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Bee Gees

I remember discovering a copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in my parents' pile of old LPs when I was about eight or nine, one of the many copies that was bought and played on a compulsory basis in 1977 and neglected after the widely-reported "death" of disco. At this point, well-worn copies of the Fever soundtrack are much rarer than near mint ones.

The sleeve caught my attention well before the music. The clothes enthralled me to the point where they were more like alien curios than the outdated styles of 20 years prior. And at the center of this sartorial archaeology stood the Bee Gees, looking like intergalactic deities guarding the secret of their powerful, unearthly falsetto harmonies as Travolta strains to touch his idols like the hand of Adam reaching out to God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Holy, thy name is Gibb.




It's a rare Bee Gees hit from this era that doesn't rely on a Barry Gibb lead vocal. The group's calling card, "Stayin' Alive," is synonymous with disco itself despite being a poor representation of the aims of the vast majority of disco songs. In a genre primarily used to score continuous stretches of two very popular and spontaneous forms of cardiovascular exercise, "Alive" is a sideways commentary about dancing while enduring unemployment, urban decay, and other ungroovy things.. Though I'm still confused about the meaning of lyrics like "We can try/to understand/the New York Times' affect on man," I do know that they are deeper than required for a goddamn club song. Of the Fever hits, "You Should Be Dancing" does the best job of equating dancing and sex, but the Bee Gees never seemed to embrace gitter-ball hedonism like the true progenitors of the disco scene. Would you get excited about dancing to a song called "Tragedy"?








The brothers Gibb were probably one of the first groups to apply real pop songcraft to the extended-play dance workout and reap the spoils accordingly. But the flip side of re-defining disco was having that privilege wrested away from them almost immediately and being forever equated with cheesy outfits, dancing hopelessly flailing coke fiends, and vacuous narcissists. That's why "How Deep Is Your Love" has always stood out to me as a respite from the emotional thunder, a low-key R&B number comparable to the Bee Gees' earlier, more sentimental pop hits like "I Started A Joke." The Gibbs nearly had the memory of their early career entirely wiped out by their later success, but songs like "How Deep Is Your Love" remind us that they always knew what they were doing, even when things got out of control.

Beck

The darling of the postmodern age, Mr. Bek David Campbell was once the definition of American post-grunge "alternative," inasmuch it was difficult to describe what sort of music he was creating. Rock, funk, electro-folk, hip-hop sampling, ironic rapping - you never quite knew what to expect from a Beck album. He's more straightforward these days and seemingly in a rush to look like Tom Petty circa 1989, but I cut him a lot of slack. He's earned it.

Ah, the youthful monkeyshines of "Loser," a head-scratching number that combines a raga beat with trailer park imagery and a Spanish-language hook. It sounds like a laconic version of the Beastie Boys who traded in their brass monkeys for Budweisers.





People call "Loser" a 'slacker anthem' but that's a misnomer. It's more like a working-class slimeball anthem, a self-aware "here I am, poor and weird, and what are you going to do about it?" It's a sentiment all but lost on the radio after the alternative boom, and now we have to listen to Bruno Mars whining about how he wants to be a billionaire so frickin' bad. Mellow Gold is likewise comfortable in its own skin, a collection of trashy folkie sludge composed amongst imaginary swaps of flies and pyramids of empty beer cans.





Along come the Dust Brothers on Odelay, helping Beck fashion the hillbilly rock-rap on Mellow Gold into a hip, crowd-pleasing musical collage, an approach that spawned hits like "Devils Haircut" and "Where It's At." Call it a second, more commercially successful pass at Paul's Boutique. Odelay also sees Beck still showing his "Loser" roots on the soulful "Jack-ass"; the braying donkey at the end lets you know he hasn't lost his sense of humor.





The Odelay formula basically set Beck up for life, but it also typecast him as a deadpan white rapper, someone to be trotted out to make your movie or TV show soundtrack seem kooky and hip. His resistance to this only made him more fascinating to watch as he tried on a variety of stylistic hats - the hair-raising funk of Midnite Vultures, the darkroom philosophy of The Information, the deep audio pleasures of Modern Guilt (...and garage rock revival on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World OST, but that's another post).

