Dinosaur Jr. Reminds Me of My Sandals (Not a Shoegaze Joke)

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, there are a few things you can count on in this life: 1) (spoiler alert!) You’re gonna die, 2) You’re probably gonna pay some taxes and 3) Despite being a pretty boring live act, Dinosaur Jr. will always crank out albums that are wall-to-wall crunchy guitars, pounding drums, and Lou Barlow doing whatever it is he does (which appears to be mostly hoarding his best stuff for his solo albums). That Ben Franklin was a prescient fellow, no?

My first exposure to Dinosaur Jr. was when I worked at Tower Records in Harvard Square. Their first three albums were reissued and I got in trouble for blasting “Freak Scene” on our in-store stereo system because J. Mascis says, “fuck” in that song. But I dug the sound, because Dino Jr. seemed to have no qualms about that fact that their music was just three guys plugging in and playing really fucking loud. Yeah, there were some words in there, but mostly you were waiting for J. Mascis to bust out into a face-melting guitar solo. His solos were (and still are) perhaps most impressive to me not for their virtuosity (although, seriously,  Joe Satriani and his ilk can go fuck themselves – J. Mascis is so good at the guitar you kinda want to kick him in the nuts) but for the fact that they never bore me, nor do they piss me off. I listen to, I dunno, anything by Joe Satriani or Kenny Wayne Shepherd or any of those wanky guitar guys and I get really angry really fast. Because playing a bunch of notes really quickly doesn’t mean you’re making great music. It means you know scales. Mascis expresses more in one bent note than Joe Satriani has in his entire canon of banal noodles and finger-tapping bullshit. (Incidentally, and I know I’ve said this before, The Hold Steady’s Tad Kubler is also far better than all those shred nitwits.)

Dinosaur Jr. “came back” in 2007 with the super-impressive Beyond (it was the first album since their first three that featured the original Dino line-up of Mascis, Low Barlow and awesomely-named drummer Murph) – an album that blew critics’ minds because it didn’t suck, like many reunion albums do. In fact, if I can fess up a dirty little secret here, Beyond is still my favorite Dinosaur Jr. album. Over the last couple of years, Dinosaur Jr. has let their pop sensibilities shine and they’ve crafted some of the best melodies of their career while still maintaining the things that make them great (namely, Mr. Mascis’s guitar playing). Farm, their second album since the reunion, compares quite favorably to Beyond, though it’s not quite as good as that record in my none-too-humble estimation.

Farm, as you might guess by the hippie-art cover, is a bit jammier in places (three songs surpass six minutes) and it suffers a little for it, though, overall, it’s still a great album, especially this time of year, when you can blast it out of open car windows. Mascis brings a little more variation to his guitar attacks (although I’m convinced that a Dinosaur Jr. song doesn’t end until he’s played every single note in every position on the neck), Barlow’s bass work dances around the squalling guitars and his vocal turns are, as usual, superb (Barlow’s tunes always get bagged on by other critics, but I liked “Back to Your Heart” on Beyond and I really like Farm‘s “Your Weather”).  And Murph does what a drummer in a band like this has to do – he beats the shit out of his drums. Just destroys ‘em. Well done, Murph.

In a lot of ways, Dinosaur Jr. reminds me of my two-year old pair of  sandals. I bought ‘em at an outlet store a couple of years ago and, this being L.A., I’ve worn them nearly every day since. I even did a five mile hike into downtown Berkley in the damn things (ill-advised, that was, but I was on a mission to get Evil Urges, I happened to be in the East Bay, and I knew there was an Amoeba over there somewhere. Fortunately, I got a ride back and managed, somehow, to avoid blisters). These sandals are broken in to the point that I hardly feel like I’m wearing shoes when I’ve got ‘em on. They’re comfy. I know that they’re not the prettiest pieces of footwear at this point, but they’re awfully comforting. And that’s how I feel about Dinosaur Jr. They’re not gonna change the world or anything, but that was never their mission. All evidence would indicate they are out to rock as hard as they possibly can, and they do that very well. They’re a guitar band that makes me want to play my guitar really loud, and that’s what a great guitar band should do.

I know a lot of critics have claimed Farm outshines its predecessor, but to me, what makes Beyond the better bet is brevity. Farm bogs down in its longer songs (except, for some reason, “Plans”, which features one of J. Mascis’s catchier vocal melodies) and that detracts from the shorter, better joys of songs like “Pieces” and “Over It.” But if you like Dinosaur Jr., you’ll like Farm (if you’re new to Dino, ease in with Beyond, which is a thunderously rad record) because, like my sandals, barring a catastrophe, Dinosaur Jr. will never change in the best possible way a band can never change.

