Well, it’s near enough to the end of the year that some folks who write about music are starting to crap out their annual lists of the best music of 2011. While Pitchfork has yet to weigh in (I hear they’re in the midst of a terrible decimal shortage), the good people at Rolling Stone have declared, presumably on behalf of your parents, that Adele’s 21 is the best album of 2011. Now, I have nothing against Adele; I have heard “Rolling in the Deep” roughly 14,000 times this year and I kinda get why people like her. But I can’t shake the feeling that her success is a sad omen that middle class, middle-aged white people have found someone whose music allows them to say they like “soulful” music without ever having to listen to a black person again. Is that fair? Of course not. But if you want fair, watch baseball. This is the internet, dammit.

And what’s the fucking deal with listing the top 50 albums in a given year anyway? Isn’t that just a cheap way of keeping yourself from making hard decisions about ranking the music to which you listen? I’m all for not ranking your music, by the way; that’s why we here at Bollocks! have a proud tradition of openly mocking Pitchfork’s pretentious decimal system. If you can’t tell how I feel about an album by reading what I wrote, maybe you need to log a few hours in night school. And so what if some other asshole thinks Wild Flag’s totally amazing debut is only the 9th best album of 2011? I can still think it’s forever tied for first with TV On the Radio’s Nine Types of Light and the Handsome Furs’ Sound Kapital, two albums that don’t show up nearly enough on the year-end lists that I’ve read (TV On the Radio was #17 on Rolling Stone’s list and the Handsome Furs were not included).

So far this year, I haven’t seen the Onion A.V. Club’s list of the best music. But then, they don’t think any albums were important this year. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. I don’t think you can always spot an important album when it first comes out. My beloved London Calling was panned by critics in the U.K. when it was released and I regard it is a very important album indeed. Then again, I think we all think differently about what albums are important; to some of the kids I work with, emo “music” is vitally important. No joke – it helps some kids feel like maybe they shouldn’t cut on themselves or try to die before they’re twenty. Now, I happen to think emo is almost hilariously bad music, but I’m not going to deny its importance to some needy kids, as long as they don’t try to convince me it’ll change my life.

Here’s another realization I’ve had in the last twelve months: Coldplay sucks. I know many people out there like Coldplay and that’s fine. Stop reading this if you think it’ll be upsetting. No one here is going to try to “fix you.”

I’m not saying Coldplay is the worst band I’ve ever heard. I just think they suck. And here, in a roundabout way, is what that means: since moving back to Portland, I’ve discovered that my favorite local radio station, 94.7 FM, has basically become just another repetitive, dull station that plays the same twenty songs over and over (excluding the occasional weekend programming that emphasizes a slightly wider variety of artists). That discovery was easy to make because I drive around a lot for work and have been kind of terrible about bringing CDs with me lately. So it happened, over the course of a day, that I heard the new Coldplay single like seven times (what’s it called? Something about paradise. Who cares?). Listening to it, I had the thought that Chris Martin and company probably own some decent albums and they clearly have some idea of what awesome music might sound like. But they are absolutely incapable of actually making awesome music.  Even the melody for this stupid single is hackneyed as hell and Martin delivers it the way a gnat might deliver you a ton of bricks. It’s a clunky, forced affair and I can tune it out easily enough but lately, I have spent a good deal of time wondering how a band that bad at the act of playing music actually became famous. Say what you want about those emo bands some of my clients are into, but nothing I’ve heard from them is as monumentally stupid, lyrically speaking, as “Yellow.” Or “Fix You,” which is about as artful as a bottle of Nyquil.

I want to discuss more music that I liked from 2011 (because I liked a lot of music this year) and I will a little later. Zac, Justin, and I have started a promising email argument about the best music of the year and, while it will in no way end up as a countdown of the 50 best albums of the year, I think it will be pretty hilarious since, so far, it’s mostly been a fun excuse to call each other names and fully revel in the fact that, while a lot of stuff matters a lot, music criticism certainly doesn’t. So don’t sweat it if you like Coldplay or emo (or even “screamo”) – you can find plenty of people who agree with you and, as long as I’m around, at least one person who disagrees.

Why hello there. Did ya miss me? It’s okay to lie.

I haven’t been blogging as much the last couple months because I’ve been going to graduate school for social work, which means I’ve been basically learning how to help people. And, although it might pain us all to admit it, helping people is waaaaaay more important than writing about music. But now I’m on winter break and can start doing really unimportant things like playing Orcs Must Die! and listening to (and writing about) music with the same obsessive glee that spawned this here blarg to begin with.

We’ll get into some year-end madness fairly soon, although what that will look like is still being determined by our general level of ambition. I had the thought today, while Zac, Justin and I were arguing via email about the best albums of the year, that it might be fun to have a drunken podcast wherein we do in person what we did via email. Don’t get too excited – the idea of a Bollocks! podcast has been bandied about before with less-than-tangible results. I’m just saying it’s a thing that might be fun. Like turning on the news without hearing the words “Newt” and “Gingrich” so fucking much. That asshole said Palestinians are an “invented” people. Guess what? Americans are an invented people. As soon as you name your nation and call yourself a member of that nation, you’re part of an invented people. But I can’t expect Na-Ginga (credit for that nickname, I believe, goes to David Letterman) to understand that because he’s a fucking moron.

