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.