Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire
The Arcade Fire is a band that owes a lot to its "indie" forerunners of the late '90s and early '00s, the type of consistently great artists like Spoon, Ted Leo, Broken Social Scene, etc. that you hadn't heard of unless you attended private school. But you did hear about the Canadian multi-instrumentalists, a big group (seven members) from a small label (Merge) that always spoke with ironclad conviction, even if what they were saying was fairly obvious. Their bitterly nostalgic breakthrough is one of the most deserving right-place, right-time scenarios in rock history.

Of course, opportunity means little if you ain't got talent, and Funeral finds Arcade Fire seemingly exhausting all of its jollies in a single brilliant record. Lots of bands overthink their tracklists, so it's nice to find one that gives us twenty minutes of the "Neighborhood" cycle (broken up by the quirky "Une Annee Sans Lumiere") before switching gears to a series of massive anthems whose sentimentality is outweighed only by their gravitas. When Funeral says something is important, you better believe it.

The first two "Neighborhoods" are good examples, the contrasting "Tunnels" - about the righteous struggle of building a community - and "Power Out" - about the perverse thrill of watching it all burn.





But, as Spike Jonze confirmed, "Wake Up" packs the biggest punch as a eulogy for childhood ("Our bodies get bigger/But our hearts get torn up") and a halting acceptance of the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood ("I guess we'll just have to adjust").



As I mentioned, Arcade Fire traffics in the biggest and broadest of feelings but in this they are nearly unparalleled. Empathy is their strength, and emotional validation is their best promotional tool. The less specific they are, the better.

Neon Bible strays from this winning formula - a transparently conceptual record, it's also a bit too preachy in spots. However, it does score a couple direct hits on the meddlesome role of religion in modern life with the eerily calm "Neon Bible" and the reverberating "Intervention."


("Intervention," by the way, will never fail to spoil the cheerful mood on karaoke night, no matter how profundo your basso)

"Keep the Car Running" has more of the band's signature wild abandon, but I think "(Antichrist Television Blues)" is the heart of the record, and the high water mark of Arcade Fire as a "conceptual" group. The song's protagonist is admitting harsh truths about the most omnipresent forces in his life - God, family, the media - but at the same time is desperate to please these idols, pre-emptively offering up his firstborn to the TV industry. Thus, a reality star is born.



Scrutiny is also a resonant theme in Arcade Fire's body of work, including "Windowsill" from Bible and one of the first leaks from The Suburbs, "Rococo," a disturbing and dismissive evaluation of profligate hipster culture and its dangerous king-making powers.



There is some sense that Suburbs is about a twentysomething's return to the titular subdivisions, with all the attendant judgments and tut-tutting as heard in the Todd Rundgren-influenced "Modern Man." But there is no real advancement of a false dichotomy nor do they dwell on the Springsteen-lite philosophizing that they are inexplicably known for (presumably these critics have never heard of The Hold Steady). They are blessedly aware that the grass is always greener. There's time for play, too, as on "City With No Children," which puts a euphoric slant on the Stones' "Street Fighting Man."



The issue of emotional validation crops up again in "Month of May," a punkish bob-and-weave that twists Aristotelian advice into the supposition that a life unexamined by others is not worth living. Life for Gen Y is just one long, award-winning documentary ("Two thousand nine/Two thousand ten/Wanna make a record 'bout I felt then").



"We Used to Wait" saves the best for (almost) last with a bracing description of Western ennui. Along with the "Sprawl" duology, it takes aim at the complacency that's suffocating enough to inspire caustic reminiscence but comfortable enough to preclude drastic action. They know the price of stability is unfulfilled wishes ("We used to wait/Sometimes it never came").



But Arcade Fire doesn't come to bury dreams. On the contrary, they are here to celebrate them - "Wait" is sung in the past tense, ultimately a song of optimism and try-it-again from hope's House band.

Apes and Androids to Aqua

Apes and Androids - Blood Moon
Blood Moon lies prostrate at the feet of Beck and Prince with a heaping helping of funk mythology borrowed from Funkadelic. The spaceship that descends in "Blood Moon I" is the vessel for the "Riders on the storm," to borrow a lyric from the hypnotically officious "Make Forever Last Forever"; the latter is just one of the many commandments from the would-be interstellar gods of Apes and Androids. The fact that they're really glam versions of the Cobra Kai kids is only mildly deflating.



Blood Moon is really a prism for a single fantasy about a giant space glitter party, refracting this central theme through a handful of different styles as to keep it interesting. "Radio," for one, entertains with a vaguely Oriental swing and "Hot Kathy" is some pretty inventive Paisley Park weirdness.

It all comes to a head in the rapturous mid-record anthem "Nights of the Week," which steals an excellent riff from the Police's "Message in a Bottle," chops it into dozens of little pieces, and tosses them into the sweat and shimmer of the band's hardcore night-owl milieu. It's a thrilling summation of "the scene," applicable as long as young people with more stamina than perspective convene to cause one in claustrophobic spaces.



My only gripe is that too many of the songs on the album's back nine come off as Radiohead retreads. The entire record seems long in the tooth, actually. 18 songs is hefty for a debut. And yet I'm thankful for this excess - the mercurial group of New Yorkers disbanded in 2009, a year after releasing this, their only LP. Turns out it wasn't the stirrings of a true glam rock revival but a pit stop before a return to the Mothership. It's kind of nice to find a band that exits as inscrutably as it enters.