Speaking of fucking morons (yeah, that’s how I chose to segue back to music talk. You did miss me, didn’t you?), you may recall from last year’s epic, two-part Bollocks! Awards that I handed out an award for being the biggest asshole in music. Well, I don’t know if we’ll do the awards again this year (I think we might), so I thought I’d hand one award out now, just in case. I am completely not surprised at all to be handing the John Mayer Award for Being a Shamelessly Stupid Prat to Korn’s Jonathan Davis.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Davis thinks Barack Obama is “an Illuminati puppet,” which is a pretty good assertion to make if you’re in a band that hasn’t been relevant in twelve years (or good, um, ever) and you need to spark a minor controversy in order to move some units. It’s not even worth debating the (ahem) “facts” of Davis’s statement because to do so might release collateral retardation upon the general public. I’ll just leave it at this: Davis asserts that Obama has made America “the worst it’s ever been,” which is just the sort of thing you might expect to hear from a privileged, wealthy, white rock (ahem ahem) musician. Or, you know, Glenn Beck. I guess Mr. Korn is unaware of how African Americans have been treated throughout this country’s history, or that there was a Great Depression. Look: if you really think things in this country are the worst they’ve ever been and you’re just sitting around making shitty (ahem ahem ahem) dubstep-influenced albums, you should maybe get your priorities in order.

The fact that Davis wrote a song called “Illuminati” to make the assertion that Barack Obama is an Illuminati puppet means one of two things, both of which are pretty bad. One, it means Davis really believes in all that conspiracy bullshit about the Illuminati and that he thinks exposing Obama through (shitty) song is going to blow the lid off of said conspiracy. Or, more likely, Davis wants to sound all anti-establishment and is too fucking lazy to actually find some policy positions with which to disagree with our president. To be clear, I don’t think everyone should like Obama – honestly, I’ve got more important shit to do than worry about whether you voted for the guy I voted for. But Davis’s pseudo-political crap is so mind-bogglingly stupid that the best thing I can hope for is that he’s just a whore and not an idiot.

But Jonathan Davis isn’t done being stupid to promote Korn’s new The Path of Totality. In addition to claiming that Barack Obama is being controlled by… who the fuck are the Illuminati anyway?

Whatever. Who cares?

Anyway, in addition to claiming the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard about Barack Obama, Jonathan Davis has now decided that Korn invented dubstep. I don’t know much about dubstep, but I’m pretty sure Korn didn’t invent it. In fact, I’m pretty sure Korn never invented anything. All they ever did was mix together a bunch of different flavors of mostly rock music and they did that impressively badly. All of their songs sound, to me anyway, like a gorilla trying to rape one of its own turds. To say they invented any genre of music is like buying a box of cake mix, mixing it with feces, and claiming you invented cake.

So for being dumb on a positively Mayer-esque level, the Illuminati and I proud to present Korn’s Jonathan Davis with the freshly-invented John Mayer Award for Being a Shamelessly Stupid Prat.

It’s good to be back.

I know everyone’s got their genitals out for the Kanye West/Jay-Z collaboration, Watch the Throne, but I haven’t even listened to it yet. I’m not saying I won’t like it, mind you – I’ve already found some surprisingly good hip-hop this year and I dug the hell out of Kanye’s last album . I just haven’t made time for Kanye and Mr. Beyoncé and I don’t know if I will for quite some time. I know they’ll get plenty of critical love (the most absurd thing about Pitchfork’s review? Writer Tom Breihan’s confession that he liked Ocean’s Twelve, a movie that crawled so far up its own ass that it couldn’t help but vomit up a shit-stinking, infuriatingly indulgent-yet-lazy-as-fuck ending that makes my eyes want to bleed just thinking about it) and move plenty of units and, even if I love Watch the Throne, I know Jay-Z and Kanye West couldn’t give less of a shit what I think about their album. And rightfully so.

I’m guessing Pharoahe Monch, being a fairly astute dude, also doesn’t give a rat’s ass what I think of his music so I’ll start my review of W.A.R. (which stands for We Are Renegades. I know. I know. But just bear with me, will ya?) with my own confession (in case you couldn’t tell already, there’s no chance that I’m about to admit to liking Ocean’s Twelve): I bought W.A.R. on the first day it was available in Amazon’s digital store because I fucking loved Pharoahe Monch’s 2007 album, Desire. Sorry, that’s not the confession. My confession is that I avoided listening to W.A.R. for months – months - because one song features a collaboration with Citizen Cope, a guy who manages to marry (in a predictably unsuccessful and cringe-inducing fashion) a strong desire to be Bob Dylan to an equally strong desire to be Chuck D. Before I’d heard even a single beat of Pharoahe Monch’s new album, it had inadvertently reminded me that Citizen Cope is allowed to make music for a living in an economy where some people have no job at all. So I shunned W.A.R. for a while, fearing the worst.

Which was, admittedly, a dumb thing to do.

Citizen Cope’s (thankfully non-rapping) cameo on W.A.R. is not great, but Cope avoids fucking up the entire album and that’s the nicest thing I’m ever going to write about him (unless he announces his retirement from music tomorrow). Goofy abbreviated title notwithstanding, W.A.R. is always good and often great, which is in accordance with my expectations for Pharoahe Monch, who I think might be one of the most underrated rappers working right now (by his own admission, on “Calculated Amalgamation,” Monch claims to have “raised the bar so high/ the bar’s afraid to look down”).

