Spoiler Alert: It’s All Been Worth It

I’ve actually always been pretty dubious about the “concept” album. It’s not that I mind that a band is stringing together a series of songs around a common theme (or even attempting to tell some kind of specific story with a bunch of songs); it’s that I object to being told there is some underlying concept to an album, especially before I listen to it. You see, I consider myself to be a pretty intelligent bloke and when I’m listening to an album and a story starts to emerge from the songs, I like to pat myself on the back for getting it. It’s like a little reward for listening to an album enough times to feel like I know it on a deeper level.

Being informed of a concept album’s conceptitude doesn’t ruin it for me – in some cases, being told an album is a concept album doesn’t even always convince me that it is one. After deciding that Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade was a Great Fucking Album, I read on the ol’ interwub that it was a concept album. In my GFA write-up, I mentioned that the alleged concept didn’t hold much water for me (that “concept” can basically be summed up like so: “A young person is tired of his parents’ bullshit so he goes out into the world in search of adventure and finds more bullshit. Perhaps he understands his parents better and perhaps he just does a lot of drugs and records a trippy instrumental track at the end of a seminal hardcore/punk/awesome album”). There are common themes running through Zen Arcade for sure and the album is a richer experience for it. But knowing – or believing, I guess – that it’s a concept album neither adds to nor subtracts from my enjoyment of it (and if you haven’t heard Zen Arcade, it better be in your headphones by the time you get done reading this or… well, I probably won’t do anything to you. But it’s a great goddamn album).

Which brings us now to David Comes to Life, the new album by Canadian hardcore/etc. outfit (how many of those do you reckon there are?) Fucked Up (to answer my own question: based on the one Fucked Up album I’ve listened to, they really only need the one hardcore band). I’ve heard it described as a concept album and, less helpfully, as a “rock opera.” If telling me an album is a concept album causes me some trepidation, telling me it’s a “rock opera” makes me wanted to handle it with long robotic arms from behind some kind of soundproof glass. Because the phrase “rock opera” implies an almost certainly wanton degree of pretension. And, though I enjoy it, David Comes to Life is a pretty pretentious record.

It attempts to tell the story of a dude named David who falls in love with a girl, the girl dies, and then he kinda goes nuts (Pitchfork’s review of David Comes to Life states that David and his girl “conspire to build a bomb together” but that’s nowhere in the lyrics that are in front of me). He ends up fighting his narrator, a handy stand-in for God (who later seems to feel ashamed for what he’s put David through), and the whole thing ends (spoiler alert) by David experiencing something akin to a resurrection “with love in his heart,” according to the extensive liner notes. Clearly a concept album, nothing particularly operatic about it that I can see.

But what I can hear is the kind of awesome, cathartic, melodic hardcore music that makes Zen Arcade such essential listening combined with the Last Call, Bar Band, Really Really Really Big Decision Blues guitar riffage of the Hold Steady’s also essential concept album, Separation Sunday. So if you’re tempted to try to sell a friend on David Comes to Life by calling it a concept album or “rock opera,” maybe you should consider describe it as a totally kickass rock record instead. Because who doesn’t like those?

Of course, the throat shredding vocals of singer/lyricist Pink Eyes (I know the name seems funny; they name people using the metric system in Canada) will not endear this album to everyone, but as a fan of 1980s hardcore, I have no problem with a guy shouting his nuts off, as long as the song is awesome. And there are plenty of awesome songs on David Comes to Life that don’t require a lit professor’s understanding of the album’s plot. In fact, the first three real songs (I don’t count opener “Let Her Rest” because it’s an instrumental overture-type thing that I find myself skipping to get to the uptempo stuff) are blissfully aggressive, surprisingly melodic anthems. And if the story really is gonna have a moral, it’s sounded on “Under My Nose” when Pink Eyes howls, “It’s all been worth it.” It takes this David dude the whole fucking album to figure out that all the pain and bullshit you put up with in life is worth it if you have true love. Does that sound trite? Not on David Comes to Life.