Apostle of Hustle - "I Want A New Drug"
In the summer of 2007, a group of friends planted the seeds of a staggeringly awesome project entitled Are You Still With Me?!, a full album of indie rock covers of songs by Huey Lewis and the News. Like most attempts to redeem the 1980s, it was too good to be true. Three years later we have only the meager fruits of the labor of (mostly) C-list indie rockers. The majority of the proposed tracklist used to be available on an all-you-can-listen buffet of a MySpace page, but the project has stalled for so long that only a few lonely MP3s wander across the Internet, tantalizing the public with what might have been. This thing is the Smile of indie rock covers of 80s pop superstars.



Apostle of Hustle's contribution is, in my opinion, one of the weaker efforts solicited. It is a darker and surprisingly menacing version of the smash hit from 1983's Sports, performed by people who could be talking about actual drugs (as in, I'm tired of these psychotropics, I think I will try painkillers next). Something is lost in the translation.

Aqua - "Barbie Girl"
It is abundantly clear that Scandinavians prefer their pop music to lack pretense (well, most of them, anyway). Aqua's "Barbie Girl" pushes the envelope even further, an airhead anthem for an airhead icon. People complain about the likes of Ke$ha now, but keep in mind that 13 years ago this was a top 10 U.S. single:



Mattel, however, wasn't laughing. They took a break from peddling juvenilized femininity to sue Aqua, which resulted in one of the most appropriately flippant rulings in judicial history: "The parties are advised to chill."

It's kitsch. It's boomerang sideburns. It's the sound of being eight months away from never working again. It's "Barbie Girl."

Antony and the Johnsons

To save my sanity, I'm trying a new strategy - listening and writing in smaller chunks. Let's get minimal.

Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
Antony Hegary is an otherworldly transgender chanteuse with a voice that makes him sound like he's perpetually about to burst into tears. I can handle it in measured doses. I suspect that he and his band, the Johnsons, appeal most to two very different segments of the same niche, one that staunchly believes the opera should pull the same attendance as Spamalot and one that still thinks The Rocky Horror Picture Show is edgy and subversive.

The Crying Light is schticky, an eco-concept album that reverses the traditional contextual problem of concept albums - out of context, several of the songs are so exquisite they turn you into the type of baroque weenie who uses the word "exquisite" in casual conversation. In context, however, the record's earnestness borders on cheesy. "I'm gonna miss the wind/Been kissing me so long" Hegarty warbles on "Another World," a laundry list of the things that will disappear when the world hits full Goremageddon.

"Epilepsy Is Dancing" illustrates this discrepancy very well. A neat metaphor about creativity and the unquiet mind that hits all the right bittersweet notes, it's an out-of-context delight. But put it in the context of Hegarty's fevered imagination and its vision hews pretty close to that of a overgrown drama nerd. And you get this...

[Warning: theatre boobies ahead....NSFW]




Despite the Johnsons' somewhat discouraging resemblance in image to early Jamiroquai - what with the environmentalism and the elaborate chapeaus - their music, thankfully, is more like Secretly Canadian labelmate Jens Lekman. "Daylight and the Sun" and "Aeon" prove that their darker brand of cabaret can too reach soaring heights and overcome the distractions posed by Hegarty's voice. Unfortunately, when The Crying Light aims for anything less than a grandiose emotional impact, the result is always tempered by some loss of affect - unless the intended effect was always to remind the listener of weeping unicorns shuffling across a kabuki stage.

Andrew W.K. to Animotion

Andrew W.K.
It's been rumored that the mercurial, rabid, piano-pounding Andrew W.K. was conceived as some sort of obtuse music business prank against the public, which is just the type of plausible but unnecessarily elaborate and counter-intuitive idea that breeds conspiracy theories. Others simply hated him on principle. In my opinion he's just a weird, interesting dude who confounds the fame clock. He's the rare non-deluded niche entertainer that understands that his work follows his persona, not the other way around.

But he came to us, as Harry Chapin might say, in the usual way: as a self-flagellating, classically-trained pianist in nut-hugging white slacks and a jones for melodic party metal. I Get Wet is a masterpiece of stupidity and simplicity, as if going beyond the monosyllabic is the ultimate party foul. "Party Hard" is his Model T. The other 11 tracks more or less roll off the same assembly line.



Unfortunately, Andrew stretched this wafer-thin premise across two more plodding, highly forgettable albums, The Wolf and Close Calls with Brick Walls. Tellingly, Close Calls was a Japan-only release - it also proves that axiom that once Japan loves you, it loves you forever as long as you never, ever attempt to change (see: Anvil!: The Story of Anvil).

But what makes Andrew so wonderfully perplexing is that, in everything outside of his music, he seems remarkably malleable. He is whatever he is required to be - self-help guru, talking head, children's television host. Unsurprisingly, he makes a good pitchman. I really dig his "Give Me a Break" jingle for Kit Kat:



Relentlessly energetic and disarming in spite of (or because of) his overbearingly aggressive life coach persona, the world is his personal rager, a bully pulpit for the party animal gospel. The music is the least interesting thing about him. It's is just another method of delivering his propaganda. "You can't stop what you can't end" notes "I Love NYC." I say Armageddon beats Andrew W.K., but not by much.




