September 3rd, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby
Ah, The Smiths. Less than two years ago all I knew of them was their name and “indie” street cred. And less than three years ago, that was all I wanted to know.
See, there’s this funny thing that happens when you convince yourself you’re redefined. When I discovered “progressive” acts like Rush and Dream Theater in high school, I didn’t just move away from radio and pop, I swore it off. Cold turkey. Why bother with basic time signatures and market-focused three-minute tracks when there was so much more out there worthy of exploration, I thought. What could 99% of what’s played through Clear Channel, Inc. teach me about emotion, creativity and expression? How could that Product possibly enrich my life?
In my defense, about most of what’s played on the radio (these days), a lot of that is true. But as a generalization, it’s more than just a little ridiculous. It’s the classic kneejerk oversimplification of someone embarking on something they haven’t quite figured out and, so, have no real idea what they’re talking about. It’s the Renounce & Evolve theory. Bartering extremes for experience.
It’s impossible to compare the heart-soaked lyrics that Morrissey brandishes on his sleeve to the allusion-packed concept scripts of Neal Peart’s. How can you set Rush’s balls-out rock sensibility next to The Smiths’ dry, almost flippant tone and tell yourself you’re being fair? These bands, and all bands, are the same in that they share a common goal: to make you feel. Except the means by which they reach that end are all unique. Learn to love the differences and you move from somebody who likes bands to someone who appreciates music. Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Smiths
September 2nd, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Mike
Apparently Rolling Stone recently published a list of “the” Top 100 Beatles songs. Just in time, too; you can only dodge the question so often at parties before your friends start wondering why you’re always in the bathroom. Having opinions is so much easier when you’re backed by an authority.*
*More good news: Next month Time will be compiling an ordered list of the Top 10 Best Colors, and Esquire will be doing the Best 20 Jelly Belly Flavors. Finally, right?
Now, despite certain moral aversions I have toward the Top Whatever, in the spirit of my 50 Albums Project (The 50 Most Important Albums in My Life, not The 50 Best) I’ve decided to play along. It was my cousin who piqued my interest in the idea when he sent over his personal 25 and I realized how similar, yet so totally different, my own picks would be. I mean, it’s The Beatles. Sophie’s choice was a cakewalk compared to this.
Since the 50 Albums Project started, I’ve not really been posting peripherally on here (and I think it’s better that way), but with this we’re sort of playing in the same ballpark. Consider it an extra. A bonus. It’s here maybe only for me to look back at years later to see how much my tastes have changed.
The trick is to try to make your list in no more than 30min. I won’t lie to you, it’s hard (especially when you get down to ordering). But it is interesting. And you’ve got to be honest with yourself that, given the day (or the stylistic phase), your entire set might change.
So here’s mine. It’s not perfect and the ordering is pretty meaningless but, it’s the best I can do.
Give it a try. And feel free to post what you come up with in the comments. Read more…
Posted in: music
Tags: Beatles
August 27th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
Thick as Brick earns a coveted place on the Mellotron Sounds 50 Albums List not because it’s so important musically (even though it is) or because I love it (even though I do), but more because of what it represents.
A near-45 minute epic, all one singular track, the arrangement transitions often, from acoustic elements to electric, organs to flutes, guitars to xylophones, putting to tape one of the most committed concept albums ever recorded—one, we’d only find out later, is actually a satire.
Straight from the horse’s mouth (the horse is Tull frontman Ian Anderson):
“Thick as a Brick was written as a spoof, as a send-up of a concept album. The record preceding it, Aqualung, had been viewed by some critics as a concept album, which I disagreed with…. So I said, “OK, let’s give them the mother of all concept albums.” An integral part of that was to pretend the lyrics had been written by an eight-year-old boy, a preposterous, sort of precocious child who came up with these convoluted and vague-sounding lyrics all set to a continuous flow of music. It was a lot of fun to do. I wasn’t trying to deceive people. I just thought everybody would get the gag.”
So that explains the lyrics*. But Thick as a Brick is a musical spoof the same way Edgar Wright’s movies (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim) are cinematic ones—which is to say, it really isn’t. Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews, prog
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Ayreon, Devin Townsend, Dream Theater, edgar wright, Hot Fuzz, Ian Anderson, James Labrie, Jethro Tull, Scott Pilgrim, Shaun of the Dead
August 20th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
What a Little Moonlight Melody Can Do
From the beginnings of “progressive” rock with Rubber Soul/Revolver at #40, Frost* is the mark that we’ve officially reached the other pole of the spectrum.
