Despite having worked with a myriad of producers and despite the progressive upward arc of her work, the best word to describe Björk’s music can be taken from the title of her third solo album: Homogenic.
“Homogenic” is usually used as a pejorative when describing a musician’s work, but as demonstrated on Björk’s Greatest Hits, the Icelandic singer has managed to ground her work in a single aesthetic, even when she’s bouncing from collaborator to collaborator.
On their own, Björk’s albums have felt like autonomous works, individual collections that share some similiarities with each other but diverge greatly in the detail.
There’s no mistaking the half-baked skeletons of Debut for the richly realized epics of Homogenic, nor the bizzare minimalism of Vespertine.
But when the different creative eras of Björk’s work are collected onto one disc, the similarities become more striking than the differences.
If the strings on “Hyperballad” were given more prominence, they would have fit nicely on Homogenic. If “Possibly Maybe” employed more esoteric samples, it could be mistaken for a track on Vespertine. “Hunter” from Homogenic and “Hidden Place” from Vespertine almost sound like they came from the same album.
Even the more radio-friendly songs — “Human Behavior”, “Army of Me” — fit snugly in Björk’s grand singular vision.
The non-chronological track listing goes a long way in stringing together Björk’s diverse output. Instead of presenting her career as a progression, Greatst Hits posits the influences which inform her music — an orchestral foundation supported by fluttering beats — has always been there.
Björk fans were solicited to vote for the collection’s track listing, a tricky proposition since a musician’s most popular works aren’t necessarily their best. (Case in point: Japanese band L’Arc~en~Ciel’s Clicked Singles Best 13.)
For the sake of continuity, remixes of certain tracks — “All Is Full of Love”, “Big Time Sensuality” — were chosen over their original versions. A smart move.
Even a brand new song, “It’s In Our Hands”, manages to weave itself seamlessly into what’s gone before.
At the time, it seemed Björk was taking steps to become the artist she is. In fact, she was become more of the artist she already was.
In a way, Greatest Hits rewrites Björk’s own history. She didn’t arrive at her aesthetic so much as she settled into it.
When the band released Best of 1980-1990 back in 1998, they wanted you to forget four Dublin lads barely out of their teens could hardly play their instruments, let alone write music.
Boy? October? What are those?
They’re trying to pull the same stunt again.
With Best of 1990-2000, U2 wants you think they’ve improved upon some of its missteps, learned from its mistakes. But covering up mishaps only serves to shine a harsher light on them.
What’s more? Some of these improvements don’t improve a thing.
No, “Discotechque” was not a shining moment in the band’s history, nor was it a very good single. But it was interesting and certainly something that deserves attention in a career spanning retrospective.
But the “new mix” of the song on Best of 1990-2000 sounds worst than the original. So too with “Numb” — that song was one of U2’s wildest and best moments, which the “new mix” strips of its charms.
Guys, take a lesson from the late-Brandon Tartikoff of NBC — if ain’t broke, don’t fucking fix it.
The problem with being the biggest band in the world is that even when they’re trying to admit their shit does stink, they still act like it doesn’t. What U2 chose to include and exclude shows it still hasn’t found what it’s looking for.
“Gone”, which also sports a “new mix”, has fascinating guitar effects, but it’s no “Elevation”, which didn’t make the cut. “The Fly”, also one of its least successful singles but most interesting moments, is also absent.
U2 did do one thing right — they left “Lemon” off. Man, did that song ever suck.
Like the re-recording of “The Sweetest Thing” before it, the new songs on Best of 1990-2000 — “Electrical Storm” and “The Hands that Built America” — don’t contribute to the continuity of the collection. In fact, they’re not even terribly memorable.
Unwittingly, The Best of 1990-2000 demonstrates U2’s humanity. Even when they’re trying to rewrite history and present itself in the best light possible, they’re still fucking up left and right, doing some things wrong and a lot of things right.
They’re still running on instinct, as they have for the past 20 years. And even if that instinct tells them to hush things up when they shouldn’t, at least they’re following their gut.
For once in his life, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes actually garnered good reviews for his work.
The British press actually looked kindly on The Devils, Rhodes’ side project with the Lilac Time’s Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy.
Of course, Duran Duran historians know the significance of this pairing — Duffy was one of Duran Duran’s first singers, before the then-upstart band recruited Simon Le Bon as a frontman.
Dark Circles, the result of this pre-historic reunion, does the unlikely job of transporting Rhodes and Duffy back to their past, while grounding them in the now.
(Diety help me not use the word “electroclash”.)
For Duranies salivating at the prospect of a new studio album featuring Duran Duran’s original line-up, Dark Circles is a playful appetizer, a collection of robotic, deadpan pop as familiar as it is new.
I’m not impressed.