Now We Can See

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but whether or not you like the Thermals may well depend on how willing you are to put up with Hutch Harris’s voice. I am more than happy to put up with it (I know he’s dramatic, sometimes Shatner-esque, but goddammit, I can’t help liking the guy. Maybe it’s because part of me thinks that punk music should be obnoxious and the Thermals are probably the best punk band going today. Hell, throw in Titus Andronicus and I’d say they’re among the only real punk bands going today) and so I can sit back and enjoy Thermals albums as much as the next guy and, often, more than the next guy.

Histrionic vocals notwithstanding, Hutch Harris wields verbal razor blades (listen to The Body, The Blood, The Machine if you don’t believe me: “God reached his hand/ out from the sky/ he flooded the land and set it on fire/ He said ‘Fear me again/ know I’m your father/ remember that no one can breathe under water’”) and also has wicked awesome guitar tone, with minimal effects. The newest Thermals record, Now We Can See is packed with melodic guitar solos, pounding drums, and Harris’s lyrics are still sharp as ever. Those virtues come together nicely on the title track when Harris points out “Now we can see/ Now that our vision is strong/ we don’t need to admit we were wrong” before bouncing into a positively Beatles-ish chorus and a lilting guitar solo that may be his best since “Ear for Baby”.

But enough about Harris – there’s another Thermal who plays bass and drums on Now We Can See and also adds her vocals to the mix. Of course I’m talking about Kathy Foster, whom you may have heard on last year’s All Girl Summer Fun Band album Looking Into It (which took over the niche that Dressy Bessy used to fill in my life). The Thermals always seem to find a drummer to tour with but the last two albums have been entirely recorded by Harris and Foster. What we learn on Now We Can See is that Kathy Foster is a badass drummer and that her backing vocals help to offset Harris’s more strident moments.

I have seen people on the interweb accuse critics of not liking an album before they’ve given it a fair shot and while I don’t dispute that this happens (come on kids, I was never gonna like Chinese Democracy. But I’ll admit it surprised me…. ’cause it sucked even more than I thought it would) but I find it funny that it’s treated like some sort of crime. You see, critics – especially internet critics – don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing. We’re spitting our dumbass opinions into a void here and, as I’ve said before, the fact that anyone ever reads it is astounding to me. But thanks. And, it goes both ways: Axl Rose doesn’t owe me a goddamn thing, which is why I’m not personally offended that his music sucks and why he shouldn’t be personally offended that I think it sucks. On the flip side, I will cop to being predisposed to liking certain things. If Tom Waits or The Hold Steady or the Thermals release an album, they’ve already built up a lot of goodwill from me and I’m probably gonna like what they do. The interesting thing is that this hardly ever provokes the strong reaction that not liking something does. The bulk of negative comments (probably all of them) I’ve received in the last year and a half (ish) of doing Bollocks! have come in defense of some album that I thought was bad (or, usually, terrible). People seem to want to come rushing to the defense of their favorite bands, but they don’t come rushing to assault me for liking their least favorite bands. I acknowledge people’s right to hate me for not liking the shit they like but I don’t apologize for not liking things. If I did, I’d be willingly putting myself in the position of feeling like I have to like everything. Or make everyone happy. And let’s face it: that ain’t gonna happen. I’m just saying it would crack me up to see a comment some day that’s like, “The Thermals are the shittiest band on earth, how can you possibly like them? You are teh s uck!” or something like that. As it is, people seem generally okay with me liking things.

So maybe y’all will forgive me for just liking the Thermals so goddamn much. Now We Can See, like it’s predecessor, is a catchy, raucous, melodic, and refreshingly brief album that takes simple tools (bass, drum, guitar) and makes joyous noise out of them. And I was gonna like it before I ever heard it, I’ll admit. So what? Some bands start with all the points and a good review is theirs to lose; other bands start with no points and a good review is a steep-ass, Sysyphusian ordeal. Is that fair? Of course not. But this idea that subjective criticism has to be fair is misguided at best. I would submit to you that any given Bollocks! review is more fair than an Iranian election. That’s as good as it gets. But, almost nothing in life is fair, except baseball – and baseball is fucking boring. (At least until Alex Rodriguez knocks up Willow Palin)

The Extremely Long Soundtrack of Our Lives

The potential pitfalls of the double-album are well enumerated throughout music history. Sometimes you get The Wall or, if you’re very lucky, London Calling. Other times, you get the last Beyonce album or – dog help you – Stadium Arcadium.  So it’s treacherous territory, even for bands as talented as The Clash (I know some of you are thinking that Sandanista was their big stinker double album, but you’re wrong – it’s their big stinker triple album; with the help of Winamp or a similar player, you can whittle it down to the length of London Calling and make it a pretty good listen).