What started as an in-his-spare-time synth experiment of pop music producer Jem Godfrey’s, Milliontown was never intended as a proper album. It was more of a pet project, an after-work “labor of love” that sort of took on a life of its own and gave birth to what is now Frost*, one of the latest and most uncompromising prog-rock outfits with a flair for layering, excess and the wonders of post-production.
Think of it this way: If Rubber Soul/Revolver was the start of a kind of musical awakening, Milliontown is what happens 5 cups of coffee afterward. In my review for Liquid Tension Experiment I (my #47 pick), I refer to the album as an exercise in “showy virtuoso freakout,” and in a sense, you could file Milliontown into the same log. Where this album is a little different, though, is in its sense of self-awareness. Is it self-indulgent? Definitely. Pretentious? There will always be people who call prog pretentious. But because of Godfrey’s background in pop, it’s a bit more grounded, also—emotionally. It chooses its melodies carefully, digging deeply into each as if it were trying to find out exactly what could lie at their ultimate ends. This core keeps the piece from ever devolving into that masturbatory “so what” kind of prog, where the guitarist and keyboardist take turns showing off just how fast and technically they can solo. It proves that this frenetic, long-song model still can work, that the word “progressive”* in 2010 doesn’t have to mean “clinical.”
*I think it’s important to acknowledge that the word “progressive” is probably one of the most loosely defined terms in music. Like all labels, it really means nothing: ambition, experimentation, non-traditionalism. But bits of these qualities are/should be incorporated into all forms. And so “Prog” was born, a category for the hard-to-categorize that over time became known for, among other things, its complex compositions and electronic elements. So (sigh…) for my purposes, let’s call “Prog” anything that ignores traditional song structure and, in borrowing from other styles, endeavors to create something that might surprise people. It’s a stupid setup: Neutral Milk Hotel is “progressive,” but good luck getting anyone in the community to call it “Prog.”
There is definitely a part of Milliontown that understands that clichés are clichés for a reason and that there’s value in tradition. But then there’s another, more enthusiastic part that gets off on breaking the rules. And, really, it’s that latter quality which makes this, Frost*’s debut record, special. Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews, prog
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Frost*, Liquid Tension Experiment, Steven Wilson
August 13th, 2010 / 2 Comments » / by Mike
*Something to keep in mind: Order-wise, my list is pretty bunk. I try to stick to general sets but the fact remains that often I sacrifice where I’d really keep a certain album for the sake of better readability. St Anger, for example (my #50 pick), would really be closer to the top 30-20—but it’s a good opener, so I started with it. And Rubber Soul/Revolver? Well, suffice to say that A) there’s another Beatles’ album closer to the top, and B) thematically, they make sense here. So as a general rule, take my ordering semi-lightly. All for the greater contextual good.
Building the Bridge
As obscenely popular as The Beatles were through their first 5 or so LPs, it’s pretty inarguable that they’d have never become THE Beatles if not for the way they grew, evolved stylistically, thematically and tonally with the times. Records like Rubber Soul and Revolver aren’t just incredible pieces of work; they’re freeze-frames of a metamorphosis, documents of a startling and rare brand of becoming. Where Rubber Soul works as a testament to growth, Revolver jolts alive as one of awakening.
Listen to Rubber Soul and you get to witness the best band in the world mature, test out some darker shades of sarcasm and retrospect in their songwriting. This isn’t “Can’t Buy Me Love” or “I Wanna Hold Your Hand;” it’s a different and deeper kind of pop.
And then we have Revolver, where it’s almost like John, Paul, George & Ringo accepted the mantle, grew confident in the fact that they were the best band in the world—not just the most popular—and decided to start acting like it.
As a segue out of the 40s portion of my list, where everything’s pretty straight-up rock and nostalgia, there’s really no better albums I could pick to mark a shift into new territory. I love each of these records not only for what they symbolize musically, but also for their accessibility—which I could say about the entire Beatles discography (and is maybe even the greatest accomplishment of their later, more ambitious releases).
Look anywhere and you can find a thousand Beatles reviews far better and more knowledgeable than anything I could come up with here, but just think: this is a band that went from Please, Please Me (their debut) to Sgt. Pepper’s in only 4 years. You don’t have to be a muiscphile Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Beatles
August 6th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
It’s summer again and, like every summer for the past few years, my cousin Andy is telling Chris and me that we listen to the best music.
Andy’s only a year younger than me and I get a serious s kick out of how annoyed he gets when instead of his name I call him “Junior” and “Squirt” and “Sport” and “Tiger.” He’s from Missouri and it’s our new tradition that every year he come to Florida to spend a couple weeks in Palm Coast, to hang out with my brother and me and Matt Clay and Jose, who we affectionately refer to Our Puerto Rican Friend Jose. Or Joselito. Depending on the context.