Vultures separates itself from the rest of Beck's genre-shifting partially because it's shockingly masterful throwback to Ohio Players and Funkadelic and Prince, and partially because it contains "Mixed Bizness," the song that turned me on to American alternative in the seventh grade. Though I was mostly unaware of him at the time, Beck's performance of "Bizness" at the 2000 American Music Awards completely transfixed me. Gas masks, superhero capes, sit-ups, crazy skinny man dancing - it was the coolest thing I had ever seen on television. The music video only ups the ante.





The oddest thing about Midnite Vultures is that, like a discofied Ziggy Stardust, this was a one-and-done version of Beck. But damn, that record gave us so much greatness like "Nicotine and Gravy" and "Debra" and the "Sexx Laws" video featuring kitchen appliances fornicating in the presence of Jack Black. What a magical time.





The divergent Mutations (a title he should have saved for the greatest hits comp) really sounds like a transition album, its nascent introspection ("Nobody's Fault But My Own") not fitting with the leftovers from Odelay ("Diamond Bollocks"). However, it foreshadowed a mood that Beck would perfect four years later on Sea Change.

A superior breakup album from a normally playful artist, Sea Change can be a painful listen. Inspired by the ugly end of Beck's nine-year relationship with his then-fiancée, it isn't the thinly veiled vitriol of pop kiss-offs from the likes of Taylor Swift or Justin Timberlake, but it doesn't nibble around the edges either. Beck makes sadness interesting by refusing to write straight-up weepies and instead adorns the songs with little synth whorls and his groaning baritone. Even his pain has an evolved sense of musicality.





"Little One" threatens 'In the sea change/Nothing is safe' and portends a creative revolution, if not personal ruin, so it's fitting that Beck's next move was to bring it all back home with Guero.

Coming of age after "Loser" and Odelay, it is somewhat inevitable that I consider Guero Beck's finest album. Reunited with the Dust Brothers, he throws together all the styles and influences he's played with to create one whopper of a record packed with wit, nostalgia, and just plain cool ideas. It has astounding replayability despite its overexposure (the Guerolito remix album, the 8-bit Hell Yes EP) and having perhaps a few tracks too many - still, you can go 11 deep and pick any one of them as a fan favorite.

Los Angeles is the songwriter's foil to New York City, with the latter inspiring decades of songs of praise and pride and the former relegated mostly to tunes describing its anxiety and malaise and disappointment or reveling in its superficiality. But Guero finds Beck celebrating his hometown in "Qué Onda Guero," an affirmation of the LA beyond Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. Easily overlooked since it is sandwiched between the record's two big singles ("E-Pro" and "Girl"), "Qué Onda Guero" is one of Beck's most effortless and densely mythological performances. Behold the origin story of the archetypal American whiteboy.

The Beatles

The Beatles
I am not ashamed to admit that the first and only Beatles album I physically owned was 1, given to me by a relative for Christmas. This is a source of derision for my friends who spilled out of the womb singing “Hey Jude.” The truth is that the Beatles didn’t have much of a direct impact on me until the world starting telling me that they should. (Indirectly, well…I was a big Oasis fan, but that’s a story for another post.)

I attended a middle school dance not long after 1’s release where the DJ claimed that there was a band that people had been “requesting all night long” and that he’d finally throw them a bone. He then played some weird Beatles megamix that wasn’t so great for dancing but splendid for inviting 12-year-olds to scream “She loves you/Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” in each other’s faces.

1 is actually a remarkable album showcasing the band’s mastery of the short pop single – few of the tracks break the 3-minute mark. It’s a fine collection of their standards that gets pretty weird near the end. I loved “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and especially “Lady Madonna” because I never really grasped how either of these songs could be number ones, at least not in today's world.

