The Family Sign (of an Impending Shark-Jump?)

Can you tell when a TV show you love is about to jump the shark? My wife and I are working our way through Battlestar Galactica and we just finished the third season. I like the series a lot (I don’t want any spoilers from nerdy Bollocks! readers. And let’s face it, the odds of you being a nerd if you’re a regular Bollocks! reader are pretty fucking high), but as I watched the Season 3 finale, cringing at the way the writers (stellar up to this point) shoe-horned the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” into the plot, I could see Season 4 out of the corner of my eye; it was strapping on the water skis and putting on its leather jacket.

My sense of  impending shark-jumpiness is even more acute when it comes to music, perhaps because I’m a much bigger nerd about music than I am about television shows. When Marilyn Manson tried to restyle himself from frighteningly on-point David Bowie fanboy to…well… whatever the fuck he is now, I saw the writing on the wall. It said, “Marilyn Manson is going to start singing about vampires. You can stop listening now.” When I saw a song called “My Three Sons” on Elvis Costello’s otherwise (mostly) okay Momofuku, I was haunted for days by visions of his horn-rimmed glasses flying off as he sailed over the glistening dorsal fin of a confused Great White. A song about the joys of parenthood is usually a strong indicator that a shark jump has just occurred or is imminent.

Atmosphere bucked that trend mightily on 2008′s When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold (best album title of that year, by the way) and I was actually surprised at how well they could pay tribute to fatherhood without pissing me off even a little bit. This was due in large part to Slug’s (known to his moms as Sean Daley) ability to tell compelling stories with a playful wit and a wisdom that didn’t judge his characters too harshly (like “Waitress,” which featured Tom Waits beat-boxing). When Life Gives You Lemons also featured some great live instruments – grooving, funky guitars and the kind of rollicking piano that worked so well on You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having‘s “Get Fly.”

Slug and producer Ant (that’s Anthony Davis) seem content to keep up the live instruments and familial musings on The Family Sign, but the returns seem to be diminishing rather quickly. My first time through the new album was pretty uncomfortable. It’s generally slower and less playful than its predecessor (on “Ain’t Nobody,” Slug informs us, “I’m on that grown-up stuff;” it doesn’t mean he’s gotten totally serious, but it’s a far cry from, say, “Little Math You”) and I was stunned to realize that my immediate reaction was, “This sucks. How is that possible?”

How indeed? It’s hard for me to believe that Atmosphere could fall from Completely Awesome to Totally Crappy in the span of one full-length album (I’m not counting last year’s To All My Friends, the Blood Makes the Blade Holy: The Atmosphere EPs, although it/they was/were excellent), but I’ve never been so let down by one of their albums on the first listen. Clearly, something wasn’t right.

So I took a deep breath and drew up a plan of action. I would listen to When Life Gives You Lemons and then follow it immediately with The Family Sign and see what I noticed. The first thing I noticed: When Life Gives You Lemons is still fucking awesome. They were definitely onto something with that record, and Slug was at his most lyrically sharp. That album was also a bit of a stylistic stretch from You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having, so it sounds pretty fresh. The Family Sign doesn’t expand at all on the sound of When Life Gives You Lemons, but I can mostly live with that (“She’s Enough,” from the new record, has some great keyboard and guitar lines).

And then it occurred to me: if I listen to the last three Atmosphere full-lengths, The Family Sign is the first one of those with bad songs on it. There are two tracks on The Family Sign that completely sank it for me the first time through. “Something So” is just trite and sappy, like a hip-hop version of Elvis Costello’s “My Three Sons.” And then there’s “Became.” “Became” is the longest song on the album and it’s a real lyrical clunker. If we accept the song at face value, it’s the story of a dude whose girl runs off with wolves during an inexplicable winter camping trip (in Minnesota? That’s gangsta) and – Holy Twilight, Batman! – she turns into a wolf herself. Now, of course, we can take the song as a metaphor for a woman who is pathologically incapable of monogamy, but that metaphor is still pretty fucking clumsy. No, I think “Became” is just a lyrical misstep, albeit a rare one in a career full of gems.