For all its retro-charm, exaggerated excess and, to its credit, orchestral scope, there’s something utterly lifeless and forgettable about Dark Circles.
At some points, Duffy could be mistaken for John Taylor, whose own solo albums sport weak singing that’s alternately charming and grating.
Rhodes, unfortunately, has been trapped by his own stubborn refusal to let Duran Duran go into that good night. Even though Dark Circles sounds like it’s played on different instruments by different people, at its core, it’s a Duran Duran album.
The guitar work even apes departed axeslinger Warren Cuccurullo, and those two aren’t even on good terms! If that’s not Tessa Niles singing back-up on these songs, that woman certainly sounds like her.
Don’t buy it? Exhibit one: “Come Alive”. Forget for a moment the conversely-titled “Come Undone” — the intro sounds alone sounds like “Girls on Film” redressed.
Maybe the British critics are right. Perhaps there’s something cool and unusual about the Devils.
And yeah — I’ll be the first to admit I’m a lapsed Duranie totally skeptical about the upcoming reunion.
But despite my own attraction to robotic rhythms, strange effects, soulful back-up singers and piercing guitars, there’s something too familiar about it all. In short, Rhodes has gone as far as he can go, and even working with friends from days of olde isn’t enough to shake it up.
Although clocking in at 35 minutes, John Vanderslice’s Life and Death of an American Fourtracker sounds more realized than most albums twice as long.
On the surface, Vanderslice sounds like one of those precocious indie rock types, a knob twiddler with a burnished voice and large vocabulary. But his snappy songwriting is underscored by an even-handed orchestral sensibility.
Right from the noisy, dissonant start of Life of an American Fourtracker, Vanderslice’s third album, it’s evident the chamber music flourishes on “Fiend in a Cloud” or “Me and My 424” aren’t merely after-thoughts. Even when he uses drum loops and sythesizer effects, Vanderslice treats them with an orchestrator’s touch.
Life and Death of an American Fourtracker has been alternately described as a song cycle or a quasi-concept album. Vanderslice’s obtuse lyrics don’t serve to thread a thematic element through the album, but a compositional arc does tie the album together.
Tracks segue into one another (“The Mansion” into “Nikki Oh Nikki”; “Greyhound” into “Interlude #5”), and hints of a later track (“From Here On”) are introduced close to the beginning of the album (“Interlude #4”). Then, Vanderslice ties everything together by reprising the album’s opener.
Impressive? Shouldn’t be.
For quasi-concept albums, this kind of intra-track interplay is normal. It does, however, serve to keep a listener engaged through all 35 minutes of Fourtracker, regardless of any implied theme.
Vanderslice’s scratchy voice fits well within the lo-fi context of the album’s production value, but like those classical underpinnings in his songwriting, his diction hint at something far more lofty.
Smart though Life and Death of an American Fourtracker may be, Vanderslice doesn’t sacrifice the pop song at the heart of all the studio finesse. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the chain gang percussion and ominous drones of “Nikki Oh Nikki” impress your inner Ingram Marshall — not when Vanderslice insists “We’re going to die/We’re going to die”.
Life and Death of an American Fourtracker offers a lot more than most troubadours produce without being overly sufferable about it.
Best played after hours, when the clubs are closed, the children are asleep and there’s nothing good on TV.
David Poe, like namesake David Mead, traffics in the kind of six-string storytelling not allergic to a radio-friendly melody.
In a just world, tracks such as “Echo Box” and “The Drifter” would reveal John Mayer for the treacly bullshit artist he really his. (Not that “Your Body is a Wonderland” doesn’t already do that.)
Poe’s deep, smokey voice serves him especially well on “Deathwatch for a Living Legend”, a country-tinged romp told through the eyes of a hard-drinking, hard-living star. Poe lets your imagination fill in the blank: Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.
But it’s when Poe dresses down with little more than brushes on a drum that his songs really shine.
When Poe sings the title lyric of “Your the Bomb”, he lets the understatement of his delivery reinforce the overstatment of the slang. The watery guitars on “Never I Will” gives his voice a cool, ethereal setting.
“Love in the Afternoon” could almost be mistaken for one of Bill Frisell’s more melodic moments.
Poe’s crooner tendencies are less pronounced on “The Late Song (Je Ne Suis Pas Mort)” and “Wear Your Best”, but the intimacy is no less there.
The Late Album’s mainstream appeal might make it a difficult sell at first, but it doesn’t take long for Poe’s hushed performances to draw a listener in and, ultimate, seduce.
But if the Austin-based vaudevillean ensemble attempted to recreate some of the sonic acoutriments on its latest long player — the confidently-titled My Favorite Record — on stage, it would need to plug in a sampler.