Chris and I are still young, probably 17 and 15 at the oldest, and it’s not that we’re introducing Andy to anything esoteric or weird. It’s more that where he’s from—the in-the-middle-of-nowhere chunk of rural land just outside of St Louis called Hillsboro, where he races dirt bikes and has to travel 20 minutes to the nearest grocery—he’s used to listening to country and a bit of rap. So the radio rock we send him back home with, usually, seems pretty new.
Metallica, Trust Company, Van Halen, A Perfect Circle—these were all in the rotation at one time or another. But this year, it’s Ozzy, and we’ve been playing a lot of “Over the Mountain” and “Mr. Crowley” and “Flying High Again” to set the mood.
When it came to full albums, though, the only ones we ever really committed to were Ozzmosis and Down to Earth—probably because of their 1995 and 2001 release dates. That was right around the time “The Prince of Darkness” became a regular in the Cavaliere spin cycle.
Everybody likes to bring up the “bat head” episode when Ozzy comes up in conversation but for me, I guess you just had to be there. I never cared much about the “evil Ozzy” theatrics, probably because I wasn’t alive yet for most of them. Instead, I was floored by the idea Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Alanis, Macarena, Ozzy, Weezer
July 31st, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Mike
*Sorry about the delay in posting this week. A last-minute change to the order of my list moved what was going to be this week’s pick way into the future. But I’m like the mailman, ladies and gentlemen, delivering witty and creative bits of autobiographical criticism through rain, sleet, snow, or numerical indecision. Because that’s my job. And you depend on it.
Everything I knew about early rock I learned from my Uncle Jimmy. He was a New Yorker in his 20s when my brother and I were little and just happy to be there, up north where the grass felt different and it might actually snow for Christmas. He loved horror movies, always owned the latest Madden and hockey game and would play them with us under the alias “The Master.” He’d take us to the movies, Mets games. He’d play Wiffle ball with us in the backyard, had a German Shepherd named after Charles Haley, sung in a band and rocked a haircut that would now be recognized as a “mullet,” but then was a “perm” (but just try getting him to admit that).
Uncle Jim was the kind of guy you’d imitate and look forward to hanging out with. Even though he was so much older than us, he’d go out of his way to spend time with Chris and I, almost like he actually wanted to, like he actually “got” us. In his bedroom closet there was a bottle of tequila with a worm resting curled and fuzzy at the bottom; pinned to a cork board over his desk, a picture of a topless blonde lying on the beach. When we got a little older, he told us about the first time he got caught drinking cheap beer underage by his friend’s dad who sighed and said something like, “If you’re gonna do this, at least use the good stuff”—then handed them some Budweiser. Then about the signal one of his friends came up with that meant his parents were gone for the night and it was prime to party: he’d turn on the Christmas lights that were kept up year-round outside his house.
We always looked up to Uncle Jimmy. So it’s no surprise that when he introduced my brother and me to Van Halen in his car one day—probably while he was taking us to ice cream or to Modell’s to pick up a stickball bat for the schoolyard—of course we loved it.
You can cite a million things in records like 1984 and Van Halen to appreciate, and considering Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Van Halen
July 23rd, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
The first CD I ever bought was a cassette.
I‘m not sure why this is; by the time of Dookie’s release in 1994, CDs had been the standard for years. I even distinctly remember having a CD setup in the house. It was my dad’s, a multidisc changer connected to an ancient silver tank receiver and two wood-paneled cabinet speakers. Christmas music would blast in a constant loop out of it during the Season; I even remember shuffling through my parents lot of jewel cases lined in a cheap black plastic pull-out drawer, just staring at cover art—Michael Jackson leaning on an elbow in his signature white suit, all the Chicago albums that were impossible to differentiate since they were numbered instead of named and rarely had pictures on the front.
But I was buying tapes, not because I was a purist but more because of this awesome yellow Walkman I had that you could use underwater just by snapping shut a gray clasp on its side. I never used it like that, of course, but I could if I wanted to, which is more than I could say about your Walkman.
Regardless, with my parents’ money I picked up Dookie along with tapes of REM’s Monster and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. Even at 8 years old I appreciated an inscrutable dose of eclecticism.