I thought that, having identified the two major problem spots on The Family Sign, I could give the album a listen and skip the offending tracks. The results were pretty satisfying, although The Family Sign is still a bit of a letdown from When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold. The stories aren’t quite as interesting, the instrumental arrangements aren’t quite as funky, and I still come away from the album thinking that it would be prudent for Atmosphere to find a new thematic direction for their next outing. Slug is an immensely talented MC and writer (before When Life Gives You Lemons, Atmosphere gave away a “party album” called Strictly Leakage that ranks among my favorite hip-hop records of the last ten years and it was basically a goof) and I have faith that there are plenty of great albums in Atmosphere’s future. For that matter, The Family Sign isn’t a bad album per se, but it’s a little jarring because it’s the first Atmosphere album I’ve heard in a long while where I find myself skipping tracks.

So the good news is that Atmosphere has managed to avoid jumping the shark for the time being. The bad news? It would appear that Slug and Ant are, at the very least, trying on leather jackets and pondering the purchase of some water skis.

Turn It Up Until the Cops Come

If there is some sort of Presidential or Congressional Medal for Fan Service, Atmosphere should probably plan a trip through Washington, D.C. very soon. The Minnesota rap duo have a habit of filling the time between proper releases with awesome little gifts for the people who allow them to do this for a living. Between 2005′s stellar You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having and 2008′s even more stellar When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold, Atmosphere dropped – for free – a “party” album called Strictly Leakage which probably ranks right behind When Life Gives You Lemons as one of the two best hip-hop releases of 2008.

Of course, a follow-up to When Life Gives You Lemons will be a most welcome thing whenever it gets here. Until it does, Atmosphere has kindly decided to release 2 EPs on one disc (some of us would call that an album, being 12 tracks and all) and they’ve given the whole package the unwieldy full title of To All My Friends, Blood Makes the Blade Holy: The Atmosphere EPs. We’ll be calling it To All My Friends for short and whether you think it’s an EP or an LP, you can assure yourself of one thing: like the bulk of Atmosphere’s recorded output, To All My Friends is fucking awesome.

Pitchfork’s review of To All My Friends, which was mostly positive, contained a pretty hefty jab at When Life Gives You Lemons for its tendency to use (gasp!) real instruments. The P-forkers accused Slug (MC Sean Daley) and Ant (DJ Anthony Davis) of aspiring to be Gym Class Heroes, an accusation every bit as baseless as Pitchfork’s assertion that Sufjan Stevens is some kind of musical wizard. In fact, Sufjan Stevens is a trust fund kid’s Andrew Bird. Pitchfork isn’t wrong to be nervous about the use of live instruments in hip-hop, though: the usual result is something horrifying known as rap/rock, which seems to be all frat kids can come up with when rapping around a real live rhythm section. Here’s a test: can you name any good rap/rock bands? No? Me either. But Pitchfork is missing two crucial points that set Atmosphere’s use of real instruments in a different class than, say, Linkin Park. First: while there is a certain rock undercurrent to a lot of Atmosphere’s instrumentation, some of it is clearly soul and R&B based, creating funkier rhythms for Slug to flow over. Second, Slug writes better lyrics than your average Gym Class Hero or any of their ilk. I realize that’s not hard, so allow me to clarify: Slug writes better lyrics than the bulk of his hip-hop contemporaries and lyrics matter a lot in hip-hop, maybe more than in any other style of music. Besides, attributing the shittiness of Gym Class Heroes to their use of live instruments is overlooking a whole pile of more terrible features of their music. Like collaborations with Fallout Boy on songs that steal their chorus melodies from Supertramp. But – and I can’t stress this enough – Gym Class Heroes (and Rage Against the Machine, still one of the most overrated bands ever) notwithstanding, live band hip-hop can still be done well. If you saw De La Soul’s set at Coachella last year (or presumably anywhere else), you have a good idea of what I’m talking about.

