Fountains of Wane

I don’t like it when critics use the phrase “more of the same” to castigate a band. Here’s the thing: if you used to like an artist and then suddenly don’t like them for doing “more of the same” what you’re really saying is that you’re over that band. Because you used to like the same thing they’re doing now and now you don’t like it. What’s happening is a little thing called the Law of Diminishing Returns – or what I sometimes call The Reason You Only Need to Own One Placebo Album (Sleeping With Ghosts is mine). It’s not that a band you like has gotten worse; it’s that their style no longer does it for you. This can definitely affect your willingness to spend money on their albums or even to take the time to look them up on Spotify.

The first time I listened to Fountains of Wayne’s Sky Full of Holes, I couldn’t tell if I was falling victim to the law of diminishing returns or if something is really different about this new album. Every review I’ve read or heard of this record, including from friends who are long-time fans of Fountains of Wayne (I’m one myself – I logged many hours in college wearing out their self-titled debut and Utopia Parkway), is that it’s just like their 1990s output and that’s either a good or a bad thing, depending on the review. The Onion  A.V. Club claims that the “Just like the 90s” tag is a superficial reading of Sky Full of Holes. I don’t necessarily find the album as deep as the A.V. Club does, but I do agree that it’s different from their very strong 90s stuff.

Listen to their first album again – it’s goofy, sure, and dead-simple, but it told you what was up by the end of the second verse of “Radiation Vibe,” when Chris Collingwood sang, “I can still croon/ and make the girls swoon/ isn’t that the way life’s/ supposed to be?” And then there was plenty of electric guitar and crashing drums and, dare I say it, fun. If I believed in guilty pleasures, the first three Fountains of Wayne albums would be guilty pleasures for me, the same way Oasis’s What’s the Story Morning Glory? would be – all of those records make me want to plug in my guitar, crank up the distortion, and bash out fifteen songs in major keys (mostly C and G, thanks).

On the first listen, Sky Full of Holes didn’t feel as, well, electric as its predecessors, though it does sort of maintain Collingwood and cohort Adam Schlesinger’s keen pop sensibility. The tone of the thing struck me as pretty flat at first and I’m sad to say that it still does after five trips through it. I’m interested in the A.V. Club’s assertion that Schlesinger and Collingwood are using the mundane “as a shield,” as if they themselves are trying to hide “real-life worries” behind a decidedly more adult-contemporary sound (contrasted to, say, “Leave the Biker,” which is still a pop song, but it’s got some thump to it). That’s a grim reading of Sky Full of Holes and however accurate it is, it doesn’t make me want to listen to the album again.

The thing is, there’s a difference between using the mundane as a shield from your troubles and using it as a creative crutch. When Collingwood admits “it’s a cliché” on “A Road Song,” I wince. I know what he’s getting at (he adds, “but hey/ that doesn’t make it so wrong”) but Fountains of Wayne used to be better than that. As recently as “Valley Winter Song,” they were able to use cliché in a way that was likable enough to excuse it. Now, they’re excusing themselves and just copping to the cliché and if that’s splitting a few too many hairs for you, you’ll probably like Sky Full of Holes a lot more than I do.

Don’t get me wrong; musically, the album is pleasant enough. But “pleasant enough” isn’t what I want from Fountains of Wayne; it’s what I want from any given CD I hear at my parents’ house where, musically speaking, “pleasant enough” is a surprise – it’s the first Norah Jones record instead of Kenny G or Yanni. I can see where people are getting the notion that Sky Full of Holes is heavily recycling the 1990s for Fountains of Wayne, but this album just sounds so fucking resigned to me. They went from “She’s Got a Problem,” which was a darkly humorous pop song (“She’s got a problem/ and she’s gonna do something dumb”) to “Hate to See You Like This,” which is a maudlin, if properly concerned, pop ballad which urges the featured depressive to “make a little effort.”