Nobody needs me to tell them that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is pretty great, so let me just say that Sgt. Pepper’s is real fucking good. The highlight for me is “With a Little Help From My Friends,” which of course sounded so alien to me after The Wonder Years pounded Joe Cocker’s devastatingly lonely version into my brain. These days I prefer the goofy Ringo Starr-driven version. It’s got a sweet, bouncy camaraderie that's fitting for a song about the people who tolerate and indulge your petty insecurities (and create beautiful harmonies to compensate for your utilitarian singing voice). Now I can’t imagine it being any better without Starr’s lilting nasal vocal.

Pound for pound, Sgt. Pepper’s is comparable to its major creative impetus, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Perhaps the highs aren’t as high, but “Getting Better” and “A Day In the Life” are nice pieces of work.

My earliest Beatles “experience” was with The Beatles (White Album), for which I pegged them as some sort of novelty country-western outfit. When I had my fill of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” I would switch to the only other Beatles CD my parents owned, Anthology, and cue up “Twist and Shout.” I'd like to say that this confused chronology was the reason I gave up on the Beatles for a while, but the truth is that my Weird Al cassettes weren't going to listen to themselves.

I don’t recall ever making it past “Bungalow Bill” on The Beatles – unless you count “Birthday,” which fit the silly personas I had created in my head for the group – but I have come to realize that riffing on the novelty of pop music is one of the main themes of the album, which is peppered with self-deprecation and satire. “Back In the U.S.S.R.” is Dr. Strangelove plugged into a Marshall stack and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” still has the Charles Schultz estate pissed, I imagine. Finally, I love the fact that Lennon and McCartney wrote most of the songs for this record – the band’s most playful by far – surreptitiously during a meditation retreat where they were explicitly instructed not to work. It means that two of the greatest musical talents of our time kept evolving through their connection to the world and other people, not knocking about in some sealed creative fortress native to monolithic geniuses and demi-gods.

The Beatles is also a cipher for decoding the four personalities that could soothe and enrage each other. Paul unleashing his inner vaudevillian (“Martha My Dear”) while trying to maintain some sort of rock cred (“Helter Skelter”). George writing interesting and melancholy songs that aren’t full of interminable sitar bullshit (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”). Ringo just trying to act like when we all still a family and happy together (“Don’t Pass Me By”). And John the artiste blessing us with his avant-garde sound collage (“Revolution 9”) that also happens to contain our first Yoko Ono sighting. It’s a record that goes a long way in establishing the members of the Beatles as ‘problematic’ archetypes – each predictable in their own way but still capable of anything in their little collective of one-upmanship.

“Glass Onion,” a John song, is the most telling of the lot. In a salacious interpretation, “Onion” is Lennon’s frustration with the band’s detours into pop nonsense and minor dalliances with a groovy worldview. Referencing multiple songs in the back catalog, he seems kind of irritated that none of them are as ostensibly useful as a bauble that can let you “See how the other half lives.” He might even be pointing a holier-than-thou finger at McCartney – “Well here’s another clue for you all/The walrus was Paul” – even though John was the one behind “I Am the Walrus.” Or he’s just having a laugh. Point is, The Beatles sounds like it pushed everyone significantly closer to the breaking point. Though not a sustainable model for any band, it did lead to an especially transcendent two and a half years of music.

Oh yeah, Abbey Road is pretty good too. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is a waste of time but the side two medley more than makes up for it with its supreme ambition and callbacks to their prowess with songs lasting 150 seconds or less. Abbey Road is also, in my opinion, their most impressive album from a vocal standpoint. “Something” and “Octopus’s Garden” simply fit George and Ringo, and there’s some great about-to-burst-into-tears singing on “Golden Slumbers” that's even better than the dramatic blubbering on “The Long and Winding Road.” But Paul is the winner here, demonstrating a knack for rock vocals after “U.S.S.R.” and “Helter Skelter” with the wrenching “Oh! Darling.”

Among the chaff are some introspective highlights from Rubber Soul, including “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life”…and also “Drive My Car,” perhaps the filthiest Beatles song (hint: the car is Paul’s penis). Also, is it such a surprise that a dour, pretentious, annoying Beatles movie musical would be titled after the dour, pretentious, annoying “Across the Universe”?