“So,” you might be thinking, “why the hell would a pleasantly mediocre band like The Soundtrack of Our Lives want to foist 90 minutes of music on us in this here 21st century? Haven’t they heard I Am Sasha Fierce?”

Those are good questions, dear reader. From the reviews I’ve read of TSOOL’s Communion, the double-album in question, I start to get the feeling that the reviewers, daunted by the sheer size of the task, have scanned the tracks once or twice before muttering a tired “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” and scampering off to digest some eight-song indie EP or to circle jerk about Wavves some more.

But not I. I’m the crazy fuck who actually listened, track by track, to Chris Cornell’s Scream album. If I could do that, I can certainly wade into the deep waters of Communion. And I did. And they’re not, as I suspected, that deep.

The central question here is, “Can an album suck even if none of the songs really suck?” Of course it can. This leads us to Chorpenning’s Theory of Tolerable Mediocrity. I submit to you, dear reader(s?),  that a certain amount of mediocrity is tolerable in music (it’s never “good” because that would make it something other than mediocre). That is, there is truly good music (Neko Case) and there is truly terrible music (My Chemical Romance) and in between, there are myriad degrees of quality and unquality. For example, if Oasis or Coldplay come on the radio, I don’t get pissed about it. Those are two distinctly mediocre bands, not good enough for my praise, not bad enough for my scorn. (Chris Martin is, however, worth singling out because he’s such a fucking goon) Don’t care what they’re all about. On the other hand, if My Chemical Romance comes on the radio, I fly into a rage. This is because My Chemical Romance is one of the worst bands ever; they make the listener a worse person for having heard them. If I could fight the entire band, I would. Seriously, fuck My Chemical Romance. Where was I? Oh yeah – the point is, there’s mediocre stuff that I don’t much care about and then there’s all the other stuff.

You might’ve guessed by now that I think The  Soundtrack of Our Lives is a mediocre band. You’re partly right: sometimes, they creep up into “Pleasant Enough” or even “Pretty Okay.” But that doesn’t excuse the bloated mess that is Communion. Part of what makes something mediocre tolerable is brevity.

TSOOL is at their most Oasisy on the album opener “Babel On,” which even features shouts of “Come on!” on the chorus, a trope that Oasis is contractually obligated to use at least once per album. Oh, and “Babel On” is nearly six and a half minutes long. So they start out their bloated mess of an album with a bloated mess of a song, but it lets you know what you’re in for. If you’re rocking out to “Babel On”, you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Communion. But, as I did on the Obits record, I found myself checking my watch half way through the first disc – and I don’t own a watch.

There’s a sense that TSOOL is trying to go for something Big and Meaningful on Communion, but there’s not really anything in the lyrics that articulates it. It strikes me more that they had 24 songs and didn’t feel like cutting any of them out. As I alluded to earlier, none of the songs on Communion are terrible, but none of them really reach out and grab you either. The first track I even nodded my head to was “Flipside,” the Kinks-aping song three tunes deep on the second disc.  That’s the song that climbs up to “Pleasant Enough” but it’s the 15th of 24 songs, and that’s too long to wait for something I can get on the first song of Vetiver’s Tight Knit. Oh, and all the songs that follow that first song.

All in all, Communion is bloated ogre of a mediocre record (it’s mediogre, which would be a pretty awesome name for a band) from a band that did much better for itself on its 2005 release Origin, Vol 1. If you’re a diehard Soundtrack of Our Lives fan, I guess you’ll be fine with Communion, but you know what I’ve never seen? A diehard Soundtrack of our Lives fan.

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.

Best Albums of My Life: #5 (The Delgados are Dead; Long Live the Delgados!)

What Scottish bands do you like? I know you can name a few – Franz Ferdinand for sure, probably Snow Patrol, and, for you P-fork kids, Mogwai. But you know what? None of those bands, not a fucking one of them, can match the beauty, the tunefulness, the sheer sonic majesty of the Delgados.