About the time Sage Francis dropped the Lyrical Master ball and crawled up his own asshole to restyle himself as some sort of hip-hop Johnny Cash (which, you know, when you put it that way, sounds like a fuck-terrible idea), Slug picked that ball up and has been eking out Heisman-worthy yardage with it ever since, occasionally pitching on an option to fellow Rhymesayer Brother Ali. Slug crafts witty, humorous stories of life at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, a position he has had experience occupying. Even when he’s engaging in that tired old tradition of dissing other rappers, he’s legitimately better than they are – “Hope” provides the best example on To All My Friends, and it hinges on a jaunting electric guitar lick. Mostly, though, To All My Friends spends a lot of lyrical time being positive and reminding the listener to do the same. “Free Fallin” and “To All My Friends” end the album (er, EP[s]) with a one-two punch of 1) be grateful for what you have and 2) I’m grateful for what I have. Now, gratitude is nice to hear from rappers (I mentioned this in my review of Brother Ali’s Us, which you should own by now), but it struck me while listening to To All My Friends that it’s really difficult to do the whole positivity thing without sounding like a deluded idiot – Atmosphere pulls it off with style, largely because he seems to be operating in earnest. His optimism is hard-won to be sure, but that’s the best kind of optimism. If I can digress here (only slightly) for a minute, I think the reason a lot of overtly positive music (think Christian rock) sucks is because the positivity tends to exist in a vacuum. I don’t begrudge you your optimism if you haven’t suffered much, but I don’t find it very interesting either. If life has never really hurt you, of course you’re going to be positive. But if that’s the case, your life is probably pretty fucking boring. It’s much more compelling to me to see someone who can keep their head up even though life keeps throwing rocks at their face. I think Atmosphere and fellow Minnesotans the Hold Steady possess a gift for making decent positive music because they’re not just telling you to put on a happy face because Jesus loves you. Their songs acknowledge the negative aspects of life which help us appreciate our good fortune. To All My Friends will never try to kid you into thinking that everything is going to be all right because Atmosphere doesn’t believe that everything can be all right – things can be pretty good for quite a while and, if you calibrate your brain right, you can let the good shit carry you through the bad times.

My Year in Lists: The Ten Best Albums of 2008 Part I

By now you’ve probably ready Spin‘s best albums list, Blender’s best album list, the Onion A.V. Club list, and maybe even Rolling Stone‘s best albums list. Perhaps you’re salivating over Pitchforkmedia’s forthcoming lists of tracks and albums for 2008. So now that you’ve looked over the lists by the big players, the magazines that can afford to hire a “staff,” it’s time to turn your attention to one dude living in Los Angeles and see what he thinks are the ten best albums of 2008. Why? I have no idea, but I’d be compiling this list even if no one read it.  So if you’re reading it, hey, thanks.

10. She & Him – Volume One – Usually, I have no time for albums made by actors or actresses. This is because they are usually made simply because a famous name can be attached to them (no one would’ve given a shit, for instance, about Scarlett Johannsen’s Anywhere I Lay My Head if it hadn’t been her name on the record). Disney signs kids on to be TV stars and instantly gives them record deals because they’re turning them from children into products. So I was fully prepared to tell Zooey Deschanel to go back to her day job when I heard about She & Him (the him is M. Ward, which did earn Ms. Deschanel serious bonus points). However, Volume One is an addictive and beautiful album, full of classic country and old-school pop. Deschanel’s voice is outstanding and Ward’s production showcases it perfectly on songs like “Sentimental Heart” and the heart-wrenching “Change is Hard”. As an added bonus, Deschanel wrote 10 of the tunes herself, showing a promising talent for songcraft. The pair are apparently hard at work on Volume Two and this is one case where I hope the actress quits her day job and sticks with the music. There wasn’t another woman in music that sounded like Zooey Deschanel in 2008 and Volume One is the proof.