There’s a loose sort of concept behind W.A.R. that has something to do with some soldier in 2023 finding some hidden information in Afghanistan that reveals the nefarious plot of some ill-defined evil organization that presumably started the war (and maybe some other wars) in order to facilitate that most dreaded of all conspiracy tropes, the one-world government that just totally oppresses the shit out of everyone. You can completely ignore this concept while listening to W.A.R. and you’ll do just fine. In fact, Monch spends more of the album at war with mainstream hip-hop (both in sound and fashion – at one point during album highlight “Let My People Go,” he admonishes the hip-hop youth to pull their pants up) than anything else, which is just fine with me.

The thing I’ve loved most about Pharoahe Monch since the first time I heard him is his voice, both as a writer and the actual vocal tone of his rhymes. Dude’s voice sounds like a hot, buttered saxophone and, whether he’s delivering a bare-knuckled verbal beatdown to an inferior MC or preaching about the understandably uneasy relationship African-Americans still have with our police and/or government, his rhymes are compelling, intense, and sometimes just fucking hilarious. There are a couple great guest performances, most notably by Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, Jill Scott, and Ms. Jean Grae who is the second highest ranking member of my Make Another Fucking Album Already! Club (behind Santigold). Grae’s verse on “Assassins” is phenomenal and it’s just one of the ways in which W.A.R. overcomes its wonky concept and guest shot from Citizen Cope.

Should I have known better than to doubt Pharoahe Monch’s greatness, even given the presence of the aforementioned dopey Cope? Probably. But, assuming your reading comprehension is above about a first grade level, you’ve probably gleaned by now that W.A.R. is far from perfect, even if CC is the album’s most glaring weak spot. The concept, though easily ignored, isn’t even half baked and if there’s one thing I like more than an easy to ignore, half-assed concept, it’s the lack of such bullshit in the first place. The actual songs on W.A.R. are just fine on their own, especially for people who dug Desire as much as I did. But without its wisp of a concept, W.A.R. would simply be a collection of funk, soul, and gospel-tinged, wonderfully old-school rap tunes from a guy whose skills easily eclipse those of his better-known peers. And I think that would certainly be enough.

Yesterday, when I was listening to Shabazz Palaces’ rather remarkable new album on Spotify, my enjoyment of Ishamel Butler’s spaced out hip-hop was interrupted by a commercial for a song by someone with the unlikely name of Victoria Justice. That song was called “My Best Friend’s Brother” and I alluded to it in my review of Black Up knowing full well that it was going to end up here eventually. Because without a doubt, “My Best Friend’s Brother” is one of the worst songs I have ever heard. I don’t know who Victoria Justice is, but I do know that she needs to be stopped.

And yes, I’m well aware that this music isn’t being made for people like me (that is, people who have any kind of discerning taste whatsoever), but Spotify clearly isn’t aware of that fact because they fucking advertised this piece of shit right into my earholes when I was trying to listen to some groovy, laid back hip-hop. So if this makes your tween-ager weep, blame Spotify. And then stop letting your fucking kids read Bollocks!.

“My Best Friend’s Brother” starts off with the kind of produced-until-lifeless synth and guitar riffs (over programmed drums, no less) that have backed every teenage pop track since Britney first demanded that you hit her, baby, one more time. It’s a formula that has been vile since its inception but it’s hardly the most stupefying thing about this particular song.

The thing I find the most baffling about “My Best Friend’s Brother” is its central premise. I just don’t see what’s so taboo about having the hots for your best friend’s sibling. If Ms. Justice was jonesing for her best friend’s boyfriend (or girlfriend maybe), I could see a conflict. But it’s not like Justice’s best friend is fucking her own brother, so what’s the problem? Is the brother in question a notorious brute who likes to beat the shit out of women (the song says he’s a “punk rock drummer” but I’m guessing Victoria Justice and I disagree vehemently about who is and who is not a punk rock drummer)? The song never bothers to say why exactly Justice’s best friend would object to the relationship, which makes Justice’s love seem about as forbidden as brushing your teeth.

And of course, the video has a stupid fucking dance that goes along with the chorus and said dance actually features a part where Justice motions for the hearer of her dirty little secret to keep mum about it in front of her best friend! So if you watch the video, you will see Victoria Justice attempting to be coy, in a completely Disney-fied way, about something that really doesn’t need to be a secret to begin with and then punching a truck-sized hole (with a dance!) in her own secret plot.