Oddly enough, “Hate to See You Like This” is a pretty apt summation of my feelings for Sky Full of Holes. It makes me feel like I’m bearing witness to my generation’s decline into softer sounds, wild nights that end at 10:30, the taking up of tennis or golf as a hobby, serious discussions about the horsepower of our various lawnmowers, and all that stuff that I guess Justin felt about the new Death Cab for Cutie album. It’s not the aging itself that bothers me; it’s the implicit acceptance that our spirits must wane as we go gray. I’m 31 and I know it’s hip to feel old in your thirties, but that’s not me. I doubt I’ll feel that old when I’m forty. Mind you, I plan to age with my dignity intact (for instance, I’m well aware that I have less than a decade left where I can attend concerts alone), but I see no reason why that means the fire has to die until my body does, and that’s especially true of the music I enjoy (before you ask: yes, it is possible for so-called “mellow” music to have some fire in it. Listen to “Picture in a Frame” by Tom Waits and you’ll know what I’m talking about). Sky Full of Holes is, I fear, the soundtrack to a surrender that I don’t see as inevitable at all – the surrender to stillness, to dullness, to that nagging whisper in the back of your mind that says you shouldn’t have another beer because you’re counting calories (I’ll continue to run, thank you, and beer calories be damned) or that you can’t make love because you have to get up early for work tomorrow. I will be damned two, three, and even four times, before I surrender to that voice.

Crazy Heart Probably Should Have Just Been About Steve Earle

Back when Tower Records was still a thing that existed, I was employed by them in their Harvard Square store and I worked with a dude named Tom who was of the opinion that a really great thing about Steve Earle is that he puts out about an album per year. So if you don’t like whatever the new Steve Earle album is, you don’t have a long wait before the next one comes out. Mind you, Tom wasn’t accusing Steve Earle of preferring quantity over quality; he was praising the man’s work ethic.

The Pitchforkers have repeatedly asserted (and not entirely without reason) that Earle’s recent work has been “uneven for some time now,” and I can see why they might think that, but I look at it more as Earle recording exactly what he wants to when he wants to and not thinking about it much at all. In 2007, he wanted to work with the Dust Brothers on Washington Square Serenade, so he did. He wanted to make a tribute album to Townes Van Zandt, so he did. And this year, he wanted T-Bone Burnett (who produced Elvis Costello’s awesome King of America record back in the 1980s, among other great folkish recordings) to produce I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. And so that happened too.

Obviously, Earle’s seemingly lax process (assuming I’ve pegged it right) can yield some clunkers – I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive has one or two – but it also lends Earle’s music a sense of immediacy, warmth and intimacy that I very much enjoy. Perhaps that has led me to forgive Earle the occasional misstep, but perhaps the good folks over at Pitchfork simply want to like Steve Earle more than they actually do like him (I’ve had this problem with some bands myself and it has led me to make really terrible attempts to justify to myself the repeated listening of stuff that is just not for me. Subjectivity’s a bitch, ain’t it?).

Earle released The Revolution Starts…Now! not too long before I started working at Tower, and we listened to it fairly frequently in the store (we were forced to skip the track “F the CC” when the boss was in because of its delightfully liberal use of one of my very favorite words). Though I never owned the album, I found a fairly consistent quality to it and I find the same quality in I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. Where the album fails, it seems like Earle is sacrificing lyricism for plain ol’ (but – let’s face it – boring ol’) earnestness, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a pretty all right way to fail. Earnestness can’t make song good, but it can leave me disliking a song and still very much respecting the singer. Whatever else you want to say about Steve Earle, he means – sometimes to a fault – every single note he sings and plays. The trade-off is that Earle’s good songs absolutely transcend his bad ones, to the point that you can very easily forget about the bad stuff.