Andy Gibb - "I Just Want to Be Your Everything"
The "Bonus Jonas" of the Gibb family, and the best-looking by a wide margin. The way I see it, there are four tiers of celebrity siblings:

• The Billy Carter Tier: for siblings who seek fame solely by embarrassing their more famous kin, either purposefully or inadvertently
• The Jim Belushi Tier: for siblings who aspire to the success of their brother or sister, but are quite obviously the one that Mom praised for having a "big heart" when asked if he/she was loved as much as the more talented sibling
• The Casey Affleck Tier: for siblings who seem to be piggybacking until, slowly but surely, they prove themselves just as worthy and perhaps even more talented

And of course....

• The Andy Gibb Tier: for siblings who build promisingly on the established template of their brethren and are kept from the Casey Affleck Tier through any combination of bad luck, personal issues, fickle audience tastes, etc.

Andy Gibb's trajectory was quite similar to his older brothers' in the Bee Gees. It didn't hurt that he sounded exactly like them, which in the 1970s meant three straight #1 singles including "I Just Want to Be Your Everything," a typical disco ballad.



I'm sure he entered my consciousness via Behind the Music - his struggles with drug addiction and death at age 30 were better television fodder than the creative impetus behind "Shadow Dancing." He's the quintessential what-might-have-been story of the disco era (which explains why people forget him) and a gentle reminder of what it was like when a family of castrato pop vocalists from Australia was on the cusp of ruling the world.


Animal Collective
Animal Collective is the type of band that makes people hate music critics, which is all the more frustrating because you don't have to be "in the know" to appreciate their music. Tolerating their music is the bigger obstacle. I know because I have been there; it still annoys me that they gnaw on most of their lyrics and then refuse to print them in liner notes. I'm also of the very recent era when you couldn't read a music blog without an AC hagiography. It's good to have encouragement.

So toss me on the pile of sweaty hipster douchebags who thinks AC hides a broad appeal underneath the avant-garde trappings. Their best material bears similarity to the Beatles' psychedelia crossed with the soul-seeking, life-affirming sloganeering of Sesame Street and Josh Groban. On drugs. Feels is my best evidence for this theory - "The Purple Bottle" is a next-gen magical mystery tour, "Banshee Beat" captures something both tender and wry in its movie-flashback do-do-dos, and "Loch Raven" is a gentle, bells-laden lullaby.



"Peacebone," the leading track from Strawberry Jam, also sounds like AC trying to corner the kiddie-uplift market with the prominent refrain "It's not my words that you should follow, it's your [extreme falsetto] INSIGHT!"



But then again, maybe they're not. The screaming is really amped up on this record, and "Fireworks," though great, will frighten babies. Strawberry Jam is perpetually in attack mode. AC's frontman, Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear), has noted that the album's title came from a condiment he consumed with an airline meal. He was inspired to create music just as synthetic and shiny, and also as tangy and aggressive, as the taste of his Smucker's.

"Winter Wonderland" is another favorite of mine from Jam. It was perfect for squeezing into radio playlists for a little bite of avant-garde weirdness threatening to become accessible pop.



Cue Merriweather Post Pavilion, which indeed contains the band's most accessible songs to date, a significant step for them in both commercial and artistic terms...but not as significant that it's been made out to be. There's been no rush to Saturday Night Live appearances or Grammy awards.

Merriweather is too grown-up for such things. The whole thing is an ode to maturity. The album's Mount Rushmore consists of songs about adult romance ("Summertime Clothes"), fatherhood ("My Girls"), and friendship ("Brother Sport"). It also has a fourth, "Lion in a Coma," which feels like the psychotropic experience AC felt obligated to provide a break from talking about all this heavy stuff, man.



Fall Be Kind is an EP and a step back towards the cryptic. I like "Graze," a cool gearshift song that rescues the pan flute from the New Age ghetto.



"What Would I Want? Sky" is a cloud-gazing pick-me-up song that earns it, cheering up good money thrown after bad. Back to basics percussion is the hallmark of the EP and a welcome change after two records that were trending too much towards, as a friend of mine so eloquently put it, "swirl farts."


Animotion - "Obsession"
I am always tickled when a cheesy band's Wikipedia entry begins by defensively noting that they are "known for their songs..." (emphasis mine). I have to call bullshit, especially when the band in question performed their hit on the short-lived nostalgia trip show Hit Me Baby One More Time. "Obsession" belongs in the Overly Aggressive '80s Love Song division, a droll little ditty about sexual entrapment. It's kind of a yawner after a couple minutes.

American Music Club to Andrew Bird

And here we come to the purpose of the exercise - in this post there are only three artists with four hours of music across five albums...and probably no more than six hundred words spent on any single record.

American Music Club - The Golden Age
American Music Club is from San Francisco, in case song titles like "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" and "The Grand Duchess of San Francisco" didn't clue you in. To be fair, though, "Windy City Funk" was supposed to be a b-side before getting cut entirely. The Golden Age is full of an atrocious acousticsm that hits its nadir quickly in the album kicker, "All My Love." The band can't settle on a mood, trying to play both junkie and jangly and gets stuck in what I believe is an inadvertent phoniness. Case in point: the record's best song - the aforementioned "Lost Souls" - easily reads as music for the opening credits of an uninspired Hollywood rom-com.




Anavan - Cover Story
One of many records I reviewed for the former KSCR, Cover Story's fun, quirky electro slant just makes The Beat Is... seem like an even bigger steaming pile of shit. Anavan is notable for carrying on a tradition of nasal, stream-of-consciousness weirdos like Devo and the B-52s, storming the gates of the hipper-than-thou with nothing but energy and enthusiasm. It's not the most original record - "Skin Like Heather" is a lot like "Beautiful World" by way of Silence of the Lambs - but it's hard to resist the prankish spirit in songs like "Off to a Fighting Start," striking a classic neener-neener stance by exhorting us to "take a long walk/off a short dock."