I know I’ve been alluding to Finnegans Wake with some frequency lately, but that really just means that book accomplished its considerable aim, which was (at least in part) to create a modern myth for the continued rise and fall of humankind. The more I listen to David Comes to Life, the more I see an analogy between the album and James Joyce’s masterpiece. Both are a bit daunting, at least at first, both have shifting identities and narrative voices (both female characters in David Comes to Life have the same initials and there’s a sort of Fight Club-y dichotomy between David and Octavio, the narrator. In fact, their relationship reminds me of that of Joyce’s Shem and Shaun) that shed new perspectives on the same events, and both operate in a cyclical manner – Finnegans Wake ends in the middle of the same sentence that opens it and David Comes to Life ends with the “Lights Up,” wherein David is reborn and eager to “do it all again.”

But – and here’s where the Pitchfork review pretty much nailed it (hey, I give credit where it’s due) – those are thoughts you can have or not have upon your own nth trip through David Comes to Life. The first one or two times, you can just crank this fucker up and let the sonic ferocity get all up in you like Boston’s humidity in the summer. Like the best music of their forebears (Minor Threat, Black Flag, the aforementioned Hüsker Dü), Fucked Up’s best moments on David Comes to Life are immediately, viscerally pleasurable, especially for people in need of instant violent catharsis.

I have no way to end this post, so I’m going to sign off by saying that Instant Violent Catharsis is the name of my Fucked Up cover band.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

Is nothing fucking sacred anymore?

I just found out that My Chemical Romance covered Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” for the Watchmen soundtrack. I just watched the fucking video on YouTube. The whole thing. Guess I’m lucky they didn’t cover all 11 minutes of it. But still, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Fuck you, My Chemical Romance. Fuck you in the face.

My Chemical Romance’s latest crime against music came at the expense of my favorite Bob Dylan tune. Such an atrocity can only be interpreted as an act of war and I shall respond in kind.

This aggression will not stand, Dude.

Merriweather Post Pavilion

Normally, I have no fucking time for groups that refer to themselves as “collectives” because all bands are collectives. Calling your band a “collective” is just a pretentious way of either 1) just saying you’re in a band and/or 2) saying that you have trouble keeping your line-up consistent. Having made half-hearted (and massively failed) attempts to like Animal Collective in my days as a Tower Records employee in Boston, there was pretty much no way on earth I was gonna listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Unless, you know, it was a really slow start to the new year and I was really really jonesing for new music to listen to.

For those of you who don’t know, Animal Collective is a band… wait. In fact, I’m going to do us all a favor and refer to them as Animal Pack or Animal Band from now on since they’re a band and collectives of animals are just packs anyway. Or flocks or gaggles or… well, whatever. Anyway, Animal Band is a band of pretentious “avant-garde” musicians (it’s easy to hate them on those grounds alone) who make somewhat psychedelic electronic-ish music. Oh, and they all have bollocksy nicknames like Panda Bear.

As you might guess, Pitchfork has a Sufjan-sized boner for this band. (Had a great birthday coversation with my pal Zac this weekend wherein he pointed out, “You can basically write an algorithm that would predict Pitchfork scores.”) Pitchfork hailed Merriweather Post Pavilion as Flock of Animals’ “most accessible” album yet. And I guess it must be, because I’m not entirely unglad that I own it.