But I don’t want to (and hell, I don’t need to) try to excuse I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive as a mediocre album doomed by the good intentions of its creator. It’s a pretty good album with a few flaws here and there, none of which are unendurable. In fact, the first three tracks on the album are excellent. Opener “Waitin’ On the Sky” is a rollicking country rocker that convinced me (admittedly, this wasn’t that hard to do) that Crazy Heart really should have just been about Steve Earle and – like fellow grizzled musical survivor Neil Young – Earle displays a facility for ripping songs straight from the headlines on “Gulf of Mexico” which is about exactly what you think it’s about (in case you’re lost and/or watch more American Idol than actual news, I’m referring here to that time in the all-too recent past when BP spilled a bunch of oil in the Gulf and then John “Boner” Boehner suggested that it was only right and proper for the American people to pay for the cleanup. This led Boehner to adopt a new official slogan: “John Boehner: Yep, I’m an Asshole”). Rather than ranting for five minutes against the unadulterated greed of a company that sacrificed safety (and, ultimately, a large chunk of the environment) for profits, Earle tells the store of several generations of men as they make their livings in the Gulf, culminating in the youngest man witnessing “the guts of hell” spilling into the water. It’s one of the most inspired songs on the album, along with the beautiful closer “This City” which is about New Orleans (hey, did you know that New Orleans is right near the Gulf of Mexico? You know, where that fucking oil spill was?) and its recovery from Hurricane Katrina. “This City” features a muted horn part that is best described as “exquisite” and taken together, the two songs show Earle’s creative instincts at their best.

There are three songs on I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive that I can live without: “God is God,” “Meet Me in the Alleyway,” and “Heaven or Hell,” which is a duet with Allison Moorer (to whom Steve Earle is married). “God is God” is one of those songs where Earle tells you, very plainly indeed, what he believes. It’s nice stuff – Earle isn’t a fundamentalist asshole or anything like that – but the song is a little dull, which is my exact criticism of “Heaven or Hell.” “Meet Me in the Alleyway” is actually my least favorite song on the album, largely because it is such a shameless ripoff of Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits that I feel a little embarrassed listening to it. I don’t quite skip the song every time I listen to I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive though; in fact, I haven’t skipped it once. It’s as if I need to hear the worst thing about a Steve Earle album right next to all the good stuff, just so I can marvel at the fact that time after time, Steve Earle’s best music enables me to forgive and literally forget his worst.

Why I Don’t Hate Vampire Weekend

I don’t believe Americans invented the ill-informed, knee-jerk reaction, but I know we’ve perfected it. Ask yourself if people who have the time to go to D.C. for a week and wave (often misspelled) signs are actually working enough to make enough money to be “Taxed Enough Already.” Just a for-instance. Politics is an easy field to which I can point and say, “Behold, y’all: ignorance abounds.” But fans of music are not immune, as I have found out on more than one occasion. Sometimes, if you don’t like a band that other people like, they’ll hate you for it. I don’t understand this myself, but it happens. And sometimes music fans like to react to things before they’ve heard them. I didn’t want to write too much about how people hate Vampire Weekend for their Ivy-League pedigree, their elitist references to “kefir” (goes good with arugala, Tea Partiers), or their globe-trotting sound because every Vampire Weekend review discusses that shit ad nauseum. But every review discusses that shit because there are more than a few people whose knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss Vampire Weekend as privileged posers, allowing their perception of the band as people to color their perception of the band as musicians. (It should be noted that plenty of great musicians are/were horrible people. Ask John Lennon’s kids what kind of father he was. Ask Joey Ramone what kind of friend Johnny Ramone was*. And so on.)

But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to like Vampire Weekend at first either. I felt snob-guilt for liking “A-Punk,” which I heard for the first time (gasp!) on a non-NPR-affiliated radio station. And I still listen to their first album and it’s still fun and interesting. And I wanted to cut myself off there and resist the urge to purchase Contra on the day it came out (I did read an NPR review of the album before I bought it. Cred restored? I don’t care). But who was I kidding?