This is the part of the show where you ask, “But who are the Delgados?”

And this is the part of the show where I drunkenly slap you, then kiss you on the mouth and ask for your forgiveness, then storm off to the fridge for another beer muttering about how kids these days don’t know fuckall about the Delgados.

Okay, I’m back with the beer. And I really am sorry about the whole slapping/kissing thing. Or whichever parts of it you didn’t like. Allow me to educate you for a second. See, back in the day, that being the late 1990′s and early “aughts”, there was a phenomenal band called the Delgados made up of Emma Pollock (vocals/guitars), Stewart Henderson (bass), Paul Savage (drums and being married to Ms. Pollock) and Alun Woodward (vocals/guitars again). The Delgados were a Scottish band named after (I believe) a Spanish bicyclist named Pedro Delgado. Makes perfect sense, yeah? Well,  they burst onto the music scene with a little album called Domestiques and… okay, they mostly quietly entered the music scene and were noticed by one or two people. That’s not the point.

The point is, along about 2002, the Delgados recorded and released their masterpiece: Hate. Its title track would simultaneously nod to the Beatles and flip off the world as Woodward sang, “Hate is everywhere/ inside your mother’s heart and you will find it there”. And, before you get to “All You Need is Hate,” Emma Pollock ushers in the album with the incredible “The Light Before We Land.” And the other ten tracks (that’s if you got the U.S. release with “Coalman” and “Mad Drums”. Which I did) are varying levels of awesome as well. But if you’re not hooked by “The Light Before We Land,” then maybe you’ve got bratwursts in your ears. You should get that looked at.

Which, incidentally, brings me to how I first heard of the Delgados. Back in, I believe, the winter of 2003, my pal Blake appeared in my room at college with a link to some clips from some anime show (to this day, I don’t know what show it was) that was set to “The Light Before We Land.” The anime stuff was all well and good, but I probably asked Blake a hundred times who the music was by. My friend did not disappoint – he filled me in not only on who the Delgados were, but had some pretty good tips on the album that contained “The Light Before We Land,” and the poppy masterpiece that was “All You Need is Hate.” It wasn’t long after that before I was down to Face the Music (may that store rest in peace) and purchasing my very own copy of Hate. I own all the other Delgados albums now too and they’re great, but it’s not understating things to say that Hate is the Delgados’ London Calling.

Only not many people noticed here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with you people? While bands like Slipknot and Korn were climbing our charts, we were ignoring (well, I wasn’t – thank you, Blake) the Delgados. We welcomed Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol with open legs (that’s how that saying goes, right?) but somehow, there was no room in lives for The Delgados.

So they put out one more album after Hate and broke up. Emma Pollock released Watch the Fireworks a couple of years ago and I pray to sweet Zombie Jesus that she makes and releases a follow-up to it. But The Delgados are no more.

I hope you’re happy now.

But it’s not too late. You can still pick up Hate for yourself and learn – too late, just like you always do – what you were missing. You can still hear the sublime ending to “Woke from Dreaming” as Emma Pollock sings “We will kill if we need to.” You can still here Alun Woodward’s depair on the (anti)anthemic chorus of “If This is a Plan”: “If this is a plan/ then I’m dead where I stand.”  The point is, you can still hear Hate and if you like music at all, you should probably check it out.  Hate has grown on me more than a lot of albums I’ve owned for a longer time, and I liked it from the start. Just think – if the 6 to 9 people (on average) who read Bollocks! check out Hate and pass it on to their friends, maybe we can generate enough buzz to convince the Delgados to reunite and come play in the U.S. so that we (and by “we” I mean “I”) can come see them.

Don’t Keep It Hid

I’m gonna get this outta the way right quickly, with the help of enumeration. Two things:

1) Dan Auerbach is one of the finest guitar players in any band playing right now. Check out the Black Keys Live at the Crystal Ballroom DVD if you don’t believe me.

2) His solo debut, Keep It Hid is a beautiful album, where Auerbach expands on the old school blues sound he pushes in The Black Keys and tosses in some old school soul and some seriously Band-ish country rock. It’s good stuff and good for you, Dan Auerbach.

Seriously, Keep It Hid is a good album, it’s not just a Black Keys album by any other name. Somewhat paradoxically, this is what kinda pisses me off about Dan Auerbach and his pal Pat Carney, who are better known as the two guys in The Black Keys.