I get that a lot of this teenage Disney shit (I know, because the internet just told me, that “My Best Friend’s Brother” is from something called Victorious, which is a Nickelodeon show, but you get what I mean here) is fundamentally retarded but before you suggest that it shouldn’t matter to me as a functional, devilishly handsome adult with diverse interests and tastes, let me tell you why it should matter to all of us. The underlying message of the success of your Miley Cyruses (who is herself no stranger to our Worst Songs feature), Hillary Duffs, and Victoria Justices is that our kids are fucking stupid. At this juncture, it’s pointless to debate whether they were fucking stupid from the outset or if it is in fact a culture that allows not only Miley Cyrus but her bemulleted scumbag of a father to be (ahem) successful (ahem ahem) musicians that has made them (and perhaps all of us) fucking stupid. Many of us (well, many of you, parents) accept as an immutable fact the idea that our kids will like low-quality dreck when it comes to music (and movies and television) and that it’s just dandy to allow them to consume this shit so long as they keep their mouths shut and bring home a fridge-worthy homework assignment once in a while. But let me ask you this: would you let your kid consume cheeseburgers or Chocodiles with the same degree of passivity? I mean, clearly some of you would because we have an obesity epidemic in this country. But surely most of you (I’d like to think only good parents read Bollocks!. I happen to know a few awesome ones who do) would not allow your kid to consume terrible food the same way they consume culture that is absolutely designed to keep them tugging your pant leg for newest cutesy bullshit to be burned to disc. So I have to ask: why don’t we care about our kids’ cultural consumption as much as we do about their caloric consumption?

It seems to me that we’re only fighting half the battle if we’re working so hard to get our kids to exercise and eat right and then allowing them to poison their brains with shit like “My Best Friend’s Brother.” What good is a healthy body if it houses a mind turned to sludge by auto-tuned, assembly-line music that’s created to get you to tune into (and buy the shitty trademarked merchandise of) vapid, thoughtless television shows? And if you think your kid is somehow incapable of “getting” better music than can be found on Victorious or Hanna fucking Montana, then you’re implying that you agree with Disney and Nickelodeon and Mattel and most major record labels that your kid is fucking stupid. But hey; maybe your kid is fucking stupid. I don’t know. But it seems like exposing them to stuff like “My Best Friend’s Brother” is only gonna make it worse.

And yes, of course, this is ‘Merica and we have a constitutional right to be completely fucking stupid but if you find yourself using that defense for our most inexcusable cultural excesses, I don’t know that you’ve got anything worth defending. We’ve spent the last two hundred years finding better, faster ways to become physically, emotionally, and intellectually unhealthy and it hasn’t exactly borne us any useful fruit. For those of you who want a better future for your kids, why not start by making sure that your kids are just as culturally fit as they are physically fit? Why not create higher demand for intelligent, artful children’s culture (it exists, you know. Read a Shel Silverstein book) instead of relying on cable networks to pump our kids full of brain-dead crap like “My Best Friend’s Brother”? We can do this, America. We’re like the 23rd or 24th best country in the world and we can do anything if we put our minds to it!

In the early days of Bollocks! (when we updated about as frequently as we have been the last two weeks. We’re working on it, I promise), I sometimes felt guilty for never having listened to bands or artists whose names are repeatedly dropped in circles of People Who Know Shit About Music. For instance, I have still never heard a single Guided By Voices song. But I do own one Robert Pollard record. Guided By Voices fans might be quick to suggest I’ve missed out on something special, but there’s also a kind of advantage in hearing something like Pollard’s We All Got Out of the Army without being able to make the default comparison to his old legendary gig. I don’t know how legendary Digable Planets were, but I’ve heard their name mentioned by every trustworthy hip-hop aficionado I’ve spoken to in the last decade or so. I still haven’t listened to them and yet here I am blasting Black Up, the new record by former Digable Planet Ishmael Butler, released under the name Shabazz Palaces. 

The first thing you’re likely to notice about Black Up is that it’s an almost willfully obtuse album. The song titles are pretentious on a level that would make Conor Oberst blush and the beats are generally free of both boom and bap, preferring instead to wander over jazz-inflected bass lines, glitchy electronics, and exquisitely sung female backing vocals. Shabazz Palaces’ defenders might call these songs “spacious” and I’m inclined to agree with the assessment. In terms of sheer musical imagination, Black Up is like a sparse cousin to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, although Ishmael Butler buries his pop sensibilities a little deeper than Kanye does.

I first tried to listen to this album in my car but, with the sound of road noise, other cars, and a crazy woman telling everyone to go to hell as she crossed against a traffic signal (happened to me on my way to work the other day), it just didn’t grab me. As I write this, I’m listening to Black Up on my headphones and it fares a lot better this way. My head is full of every nuance of these beats (and let’s face it: a lot of hip-hop, especially the mainstream stuff, is desperately lacking in nuance) and I’m hearing melodies in the instrumental parts that were completely lost in my car’s shitty factory-issue sound system (I’m never gonna be the guy next to you whose throbbing bass is shaking your fillings loose, but I wouldn’t object to a car stereo that can give me a little more bang for my sonic buck, both on albums like Black Up and, say, Minor Threat’s Complete Discography or Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. I’m talking about clarity of sound here, not just bowel-jiggling bass).

The lyrics, in part because of Butler’s slight voice, tend to drift up from below the surface of the music, but there are some great moments here. “Youlogy,” which also has the least pretentious title on the album, features a line that I love: “The money always fools ya/ so corny’s gettin’ cooler” (the line was particularly resonant with me when I was listening to the album on Spotify because it was interrupted by a commercial for some song called “My Best Friend’s Brother” which is apparently all the rage among the Disney kids these days. The nicest thing I can say about that fucking song is that it is corny). Butler proves to have a subtle but biting wit throughout Black Up but it may take you a while to notice it through the fog of clicks, hisses, and snapping beats. The album ostensibly has battle rap tunes (“Yeah You”) and party songs (“Recollections of the Wraith”) but they’re presented in a way that reveals Butler to be a tireless tester of traditional song structures. It may be cliché to say that Black Up is like no other rap album I’ve heard, but it’s also the truth. Maybe Madvillainy is close.