I just can’t quit Vampire Weekend, to borrow a phrase from a vastly overrated film. The reason I can’t is because Vampire Weekend makes very – very - compelling pop music. That is due in no small part to the arranging abilities of a multi-instrumentalist whom I affectionately nicknamed Batman when discussing their first album. Batman punctuates Vampire Weekend’s hyper pop music with flourishes of wind and string instruments, while Ezra Koenig yelps his sometimes-clever lyrics (he’s no Isaac Brock, but he scores his share of points) and strums his usually-clean guitar. Their sound is not like the sound of other popular acts and I believe they come by their world-music inclinations honestly. So I like them and I like Contra and if you write a review where you say it’s the worst piece of shit you’ve ever heard, I promise I won’t post comments on your blog telling you to shoot yourself or trying to simultaneously abuse you and the English language. The reason I won’t do that is simple: I’m a fucking adult (looking at you -but certainly not all of you – fans of Portugal. The Man).

But enough peripheral bullshit. Let’s talk about Contra, can we? The songs are not drastically different from the songs on Vampire Weekend’s eponymous debut – which is to say, the songs are good. There are one or two slower, more ballady numbers, and Auto-tune rears its ugly head on “California English”, much to my dismay. While I understand the aesthetic choice and there is compelling evidence that Ezra Koenig doesn’t need Auto-tune, I cannot state clearly enough that I loathe Auto-tune at all times under all circumstances. I think it sounds like shit. If Joe Strummer came back to life and told me that Auto-tune cures cancer, AIDS, poverty, and stupidity all at the same time, I would counter that it still sounds like shit and has no fucking business in my music. Ever. Also, Kanye West used Auto-tune on his entire last album and he doesn’t seem to be less stupid from where I sit. My gripe about the Auto-tune is smaller than it sounds, though – it (just barely) doesn’t ruin “California English” and certainly doesn’t ruin the rest of the album. Contra is similar to Vampire Weekend, but Contra is musically smarter. This is analogous to how I feel being newly 30 – it’s like being 20 again, but I’m smarter. I hope.

The only real question I have for Vampire Weekend is, can they pull this music off live? I might have to see them at Coachella to find out, but it looks like I’m headed back there this year, so that won’t be a problem. It doesn’t sound to me like Koenig sings anything particularly challenging for his vocal range, so what I’ll be looking for his how they pull off all of the nifty little instrumental flourishes. I predict heavy sequencing.

The bottom line is, if you liked the first Vampire Weekend record, Contra will probably also please you. If you didn’t like their debut, you’re probably not going to find much to change your mind here. If you don’t like Vampire Weekend because of where they’re from or what college they attended, or how “privileged”** you think they are, I think you’re cheating yourself out of some great pop music, but that’s your business.

*A bit of explanation for those of you who have, for some reason, not seen The End of the Century: Johnny’s wife was, at one time Joey Ramone’s girlfriend. Johnny Ramone wooed her away from Joey who, by way of passive aggressive vengeance, wrote “The KKK Took My Baby Away”, ostensibly about his guitarist Johnny. I honestly don’t know how the Ramones stayed together as long as they did, given how little they seemed to like each other.

**Anybody who gets to make music for a living is privileged, as is anyone who can go to the occasional (or frequent) concert. If you have time to troll the internet to defend the bands you love and dis the bands you hate, you are also privileged. To my knowledge, the dudes in Vampire Weekend are not the sons of cable TV moguls or oil barons or former pop stars. Even if the guys in Vampire Weekend were born rich, it makes no sense to hate them for it. They clearly used their privilege to hone what is, all else aside, remarkable musical talent. On the other hand, it does make sense to hate Paris Hilton because she’s famous for being born rich and has used her privilege to simultaneously attract new and exotic STDs, launch an abortive acting career, and launch an even more abortive (if possible) musical “career.”

A Camp, Compromise Albums, and Why Many Musicals are Pants-On-Head Retarded

I bet I can guess what you think of when I bring up the Cardigans. You think of a one-hit wonder band from Sweden (Switzerland? No, Sweden) who did that song from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (the film for Shakespeare fans with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). But if that’s all you think of when I mention the Cardigans, I’d humbly ask you to think again. Consider, perhaps, 2003′s Long Gone Before Daylight, the Cardigans’ best album (it’s wonderfully devoid of “Lovefool,” a song that was used to hilarious effect in the Edgar Wright film Hot Fuzz). Long Gone Before Daylight is their best album largely because of Nina Persson’s voice, which usually falls somewhere between “enchanting” and “amazing.”