But flip the counter to 3 on pointless hidden tracks with the worst one yet (and not even halfway through 'A'!), an indecipherable phone message that includes an intolerable amount of (simulated?) retching.

Andrew Bird
I saw and heard Andrew Bird for the first time at an Amoeba Records in-store performance, by which time he had been elevated to minor prophet status by a handful of friends who I wanted to impress very, very badly. These were heady days - one of these friends would place the dust jacket of the Armchair Apocrypha CD on a bookshelf at parties and warmly remind me that "he watches over us."

I actually worked backwards to Weather Systems to better understand Bird's initial appeal, which is pretty simply understood - it's pure whimsy. This blitheness can be better as an ideal than as a practice, but Bird hits most of his marks. "Lull" is a pretty great song. No frills, just fun.

Armchair Apocrypha, by comparison, is Bird's epic. The unBirdlike electric guitar is featured prominently in many of the standout tracks like "Fiery Crash" and "Plasticities." But strings and whistling are Bird's meat and potatoes, and they are here in full force. "Yawny at the Apocalypse" gives us the word to describe his signature sound: it's not sleepy, but it's tired. Beautifully tired.



His most recent album, Noble Beast, feels more of the same with its morbid fascinations married to twee affectations. To be honest, I really wanted to bury this turkey based upon memories of more than a year ago, scoffing at the pretense of this, the album with its own recurring column in the New York Times and a second disc of instrumental tracks (Useless Creatures).

And though this Beast is overstuffed, it may just be appreciably better than Armchair. Even if it's highs aren't as high as "Dark Matter," it's more consistent in deploying the loud-soft dichotomy in book-learned fiddlin' songs like "Fitz and Dizzyspells" and "Nomenclature." It's also takes a surprising number of detours outside of Bird's comfort zone, including a song - "Not A Robot, But A Ghost" - that uses (gasp) a drum machine.



It's a bold step for a man who's turned whistlin' and pickin' into a livelihood.

Alphabeat to America

Some Stray Thoughts
For someone who pays a little too much attention to the music in television commercials, it's distressing to see so many self-consciously "indie" ads modeled on the hottest trends of 3 years ago. And unlike the bad old days when a young Daniel Faraday told us that a Subaru was "just like punk rock, except it's a car," it's easier to sell consumer goods with twee posturing and cramming in all the whistling, ukeleles, and handclaps that your 25-49 demo can handle. Gerber: forward-thinking that's pre-approved by the bourgeoisie! (Also: fuck, they market baby food for preschoolers now?)



Advil also has a new ad using the exact same gimmick with fully-grown humans and a simpatico soundtrack (though I couldn't find video of it on the Internet, just the song). Peter Bjorn and John wannabes from the cradle to the grave...such is life in Ad America.


Alphabeat
Of course, there's nothing wrong with cute if you can pull it off like Alphabeat does on their self-titled debut. When you're front-loading a sunny pop album, you can't do much better than the depression-leavening "10,000 Nights of Thunder," four minutes of pure uplift.



Suspiciously cheap-looking videos, classic boy-girl vocals, and a song titled "Fascination" - are we sure this isn't a long lost Human League record? Well, probably not. Alphabeat is more versatile than its first 10 minutes might lead one to believe, notching a Britpop opus about condoms and/or raincoats ("Rubber Boots/Mackintosh") and a Nordic-accented country ballad ("Nothing But My Baby") before playing us out with a "hidden" 10-second piano instrumental. The album is all the exhilarating wonder and vigor of youth, a properly noncommittal debut with a charming let's-try-everything quality.

For The Beat Is..., Alphabeat's second album, the band commits hard. To electronica. Such dedication is admirable in theory but in practice it's like returning from a global culinary tour to nothing but Hot Pockets. The line "I need something I can dance to" repeats throughout "DJ" and is the album's keystone. I'm not sure where the imperative comes from. Alphabeat was plenty danceable, whereas The Beat Is... is like Ace of Base discovering auto-tune. The results are horrible, by the way.

But an acoustic cover of "Digital Love"? That's as unhorrible as you can get.




Alphaville - "Forever Young"
Surprise pop standard, unlikely hip-hop bedrock, and forever a reminder of the school dance thanks to the Saturn Ion and Napoleon Dynamite and the sentiment of the song itself. Do not confuse it with an inferior Rod Stewart song of the same name.




Amanda Blank - I Love You
Amanda Blank is part of the new wave of female rappers that has stormed hip-hop's boys club over the past few years in a movement that is as cyclical as the tides and fickle as pop music success. There are probably a dozen Amanda Blanks for every Queen Latifah or M.I.A.

I Love You boasts a few distinguished party songs such as "Might Like You Better" and "Make It Take It" and energetic production from the likes of Diplo. As a whole, though, it's not built to last. Part of that's to blame on Blank's attempts to show us the softer side of Sears, culminating in a risible "interpolation" (the new synonym for "rip-off") of LL Cool J in "A Love Song." It's schizophrenic at best. I guess I should give her credit for at least attempting to break up the monotony of sex-and-sports braggadocio, but a party rapper's music is only as valuable inasmuch as it instructs us on how to release our inhibitions in relaxed and informal social settings. This record lasts longer than a quickie should.