Revisiting the Beatles has confirmed two things for me: one, you miss out on a lot when all you have is a greatest hits album; and two, I am more of a McCartney than a Lennon. To me, Paul is the one element without which the Beatles could not have existed, a self-conscious, striving dude that people could relate to apart from the preternatural musical gifts. In my notes for this post I was actually harder on John. Part of me still feels put off by a smug and sarcastic manner that becomes more prevalent in the band’s later work. That’s the way it comes across to me, at least – the proto-hipster.

But he was still capable of letting his guard down in his songs, his emotional distance unable to conquer the deepest pain of anyone in the band. The “hurt Beatle” was an enigma, a poet, and a brute, seemingly determined to have people indulge him as an adult in a way that he wasn’t as a child. And he wasn’t busy proving what a nonconformist he was, the boy came out, sharing his passion for rock ‘n roll with other like-minded kids. Whenever I hear “Don’t Let Me Down,” I can’t help but wonder if he really wrote it for Yoko (as he claimed) or for himself.

Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys
I discovered the Beasties around the time of "Intergalactic" and 1998's Hello Nasty. I seem to recall MTV promoting it as a sort of glorious comeback from a long exile, so it was also my first taste of album cycle hype. Still worked on me.



"Intergalactic" is the catchiest thing the Beastie Boys have ever done, but it's a strange entry point despite containing a callback to one of the Beastie's earliest rap singles, "The New Style." Originally a punk rock band, the group's 1986 hip-hop debut Licensed to Ill is built around heavy rock riffs and goofy lyrical excess. The bulk of Licensed to Ill is simply rap style dolled up in rock clothing, most apparent in the video for "No Sleep Till Brooklyn."





But I don't mean to dismiss Licensed - it remains one of the trashiest, most enjoyable pop records of the 1980s and includes some canonical works including "Paul Revere," "Girls," and the smashing "Fight For Your Right." Compared to the rest of the group's output, though, the record seems like a smartass message written in a high school yearbook, sharp and immature and likely to make one cringe reading it ten years later.

The Beasties' second album, Paul's Boutique, marked a major step forward, realizing all the confidence, creativity, and credibility that Licensed boasted of but did not actually deliver. It was also a complex artistic achievement, replacing Rick Rubin's guitar assault with extensive sampling and layering of funk and R&B classics. I think the appropriation of Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" on "Egg Man" is especially inspired.



Paul's Boutique is also, for my money, the first deployment of the group's trademark wit grounded in omnivorous pop culture consumption. The rhymes are jam-packed with seriously silly allusions to Mario Andretti, Yosemite Sam, Grease, and "Maggie's Farm," as well as the esoteric rejoinder "I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh" in "Hey Ladies."

It's a truth, though, that the Beastie Boys can sound repetitious - they also claimed to have "mad hits like Rod Carew" on 1995's Ill Communication. (For the record, Carew collected more hits in the majors than Oh.) Their '90s output on Communication and Hello Nasty - I've not experienced Check Your Head for some unknown reason - stretches the group's old-school appeal too thin. Large chunks of both albums still exist in the era when rap was a team sport centering on sparsely-produced tracks with a group of friends simultaneously yelling the rhymes at the end of each line. While the style does have its charms, the records are sprawling, indulgent affairs that appeal primarily to Beasties diehards, despite having their most recognizable hits, "Intergalactic" and "Sabotage."



"Sabotage" is one of Ill Communication's nods to the group's punk roots and an interesting example of their particularly malleable definition of hip-hop. The video is, I think, one of the benchmarks of Gen-X sarcasm giving way to Gen-Y "irony," mocking the stupidity and chessiness of '70s cop shows while displaying a not-very-secret affection for the form that it is lampooning. Sadly, the rest of the album fails to measure up to this level of entertainment.

Hello Nasty deserves credit for the addition of turntablist Mix Master Mike ("3 MCs and One DJ"), who inspires more experimentation with pop-style hooks and choruses ("Body Movin"). The drawback to this is that it sounds too much like a late-90s DJ record in the vein of Moby or Fatboy Slim. It's important to note that all these DJs worked more or less concurrently, but it can't help but sound derivative to modern ears.