Fans of more traditional hip-hop (even stuff like Atmosphere or Pharoahe Monch, whose new album is pretty good despite a guest appearance by the completely unnecessary Citizen Cope) might find Black Up a little baffling or possibly even a little infuriating at first and the real test of whether or not you’re gonna like it is the amount of time you’re willing to spend getting to know it. It’s taken me about a month of steady listening to finally decide I like the record and that might be a bit too much time for others to put in when they can get instant gratification elsewhere.

One of the questions I struggled with before Black Up completely won me over was whether or not it was possible to recognize something as an innovative, impressive piece of art and still not be all that enthusiastic about it. I think that’s basically how my wife feels about John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, an album that I fucking love. Obviously, it depends on the individual listener, but I decided that I definitely can. It wasn’t hard for me to understand immediately that Shabazz Palaces was doing something special with Black Up (hip-hop songs with distinct movements!) but I came to that conclusion well before I developed any desire to listen to the album for pleasure. As it is, I’m finding it pretty enjoyable on my headphones while it’s raining outside (maybe because Butler is a Seattlite), but it’s going to be hard-pressed to work its way into my party mix. It’s just not that kind of album to me. I guess what I’m saying is that whereas a lot of hip-hop albums are made to be consumed as loudly and publicly as possible, Black Up feels like a secret whispered in your ear and set to some wonderfully whack beats.

I was going to do a Worst Songs I Have Ever Heard entry on “Got It All” by Portugal. The Man, but I have a bit of a past with that band. Well, more specifically, I had a run-in a couple years ago with some of their more undignified fans and I don’t want to be seen as trolling anyone here. But this is my fucking blog and I’m not going to let the possible wrath of a few rabid wingnuts dictate what I do and don’t talk about.

So here’s the thing: since I’ve moved to Portland, I’ve heard Period The Used Incorrectly’s new hit single, “Got It All” like a billion times on the radio and I’m sick of it. I know someone is going to say, “Change the channel,” and I frequently do, but sometimes my wife likes to put the radio on (she doesn’t always love the CDs that are in my car) and we mostly enjoy the offerings of 94.7 FM when we’re driving around our new/old stomping grounds. So even given my comparatively rare time spent listening to the radio, “Got It All” is taking up too fucking much of it.

In all honesty, “Got It All” is not one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. When considered alongside utter pieces of shit like Kid Rock’s “Amen” or pretty much anything by George Thorogood, “Got It All” is fairly musically inoffensive. But I find it troubling for two reasons.

First – and we’ll just mention this one and then let it go, thanks – the song, like much of their Satanic Satanist album, still sounds actionably (in a legal sense) close to MGMT’s first record (angry PTM fans please note: I am not saying that I think MGMT is original in any sense of the word. I am merely pointing out that Portugal. The Man seems to like to sound like them. And if you’re going to use the “all music is derivative” defense, pretend I’ve heard it a million times and don’t bother showing up). People still seem to like it and that’s their right. Some people like Brussels sprouts.

My second and largest beef with “Got It All” is the fear it instills in me that songs like this are going to be what passes for “substantive” now and perhaps for long time from now. If you’ve managed to avoid this song so far in 2011, you lucky sods, the chorus is, “We got it all/ until the revolution comes,” which I assume is intended to assert that our current moments of luxury, perhaps spent listening to and/or dissing Portugal. The Man, are tenuous at best. I don’t dislike that idea, but it’s delivered in a trope that’s so played out that it has become a crutch. “Got It All” makes me realize that the word “revolution” needs to be voluntarily banished from the vocabularies of thinking people for the foreseeable future. Portugal. The Man makes no attempt to describe this revolution that is coming and they neither oppose nor endorse it. If anything, the chorus seems preemptively wistful about the loss of the titular “it all.”

Lyrically, the song seems to be yearning for some kind of idealistic change and – again – that’s a fine goal. But – also again – the delivery leaves something to be desired. I am not suggesting that every song written now has to be substantive (Billy Bragg is saying that and I love him for it), but “Got It All” is clearly trying to be substantive and I feel like I’m going to be in the minority for observing that it fails miserably. I can already hear kids nodding along to this song and going, “Yeah, man. ‘Revolution’” without ever having any real concept of the word. If you’ve paid attention to the news since last spring, there are people all around the world seeking real meaning to the word “revolution” and some of them are giving up their lives on that journey. The meaning of “revolution” as it appears in American pop culture is miles away from what it means to people in Egypt and Libya right now and that renders the word’s repeated use in “Got It All” all the more shallow. Portugal. The Man, many of the people who listen to their music, and most other Americans (myself included) really do have it all in comparison and we all know by now that a revolution isn’t fucking coming. And if one does come to America, the evidence is overwhelming that it won’t be the one we need.