The Black Keys, despite producing one of their finest albums yet with Danger Mouse, continue as a two-piece, which may be why Auerbach kept their name off of his solo debut, which employs nifty things like a bass player and a keyboardist. But make no mistake, following last year’s Attack & Release with Keep It Hid only solidifies this point: The Black Keys need to give up the two-man show, hire some other musicians full-time and use Keep It Hid as their launchpad to bigger and better musical things.

The two-man show thing works pretty well for what it is (again, see them live or see a live video of theirs for evidence), but it only lends itself to the expression of so many musical ideas. Auerbach very clearly has more in him than that, as evidenced by the achingly beautiful Keep It Hid opener “Trouble Weighs A Ton.” It’s a harmony rich, acoustic ballad that hits you like a ton of bricks. And wouldn’t it be refreshing on a Black Keys album if they could just drop their usual shtick (good as it usually is) and go for that kind of vibe? There were places on their last album where they hinted at this capability, but why limit that exploration to the studio? Carney and Auerbach are clearly talented musicians, so why cage up all those great ideas?

There are songs on Keep It Hid that sound like Black Keys songs (“I Want Some More”, “The Prowl,” and the title track come to mind), but what they’re missing is Carney’s stellar drumming. The songs are still pretty good, but you think, “Wow, these could use some of that crashing Pat Carney drumming.” But then you come to songs like “Trouble Weighs A Ton,” “Real Desire,” and “When the Night Comes,” and you realize that if you added Pat Carney to Keep It Hid, you’d have everything you love about The Black Keys plus that ever-sought-after So Much More. Auerbach’s solo debut is a good album, but if you added to it everything that made Attack & Release so strong, you’d have a truly great record. And it woudn’t be that hard to do. Auerbach would merely have to keep everyone who played on his solo album except for the drummer, who would be replaced with Auerbach’s fellow Black Key.

Perhaps there’s a feeling between Auerbach and Carney that their fans love the Black Keys for their lo-tech,two-man sound, but I’m willing to bet that their fans would be willing to forgive them for foisting an album upon us that had the strong melodies of Keep It Hid and all the pure balls of, say, Thickfreakness. Sure, it’d be a change, but some change is just too awesome to pass up. And it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to the Black Keys’ more attentive fans, who, among the ones I’ve spoken to, generally approve of the expanded sonic palette of Attack & Release.

Keep It Hid is lovely, as I’ve said, but that’s not really what we need to be discussing here; Auerbach’s solo album can stand on its own merits. What really needs to be said, and said loudly and repeatedly, is that it’s time for The Black Keys to put two and two together (meaning Carney’s drumming with the sort of songs Auerbach cooked up for Keep It Hid; “My Last Mistake” is a great song toward the end of the album, by the way, but it is the tune that most egregiously suffers for the lack of Carney drumming) and just become a bigger band. They can add a few more musicians and not sacrifice their deliciously old school sound and no one with a brain or an appreciative ear would accuse them of selling out.

Holler and Stomp

Here at Bollocks!, we don’t believe in guilty pleasures. You like what you like and that’s your damn business (unless you like Fall Out Boy, then it’s the world’s business to take note and join forces to stop you). So I’m not going to make any apologies for liking Dressy Bessy. I like them. Fuck you.

Yes, their music is dreadfully simple. Yes, Tammy Ealom sings like your teenage sister, taunting and too cute by half. Yes, they have five albums that mostly sound the same. But they’re a lot of fucking fun, which is a good thing for rock music to be. Some people operate under the false assumption that indie music should be all serious and sensitive. Sometimes, though, you have to chill the fuck out and bounce around the room. That’s where Dressy Bessy comes in (although it should be said, and can’t be said enough, that The Hold Steady perfectly melds room-bouncing awesomeness with serious intelligence).

Holler and Stomp is their latest offering and I tried to resist it for as long as I could, but who am I kidding? I’m a complete weakling for this band and have been since their eponymous third album (which is really their best – loud guitars, tight focus, and perfect brevity). So here I am listening to Holler and Stomp. And since I liked this album before I ever even heard it (weakling, remember?), there’s not much to talk about here.