The thing is bloated with pretension and excess but the great/infuriating thing about Animal Pack is that there are some great melodies to be had in there too. Sometimes, the good music outweighs the bad for an entire song, as on “My Girls,” and the truly outstanding “Summertime Clothes,” (you can tell this band is from Baltimore becuase there’s a line that goes “smell that trash.” ‘Tis a dirty city, Baltimore). “Daily Routine” is a meandering song with some pretty bits and that’s basically what you’re in for with Merriweather Post Pavilion. Whether or not you like the album depends on whether or not you find the really indulgent bits interesting (I find this to be true for a lot of electronic music). Most of the tracks are four minutes long or longer and where the band/flock/pack/pride allows their obvious melodic knack to dominate those four minutes, the rewards are pretty good. “Taste” doesn’t really cough up its melodic fruits until its almost over, for instance. And it’s followed by “Lion in a Coma,” which is mostly pretty annoying. Merriweather Post Pavilion is a mixed bag, then, a salad of melody and douchebaggery. The question is, do you pick out the douchebaggery and enjoy the melody or do you send the salad back and tell your server, “I ordered this without douchebaggery”? Maybe it depends on your mood; but, if you’ve had a bad day and are just hungry for some melody, you’re probably not gonna wanna wrestle with Merriweather Post Pavilion.

I reckon that, if you loved Panda Bear and His Animal Herd before, you’ll continue to love them and if you didn’t, Merriweather Post Pavilion is not going to change your mind much. If you’ve never heard them, it’s not a bad way to dip your toe in their waters. I’ve made it through the album three times now, and there are songs I actually like (“Summertime Clothes” is really awesome, as I said) and I don’t despise any one part of this album in particular. Animal Troupe is a very pretentious band that has, in the past, made unbearable music and is currently taking steps toward making bearable and sometimes even beautiful music. I’m sure there are people who genuinely love everything these guys do, but I’m equally sure there are people who name-check them when trying to put on an air of indie sophistication.  But we here at Bollocks! don’t judge a band by the assholes who love them; we judge bands on the music which is why I can give Merriweather Post Pavilion an enthusiastic shrug, set my player to shuffle, and probably forget the entire album except for “Summertime Clothes.”

Is Kanye West the (Auto-Tuned) Voice of Our Generation?

Stealing from Zero Punctuation here:

The short answer is “No.”

The long answer is “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

Kanye West recently declared himself the voice of his generation (which is, I believe, my generation), which is, in my book, totally against the rules. You don’t get to decide you’re the voice of your generation; your generation decides that. I don’t think my generation has elected Kanye our Spokesdouche. Or, if we have, I missed the meeting. In case you’re wondering, my Voice of a Generation nominees are, in no particular order: Craig Finn, Jarvis Cocker, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Matt Berninger. Take your pick.

Lest I be accused of hatership here, I will cop to really liking “Gold Digger” and a smattering of Mr. West’s other tracks. He’s probably the best of the mainstream rappers, which I admit is like saying he’s driving the short bus instead of traveling as a passenger, but I want you to know that I am acknowledging his modicum (or jot or iota) of talent. And I don’t hate hip-hop as a genre, either. To the contrary, I tend to compare all hip-hop I hear to “Rebel Without A Pause,” or “Don’t Believe the Hype” and I usually find it wanting.

I’m not rambling all this preamble because of West’s brash declaration (I’ve supported his brash declarations in the past, cheifly when he said “George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Come on – you were thinking it too.) but because he’s released a new album and I, inspired by a recent debate over the merits of Auto-Tune (the prize in that discussion goes to my pal Jon from Portland who quipped, “Now, Now…for some, Auto Tune saves that one perfect take with that one slight imperfection…for Britney Spears that one imperfection is her whole voice.”), have actually bothered to listen to it.

The question is, can anyone use Auto-Tune creatively? I opined that Tom Waits would seriously bust some shit up with it, but we have no evidence of that so far. So, Mr. Waits, if you read Bollocks!(doubtful), feel free to throw your beaten-up hat in the ring and record something with Auto-Tune. In the meantime, we’ll settle for Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, his album that is more pop than hip-hop. More pop means more singing, which is where the Auto-Tune comes in.