Portugal. The Man clearly knows how to write (or borrow) a catchy melody and that’s a power that can be used to inspire incredible things (read Billy Bragg’s article about the profound effect the Clash had on him if you want to know what I’m talking about). What if “Got It All” actually got down to brass tacks and talked about what kind of revolution was going to come and take away “it all?” Even better, what if they discussed their feelings about the having of “it all?” Perhaps they welcome the surrender of “it all” in order to change the world for the better? We’ll never know because they never say. Generalities sell more records (another theme hit upon by Mr. Bragg, right before he writes, “Joe Strummer is spinning in his grave”) because they offend fewer people. It’s every band’s right to say nothing if they want, but I’m also well within my rights to piss and moan when they dress it up like it’s something.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was spending my time complaining to you about unforgivably shitty love songs, many of which were perpetrated by Peter Cetera. Well, it’s a bit too easy to just sit here and rage against songs like “Glory of Love” without offering some viable alternatives. I mean, there have to be good love songs out there, right?

The answer is “yes.” There are several. And they are the subject of this Lazy Friday Mix.

The first decent love song that I can think of whenever I stop to think about awesome love songs is “Be Mine” from R.E.M.’s vastly underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Over what is arguably the finest guitar playing moment of Peter Buck’s career, Michael Stipe sings lines like, “I wanna be your Christmas tree” with such beautiful sincerity that you forgive their inherent cheesiness. With a simple refrain of  ”you and me,” this song is and always will be my favorite R.E.M. tune.

My favorite accident at my wedding last year was the fact that, by complete playlist coincidence, I walked down the aisle to “Picture in a Frame” by Tom Waits. Waits wrote it for his wife and he says everything anyone needs to say when he sings, “I’m gonna love you/ ’til the wheels come off” and if you don’t get the true fucking love of that line, you need to listen to this song until you do.

So far, we’ve been talking about pretty sentimental (but still beautiful) love songs. But what about songs that are designed to turn up the heat a little? “Lover’s Day” by TV On the Radio is the best song about fucking (“I’m gonna keep you/ weak in the knees” is among the tamer lines) that has been recorded in the last ten years (“I’m gonna take you/ I’m gonna shake you/ I’m gonna make you cum” is less tame). I could talk about the catchy melody or the awesome horn part (haha, “horn part”), but if you weren’t checking out the song based on my assertion that it’s a great song for the getting of it on, there’s no point trying to woo you with the pure musical aesthetics of the thing.

Sam Cooke had one of those voices that is best described as iconic, to the point that I literally don’t understand the concept of not liking his music. His “Wonderful World” is a classic oldie, the sort of thing that will even get the old folks out on the dance floor and the sentiment is cute without being too precious to be tolerated (a lesson, among many, that John Mayer could stand to learn).

Badass woman Ani DiFranco wrote a pretty realistic but lovely love song for her partner, Mike Napolitano. It’s a tune called “Way Tight” and it sweetly points out how she and Napolitano “get this crazy combination/ of everything and nothing right.” One of the song’s many strengths is that it would rather stick to the romantic facts than toss out platitudes like, “I will never let you down” (Incidentally, my wife and I have been watching a lot of Mad Men lately and one character says to Don Draper, “I will never, ever let you down,” to which John Slattery’s character replies, “Jesus, Campbell. Don’t ever say that.” It’s one of my favorite moments in the show so far). There’s no pedestal upon which a lover can be placed in “Way Tight,” and that’s a good thing – it’s about loving someone for everything they are, even the stuff that drives you fucking nuts.

I’ve mentioned a few times in the last year or so that “We Can Get Together” by The Hold Steady is, to my ears, a pretty sweet song. It’s all about that line, “Heaven is whenever/ we can get together,” which I guess doesn’t just have to apply to romantic situations. But it sure as hell can be applied to romantic situations and has been on at least a few occasions in my life.

Speaking of “In My Life,” I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this Beatles classic on a list of great love songs. Like Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame” and the aforementioned Hold Steady line, “In My Life” boils down to one simple, beautiful declaration: “In my life/ I love you more.” And that melody is one of the best the Beatles ever recorded, which is saying something indeed.

Have you heard “Tender” by Blur? If not, why not? It’s a love song with a heaping forkful of gospel thrown in for good measure and it’s wonderfully vague. Rather than composing a love song for a specific lover, Blur went ahead and wrote a love song to love. And it’s fucking awesome.

On the dancey, catchy, and totallyblissful It’s Blitz, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs did something I didn’t think was possible: they took a horrifyingly cloying line from Jerry Maguire (“You complete me”) and worked it into a beautiful pop love song called “Hysteric.” Karen O is one of the best vocalists in rock right now and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ albums show that she’s just as comfortable screaming like a banshee on PCP as she is cooing like a dove.

If you like your precious music super precious, you might find “VCR” by The XX to be sugary-yet-simple delight about watching movies on outmoded pieces of technology and thinking that you and your true love are “the best thing.” I tend to favor DVDs myself, but I happen to believe that my wife and I, as a couple, are probably the best thing. It’s a matter of perspective.

When I worked overnight for Target the first time (it’s a long story; well, not a long story but definitely a boring story), we used to listen to shitty radio stations while we neatly arranged diapers and douches on the store shelves and no matter which shitty radio station we were listening to, they always seemed to feature some late night dedication/request show. One night, a lady called in and dedicated, “with love,” the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” to her husband. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song. But it’s a fucking terrible love song (see the title for proof). My point here is that she should’ve chosen “All I Want is You” in which Bono talks about all the stuff his girl wants when all he can think of for his Christmas list is her.