A longer-than-usual hiatus led to the release of To the 5 Boroughs in 2004, just as the Boys began to push 40 years of age. I remember great anticipation for this record that manifested bizarrely in the launch of the single "Ch-Check It Out" on an episode of The O.C. Promotional gimmicks aside, Boroughs is both a return to form and a personal exploration of anger and angst in post-9/11 New York City.



Still, these are the Beastie Boys, not Springsteen. Their clowning is alive and well and again shines when committed to video, such as the Sasquatch-baiting, Kanye-confusing "Triple Trouble."



"Triple Trouble" samples hip-hop's oldest standard, "Rapper's Delight," and in a way demonstrates how the Beastie Boys represent a standard within the genre (indeed, within music as a whole) - the passionate poseurs who thrive when given the chance to expand on artistic impulses instead of marketing directives. Simiarly, they Elvis-ed their way into my collection as proof that I sometimes listened to rap and have survived because there is far more to them than "the white guys who rap funny."

The Bangles to The Beach Boys

The Bangles
The Bangles were part of the vanguard of the 'Paisley Underground,' a 1980s Los Angeles music scene spun out of 1960s West Coast pop and rock. A kind of antidote to the Sunset Strip/glam metal era, they paid homage to hippy-dippy trends sonic and sartorial - a little far out, man, but nothing too dangerous.

Because America loves nothing but a good old fashioned dance craze, the band is most commonly associated with the asinine "Walk Like A Egyptian" (which experienced new life through anti-Hosni Mubarak sloganeering). But close behind in the hit parade are soulful ballads "Eternal Flame" and "Manic Monday."

"Eternal Flame" unfurls with a sparse arrangement and the one of greatest triangle accompaniments in rock history, providing a downy-soft canvas for a giant Susanna Hoffs vocal that's powerful but never overpowering.



Zach Galifinakis' interpretation:



Written by Prince, "Manic Monday" brings on a chorus of well-wishers to embellish the comparatively dour routine of the song's working girl protagonist. In terms of workaday cheeriness, it's no "Walkin' on Sunshine"; in fact, it's just a couple clicks north of slightly depressing, which makes its fantastical production sound even more sublime.



Barenaked Ladies
Who is BNL? For many people, the awfully simple answer is "the guys who did the speed-rapping 'Chinese chicken' song."



Having an unavoidable pop smash like "One Week" is fine if you are trying to become an arena-filling sensation, but the Barenaked Ladies' goals have never been that quotidian. Or that cogent. Whereas the world recognizes that BNL is "One Week," the BNL world is like an alternate universe where "One Week" was a tossed-off piece of album filler (there remains a possibility that that's what the song actually was). And thanks to the indefatigable loyalty of Canadians and geeks everywhere, BNL is one of a very small number of artists that can ignore its biggest hit and thrive financially. They'll fill arenas, all right, but only with the people that they want to be there. Anybody who spotted the upright bass and the orange-tinted glasses in the "One Week" video and pegged the Ladies as pure late-90s alt-rock need not apply.

But delving into the sprawling nerdy comic opera and creepily committed partisans of the BNL-verse, well, it can be easy to see why people will stop at "One Week." It's the only thing that saves listening to the Barenaked Ladies from being an all-or-nothing proposition. Accepting them means accepting all their different guises, which can be somewhat frustrating - are they the folkie jesters of "If I Had A Million Dollars"? The sensitive wise guys of "Pinch Me"? The mournful troubadours of "Brian Wilson"?

"Brian Wilson" is my favorite Barenaked Ladies song because it is one that stops winking long enough to suggest why these guys love music and felt compelled to form a band. For once, we get to a hint of the complexity and the pain behind the goofy personas and restrained album-oriented pop. It was unexplored country again until the 2008 cocaine-related arrest and subsequent departure of Steven Page, one half of the band's creative compass along with Ed Roberston. It turns out that BNL was a mess like dozens of other successful bands despite appearing to have the lowest scandalization quotient this side of Coldplay.