My Favorite Record is the first album the band has released for another label since its well-publicized battle in 2000 with Watermelon Records. The band and the label sparred over master recordings of the Spankers’ first albums, which has since been reissued on Bloodshot.
(The group formed its own label, Spanks-a-Lot, that year and has released a number of EPs, live recordings and solo projects by itself.)
My Favorite Record feels like a proper follow-up to 1999’s expansive Hot Lunch. Both recordings share the fidelity of a studio project.
In some ways, My Favorite Record feels like the umpteen-member ensemble have gone through some creative downsizing of its own. In the past, the Spankers leap-frogged from jazz to country to blues to comedy to Hawaiian to … you get the idea.
The new songs focus more on blues and roots music. It’s not as wildly diverse as previous albums, but that clarity gives the album a forceful confidence.
Asylum Street Spankers can be jokesters, but they can also be poignant when they wannabe. In the past, those moments of gravity didn’t fit so snugly with the band’s pranks.
This time around, those moments don’t feel so incongruous. The sweet sentimentality of “Smile” doesn’t seem out of place next to the honky-tonk imagery of “Wingless Angels”. The playfullness of “The Minor Waltz” serves as a nice lead-in to the smoldering “No Song Sad Enough”.
Of course, the Spankers are best when its offering biting commentary on modern foibles.
Donning on his best Dashboard Confessional, Guy Forsyth vows to take up any and all political causes for the loftiest of all goals — “to get in bed with you”.
Wammo indulges his inner Ozzy Osbourne on “Wammo’s Blues”, bragging how he’ll “go on a blind date to Disneyworld with Charles Manson, Loreena Bobbitt and Lizzy Borden and … still be the only one who gets naked”. That’s before he “suck[s] the formaldehyde out of the jar holding Kurt Cobain’s brain while using Hemingway’s shotgun as a straw”.
The band gets most ambitious on the album’s title track. Half way through the song, the Spankers turn into John Zorn, splicing parodies of metal, Mike Patton and doo-wop (“oh, baby sit on my face ‘cos I love youuuuuuu!!”), concluding with its own version of a skipping needle.
The confidence of the album’s title isn’t misplaced. My Favorite Record is the Spankers’ tightest studio effort yet, and it deserves many multiple spins.
New York City’s music scene blah, blah, blah. The Strokes blah, blah, blah. Joy Division blah, blah, blah.
Pretty much every review of Interpol’s debut album, Turn on the bright lights, makes some mention about the band’s locale (current “it”-town NYC), which necessitates mentioning the Strokes, which necessitates mentioning Interpol sound more like Joy Division than Television.
Musicwhore.org would not like to indulge in the more lemming tendencies of the mainstream music press — how can so much ink be spilled about Sweden’s hot garage rock scene, then turn and pan every single album made by said bands? — but in this case, it can’t help it.
Interpol really does sound like Joy Division. At the very least, there’s an early ’80s patina to Interpol’s reverb-soaked, deadpan-delivered music.
The bass work calls to mind Peter Hook, the guitars Johnny Marr, and Paul Banks’ singing Ian Curtis.
For anyone who came of age when the States miraculously sprang from the economic depression of the Carter era, Interpol is comfort food for the ears, new music in the guise of Modern English.
Which means, hell if I know how this album sounds to other people. (I like it.)
Such evokation of easily citeable source material may give the impression Interpol is a quartet of hacks, Turn on the bright lights has some decent writing.
There’s something hypnotic in the way the band’s guitarists chug away at those chords. Banks’ monotone voice gives way to a few leaps and jumps that are singable but not entirely predictable.
“Say Hello to Angels” gets downright danceable. The dirge-like “NYC” hints at a sliver of sunlight when Banks intones, “It’s up to me now, turn on the bright lights”.
On “Leif Erickson”, Interpol sounds closer to the Doors, Banks doing an eerie impression of Jim Morrison.
Familiarity may breed distress, but in the case of Turn on the bright lights, it provides warmth.
Maybe the comparrisons with the Strokes isn’t too far off. Julian Casablancas and company don’t do much different from Tom Verlaine and company, and somehow, they’ve managed to inject vitality into a tried-and-true form of music.
Interpol is as familiar as your old vinyl record collection, and it’s not. And that’s all right.
Musicwhore.org could very well take everything it said the last time about India.Arie and apply it to her new album.
The holistically-minded, acoustic guitar-strumming R&B singer has deviated little from the hit-making template she forged on 2001’s Acoustic Soul.
In creativespeak, lack of movement is just as dangerous as misstepping, but somehow, Miss Arie has managed to cross that chasm without losing footing.
Voyage to India pretty much deals with the same kinds of themes Arie dealt with a year ago — be comfortable in your own skin, to thine own self be true.