Persson’s voice is reason enough to listen to any one of her projects (she is one of the many stellar collaborators on the doomed Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse opus Dark Night of the Soul), and it’s the reason I chose to check out her latest solo effort, Colonia. Colonia was released under the band name A Camp, for reasons that I’m too lazy to look up.  I’ve had this album for months (in fact, I feel like I’ve had it for most of the year) and my feelings about it vacillate between “this is pretty good” to “these songs are outtakes from some campy musical and I sort of resent myself for liking them.”

Colonia starts off really strong, with the one-two punch of “The Crowning” (a great tune about the crowning of someone’s “useless/ruthless” head. Could be about recent American leaders or current Iranian ones) and “Stronger than Jesus”, which does the whole “love is a battlefield” thing with a healthier dose of snark. The album never quite gets back to the heights it reaches on its first two tracks, but – on a good day – I think it never sinks far below them either, not counting the last forty seconds or so of “Here are Many Wild Animals” – those forty seconds make that track one of the worst on Colonia.

My feeling that Colonia consists of songs from some lost Broadway show is bolstered by the theatrical presentation of the material. The album is littered with swelling horn parts and lilting strings and harmonized “Oo-ee-oo” vocals. Like many musicals, there’s no discernible plot to Colonia (sorry, kids, but more happens in Waiting for Godot than in Phantom of the Opera and it’s taken me years to realize this, but Rent doesn’t tell you anything that you can’t hear better on the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.), other than some loose thematic unity regarding the difficulties of romance. Persson is well-qualified to sing dirges to dead love (one of her best songs with the Cardigans is “And Then You Kissed Me”, a tale of love and domestic violence) and Colonia is pretty appealing when she does, with the exception of the too-campy “I Signed the Line”, which is about getting a divorce. Now that I think about it, however, “I Signed the Line” is too campy for a pop album but just campy enough for your average Broadway show.*

Overall, Colonia is one of many middle of the road, pleasant-enough releases that have come out this year, the kind of thing no one will complain about if you put it on at a party. But no one will get excited about it either. To be honest, not much of it excites me at all beyond it’s first two tracks. After that, Colonia is a compromise album that both my fiance and I can put up with (she actually likes it a lot more than I do) when trying to find something to listen to that doesn’t annoy the crap out of one of us (we’ve recently discovered that she likes Lou Barlow’s Emoh record, and that makes me very happy indeed). If you’re in a relationship where you and your girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever have drastically different taste in music, chances are, Nina Persson’s latest solo album will provide you with something listenable and keep you from dissing each other’s favorite bands (my fiance hates two of my favorite bands, namely the Clash and the Hold Steady. You may wonder how I can marry someone who bears two of the best bands ever such antipathy, but think about it: dating or marrying someone based merely on what they like is not only a dick move, it’s a shallow dick move. And before you go droppin’ High Fidelity quotes on me, the whole point of that book and movie is that the main character is shallow and immature. That’s why both book and film end with him making his girl a mix tape of shit that she likes).

So Nina Persson seems to have proven that you don’t have to be exciting to be good. Or at least she doesn’t have to be exciting to be good – we can’t go extending this theory to all musicians equally. After all, Kenny G is still unexciting and terrible. The problem is, though, when compared to the last two Cardigans records, Colonia, apart from its two opening tracks, feels kind of unnecessary. Long Gone Before Daylight and Super Extra Gravity don’t rock out with their genitals out, but they both provide genuinely exciting (and genuinely beautiful) moments that Colonia mostly lacks. At the end of the day, I guess, whether or not you like Colonia depends largely on how much you’ll forgive Nina Persson’s duller digressions. And that, for me anyway, rests largely on how much I like her voice, which means I’m pretty much damning Colonia with faint praise. But really, you can take this whole review as a lukewarm recommendation of Colonia and an earnest reminder to check out the more recent – and vastly superior – Cardigans albums.