Much of BNL's trademark humor involves gentle self-deprecation but there's little in that schtick that might attract serious ridicule in the grown-up world. "Brian Wilson" is an artistic gamble that might have given the band something to really be embarrassed about if it wasn't their greatest triumph.

Barry Manilow
People who were proud to bypass the excesses of 1970s rock - the type of folks who thought (and not entirely without merit) that rock could never nurture a more creative lifeform than the Beatles - are the precisely the reason why an old-school lounge singer could become a global superstar. The irony is that many of Barry Manilow's songs ooze the same sleazy showbiz artifice as the compositions of his roach-smoking, concept-album-creating nemeses. This is an ideal time to make the obiligatory observation that Manilow did not write "I Write the Songs" (regarding the song's claim "I am music," scientists are still working to verify that Manilow is the very manifestation of the perceptual process of and engagement with sound).

I was going to joke that "Copacabana" has just enough detail to form the promising threatening narrative skeleton of an all-Manilow musical revue, until I discovered that this already exists. It's a decent signature tune, a weird hybrid of a disco beat and salsa breakdown (eat your heart out, Miami Sound Machine) that's an actual Manilow song for roughly three of its six minutes.

"Looks Like We Made It" and "Mandy" fit the little man-massive emotions template; I find them enjoyably cheesy rather than simply enjoyable. But I can make an exception for "I Can't Smile Without You" with its rush to a climax that seems to last the entire song. So far it's the only tune from the Hellboy II soundtrack that has inspired impromptu duets with my mom.

(in Italian...the magic starts at 0:36)



Basement Jaxx
Advertising is once again the sad origin of an entire band's contribution to my collection. The fat bassline of "Red Alert" is catchy and lands on the right side of abrasive and is apparently perfect for your Coca-Cola campfire raves. "Do Your Thing" is a tastefully-constructed dance song that earns its euphoria with a piano sample that disappears into wailing synths and an energetic guest vocal from the elusive Elliot May; I think it was in some sort of computer ad.



Unfortunately, the skull-rattling cacophony of "Where's Your Head At" seems too typical of an electronica band that spells part of its name with a double-x. It was only used to sell everything.

The Beach Boys
A nice thing about the Beach Boys is that they aren't interested in wasting your time. I remember being able to flip the Endless Summer (a title chosen to gingerly avoid calling it a "Greatest Hits") cassette three times in little more than an hour. Somewhere along the line I must have decided that even this was too much Beach Boys; of the teenybopper hits I favored as a kid, only the teenage romanticism of "Don't Worry Baby" and the pleasantly shallow "California Girls" remain. The latter still bugs me for giving short shrift to Southwest and Mountain and Pacific Northwest girls, but I guess it has saved us from three more superficial compliments (note that Mike Love doesn't dig Northeast girls for their hardy constitution and affection for participatory politics). I guess there's also "Good Vibrations" which you know as the famous gear-shifting "pocket symphony" that's the best-known example of the genius that the Barenaked Ladies sang about.



"Barbara Ann" is charming in its roughness, a rarity in the Beach Boys' early, regimented teen idol days. I get my perception of this stifling era (which brought us the raucous call to arms "Be True to Your School") from the 2000 TV movie The Beach Boys: An American Family. The film probably deserves its own post devoted to my half-lucid memories of campy moments like a terrifying ad break where Charles Manson stands at a window and screams something like "You can't ever leave the family!" to a fleeing Dennis Wilson. Good times.

Clearly, my knowledge of the Beach Boys is not entirely academic but at least I'm clever enough to recognize the superiority of Pet Sounds and its monolithic influence on the Beatles' late-60s work. "Sloop John B," "Caroline, No," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows"...for a brief shining moment it seemed like there could be a real transatlantic competition to push the pop envelope with lush, bittersweet songwriting genius.