15 years later and I have to admit that Green Day isn’t a band that I necessarily love. But when constructing a list of not 10 or 20 but 50 of the most important albums in your life, there are bound to be a few like this, a few automatics that sort of “are what they are” but would leave the list incomplete if they weren’t on it. For me, Dookie and Insomniac (a kind of Dookie II in my mind) are perennials. They’re the two albums in my collection that have been there the longest, through phases and fads, new schools and bigger CD racks. And there aren’t many I can say have endured all that—most albums from this far “back in the day” at one point or another made the walk of shame into the nethers of my “Rejects” pile, a dried out Ziplock in the glove compartment of my car where I keep all the discs I don’t listen to enough to store in my binder.
Green Day was always a band you could relate to, the one group it seemed Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Bush, Green Day
July 16th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
“I hope this letter finds you well”
I really can’t say exactly what it is about The Moon is Down that draws me in the way it does. Maybe it’s the beach imagery, the romantic “fling” glorification or the general sense of urgency with which the record comes alive. But whenever I listen, there’s this indefinable visceral reaction I get; and it doesn’t just boil inside of me, it erupts.
The closest thing to “emo” (whatever that means) in my CD collection, Further Seems Forever’s debut release (and only with Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba) isn’t just a series of love songs and angst ballads. It’s a document of summer, an autobiography of a youth spent on the coast that’s told in flashes and bursts, lustful sweeps of electric melancholy and guitars that chug and drive and yearn, trying their hardest to echo like so many memories.
A Boca Raton native, Carrabba’s got a thing for the beach. And it’s not just here—Dashboard has more than its fair share of nods to the beautiful way that weather, seasons and the coast can break your heart. The most obvious of these is probably D/C’s Dusk and Summer album, which pictures Carrabba on the front cover, standing in the glow of a Florida shoreline just before nightfall, looking both intensely fulfilled and perfectly miserable. This is his home, Carrabba, and I imagine it’s where almost everything worth remembering in his life happened to him.
There’s a frantic sense of that in the Moon is Down, a sense that surrounded by this force, the force of the familiar, the ocean can either be infinitely comforting or hopelessly depressing. It can wrap its arms around you or leave you tiny in the sand, alone to ponder just how quickly it could swallow you up if it wanted to.
Because of how popular (and annoyingly controversial) Dashboard is, it’s hard not to read The Moon is Down from a Chris Carrabba angle. But for me that’s part of its magic. It’s like hearing a bare bones acoustic version of a song that’s all distortion and drum fills. It can sometimes be revelatory. Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Chris Carrabba, Dashboard Confessional, Further Seems Forever
July 9th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Mike
What opened my eyes to the glory that is the Satan-fueled power-rock duo known as Tenacious D, was first catching the video for their single “Tribute” one summer on MTV.
In it, these two overweight wannabe rockers (Jack Black & Kyle Gas) crammed themselves into a mall’s karaoke booth, rigged it into a recording studio and sung about an impromptu jam they once wrote that just so happened to be the best song in the world. Granted, they couldn’t exactly remember how it went, but that didn’t matter—this was a tribute. And really, “greatest and best song in the world”? That was just a matter of opinion, anyway.
Needless to say, after discovering this treasure the D became my new favorite thing. I bought their album, ate up concert videos and their short-lived HBO sitcom from which most of the material on the CD originated, became well versed in all things Jack Black and, honestly—no joke—began seeing rock music a little differently.
You see, “Tribute” isn’t the only piece in the D’s illustrious canon that’s commemorating something. Their whole debut album, every track, it’s as much a love letter to Dio, Maiden, Sabbath and the self-important, animalistic, bombastic life of rock n’ roll as it is a mockery of those things. “Kielbasa” and “Double Team” are about sex and how good (and uninhibited) sex can be with rock stars; “The Road” is the obligatory woes-of-touring track; “Kyle Quit the Band” covers inter-band rivalries and casts Black as the abusive and temperamental lead; “Explosivo” makes little to no sense but starts with an a cappella number about weed then erupts into directionless ass-kicking; “Fuck Her Gently” shows off the guys’ softer side; and then there’s “City Hall,” the social reform epic.
It’s all here: Drugs, Sex, and obscene amounts of Rock n’ Roll. There’s even a jab at the soulless state of modern radio in “One Note Song,” where Jack excitedly calls Kyle in to listen a tune he just wrote that consists of nothing more than steady monotone plucks on the same string–except with “bendies” thrown in every 3 or 4 plucks to liven things up.
“But it’s one note,” Kyle deadpans. “Anybody could’a wrote it.”
“But guess who did write it,” Black fires back. “Me, baby. Me!”
Utterly brilliant. Read more…
Posted in: cd reviews
Tags: 50 Albums Project, Comedy, Jack Black, Tenacious D