The first thing I noticed, from album opener “Say You Will” (points to Kanye for a six minute pop song), is that Auto-Tune seems to make every male vocalist sound like a cross between Peter Gabriel and that douchebag from Maroon 5. That’s a pretty deep hole to start out in and Kanye’s lyrics don’t really do him any favors. I understand the dude’s personal life has been rough this year (join the club, Kanye), but “I admit I still fantasize about you” isn’t really digging for emotional gold.  Nor is, “He said his daughter’s got a brand new report card/ and all I’ve got is a brand new sports car” from “Welcome to Heartbreak.” Sorry, Kanye, you’re going to have hone your literary chops a bit more if you want to be the voice of my generation.

The Auto-Tune gets old immediately, as does West’s tendency to repeat one or two phrases over and over while using it. There are some good beats on 808s and Heartbreak and some fun 80s synthesizer bits (especially on “Robocop,” which is ridiculous but also the best song on the album), but that fucking Auto-Tune just gets in the way, especially on “Heartless,” where I thought he was actually doing a duet with that asshole from Maroon 5.

Okay, okay. I’ll stop bashing the Auto-Tune for a minute and focus on the song writing.

It’s great.

Well, it’s great if you like your lyrics on a par with Chris Martin’s. And some people do. You know, people who take John Grisham and Dan Brown seriously as novelists. (I know that’s elitist, but criticism is elitism, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different) Once you strip away all the shitty effects, 808s and Heartbreak doesn’t have much in the way of depth. It’s long on repetition (“Amazing” repeats “It’s amazing” a bunch of times for its chorus, in one of the most brilliant rhyme schemes in the history of music) and out-of-left-field cultural reference (like “How could you be so Dr. Evil?”). Hip-hop is a great venue for literary cleverness (and so is rock music, as Craig Finn proves), and I know this is more of a pop album, but the point still stands. The rhymes on this album are pretty lazy, which torpedos an album that’s supposed to be so personal.

The music itself is fun – an eclectic mix of hip-hop drums and the afore-mentioned 80s pop hotness, but the cumulative effect is nothing that isn’t surpassed on every Grand Buffet album.  West deserves points for trying to step outside of his comfort zone, but I can’t listen to his ambition. I have to listen to his music, and 808s and Heartbreak is a mostly hilariously bad attempt at a pop album (Common’s Electric Circus was a more daring and more satifsying step outside of the mainstream) with some mildly redeeming stuff in the middle (“Robocop” and “Street Lights”). If West is really feeling ambitious, he should ditch the effects entirely and front a punk band on his next album. Live drums, two guitars, and a bass. No Auto-Tune, either. Just yell it out, dude.

As far as 808s and Heartbreak goes as an admittedly arbitrary referendum on Auto-Tune, I honestly believe West would sing better without it. And I know he was going for a particular sound with the Auto-Tune but I can’t make myself like that sound, can I? No, I can’t. And I do recognize that the album is, by mainstream hip-hop standards, a bold move. The other hip-hop songs I’ve heard that use Auto-Tune are more annoying than this whole album, but the effect is still distractingly irritating. I realize, of course, that this is just my opinion, but so is everything else on Bollocks! In a genre so reliant on technology (which is not a bad thing at all), it might be a more refreshing move to switch over to more live instruments (as Atmosphere did on this year’s excellent When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold). If you like the sound of Auto-Tune, this album might be a revelation to you, but the only thing it reveals to me is (call me a purist or a hater or whatever you want) that I really fucking hate Auto-Tune.

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.

God Dammit, Ryan Adams

Some day, I’ll sit my grandkid(s) on my knee and tell ‘em all about a brief, shining moment in American history. Being so recent, I know it’s fresh in your memory as well.

Of course, I’m talking about the moment in our history (Gold) when Ryan Adams was actually awesome. Hold onto it as long as you can, kids, ’cause that moment is long fucking gone. And it ain’t coming back.

Adams is a dangerously prolific songwriter, which means you can expect at least one album from him pretty much every year. Last year, it was Easy Tiger, an embarassingly adult-contemporary offering that was the sort of album for which the phrase “shit sandwich” was invented.