It's possible that America wasn't ready for its favorite prom kings to leap into adulthood - Pet Sounds was a smash in the U.K. but a comparative flop in the U.S. - and we weren't about to let the Beach Boys stick the landing, even if it would prove to be the beginning of the end for the band. Listening to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" I get a sense that the Beach Boys are pop music's answer to Dorian Gray (or Tuck Everlasting for you fans of children's literature), missing the adult grace that could validate their genius in a way that eternal youth just can't.

The Band to Band of Horses

In which we consider bands so band-like they began their name with the word "band"...

The Band
Coalescing while backing Canadian rock and roll godfather Ronnie Hawkins and the electrified Bob Dylan, an honorific was never necessary for the Band. The name was both humble and arrogant, a nod to the anonymity from which they sprung and a proprietary eponym (like "Kleenex" or "Xerox") for their brand of country rock that, while considerably different from the hits of the late 1960s, formed a template for four decades of edgy would-be folkies. (And, if you want to continue the analogy, probably the first band to popularize anachronistic clothing.)

The Band was comprised of four Canadians and one Yank, but all were masters of Americana, transplanting the mythos and emotional sweep of the rural heartland into the electric age. They were also somewhat unlikely counterculture icons, given their frontier milieu and their associations with "traitor" Dylan (who famously skipped Woodstock; the Band, however, played on). If there's a people's band, pre-E Street division, this is it.

Music From Big Pink introduced the quintet with a bit of songwriting assistance from Dylan. His three co-credits are unsurprisingly some of the best tracks on the record: the opening "Tears of Rage" is actually a slow, melancholy shuffle and a warning that we're going to be dealing with some very raw emotions. In "The Weight," guitarist Robbie Robertson picks up on these cues in a heartsick classic that announces his presence as the group's creative 500-pound gorilla. Robertson certainly didn't have a monopoly on talent in the Band, but "The Weight" is their quintessential song, something so pure and sweet and clear of conviction that you almost forget how achingly sad it is. A sob story about a transient who tries hard to be good, I also dig that it name-checks Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Blue Eagles and C.F. Martin & Company--a.k.a. Martin Guitar, the manufacturer of the popular hollow-body guitars favored by many musicians of the era.



Big Pink has some nice symmetry in its closing number, "I Shall Be Released," another showcase of Dylan's lyrics that cauterizes the wound opened on "Tears of Rage" and offers some hope, however distant.



The rustic feeling is enhanced and the training wheels are removed on The Band, and the result is the group's creative masterwork. A deeper commitment to roots music is obvious through the record from "Across the Great Divide" to "Rag Mama Rag" to the pretty awesome Grateful Dead impression on "Jemima Surrender." Most are probably familiar with "Up On Cripple Creek," an early ode to the quirky dream girls that so captivated the secretly-grounded men of the beat, hippie, punk, New Wave, 'alternative,' and hipster generations. It's easy to get swept up with the narrator of "Creek" as he describes his staunchly loyal, doughnut-in-tea-dipping paramour who, perhaps coincidentally, is not his wife.



The Band balances the jug band work-outs with countrified arias with a tenuous foundation in historical fact - the slinky "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" and the epic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." What these songs may lack in verisimilitude (or, um, claims on a higher morality in the case of "Dixie") they make up in verve and tears and gut feeling. There's an urgency I detect on this album, something about many of the tracks that perfectly captures an immediacy that's like sitting in on their original recording sessions. They have a life about them, and "Dixie" is the nerve center.

Two specific things impress me about "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down":

1. It turns me, a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee and detractor of revisionist Southern claims about Civil War history, into putty in old Confederate hands.

2. It was recorded, like the rest of The Band, in Los Angeles. This is kind of like if Jimi Hendrix recorded his version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Brussels.



The years after The Band marked an inevitable decline in the face of corporate rock's ascendancy, and the Band had the good sense to bow out after their 1976 swan song, The Last Waltz. The fissures were already showing by 1970, though, with "Stage Fright" capturing a new era of uneasy feelings about the group's sudden fame and fortune.



