Every step Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard takes away from the post-Bee Thousand, lo-fi indie rock of the late 90s is a good thing.
Pollard was meant to record big rock records, and when he finally did so with Do the Collapse, it was the sound of potential energy finally turning into kinetic energy.
But Do the Collapse, for all of Ric Ocasek’s slick production, was largely forgettable. It’s a disc that stayed with you only when you played it. After it was put back on the rack, that was it.
Isolation Drills continues Guided By Voices’ big budget recording career, and it’s a winner.
Producer Rob Schnapf has definitely given Guided By Voices a stronger sound. He lets guitarist Tim Tobias deliver his larger-than-life riffs as big as they are, and he doesn’t squash the rhythm section.
On first listen, Pollard’s voice nearly gets lost in the mix, but that’s only because Schnapf opted not to put the singer through an arsenal of effects processors. In short, Pollard fends for himself against the rest of the band and does a fine job.
Pollard, who serves as Guided By Voices’ sole songwriter, once again collects a set of songs that aren’t short on hooks, and this time, they’re pretty hard to forget.
“Fair Touching” opens the album with a jangly guitar lick that R.E.M. hasn’t written since Green.
“Glad Girls” is a dumb rock song in the best sense of the adjective. “Chasing Heather Crazy” has a simple back beat that gives the sing-song chorus some real shine.
Most of the really catchy songs — “Skills Like These”, “Sister I Need Wine” — take up the first half of the album. The rest of the album showcases more involved songs, high in volume and thick with heavy guitar work.
Isolation Drills is an incredibly strong follow-through to Guided By Voices’ graduation from lo-fi darlings.
Used to be there was a time when a person couldn’t figure out which song on a Janet Jackson album wouldn’t become a hit single.
Of the nine tracks on Control, only three weren’t played to death on radio.
But sometime in the early 1990s, Janet discovered her body, and her music turned seductive, risqué and, sadly enough, somewhat predictable.
Her exploration of sex continues on All For You, and nowadays, it’s hard to figure out which songs are singles, because most of them sound like filler.
The album starts off well enough with the insanely catchy title track and the equally rump-shaking “Come On Get Up.” After that, All for You starts to crash, moving from one lush, sexy ballad to another.
Janet’s endeavor is clear: put this music on and screw like rabbits.
But don’t to put this album on for long commutes or for casual listening.
When Janet decides to pick up the pace, she missteps with “Son of a Gun”, a reworking of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” that doesn’t really go anywhere, or with sampling the Ventures on “Someone to Call My Lover”, an action that speaks for itself.
There are some interesting moments on the disc. The mistitled “China Love” centers around a nice Indonesian gamelan sample. And “Would You” features the best fake orgasm since that infamous scene in the deli in When Harry Met Sally.
(The embarrassment factor of “Would You” decreases with each subsequent listen.)
Toward the end of the album, Janet regains the momentum established by the first few tracks of the album, but as a purely listening experience, the gesture is too little, too late.
In context of fuck music, however, a rousing finish makes for good post-coital mix.
Hmmm. Maybe I’m wrong about this album. Maybe All for You follows the arc of seduction — partying, pairing off, fucking, then small talk while waiting for the other person to get the hell out.
If that’s the case, then All for You is genius. But if it’s not, get this album only for those occassions when you’re digging into someone else’s pants.
If you buy books based on whether the first paragraph is any good, be prepared to use the same technique on Semisonic’s All About Chemistry.
The album’s opening track, “Chemistry”, is just one of 12 likeable-if-not-insanely-catchy tunes. Semisonic, the Minneapolis trio who scored a hit in 1998 with “Closing Time,” have returned with 70s rock channeled through 90s alt-rock.
It’s been a long time since anyone dared to use keyboards the way Semisonic does on this album.
From plaintive piano ballads as “Act Naturally” to the bouncy electric p’s on “Who’s Stopping You?”, the band pretty much shies away from the alt-rock gesturing that made “Closing Time” a blip on the proverbial pop music radar.
And it’s actually pretty refreshing.
So is the band’s songwriting. Although compared — somewhat sneeringly — to Crowded House, Dan Wilson and company do a mighty fine job of coming up with hummable songs and lyrics that can be humorous and/or bittersweet.
“Chemistry” talks about love without ever using the word “love” and still manages to hit the core of the topic. “And we found out that the two things we put together had a bad tendency to explode,” Wilson sings.
On “Bed,” Wilson takes the perspective of a frustrated lover. “If you feel like I’m asking for far too much/We can keep in touch/And I’ll find someone else to bed,” he sings somewhat chirpily.
“Act Naturally,” on the other hand, drowns in sentimentality that either comes across as crass or endearing, depending on whether Chris DeBurgh’s “Lady in Red” still makes you cringe. (I actually like it. “Act Naturally”, not “Lady in Red”)
“I Wish” sports a sweeping, dramatic instrumental conclusion that just borders on being overly long. “Sunshine and Chocolate” sounds as sunny as the title suggests.
Wilson’s croon makes for a nice break from all the frat-boy frontmen and Eddie Vedder clones running amok in mainstream rock. He sounds like the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne if only Coyne could hold a note.
If anything, All About Chemistry is nice oasis of an album, an aural retreat where the only thing that matters is a good tune.