I’m pleased to tell you that I had no trouble whatsoever coming up with this list; there are tons of great love songs out there by a wide variety of totally badass performers, which is all the more reason we should pile our derision mighty high on shitty songs like “Glory of Love” and pretty much everything else Peter Cetera ever did.

I haven’t been posting as much as I would like the last few days because my wife and I have been busy packing up our shitty Van Nuys apartment and driving from L.A. up to Oregon, where we are now slowly unpacking and enjoying our vastly superior Gresham apartment (some people here in the Portland metro area have a fundamentally low opinion of Gresham; I assume this is because they’ve never lived in Van Nuys). We took a leisurely two days driving up from Los Angeles and over that period, I was guided by some totally awesome road-tripping music, which I thought would make a great topic for my first official Oregon Bollocks! post. I don’t remember every album I listened to on the way up, but I remember most of them and why they felt like the album to listen to when I selected them.

I do remember starting off the trip with the ultra-sexy 25th Anniversary edition of Lifes Rich Pageant by R.E.M., chosen for its energetic pop awesomeness. Listening to the opening guitar riff to “Begin the Begin” as I pulled away from the old apartment for the last time felt like diving into a pool of cool blue water (then surfacing and driving a thousand miles).

Somewhere on the drive up, I realized that I hadn’t listened to the National’s High Violet in a long time, which is a travesty. High Violet was my favorite album of 2010 (a year which was an absolute boon for awesome music) and it still holds up. Flying down the highway at 75 miles per hour while rocking out to “Bloodbuzz Ohio” is a pretty satisfying way to take a road trip.

Somewhere in the fuckall nothingness between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, we hit some construction that constricted Interstate 5 (“The Five,” to my L.A. people) down to one lane going north. I decided, slowing to a crawl and gazing out at the dirt and more dirt, it was time for some kind of weird, semi-obnoxious jazz. I selected Marc Ribot’s Spiritual Unity, which is his tribute to and/or reinterpretation of the music of saxophonist Albert Ayler. Ribot didn’t disappoint me – Spiritual Unity is a messy, skronking, noisy blast of jazzy awesomeness that sounds like the players were pounding White Russians and just making noise in a garage. As I listened, I could imagine my good friend Tim, who played with me in Radical Edward and worked with me at Tower Records in Boston, sitting in the passenger seat, screwing his face up in disgust, and asking, “What the the fuck is this shit?” He’s not a big fan of instrumental music.

It was kinda hard to select a follow-up to Marc Ribot’s insane jazz orgy, so I paged through my CD wallet (one of three that made the trip with me – I was not wanting for variety on the drive up) until something grabbed my attention. My instincts led me to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album I was surprised to like the first time I heard it. It’s still a pretty awesome hip-hop album although I’m not sure it will compel me to check out West’s collaboration with Jay-Z.

When my sister died in 2008, I drove up to Oregon for her memorial and, on that trip, I began something of a road trip tradition: I listened to every Hold Steady album in chronological order. I don’t do this with my wife in the car, because she doesn’t like the Hold Steady as much as I do (or at all. And let’s face it: very few people like the Hold Steady as much as I do). But she was with the dog in her car, bouncing along the highway ahead of me (I let her set the pace for the trip because her car is a 1994 Corolla that has crossed the country twice in the last seven years) so I took the opportunity to start with Almost Killed Me and end with Heaven is Whenever, an album that was not as lauded by the critics as it should have been. It’s a great fucking record and the Hold Steady is a great fucking band and that’s all there is to it.

I think My Morning Jacket might be the quintessential road trip band among bands that are working right now (maybe tied with the Hold Steady). This year’s Circuital is pretty compelling evidence; I wound my way through the curving hills of Southern Oregon while shouting along to songs like “Holdin’ On to Black Metal” and crooning along with “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” which might be the sweetest song of 2011.

It wasn’t a large leap to go from My Morning Jacket to the Band, whose self-titled sophomore album is, along with its predecessor, Music from Big Pink, one of the all time classics of broken-ass music.

I’m telling you about these albums in the order that I remember them, not in the order I listened to them. As I was just writing about The Band, I remembered that I actually listened to two albums between Circuital and the Band’s second album. The first one was Neko Case’s excellent 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. I have gushed and gushed about Neko Case and 2009′s Middle Cyclone, but it’s worth noting that Fox Confessor is a titanic offering of beautiful, haunting music.

After Neko Case, I popped in Bob Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks, which might someday eclipse Highway 61 Revisited as my favorite Dylan album. Highway 61 has “Desolation Row,” which is my favorite Dylan tune (goddamn you in the face, My Chemical Romance) but Blood On the Tracks is probably the better album from start to finish. You get Sardonic Clown Dylan, Bitter Romantic Dylan, and Awesome Storytelling Dylan in very balanced doses on this album. Yes, there are people who are gonna whinge about how they don’t like his voice, but those people can – to be perfectly blunt – suck it. Blood On the Tracks is a fucking classic and if you don’t like the singing, go crawl into a hole with your Josh Groban and your pretty notes and you’ll never learn anything cool about life.

Come to think of it, it was even less of a leap to go from Bob Dylan to the Band than it would’ve been to go from My Morning Jacket to the Band. I still hold out hope that My Morning Jacket will just record an awesome album of nothing but Band covers, but I know the odds are against it.

