superficial depth, the sort of thing that appeals to people who are blown away by books like The Four Agreements and who have read only one poet: Robert fucking Frost. The Airborne Toxic Event is like a mumblecore band (although they don’t mumble that much) – it’s a sort of safe poetry for people who can’t get far enough below the surface to crack open Boxer (best album of 2007) or read John Berryman. Every track on The Airborne Toxic Event screams “Trying too hard,” and its prepackaged pensiveness torpedoes any chance its (half-way) decent musicians have to propel the album in any really interesting direction. It’s the risk you run, naming your band after something awesome by an awesome writer: you’ve instantly asked yourself to be compared to that writer and when that writer is Don DeLillo, you’re bound to be found wanting.