His latest with The Cardinals is called Cardinology. You like that? See, it’s a pun on his band’s name. Fucking hell, Ryan Adams. What have you wrought this time?

To be fair, Cardinology is not as ear-splittingly awful as Easy Tiger but it also doesn’t come anywhere close to the pleasant-enough mediocrity of his three 2005 albums. It starts off with “Born into a Light,” which is Adams’ attempt at assuring you everything is gonna be just hunky  dory. How anyone can sing shit like that these days is beyond me. Look: I’m not against singing about how life is beautiful, because it often is. But asserting that everything is gonna be great is 1) way too general to mean anything and 2) patently false. There’s no possible way for everything (think about everything. Fucking everything.) to work out all right. So sing about how you think a person’s life is gonna be okay despite the fact that it sucks now or something; don’t traffic in platitudes, Ryan Adams. You fucking wrote “Cannonball Days,” although I’m starting to think it was someone else.

Overall, Cardinology commits two egregious crimes. First, most of it sounds ready to be spliced into a fucking montage on Grey’s Anatomy. Second, the parts that aren’t ready for your girlfriend’s favorite TV show sound just as bad as the adult-contemporary shit on my parents’ favorite soft-rock station. There’s nothing wrong with being mellow (Sam Cooke proves this) and it’s not as though you can’t rock as you get older (Tom Waits, Wayne Coyne, and Joe Strummer prove this). But Cardinology is lacking in vitality from start to finish. Half-distorted guitars play zippy little white-blues licks in and around Adams’ new-found pseudo-Bonoisms (he does the soaring vocal thing on this album more than anyone ever should and the real bonus is he sucks at it).  The singer-songwriter “genre” is overcrowded with this kind of shit and Ryan Adams used to be above it.

“Magick” is one of the only attempts at a straight-up rocker on the whole album and it’s two-minutes of utter shit (“You’re like a rain cloud/ if it rained mushroom clouds”). It does feature a reference to zombies, which usually goes a long way with me but the bridge is a repetition of “what comes around goes around” which is a phrase that should be banned from the earth along with the words “maverick” and “socialist.” For a better zombie song, try out Jonathan Coulton’s excellent “Re: Your Brains.” You’ll be glad you did.

Lyrically, Adams stuffs Cardinology full of some of the worst writing I’ve ever heard. This is probably a product of recording every fucking song he writes, which is really just a manifestation of seriously unchecked ego. I’ve written literally hundreds of songs in my life. As of right now, there are about three that I would play for anyone. And I’m not saying that I’m on a par with Ryan Adams as a song writer, but if Cardinology is any indication, I’m Tom fucking Waits next to “I was waiting around for someone to die/ nobody did/ but a part of me died I suppose/ from all that waiting.” Seriously, to my current and future (and past!) bandmates, if I ever write or suggest that someone sing something that stupid, I expect to be punched in the face and nutsack until I pass out.

The only song on this album that mostly avoids either being skull-numbingly boring or riot-inducingly awful is the closer “Stop,” which is actually pretty nice. Except it just makes me want to listen to “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann, a far superior songwriter to Mr. Adams. “Stop” is a good way to sum up an album like Cardinology: “If you wanna make it stop/ then stop.” So I stopped the album. Good day, Mr. Adams.

I said Good Day, Sir!

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.

Earth to The Dandy Warhols: Please Stop

There was a time, what seems like eons ago, when The Dandy Warhols’ blatant bush-league Lou Reedisms were (mildly) amusing. Around that time, they released 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia, an album that I still enjoy listening to. Since then, the Dandy Warhols have managed to squander every last bit of good will that I had toward them.

First, they named a shitty album after a Kurt Vonnegut book (that would be Welcome to the Monkey House) and then they followed it up with a monumentally shitty album (Odditorium or: Why The Fuck Are We Still A Band?), the only redeemable tracks on which sound exactly like tracks from 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia.