“Get It Together” is a thematic cousin to “Video”, but Arie shift the focus from media idealization to ageism. Or as she simple states, “You’ll never be whole if you don’t see the beauty of growing old.”
On “Talk to Her”, Arie lectures men about treating women right and takes the high road by not using the words “bitch” or “ho”.
The demands of success definitely weigh on Arie’s mind this time around, with such tracks as “Little Things” and “Slow Down” telling folks on a fast track not to lose focus on the things that make them unique.
On paper, these sentiments can seem downright treacly, and on a few tracks, Arie does get too sacchrine.
Is the man Arie describes on “Complicated Melody” gay? Almost sounds like it, but given my own dating record, gay men wouldn’t even give Arnold Schoenberg inspiration.
Surprisingly, Arie is most convincing where other artists get downright preachy. On “God Is Real”, Arie makes her case for a capital-letter God not with blind, patronizing devotion but with a simple, direct observation. The world’s beauty, Arie argues, is proof enough for her.
Because of its musical similarity to Acoustic Soul, Voyage to India doesn’t stand out as either a progression or regression for Arie. It’s a comfort zone, one that feels great — especially given all the bad metal out there right now — but one that could get too quaint, too easily.
In the end, Arie will do what she does, and if it means heading in the same direction as before, the conviction of her performance will no doubt make that last paragraph sound downright foolish.
When a band moves from the indies to the majors, a bigger budget usually means a better recording.
It’s not much different for Nananine. The Fukuoka City quartet’s indie EPs sported great songs that deserved stronger mixes and higher fidelity.
While Nananine’s Warner Bros. debut, 12e12, does indeed feature a more polished sound, something got lost on the way to the big leagues.
The higher fidelity reveals Kawaseki Hiroshi’s limitations as a singer. The quiet intro to “Hummingbird” shines a harsh light on Kawaseki’s raspy voice. Somehow, his singing lacks the gut-anchored honesty of his indie performances.
Even though it sounds like he’s emoting on “Oorii”, Kawaseki gets lost in the mix, the full force of his voice undercut instead of enhanced.
The bigger studio budget doesn’t dampen the rest of the band’s spirited performances, but at the same time, it doesn’t capture the power of its live performances either.
“Flange” is a decent enough alt-rock song on recording, but performed live, it sounded far more impressive.
Half way through 12e12, Nananine trots out its strongest material. “Stroke” is the band’s masterpiece to date, a solid four-on-the-floor beat anchoring the song’s attractive hooks.
“Swing Hawk” alternates between a noisy compound meter and a straight-forward backbeat. “Minnie” finishes the album on an acoustic note, intimate and rough-hewned.
Although 12e12 is a decent debut, it’s still short of capturing Nananine at its most powerful. The higher fidelity is a nice touch, but now it’s a matter of getting the band in its best element.
There’s no denying Boom Boom Satellites makes some of the hardest, freaked-out electronica anywhere.
Between stuttering backbeats, buzzing guitars and dissonant improvisation, the Japanese duo’s music is a distinct collage, uncomfortable as it is fascinating.
But with all that activity, sometimes hooks just can’t fit.
On the band’s debut album, Out Loud, a single-minded concentration on texture translated into a loss of momentum by the end of the disc.
Boom Boom Satellites made up for those errors with Umbra, an album that maintained the duo’s triple threat while making room for some melody.
With the band’s third album, Photon, the hooks are once again squeezed out but not completely.
Rather than let the backdrop be the star, Boom Boom Satellites invites spoken word vocalists and improvisers to provide some interesting foregrounds to their busy work.
“Light My Fire” is packed full of repeated motifs, special effects and even a guitar solo, but a female guest vocalist delivers some arresting lyrics in a breathy, seductive voice.
“I can make money by selling my organs,” she tells us, non-chalantly.
On “Beluga”, trumpeter Igarashi Issei provides layers of haunting improv, while Bryan Wrightsom fades in and out with a few couplets of his own. It’s not the most hummable improv, but it certainly keeps a listener’s attention.
There’s an almost fright-fest kind of feel throughout Photon, a sense of menacing behind the band’s fractured beats and guitar bursts.
At first, “Piper” sports little more than a creepy organ and a spoken word lyric that advises, “Get yourself some real help to wake up from the nightmare.” Then the drums kick in, and the mood turns manic.
And just when all the bizarre textures starts getting overripe, Boom Boom Satellites brings everything back down to earth with “Let It Lift” a straight-forward rock song with a rock beat and simple guitar hook. It’s the most normal-sounding song in the band’s entire catalog.
It would also make for a damn fine single.
Photon doesn’t quite match the appeal of Umbra, but it’s a definite progression for the band. They have their jazz-rock-electronica aesthetic down pat; now, it’s just a matter of finding collaborators to bring something new to the mix.