9.       The Whigs, Mission Control – It’s not really a controversial statement to say that Lester Bangs would’ve fucking despised emo. Supposing you’ve never read Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (which you really should), let’s just look at the thing logically. Bangs deeply believed  in the primal, simplistic elements of rock music (i.e., Iggy and the Stooges). The contrivance, the faux-hurt, the gobs of eye makeup and ironically worn trucker caps that are part and parcel of the emo genre (this means you, Fall Out Boy) would repulse and infuriate the late, great Lester Bangs. And well it should. But Bangs would certainly find some encouragement from bands like The Hold Steady and The Whigs, who hail from Athens, Georgia. Led by Parker Gispert on vocals and guitar but truly propelled by the pounding drums of Julian Dorio, The Whigs quietly offered a salve for that spreading emo rash that broke out on your radio sometime in the early 2000′s. Simple and indelibly catchy, Mission Control is the rock record that Dave Grohl has been unable to make since about 1998. The hooks abound, especially on songs like “Production City,” “Right Hand on My Heart,” and the pounding “Need You Need You.” If the rock ‘n’ roll radio has irritated you in the last year, check out Mission Control and hear the sound of your faith being restored.

8.    Atmosphere, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold – All this talk about Kanye West being the voice of his generation is preposterously premature. The dude is not even the best rapper of this decade and before anyone gets their panties all bunched up, I ask you to at least consider Atmosphere as an alternative. Slug and Ant’s output in the last couple years alone outshines almost everything you can stack it up against – from You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having to Sad Clown, Bad Winter to Strictly Leakage, Atmosphere has made the most compelling hip-hop, often living up to the promise that Sage Francis seems to have squandered. This is especially true on When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold. Slug is rapping over live instruments (sometimes over only an electric guitar, as on “Guarantees”), creating melodies and telling stories in a way that no one else in hip-hop is doing. This year, I had to compare all the hip-hop I heard to When Life Gives You Lemons, and I found everything else to be trifling indeed.

7.  Santogold, Santogold – I don’t think I’ve read a best-album list this year that doesn’t rate Santogold somewhere on it. Santi White has created the kind of virtuoso pop album that only proves that most pop music is in dire need of rethinking. The opener “L.E.S. Artistes” is pure pop followed by “You’ll Find A Way”, a song with Cindi Lauper vocals over Clash music. Santogold dances merrily across genres and shows a versatility that is desperately lacking in most pop artists these days. If only “L.E.S. Artistes” was featured in a Seth Rogen movie trailer, Santi White could lure unsuspecting teenagers to her great album the same way M.I.A. did with “Paper Planes.”

6. The Shaky Hands, Lunglight – The Shaky Hands’ MySpace page hilariously lists their genre as “Hardcore/Grunge/Folk”, but the truth is that their sophomore album Lunglight is a shambolic pop/rock treasure, the sort of thing that might result from Murmur-era R.E.M. trying to recreate Exile on Main Street. Nicholas Delffs is sometimes unintelligible, sometimes croony, and sometimes screaming, sometimes all in the same songs. The highlights include “You’re the Light,” one of the best songs of the year, and “Air Better Come,” among others. Delffs has a great versatility in his singing and he’s helped by a raucous band of musicians, not least of whom is bassist Mayhaw Hoons (yes, that’s the dude’s real name. He’s got like 8 feet of beard and plays the bass like a motherfucker). The Shaky Hands are probably not poised for any kind of commercial success, but they deserve to be; Lunglight is the kind of pop album I would make if I were going to make one. It’s charming, half-broken, and totally awesome.

5. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges – Of all the things Pitchforkmedia was wrong about this year (which, come to think of it, woudl be a pretty awesome year-end list), they were never more wrong than when they panned Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket’s fifth full-length album. Evil Urges starts off with the title track and immediately gives the lie to the suggestion that MMJ are merely aping The Band and other classic rock sounds. “Evil Urges” starts with fierce drums and then Jim James (one of the best singers in rock) comes out of left field with his Prince/Curtis Mayfield vocal, urging us to “dedicate your love/ to any woman or man”. And the awesome doesn’t stop until the end of “Touch Me, I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2″ at the end of the album. My Morning Jacket have, with Evil Urges, transcended genre, pushing their boundaries even further than they did on 2005′s incredible Z. Evil Urges is a strange, beautiful record and the good news is, the kids over at Pitchfork still have time to realize it.

Stay tuned for albums 4 through 1, coming soon to Bollocks!