Now the Dandy Warhol’s are back with Earth to the Dandy Warhols, another pseudo-psychedelic platter of pig poo, the kind of bullshit album that should come with a warning sticker that says, “Warning: This Band Got Really High and Jerked Off In A Studio. Listener Discretion is Advised.” You know how you get when you’re stoned; no one should have to pay to listen to that over music you’ve ripped off from musical icons (usually The Velvet Undergound, but sometimes other great bands; but we’ll get to that in a second).

Courtney Taylor’s vocals are buried under a ton of annoying effects on Earth to the Dandy Dipshits, but it’s not like the music is compelling enough to make that forgivable. In fact, on “Welcome to the Third World,” The Dandies, apparently feeling they’ve mined The Velvet Underground for all they were worth, decide to brazenly rip off Paul Fucking Simonon’s bass line from “The Magnificent Seven.” Yes, that Paul Fucking Simonon, the bass player from The Clash. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? In the Overdrawn at the Memory Bank episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow T. Robot says, upon seeing a character watching Casablanca, “Hey, don’t put good movies in the middle of your crappy movie.” I would like to extend this warning to the Dandy Whorehols: don’t put Clash songs, some of the best songs ever, in your shitty little songs about… whatever the fuck your songs are about.

Which is another issue, among many to take with Earth to You Shameless Bastards: What the fuck are any of these songs about? It seems like most of them are somewhat about doing drugs and (maybe) fucking. I guess this is supposed to be psychedelic, but it’s mostly really annoying.  All the songs feel an hour long, slow, gauzy droning songs that must seem really awesome when you do as much drugs as the Dandy Warhols.

If you watched the documentary Dig!, about the on-again/off-again feud between the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, you may have come to this conclusion: both bands are just chock full of dickheads. Regardless of how good their music sometimes (rarely) is, these are Grade-A assbags who seem to have an endless line of credit with their dealers. And part of what makes them so awful is that they seem to genuniely not give a single shit about anything. This is the music they want to make, and the fact that Anton Newcombe talks about either band starting a revolution is laughable. Both bands are stuck in the basement in a cloud of pot smoke, praying to Lou Reed to appear and pronounce them Officially Cool. Well, guess what, assholes: Lou Reed may be kicking it with the Killers these days, but he’s gonna need a whole boatload of senility to hit him before he dignifies your shit with a response. (I hope; for all I know, Mr. Reed may be planning to work with The Dandies for their next album, at which point I will just pretend he has died.)

If you’re interested in keeping score, Earth to the Dandy Assholes is slightly less shitty than the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 2008 offering My Bloody Underground which I’ve already cut to ribbons on this site. These two bands are capable of making music that doesn’t completely infuriate me, but they’ve elected to go the self-indulgent, insultingly derivative route, and have therefore earned all the scorn that can be heaped upon them. Hearing the bassline from “The Magnificent Seven” in a song as bad as “Welcome to the Third World” only reminds me that Joe Strummer (a man who once said that the most punk-rock thing you could do was to treat everyone with dignity and respect) will never again beat all six strings of his Telecaster and shout “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” but Courtney Taylor is still alive and making awful music. For which I can only say this: fuck Courtney Taylor, fuck The Dandy Warhols, and fuck fuck fuck this album.

The Inevitable Comparison: Loyalty to Loyalty vs. Robbers & Cowards

It’s nearly impossible and usually unreasonable to discuss one album by an artist in a vacuum. You should compare it to their previous output (unless it’s a debut album, obviously), bearing in mind that, just because it’s different, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. There can be good differences and bad, just as their are good similarities and bad ones. London Calling, for instance, is drastically different from The Clash, yet both are essential recordings.

I have not read a review yet of Loyalty to Loyalty, the new album from L.A.’s own (sort of)  Cold War Kids, that doesn’t conclude that Loyalty to Loyalty is an almost exact copy of Robbers and Cowards. So I did the inevitable comparison myself, listening first to Robbers & Cowards and then to Loyalty to Loyalty.