America
Far too pretentious a name for actual Americans, though they did do us all a service by preventing U2 from claiming it (you know it could happen). "Horse With No Name" is the gateway despite its labored rhymes and even more labored storytelling (crying at a dry riverbed - really?). "Ventura Highway" is just as sweet and mellow with better polish; "Sister Golden Hair" is the group's true opus, a tour de force of romantic détente spoken in layman's terms: "meet me in the middle."

Alan Parsons Project to Allman Brothers Band

Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project has the distinction of being the only prog rock group to crack the infamously snobbish and exacting quality control standards of the Jock Jams franchise. It's difficult not to listen to the hypnotic instrumental "Sirius" and have your mind fill in the 'lyrics': "at shooting guard, from North Carolina, number 23...."



While we're on the subject, I think more professional sports teams need to adopt official songs from the outdated pop canon, a la soccer clubs, and they should be chosen by the same type of person who impishly reintroduced a pretentious prog opus as a pro wrestling-style intro song. The rest of the world understands this. Why don't we?

Without the Bulls, though, APP is basically the kinder, gentler, more commercial Pink Floyd (Parsons was the sound engineer on the seminal Dark Side of the Moon). "Eye in the Sky" is proof that, even if he jazzes it up with hieroglyphic window dressing and interstellar mythology, a guy with a guitar is always going to write a breakup song. Same with "Games People Play," though it is distinguished by its heavy disco feel and decent appropriation of the best parts of the Hall and Oates formula.




Alan Silvestri - "Back to the Future Theme"
Silvestri is best known as Robert Zemeckis's go-to composer, and is therefore more of an unknown to the general public as Zemeckis has gone full Lucas on us in the past decade and interest in his films has waned. Like most film composers, he is also very prolific and tends to work on projects that are big and loud for reasons that have little to do with the score.

But his work on the BTTF trilogy should give him a lifetime pass. There are few precious blockbuster themes not written by John Williams that have the evocative power of Silvestri's. It's just as much of a part of the trilogy's iconography as DeLoreans and hoverboards and moonwalking in Wild West saloons.




Albert Hammond - "It Never Rains In Southern California"
One of the great post-60s hangover songs. Only five years elapsed between the Summer of Love and this beautiful slice of bubblegum melancholy. What a difference a Nixon makes. It also established a leitmotif of musicians warning people how, despite all appearances, what a terribly perverse and dangerous place SoCal is, though recently the pendulum has swung the other way.




Alice Cooper
Journalists are bound by a covenant to refer to Cooper exclusively as "70s shock rocker Alice Cooper," but this was an image forged primarily by his appearance and live show and least of all by his music. In reality, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and "School's Out" are as edgy as the fifth-grader egging the principal's house, but they are great shorthand for the rebellion of the petulant as opposed to that of the truly disturbed or downtrodden. "School's Out" in particular feels like the bratty cousin of the much darker schoolboy remembrances that pepper the first half of The Wall (Pink Floyd reference counter: 2).

Yet Cooper can get away with this because of his great charisma and, especially, his self-awareness - "School's...out...for...summer/School's...out...for...ever" wouldn't work from someone who didn't know what he was doing in being so dopey and so eternally sly.




Alien Ant Farm - "Smooth Criminal"
In an alternate universe, ANThology is a track-for-track punk cover of Michael Jackson's Bad. I mean, why the hell not? It's not like Alien Ant Farm was going out on a limb here. It wasn't, say, like covering an obscure Leonard Cohen or Bernie Taupin composition. This was some of the lowest-hanging fruit from the goddamn King of Pop.

So AAF is forever in that dubious pantheon of artists famous primarily for performing someone else's high profile hit. They also presaged the process of "Lambertizing" a song, a technique made famous by American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert and consisting of taking a popular song that worked just fine and making it all hardcore and screeching and craaaazy! Because we can.



This video is a more loving tribute to Michael than his overproduced public funeral.


Allister - "Fraggle Rock"
Imagine arranging a conference call with Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, and Lou Reed circa 1977. The topic is the future of punk rock. "At the turn of the millennium," you say, "punk's not dead. In fact, it's one of the most influential and most popular cultural movements in the world. Contrary to what pundits are saying today, it is not a fad and has remained critically and commercially viable for all these years and moved into realms far beyond music."

"Oh, and also, punk musicians will be judged on the caliber of their dick jokes and the heartiness of their party, culminating in this cover of a 1980s children's television show theme." And you'll play it and say, "But to be fair, the Fraggles were themselves a de-facto disenfranchised underclass struggling to make themselves heard. As Muppets. Yeah, man, Y2K messed with everybody."




Allman Brothers Band
The nomadic Allmans were frequently singing about movement, like the gypsy wanderer yearning for "Melissa" and the ambulatory male of "Ramblin' Man." They heavily inspired the fictional band Stillwater in Almost Famous, and if you're familiar with the movie, it makes sense. There's a good deal of tension in these songs, pitting the pureness of the band's country-bluegrass roots against the polish of the rock production on their recordings. Plus, the original Allman lineup burned out relatively quickly after seven Southern rock template-defining years. If nothing else, I appreciate them for giving me a lot to chew on during those guitar solos.

Air to Alan Jackson

Air - Love 2
One of many albums that I collected for collecting's sake from my gig at KSCR (now KXSC). I'd bring a laptop into the studio and rip maybe 4 or 5 CDs in the downtime I spent not listening to the songs I had chosen to play that week. It was a classic left brain ("I need to stay current and find new things to play")/right brain ("FREE STUFF!") rationalization.