*Lest I be accused of musical-bashing, I’d like to clarify that I don’t hate all musicals. I hate most musicals and that’s mostly because they’re mostly the same. Mostly, they’re love stories wrapped around convoluted (yet flimsy!) plots featuring characters who never really develop beyond the songs they sing, which means they end up being sort of musical character archetypes. And nowadays, musicals are mostly based on movie versions of old musicals. Which means they then spawn new movies of the new musical based on the old movie of the old musical (see The Producers for examples of this). Some of my favorite musicals, in no particular order: Avenue Q, Assassins, Urinetown, Caroline or Change, and the Woody Allen movie Everyone Says I Love You.

Tight Knit (In which I Back into Some Kind of Endorsement of Vetiver’s New Album)

With albums out by Neko Case, M. Ward, The Boy Least Likely To, and now Vetiver, you might be inclined to call 2009 the Year of the Singer-Songwriter. Except for 2 things: 1) Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone is so far ahead of the pack on this one that you’d be better off calling 2009 The Year that No One Quite Caught Neko Case and 2) there are some great rock albums out now and some promising stuff on the horizon (I’ll talk to you about the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album later).  Having said that, though, there’s plenty to like about Vetiver’s new Tight Knit.

For those of you who are wondering, Vetiver – I believe – is a type of grass. And Tight Knit is the kind of album grass would make. Okay, that’s not true, but it reminds me of a joke: I read the other day that botanists have synthesized a new kind of emo grass seed; so, in the near future, your lawn will cut itself. Where was I?

Oh yeah. Tight Knit starts off with the gorgeous “Rolling Sea,” the kind of softly strummed summertime tune that creeps up on you with its loveliness. That’s due in large part to Andy Cabic’s soothing-ass, Iron-and-Winey vocals. That should go a long way toward telling you if you’ll like Tight Knit or not. It never gets up to any kind of rocking tempo and most of the songs are laid back love songs – it’s the sort of thing you’ll love if Sky Blue Sky is your favorite Wilco album, a pleasant-enough kind of listen, but not the sort of thing that I’m going to try to cram down the throat of everyone I meet for the next month (like, say,  a certain album by a certain woman who owns a certain farm in Vermont – you have the power to stop these repeated Neko Case references; all you have to do is make sure everyone you know owns Middle Cyclone or has at least listened to the thing). Tight Knit is the sort of album I put on when my girlfriend says, “You choose an album” and I know that, implicit in that offering, is a silent plea that I not put on The Clash or The Hold Steady or Titus Andronicus or Sonic Youth or even my beloved Neko Case. It’s a compromise album – I could put Tight Knit on for my parents (who, though I love them, have a taste in music so radically opposite mine that if we put our CD collections in the same room, they would fight to the death. Mine would win) and they’d find a lot to like about it.

And, Tight Knit is the sort of album that’s hard to review in any kind of standard way because it’s uniformly lovely, which sounds like a knock against it and maybe it sort of is. I mean, it’s not perfect like Stay Positive is perfect, but there’s nothing on Tight Knit that induces even the slightest cringe. It’s polished to a shine and standing on your front porch in its Sunday best, shuffling its feet and saying, “Aw, shucks, it’d just be an honor if I could play some music for you.” Andy Cabic has crafted a polite, safe, and occasionally beautiful album that just feels a little too clean for me.

But, goddammit, I don’t dislike the album either. You know how you might say you’re “fine” when someone asks you how you’re doing and you say it because you’re not doing bad but you’re not ecstatically awesome? You’re just kinda on an even keel? Tight Knit is “fine” like that. Cabic never under nor overwhelms you with anything on Tight Knit; it’s a perfectly whelming listen. It maintains its standard of whelming on repeated listens,too – I have felt exactly the same about it on every listen, and I’m working my way through it for perhaps the 8th time.  So if you’re looking for the kind of album you can put on and kinda forget about, noticing its good bits at your leisure, Vetiver’s Tight Knit is the album for you.

Incidentally, Emo Grass could also be a kind of reefer that induces pronounced states of self-involvement and melodrama. But who the fuck would want to smoke that? (Answer: that asshole from My Chemical Romance)