I kinda wish Loyalty to Loyalty were more like Robbers & Cowards.

For starters, you probably either loved or hated Robbers & Cowards and you probably either loved or hated it based largely on Nathan Willet’s histrionic singing. The problem is, on Robbers & Cowards, Willet’s vocals were surrounded by crisp, punchy pop music and he danced carefully and gracefully on the line between interesting and annoying. On Loyalty to Loyalty, The Cold War Kids have turned up Willet’s histrionics and turned down the other musicians. Result: on Loyalty to Loyalty, Willet is all over the wrong side of that line between interesting and annoying.

This is tolerable for a while, and album opener “Against Privacy” is actually all right – the guitar meanders about in the background while the drums and bass try not to intrude too much. Willet keeps his tenor sax voice (mostly) under control, and you get this sort of junkyard, Tom Waitsy feel from the album. You start to think this could be good, and a real departure from the polish of Robbers & Cowards.

But then Willet blows it and blows it hard on “Mexican Dogs” and many of the tracks that follow. You hear where the melody should resolve when Willet sings “Like Mexican Dogs/ no body gave us names” but he deliberately fucks up the resolution and I can’t figure out what he’s got to gain by doing so. Also, I think the lyric fails (spectacularly) under scrutiny: does Willet really think no dogs in Mexico have names? I mean, I’m sure there are stray dogs in Mexico just like there are here. But the lyric would work better if Willet sang “Like some Mexican Dogs/ and dogs in probably lots of other countries too/ nobody gave us names.” But that probably wouldn’t keep Willet from ritualistically slaughtering the melody. I know the guy is trying to sell the drama and I know he idolzies Thom Yorke (not a bad thing), but for fuck’s sake, man. Songs have notes in them. Try singing some. (This is especially annoying because Willet consistently proves that he can sing.)

“Every Valley is Not  A Lake” is a welcome respite from Loyalty to Loyalty’s worst excesses, starting off with a stomping little piano lick. But it only temporarily pulls the album out of its stubborn, Willet-driven nose dive.

“Something is Not Right with Me” starts off all right, lifting its bass-line from LCD Soundsystem’s “Tribulations”, but Willet, after singing the first chorus pretty well, turns into Freddy Mercury at his worst in the verse. And it gets worse before it gets better.

“Welcome to the Occupation” is the worst offender on the album, and maybe I’d like the whole thing better if this song wasn’t on the album, but it is. By the end of the song, Willet is shrieking “The Devil’s in the details” in such way that you’d think he was a fugitive on the run from the notes he’s supposed to be singing. Again, idolizing Thom Yorke is not a bad thing, but even at his most dramatic, Yorke is in control of what he’s singing. Willet seems to delight in not being in control, and that’s cool as a musical ethos, but – again, not to belabor the point here – tunefulness is nice too. The Clash were pretty out of control and yet, lo and behold, they had melodies. Strummer sang notes. You can look this up. It’s verifiable information.

So Loyalty to Loyalty spends three of its first five tracks digging a big fucking hole to crawl out of. The Cold War Kids mostly climb out with “Golden Gate Jumpers,” “Avalanche in B,” and “Dreams Old Men Dream.” So while you may think by what I’ve written here that I can’t stand this album (or, indeed this band), the truth is, I look at Loyalty to Loyalty like someone watching their favorite candidate in a debate: I like who they are and what they’re saying, but once in a while, they go on a run of gaffes that causes much cringing and shaking of the head (fans of Joe Biden will probably understand this analogy perfectly). Nobody’s perfect.

In terms of ideology and music, the Cold War Kids are doing something worth doing, something that might even be called important. They’re an obviously socially-minded band and they’re capable of chronicling the ills of society in a catchy, entertaining manner – and that’s what makes Loyalty to Loyalty‘s worst moments so disappointing. It’s worth a listen, but you’ll learn to skip through the chaff to get to the wheat, which you really didn’t have to do on Robbers & Cowards.