ANYWAY, Air is a pair of Frenchmen specializing in chillout electronica whose name has come to stand for "Amour, Imagination, Rêve" - or love, imagination, dream - which should really be the title of a Euro Disneyland parade. But most of the songs on Love 2 would, I think, be an appropriate soundtrack for a designer showcase that didn't have its heart set on being incongruously aggressive (unless they wanted to use "Eat My Beat," which lands too much on the side of abstract and unenforceable commands, e.g. "Smile with your eyes"). It's a fashionable record that sounds like a moon safari (the album-defining "Love") and manages to appear pleasingly vapid while retaining a certain degree of aloofness; ergo, "So Light Her Footfall" is a seductive score that's perfect for the anti-Tyra runway.

Air - "So Light Her Footfall"


You can summarize Love 2 in one word: gentle. "Sing, Sang, Sung" is the best example of this mood, a cross between music for beatific sun worshipers and a Baby Einstein DVD. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes that's what you need the most - tunes that swaddle you in smooth and tell you it's going to be all right. Especially if you're tweaking.


Air Supply
From one gentle foreign duo to another (minus the club drugs)...

Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock's names make up for what ever their music lacks in versatility. They would be perfect for either a Wheel of Fortune 'Before and After' puzzle or as pitchmen for a multi-disc soft rock compilation. By the way, one of these things actually happened.



The Russell & Russell specialty is the soporific love song that's appealing enough to reach No. 2 on the charts. It is an especially poetic ranking for the two Air Supply songs on my playlist: "All Out of Love," a maddeningly pushy ballad that's the pop song equivalent of someone asking you to decipher what went wrong in a breakup that you had no part in (though I realize a lot of pop songs are like this), and "Making Love (Out of Nothing At All)," which is the real operatic jam.



Clearly the superior of the two songs, "Making Love" is soft rock foreplay that teases and builds until ending in a hilariously euphoric verse boasting of the Russells' prowess in making "all the stadiums rock" and several other abilities that don't seem particularly special or are entirely fabricated, like making the night "disappear by the dawn." Keep shilling that AM gold, but don't you dare take credit for the music of the spheres, Air Supply!


Al Green
A few years ago USC opened the Galen Center, a new multipurpose sports arena, and one of the first events held there was an Al Green concert. Several times during each home football game that season, the stadium PA system would blast an ad that included snippets of "Let's Stay Together" (which was an old favorite of mine) and "Tired of Being Alone" (which was a new discovery) for the crowd in attendance.

If I'm accepting the power of the mellow as a leitmotif in this post, I must say it's oddly cathartic to watch thousands of drunk football fans get their kumbaya on for 90 seconds and hum a few bars of classic soul together, then return to rooting for one man to concuss the other.




Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Country music has a statistically insignificant presence in my library and it's usually not there without a utilitarian justification - I borrowed this particular record to create a playlist for a Memorial Day barbecue - but listening to 23 tracks of Alan Jackson's delicate wallflower-y voice is, in the grand scheme of this project, simple due diligence.

That said, I am a big fan of "Chattahoochee," an effective and evocative song that unabashedly uses the term "hoochie-kootchie." The most intriguing (and revealing) part of the song is the twice-appearing verse that describes Jackson's girlfriend rebuffing his polite request for sex. He does the conscionable, respectful thing and returns her home, but not before dragging her to some local chow house for a hamburger and a grape snow cone. Something about Alan Jackson slaking his intense sexual thirst with syrup and shaved ice really, really gets me. I fancy him the Mister Rodgers of county music.



Maybe, though, Jackson just has gigantic balls; several of these greatest hits are deliberately antagonistic, like a comedian that not only telegraphs his punchlines, but also cracks up before he can even get there. See: "Home," which is a straight-up autobiography that could've been kinda clever if he didn't spoil it in the first few lines or "Dallas," savoring the exquisite irony of someone named after a geographic location going on a road trip.

It behooves me to stop there, before I start making generalizations about country music as a whole. Frankly, the country music artist and the country music fan live in a alternative reality, a completely different local where what seems cornpone is lauded for its sincerity. And just as rock's obsession with New York and L.A. (or places and situations that consciously aspire to reflect the culture of one of the other) both narrows (bad) and deepens (good) the perspective of that idiom, I'd also point to country's hesitancy to acknowledge the world north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas as evidence of this separate sphere. To each his own.

One final highlight from Mr. Jackson - "Mercury Blues," a fun bit of freewheeling consumerism later reworked (with little difficulty) as the Ford truck jingle that it was always meant to be.



Not a lot of country fans are out there driving Montegos and Villagers, I imagine, but they do waterski while wearing cowboy hats.

Aesop Rock to Against Me!

Some Stray Thoughts
I posted my Aerosmith memories without mentioning the Steven-Tyler-to-American Idol news that we all knew several weeks ago and was just confirmed this week. J.Lo's along for the ride too. Even though AI's been a toxic asset for some time now, this is especially mystifying. After losing the TV's best villain since Newman, you don't replace him with two celebrities desperate to remain in the limelight after some high-profile setbacks. On the bright side, we may never have to hear another karaoke version of Armageddon'twannamissathing on national TV. Silver lining, folks.

Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass
The video for "None Shall Pass" popped up on MTV2 during the only time I would remember that channel existed - whilst exercising in the USC gym (yes, I went to the gym...for 5 months). You know, the MTV that still plays videos!? Yuk yuk yuk.

Except they don't, really, between all the reruns of Jackass and Pimp My Ride and that show with the pro skateboarder with the hat. I just happened to be there in the right 60-minute window - a happy coincidence.



Aesop is an idiosyncratic MC with the kind of charisma seen in soapbox preachers. The aforementioned title track and "Keep Off the Lawn" are suitably nutty delights. The nauticisms of "The Harbor is Yours" also reveal a gift for wordplay.

Buuuuut...well, let me put it this way. Though None Shall Pass was allegedly released in 2007, Aesop still thinks building tracks around samples from old high school science filmstrips ("Fumes") is cool and includes a "secret" track in the post-boombox era. There are lots of ideas on this record and Aesop is unfortunately in love with every one of them and reluctant to do any editing.

At least the zombieriffic "Coffee" ends everything on a high note.




Afrika Bambaata
For a while all you needed was a cool nickname and a clever way of describing whatever party you were currently at to be a rap star (and you could argue that things haven't changed much). And, really, that's all Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force/the Zulu Nation was. It was the way he did it, with the mystical trappings and the science fiction influences, that set him apart.

The tracks are long, almost like mini radio dramas. "Don't Stop...Planet Rock" is a robot rocking head trip featuring perhaps the only orchestra hits in music history that aren't cheesy. "Looking for the Perfect Beat" is the intersection between Herbie Hancock and Harold Faltermeyer; it could very well be mislabeled "Rockit vs. Axel F" on file-sharing sites if Bambaata's influence wasn't so palpable and respected in the birth of electro.

The lesson here is not to reinvent the wheel. These tracks feel like the invention of carousal cliché, the forefathers of leaning back and getting low and other vague physical imperatives, where "rocking" the party sounds like a novel idea and not like a punishment from the Old Testament.




After the Fire - "Der Kommisar"
I wasn't lying in the Adam and the Ants post - off-key rhyming was a trend that swept the globe (or at least the UK and downtown New York City) for a few years and, if anything, culminated in this top 5(!) English remake of a song originally by German electro-pop star Falco.

Though I can imagine the song being a wee bit more serious when coming out of Berlin, it's nonetheless a very tongue-in-cheek romp at the expense of Cold Warriors and bureaucrats. But even that assumes too much depth in "Der Kommisar" - its enduring value is now a giant audio banner that screams "Hey look, it's the '80s!"

Against Me! - "Here Comes a Regular"
Warner Bros. celebrated the 50th anniversary of their record label by releasing a surprisingly adventurous and obscure covers album. This cover of the Replacements is pleasant, straightforward, and pretty unnecessary and mainly reminds me that there's better stuff ahead (I organize alphabetically by artist, never by album).

Also, who really wants to hear Against Me! instead of the Replacements? I thought so.

Ace of Base to Aerosmith

Ace of Base
There's a simple formula for going nine times platinum with your American debut: Scandinavian melancholy, phone sex vocals, and the R&B demo track on the Casio repeated ad infinitum. But Ace of Base were less the second coming of ABBA than the genesis of big-time Europop built entirely around the sturdy upbeat music/downbeat lyrics dichotomy.

Exhibit A: The aforementioned debut was originally titled Happy Nation before it changed to The Sign for the U.S. release to capture on the massive success of the title track. Only Eiffel 65's Europop adheres more slavishly to the statute of truth in advertising (just imagine a Nirvana album called Disaffected Sounds of Young People from the Pacific Northwest).

Exhibit B: The singles "All That She Wants" and "Don't Turn Around," two morose tales of heartbreak with nearly identical song structures but told from two different perspectives. Just change a few lyrics and you've gone from jilter to jiltee.

Exhibit C: "Beautiful Life" is a corny stab at uplift tailor-made for a terribly green-screened video. Drew Carey weeps.


Whee! We're flying!

But just as I was ready to indict Ace of Base for everything from Aqua to Zombie Nation, I dropped the needle on "The Sign" and remembered why they have lifetime amnesty. Here, the optimism works since it's actually a giant kiss-off, and they start the listener out about as low as you can possibly go (first lines don't get much more depressing than "Why?/Why do I bother?") then work hard to bring you back up in that brilliant chorus. It's a shiny comet of pop perfection that takes me right back to the roller rink.




Adam and the Ants
"White hip-hop" was a curious idiom that didn't survive rap's first halting steps into the mainstream in the early 1980s, which makes "Ant Rap" more fascinating as an historical document than an actual song, as it is pure nonsense. Nobody has the balls to refer to his "four men" doing "that rapping thing" anymore. It is a moment to be preserved, if only to show just how elastic hip-hop can be.

Experiments aside, Adam and the Ants are a great example of the '80s band that was always interesting to look at and occasionally interesting to listen to. "Stand and Deliver" is their de facto calling card, a little glam Western about a bunch of cheeky fops-slash-highwaymen stealing our attention away from the talented and slovenly, huzzah.

"Kings of the Wild Frontier" is all about drums and comparing your fanbase to an oppressed ethnic group. "Antpeople," I reckon, were no less oppressed than Parrotheads. But did I mention how sweet those drums are?