There’s actually a greater attempt at varied song structure on Holler and Stomp than on previous Dressy Bessy outings. Stop laughing, it’s true.  Their earlier work is pretty much straightforward rock, while Holler and Stomp flirts with funk and rockabilly. Dressy Bessy will probably never go the Green Day route of coyly planting a sensitive acoustic number at the end of a record thus launching them to the top of the charts, and that’s one of my favorite things about them. Their musical approach is, in a nutshell: “Any given song can be improved by adding an electric guitar to it.” This is the meat-and-potatoes shit, and Dressy Bessy does it with an infectious style.

Granted, the lyrics are often ridiculous. On the album opener “Automatic,” Ealom sings “I’m going to steal your candy,” and there’s nothing to indicate that this is any kind of metaphor. I’m pretty sure she’s talking about stealing your candy. “In Your Headphones” pretty much just repeats “It’s in your headphones” over and over (thank your favorite deity the song is barely two minutes long). There’s scant evidence in the Dressy Bessy catalog to suggest that they believe in metaphor or irony in the least, which is actually kind of refreshing when contrasted with, say, Fall Out Boy’s calculated lack of giving a shit. (A tangent, as is my wont – I was out a bar this weekend and they had a million TVs, all of which were showing music videos. This was only occasionally awesome, but for the most part they were showing Britney Spears and Fall Out Boy videos. Remember, I live in Los Angeles. But it was the most time I’ve spent listening to Fall Out Boy at one time where I had no control over changing the song. This band irrevocably blows. They must be stopped. How much do they fucking suck? Well, I saw a video of them covering Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” with John Mayer. The forces of evil are gathering, friends. If you are in a band, or thinking of starting a band, you must work to fight this with all your might. Gather up your guitars, learn to play them, and kick Fall Out Boy’s ass. I will help you.)

Dressy Bessy will always be my favorite Dressy Bessy album, but Holler and Stomp will probably move into second place – it’s a lot of fun and is more varied than its predecessor, Electrified. If you liked any Dressy Bessy album before, you will like Holler and Stomp. If you didn’t, you probably don’t like fun.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about Holler and Stomp. I dig it and I dig Dressy Bessy and I don’t care if the P-fork people snort derisively about it.

Sufjan Stevens still sucks.

Holy Shit! Mock Orange is Still Around!

In 2004, Mock Orange released one of the most under-rated guitar albums of the young decade, Mind is Not Brain. From start to finish, that album is a masterwork of inventive melody and instrumentation. It’s really worth your time. After that, I didn’t hear anything from Mock Orange and assumed they’d pulled a Hum and gone off the map (if you wanna know about Hum, check out You’d Prefer an Astronaut).

So imagine my surprise when I was rolling through Amoeba Music one day and found Captain Love, a new album from Mock Orange. You’re probably imagining it about right. Now imagine me naked. Just kidding, don’t do that. Too late? Oh well. You probably need a moment to go vomit and brush your teeth, yeah?

All better?

Needless to say (but said anyway, apparently), I snatched up Captain Love, visions of an apt follow-up to Mind is Not Brain dancing in my head. So I have to ask you, dear 5 to 9 readers, what the fuck is this album? I give Mock Orange props for trying to expand their sound on every album, but everything on Captain Love sounds so forced, needlessly long, and… well, bad. Ryan Grisham’s vocals sound badly synthesized and the guitars (the precious guitars!) are there but they don’t really do anything. I’ve been through this album a thousand times now and nothing really grabs me about it. Except, you know, that I don’t like it. Perhaps my expectations were set too high by the thrill of finding new music from Mock Orange at all.

Or maybe this album really sucks. I dunno. There was a unifying energy to Mind is Not Brain that made it undeniable; you had to sit and listen to that album and you’d be crazy (or not much of a guitar guy) not to like it. Most of the songs on Captain Love feel like they were pasted together, each one song made of a patchwork of four or five fragments. This has the effect of making Captain Love feel like the most disappointing, disjointed mess since the new Cure album. I have nothing but love for both bands and I’ll still check out their music, but between the Cure’s 4:13 Dream and Mock Orange’s Captain Love, there are exactly zero highlights.

For Mock Orange, “Lila” starts off all right, but squanders its potential in the chorus. “Supergang” is actually okay, but it only makes me want to turn right back to Mind is Not Brain, the pinnacle of this band’s career so far.