Robertson had one last epic in him, "Acadian Driftwood," the centerpiece of the mostly-average Northern Lights-Southern Cross. Swapping famous American guilt (devastation of the American South, 1864-1865) for famous Canadian guilt (18th century deportation of Francophone Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana), "Driftwood" takes even more poetic license than "Dixie," but is no less resonant in its lamentation of defeat. On a record that includes interminable synthesizer-driven jams and inexplicable Steely Dan pastiches ("Jupiter Hollow"), "Driftwood" is a jewel.



The extended edition of Northern Lights-Southern Cross also has the unrepentantly religious "Christmas Must Be Tonight," a glorious slice of holiday cheese. And now that we've mentioned treacly, misguided Xmas songs...

Band Aid - "Do They Know It's Christmas"
Band Aid 20 - "Do They Know It's Christmas 2004"
Many things have been said about "Do They Know It's Christmas" - it's pandering and trite, it's problematic, it's self-satisfied, it probably perpetuates the annoying/horrid cultural stereotype of the "starving African," and considering the checkered track history of European Christians intervening in African affairs, do they even care that it's Christmas?

Ultimately, I give Band Aid mastermind (and onscreen Roger Waters surrogate) Bob Geldof the benefit of the doubt. The Boomtown Rats frontman raged for several years against the myopia of the Me Decade and eventually won over many of his peers. It led to the creation of the modern benefit concert template (Live Aid) and was taken as a charitable challenge by musicians across the pond ("We Are the World"). Even naming the project "Band Aid" was an act of self-awareness that demonstrated Geldof's understanding of his very small role in addressing a very complex problem. It's the type of project that will always attract opportunists but as long as they're reciprocating some of that benefit, I don't see any major harm.

The song itself is extremely dated now, with a giggle-inducing spoken word portion stuck in the middle that forever captures some of the flavors-of-the-month (Dad, what's Bananarama?) alongside strange vamping (from Paul McCartney, of all people) and an intensely serious Christmas message from David Bowie that nearly stops the song in its tracks, mostly because he sounds like the only guy on the record besides Geldof who genuinely cares about famine relief. Also, Bono kind of being a dick...feed the world!



Musically, there is no real excuse for "Do They Know It's Christmas 2004" except, perhaps, for Chris Martin to take over the alpha dog vocals from Paul Young and for Dizzee Rascal and the Darkness' Justin Hawkins to do a call-and-response sing-rap. It doesn't even have the spoken word part. The word 'inessential' comes to mind.



Band of Horses
A band at their best when gloomy and anthemic, like the Shins crossed with Explosions in the Sky and scrambled with grits - "The Funeral" (from the debut Everything All the Time) and "Is There A Ghost" (from Cease to Begin) stand out in this regard.






Everything All the Time dances with a peculiar sort of alt-country darkness and as such might be Band of Horses' most interesting record to date, full of "Monsters" come to feed on us and the ministrations of "Wicked Gil" ('helping evil people to say things they show'). But Cease to Begin runs in the opposite direction, flirting with romantic dream pop in the likes of "Detlef Schrempf" (sadly not an ode to the former Mavericks/Pacers/Supersonics/Trailblazers sharpshooter) and "No One's Gonna Love You."



It's worth mentioning that Cease to Begin was recorded after a massive lineup overhaul that left only two original members, Ben Bridwell and Mat Brooke, which may account for the diverse tone of the sophomore record. Also contributing - the money made after "The Funeral" became a hot commodity among music directors for commercials and television shows. Normally I find this annoying, but in this case it couldn't have happened to a better song. And lest we forget their country roots, Band of Horses offers the mid-album stomper "The General Specific."



2010's Infinite Arms continues the slow expansion of the band's music palette but there's something about it that's just too willowy about it for my taste. It's a record tailor-made to grab the attention of the NPR crowd that likes their music alternative but not too abrasive. To oblige, the band tosses in some strings on "Factory" and busts out the Eagles harmonies on "Older" and "Blue Beard." It's still a quality record anchored by Bridwell's wistful vocal, which only helps the group maintain its creative stamp throughout myriad personnel changes and stylistic dalliances.