Aerosmith
I wonder what happened to the old Aerosmith, the straight-up boogie woogie New England bar band of the type that Boston wrote about but could never actually be with all their synths and spaceships and falsettos. This is the Aerosmith that wrote the epically dirty "Back in the Saddle" and the epically epic "Sweet Emotion" and "Dream On" (sorry, Eminem, not even you can ruin that one). This is the Aerosmith that came up with "Walk This Way," a song so ludicrously hickabilly that Run-DMC considered re-working as it joke until they saw a way to make piles of money from it. I should note that I have only the original version and not the collabo - there's nothing revolutionary about yelling each rhyming word at the top of their lungs, then acting like it's the musical equivalent of de Klerk freeing Mandela.

"Train Kept A Rollin'" also fits into the above style but not the rant.

After that Aerosmith imploded due to the usual litany of rock 'n roll vices, Aerosmith 2.0 rose from its ashes, a jovial collection of kooky uncles with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of songwriting gimmicks. This is not entirely a criticism. I have soft spots for the barely-clever wordplay of "Love In An Elevator" and the inexplicable oddness of "Pink"; the softest spot, however, is reserved for "Dude (Looks Like A Lady)" which for many years I believed was written specifically for the movie Mrs. Doubtfire. I am smarter now and am well aware that it's about transgender love. There's also the rumor that it was inspired by Steven Tyler meeting the members of Motley Crue which, if it's true, is totally heroic. WHA KA KA KA KOW!



I'm surprised that while I don't have some of the better singles like "Living on the Edge" or "Crazy," I do have "Janie's Got A Gun" - it's kind of taboo to slam due to its subject matter but I have a major beef with those pan pipes and the heinous overproduction all around.

And we can't forget the song from Armageddon, laying aside the cock rock long enough to do some avant-garde screeching over a full symphony orchestra. Without it, nobody would take the plot of the film seriously.

Abe Vigoda to AC/DC

Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
I can't really explain (nor do I entirely 'get') the no wave scene except to say that city folk and Los Angelinos in particular are incredibly tolerant of noise. Not sound - noise. But at least Abe Vigoda has that tropical dash of "whitey sees the world" that comes through best on songs like "Dead City/Waste Wilderness" and "Gates." And a terrible ironic band name hasn't prevented them from being a low profile local institution for the past 6 years - I was surprised to discover that Skeleton is their third LP. Their song titles are better. "Whatever Forever" is, fittingly, 40 seconds of...noise. With a similar "just not giving a shit anymore" schtick for the past 15 years, the real Abe probably approves.

On a personal note, I saw Abe Vigoda open for Vampire Weekend at the Wiltern at the tail end of VW's debut album hysteria. Or at least I would have, if my buddy Jeff hadn't turned and walked out of the room after hearing 3 seconds of their opening song. That really sums it up.




AC/DC
Did you know that Back in Black, the gritty bridge from 70s glam rock to 80s glam metal, is the best-selling album by any band? Only MJ bests them worldwide with Thriller. It's easy to see why with its meat-and-potatoes appeal, the first two tracks beloved by baseball closers ("Hells Bells") and Iron Man directors ("Shoot to Thrill") alike. But still, how do we get there from here? The themes of Back in Black are insanely dark (natch), touching on death, crime, murder sprees, prostitution, alcoholism, and, lest we forget, noise pollution. It's a perfect example of the clear distinction between happy-go-lucky hedonism and balls-out nihilism. These are some of the nastiest party songs ever written. Of course, the song "Back in Black" is as fine a eulogy as has ever been written, flipping the proverbial bird to moderation in all its forms. "Shook Me All Night Long" is almost sweet in its relative subtlety (how do you envision "American thighs"?) compared to, say, "Giving the Dog a Bone."

"Relative" is truly the watchword when it comes to AC/DC. It all lies in the Bon Scott-Brian Johnson schism: the former's death seemed to inspire the group to go even more obvious in the lyrics. I don't expect much more from AC/DC, but my scattered collected of singles reveals a handful of songs that are game attempts at something more complex than Back in Black would lead one to believe. "High Voltage" and "Live Wire" (what I call "the electricity songs") are charmingly clever in comparison to the 7th grade humor of "Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap" (admittedly, you shouldn't go looking for wit in a song about a murder-for-hire business with the phone number 36-24-36).

"It's A Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock and Roll)" says fuck you, here's some bagpipes, which win a slim 3-2 judge's decision against the lead guitar in the call and response instrumental section. You gotta have serious cojones to put that much bagpipes in your lead single (Scott was, of course, ethnically a Scot). "Girls Got Rhythm" is the best thing about the Dead or Alive trailer. "For Those About to Rock" is hard rock's 1812 Overture; "Thunderstruck" isn't bad but is one of Johnson's worst sandpaper vocals. "TNT" again weaponizes the body...or the guitar...or the music itself. There's a lot of masculine id in these songs that no number of footnotes can keep straight.

I thought "Let There Be Rock" originally had a racist lyric in its dense origin story where "the white man had the smarts/the black man had the blues." But the Internet claims that what the white man had was "schmaltz." This kind of makes sense but also kind of reverses the stereotype. And I don't know if I buy a Yiddish word in an AC/DC song. Jury's still out.

And duh, "Highway to Hell" is unstoppable, the quintessence of the simple relentless energy of the classic AC/DC compositions - just as impressive as the virtuosic bursts that characterized popular metal post-Back in Black. Just as important, it was the band's first single to chart in the U.S. and the last featuring Scott as lead vocalist (unless you count the posthumous "Big Balls," and I don't, though I've always wanted to work a phrase like "posthumous big balls" into a post).