The thing is, the guys in Mock Orange are talented musicians. They can definitely play, unlike a lot of truly shitty bands out there. How can a band this good make an album this bad? Perhaps it’s a matter of balance. Not to turn this into a plug for my own half-formed band (Sputnik II), but my drummer Tim and I balance each other out – I want to write loud, abrasive, confrontationally obnoxious songs and he likes to write melodies (I’m not against melody on principle or anything, it’s just how I write songs. I like them with some snark). So we can balance each other out and craft songs that have my middle-finger-up swagger and his Beatlesesque pop – it’s a democratic process which yields the best results (hopefully!) for each song. We’re able to rein each other in when one of us is getting carried away; maybe that’s what’s missing from Mock Orange. Maybe one guy is just doing whatever the fuck comes into his mind and the others are allowing him to do it. Maybe this shambolic vision congealed for a brief moment and spat out Mind is Not Brain but has since dissolved even more into the mushy mess that is Captain Love. If so, Mock Orange is in serious needs of some checks and balances.

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

“I identify my star sign/ by asking which is least compatible with yours,” sings Gareth Campesinos on “Ways To Make It Through A Wall,” the first song on the second (!) Los Campesinos album of 2008. And I think to myself, “Here comes another awesome Los Campesinos record.”

Los Campesinos (which is Spanish for “The Campesinos”… just kidding. It means “The Peasants” or “The Farmers” in Spanish. And yes, Los Campesinos are from Cardiff, Wales.) scratched their name into my brain earlier this year with the outstanding Hold On Now, Youngster, a blistering set of snide pop tunes that lashed out at emo culture and romantic comedies with equal cleverness and ferocity. Needless to say, that album was, from its inception, bound to get stuck in my car’s CD player forever (or until Stay Positive came out three months later; but suffice it to say Hold On Now, Youngster got serious rotation between April and July).

And now, a scant 7 months after Hold On Now, Youngster, Los Campesinos are back with We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. A debut as impressive as Hold On Now, Youngster would be hard to follow up at any point and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is not quite the masterpiece that its predecessor is, but it’s still really fucking good. And, you have to admire their work ethic.  For the sake of contrast: The Killers re-released their debut and a singles boxed set (yeah, after one fucking album. Brilliant) before getting around to dropping the steaming turd that was Sam’s Town, an album that wanted so badly to be Born to Run that people reported spotting Brandon Flowers attached to Springsteen’s cock at those free Obama rallies The Boss played this year.

Ahem.

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is riddled with the same bombast and wit that made Hold On Now, Youngster a success, packed with great lines like “We kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking/ but there is no fucking future,” followed by “I’ve taught myself the only way to get along in love/ is to like the other slightly less than you get in return/ I keep feeling like I’m being undercut” in the title track. Los Campesinos are a cyncial bunch particularly when it comes to love, but they never tend toward self-pity like so many emo bands do. Nope. With Los Campesinos, it’s “I’m okay, the world’s fucked up.” Imagine love songs that reflect a worldview that’s equal parts George Costanza and Friedrich Nietzsche, set to the bouncingest pop-rock beats and you’ll end up somewhere near We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed.

The six Campesinos use a mountain of intstruments to create the wall of twinkling bells and thunderous guitars  that serve as the backdrop to Gareth and Alecksandra Campesinos’ back-and-forth (and sometimes overlapping) barbs; both vocalists are more than capable of weaving in and out of the music or shouting over the top of it where necessary. And lest you think Los Campesinos are merely good writers, I should like to point out that they have  a really kick-ass guitar sound. Check out “Miserabilia” for the proof. While we’re on the subject, Los Campesinos also employ the best-ever discretion when electing to have everyone in the band sing at the same time. This worked brilliantly on Youngster‘s “We Are All Accelerated Readers” and is employed wonderfully on the last lines of “Miserabilia”: “Shout at the world/ because the world doesn’t love you/ Love yourself/ Because you know you have to.”

So if the Arcade Fire is the magnetic north of your indie rock compass (’cause they’re from Canada. See what I did there?), consider as their polar opposite (in a good way; let us never forget that The Arcade Fire is incredibly rad) Los Campesinos. Where The Arcade Fire are downcast and serious, Los Campesinos are merry pranksters, the guys (and gals!) who know they can’t beat you in fight but they’re going to get you with incomprehensibly awesome one-liners until you cast off your football helmet and go pound them to a pulp, soaking their K Records T-shirts through with blood. Both bands use a billion or so members to create unique and beautiful textures for their respective moods and both write incredibly well, noticeably better than many of their contemporaries.