As I drove through Stockton, California, I couldn’t resist putting on Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, but this was actually the least rewarding listening experience of my entire drive. I’m not saying the album has grown off of me or anything, it just felt forced. That’s more my fault than it is Pavement’s though, and “Unfair” still fucking kills.

I was somewhere just south of Portland, maybe near Wilsonville, when I popped in Menomena’s out-fucking-standing Mines, an album that rivals the last two TV On the Radio albums for sheer sonic awesomeness. I loved this album immediately and I might love it more now than I did when I first heard it.

We stayed the night at a friend’s house in Beaverton because the power was not yet on in our new apartment. As we drove from Beaverton to the new place on the east side, the only album I could think of to listen to was The Soft Bulletin, which is widely (and correctly) regarded as the Flaming Lips’ best album. It has that perfect sense of victory, summer thrills, and a tinge of melancholy that I have to admit I feel about all the cool folks I left behind in Los Angeles. Mostly though, I’m fucking thrilled to be back in the northwest. Once I get my shit together here and start my job (and school – Sweet Zombie Jesus, I start school in a month!), Bollocks! will get back to a more regular rhythm of rocking your face with reviews of music and shows and stuff like that. Also, there are rumors emerging of a monthly podcast. Now that all three permanent Bollocks! staffers are in the same state, anything can happen.

War Widow

2011 Coming Home Records

War Widow

Typically when I pick a record to write about there’s an overall idea woven in to give you, the reader, something more than a standard track-by-track report of what I heard and why (or why not) you should hear it, too. I sincerely wrestled with this review for about a week because, while War Widow is easily a great album, it seems to exist absent of context. At least to me.

What that means is War Widow, though having ties to known artists (Mellowdrone), seem to have appeared, fully formed and confident, out of nowhere. I’m not saying that a band can’t keep the garage door shut until they’re good and ready but in their case the aggressive mystique of the band seems to enter the room a few seconds before the music. War Widow’s website, and by proxy their overall visual vibe, is dark, self-consciously edgy and littered with disjointed S&M detritus. Like the shy kid you knew from 8th grade who suddenly became Goth in 9th grade and had a meticulously developed “dark” persona that revolved mostly around Scott Walker lyrics, scowling through his hair and scratching anarchy symbols into the legs of his giant black cargo pants with a hobby knife, War Widow appear to be trying to impress upon you just how dangerous their music is with contrasty images of women in bondage poses and cat fangs and generic religious iconography. In point of fact guitarist Eric Blackwell said of singer JP Russell’s lyrics “It’s like being raped while you sleep….by a muppet.” If that doesn’t set a lofty precedent then I don’t know what does.

Now, granted, War Widow IS edgy, dark and more than a little skeezy but you get that in spades from the music itself. Despite the point of this review being to extol the appeal of that music, something about the band’s image is coloring how I choose to go about talking them up. The music is certainly awesome; the music is big, grindy and not afraid to grope you in public. It’s got the aural dry-hump sleaze of Queens of the Stone Age (“Good to Go”) with the b-movie gothic synth menace of Mellowdrone (“Heaven”) wrapped up in the fuzzed-out swagger of T Rex (“One Finger”). So, yeah, it’s got a lot going for it. War Widow have really, truly crafted a great rock record and it sounds great loud, as great rock should. It’s layered and thick with a dreamy, lucid slant which fits well with their whole decadent, goth/libertarian image. Russell’s voice has an air of detached amusement and a sinister sweetness like a smiling cult leader who’s got malice just below the surface. Tracks like “Tear It Up” and “Holy Roller” amble at an ax-murderer’s pace; slowly but persistently so no matter how fast you run it’s always just a room away. The music does a great job of being everything the band wants to appear to be all on its own.

So why can’t that be enough? I’m speculating here but I don’t really think the guys in War Widow are the deviants their image implies they are; I’m sure they’ve got families and houses and cars and pay their bills and sort their recycling like everyone else. Shit, even the guys from Insane Clown Posse wash of their ridiculous make up and sit down to eat dinner with their kids from time to time. Maybe I’m just getting old but the whole rock star image, that sexually charged, dangerous outsider, is-he-gonna-rock-me-or-rape-me thing is more or less worthless in comparison to the music. A scuffed up  image of a girl deep-throating a crucifix doesn’t make the album sound better and it doesn’t improve the image of the musicians in my mind. I’d be fine knowing that War Widow are three guys about my age wearing t-shirts and jeans playing music in a rented practice space. I was never really a huge fan of Metallica but when I saw images of them recording, James Hetfield wearing reading glasses, Kirk Hammett without product in his hair, Lars… well Lars still looked like a douchebag but the point is seeing those guys as actual people made the music BETTER for me. I was under no assumption that Metallica lived in an abandoned machine shop living on rock and eating only what they killed. For some the carefully crafted image of a band might enhance their appreciation for them, and in some cases (namely mid-90′s U2) it can work to add a layer of charisma and theatrics that you didn’t know was there. And I’m not saying War Widow are huge phonies on the level of, say, Lady Gaga or Marilyn Manson but they’re definitely trying to sell an image and I don’t think they need it.

So I suppose the theme of this review is that image isn’t everything and often times isn’t even necessary. If a band can rip out a thoroughly good album like War Widow then that’s enough for me. If I pull back the curtain and see something that resembles myself? Well, really that’s exactly what I’m looking for. Anything else is just deceptive marketing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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