I will end this review by quoting “You’ll Need Those Fingers for Crossing” at length because it contains some of my favorite lines of of 2008:

“You worry a million raindrops will die/ with the last memory of you and I/ in the soft-porn version of the end of the world/ I quake at the knees as my intentions unfurl/ you wrote a letter to God/ just in case/ you said/ “I’m nothing if I’m not a pragmatist/ you needn’t worry about us/ we can look after ourselves/ we’ve learned not to rely/ on you or anyone else.”

Wrecking Ball

Dead Confederate is a band from Georgia that sounds like a band from Seattle. Specifically, they kinda sound like Nirvana. Where that’s an affectation for a lot of really shitty bands, in Dead Confederate’s case, it’s a coincidence for a pretty good band. Hardy Morris just sounds (sometimes) like Kurt Cobain, especially on “Heavy Petting,” which is the first noise you hear on Dead Confederate’s plenty noisy debut, Wrecking Ball.

Wrecking Ball is a broody fucker of an album, taking its sweet time to stagger between maudlin and morose and burying its melodies deep under crunchy guitars, heavy bass, and Morris’s Cobainesque growl.  I’ve waded into the murky depths of Wrecking Ball many a time now and it gets better on each trip, but stand warned – you may not want to work this hard to like a rock album.

The problem is, nowadays, most people who traffic in broody rock stumble easily into emo-territory. Dead Confederate manages to keep the tension going without ever straying into My Chemcial Romance-style faux-anthems or the “getting dumped is just the worst thing ever”-isms of, say, Fall Out Boy.  Of course, I can only make out about half the words on Wrecking Ball, but I don’t detect the tell-tale stink of radio-friendly emo crap.  To get back to the album opener, “Heavy Petting,” seems to be about lying awake at night obsessing over getting that special someone to round third base and head for home, so to speak.

Wrecking Ball is but ten tracks long but clocks in close to an hour, meaning a lot of these songs build up for a long-ass time and then wander around a bit before finding the door. It’s the impenetrable shit that Hum used to do, which may sound like damning with faint praise, but it really means that I have hopes that Dead Confederate will one day produce an album as awesome as You’d Prefer An Astronaut.

Morris has a great voice to lend the proceedings and, like the dearly departed Cobain, he can go from a croon to a howl in a matter of seconds without sounding like a poser. Morris’s croony moments actually recall Paul Durham from Black Lab’s early days, especially on the ballad(ish) “It Was A Rose.”

Wrecking Ball, upon repeated listens, does manage to escape its “everything you liked about 90s alternative”-ness, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it probably doesn’t need to. I mean, The Smashing Pumpkins are a shell of their former glory, Pearl Jam is basically a Led Zeppelin cover band at this point, and don’t even get me started on the Foo Fighters (if you’re confused, hurt, or angry by the Foo Fighters output in the early 21st century, I suggest you pretend they turned into The Whigs, who picked up the ball Grohl & company dropped shortly after The Colour and the Shape); so it’s not really bad that a band has sprung up that can combine all that distorted guitar nastiness with the sprawling atmospherics of good Pink Floyd (before Gilmour started singing full-time; face it, kids,  A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a shitty album, except for “Sorrow.”). Dead Confederate, on their CrapSpace page, tag themselves as Rock/Psychedelic/Other and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of their style. I realize that I’ve just made Dead Confederate sound like a New Yorker comic of a rock band, but that’s for your ears to judge (plus, as I learned this weekend, the New Yorker has run one of the funniest comics I’ve ever seen in its pages).

The songs tend to get lost in their length, but some highly melodic and suitably heavy brighht spots emerge, especially toward the beginning: “Heavy Petting,” “The Rat”, and “Goner,” start off the album pretty well. Later, “All the Angels,” and “Start Me Laughing” bring more straightforward rocking before you descend into the two longest tracks on the album, “The News Underneath” (just over seven minutes) and “Flesh Colored Canvas” (12 fucking minutes. If you’re hitting the 12-minute mark and the song is not “Desolation Row,” just stop. Please. Okay? Stop.).  Both these songs have their moments, but I’m starting to think there’s little to no reason to ever eclipse the 7 minute mark in a song.

Dead Confederate is a good rock band that needs to balance their best bits (the ability to write solid melodies and deliver them in an impressively heavy manner) with their excesses (that meandering thing has got to go, or at least be reined in a bit) and Wrecking Ball is a compelling debut for people who have dreamed of trying to create mash-ups of Your Body Above Me and The Dark Side of the Moon. You know who you are.