It wasn’t until the third or fourth listening did I realize it — I just bought an album of the kind of guitar rock that I usually hate.
And that’s a pretty strong testament to the songwriting abilities of Powderfinger.
Odyssey Number Five, the band’s fourth album and its first to reach the States, collects eleven easily infectuous tunes that rock out one moment, then quietly seduce the next.
Odyssey Number Five has already gone platinum five times in Australia and for good reason.
Powderfinger is a master of the majestic chorus. Almost every track on Odyssey Number Five showcases singer Bernard Fanning delivering a soaring vocal at the song’s crux. It helps that Fanning isn’t an Eddie Vedder clone — his got the pipes to pull it off.
On the album’s slower tracks, the band opts to let strings and ethereal effects fill in where guitars usually do. The usual adjective to describe this technique is “lush,” but Powderfinger manages to keep the extras from taking over.
On “These Days,” an organ gives way to the chiming guitars of Fanning and Dave Middleton at just the right moments. A bit predictable but still skillfully down.
“The Metre” starts off with bits of string here and a marimba there, but then it all comes together at the chorus in a restrained but grandiose chorus.
While Powderfinger does a great job bringing out nuances and subtleties on their slower tracks, the band’s rock-ier songs are more straight-forward.
“Waiting for the Sun” and “We Should Be Together Now” shows the quintet standing on their own. “Thrillioligy” indulges in layers of effects pedals, but it’s still a rock song through and through.
The songwriting on Odyssey Number Five is so accomplished, it takes a while before some of its more generic qualities surface. “Up & Down & Back Again” reeks of R.E.M.’s “Finest Worksong” after the fourth or fifth spin. Even weirder: it’s nothing a pickier listen might mind.
Powderfinger’s success is definitely well deserved in its home country, and perhaps some of that will translate to success in the States.
It’s quite fun floating conspiracy theories that Dave Matthews would rather be Sting.
I mean, really — how many mainstream rock bands have employed a full-time saxophone player since the late 1980s? Heck, Matthews does the former Gordon Sumner one better by including a full-time violinist.
And for anyone really combing for evidence [raises hand sheepishly], Matthews’ latest album Everyday provides some disturbing proof. That is, Matthews does a better job of being Sting than, well, Sting.
Let’s face it — Sting has released some turkeys as of late. He can still write a great chorus, but his verses are muddled, clumsy prose squeezed into the confines of a pop tune. Sort of like what Paul Simon does.
On Everyday, Matthews pretty much follows this same aesthetic. His verses can be pretty jam-packed with lengthy phrases that spill all over the music, but somehow the song comes together for a rousing chorus.
With Alanis Morissette producer Glen Ballard twidling the knobs, the fat (i.e., those DMB jams) has been cut from Everyday, leaving only straight-forward, meticulously-crafted pop.
In short, Everyday is what Sting would sound like if he wasn’t too busy trying to be fancy.
Really. Just try to imagine Sting delivering the chorus of “Dreams of Our Fathers” or “The Space Between” or “If I Had it All”. On “Fool to Think,” Leroi Moore sounds just like Branford Marsalis and Matthews’ electric guitar work literally rings of Andy Summers.
All that’s missing from the opening measures of “What You Are” is a guy singing in Arabic.
Perhaps the Dave Matthews/Sting parallel reaches its apex on “Mother Father.”
While Carlos Santana provides a bit of international flair with a beautiful acoustic guitar lick, Matthews takes the proverbial weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Mother father please explain to me,” Matthews sings. “How a man who rocks his child to sleep/Yet pulls the trigger on his brother’s heart/He digs a hole right to the middle of a storm of hatred.”
At the chorus, the song takes a decidedly Celtic turn and Matthews turns into man belting out Really Big Questions. Sting hasn’t done anything this good in a long time.
So is Dave Matthews ripping Sting off? Again?
Far from it. If hero worship really is going on here, then Everyday is a clear case of the student mastering the master. Matthews has delivered a set of incredible tunes with enough complexity to make it interesting but not overbearing.
And they’re all performed pretty damn well.
Of course, Matthews’ brand of American rock can’t be confused with Sting’s brand of jazz-pop. And on “I Did It” and “So Right”, Matthews sounds like the white soul guy he is. (Although on “Angel,” Matthews decides to be “Everybody Hurts”-era Michael Stipe.)
Still, it’s a fun exercise. Hero worship isn’t a bad thing unless it can be disguised very well, and it gets even better when the worshipper does the idol one better.
Oh yeah. That’s what’s been missing in corporate alternative music for the past decade.
A European influence. More precisely, a British influence. (Oasis and Blur don’t count. Nyah.)
Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, deities bless, brought punk kicking and screaming into the mainstream but in doing so locked record moguls into thinking what America needed was an entire decade of thrice-removed punk pop mixed with — cough — heavy metal.
Idlewild reminds folks who grew up during Ronald Reagan’s second term of what made listening to the Replacements, the Cure and pre-Warner Bros. R.E.M. such a blissful experience.
100 Broken Windows sounds like an album written in the late ’80s but recorded in the late ’90s. Singer Roddy Woomble has already drawn comparisons to Morrisey, and the alternately jangly-buzzy guitar work of Rod Jones calls to mind Peter Buck and Thurston Moore.
Woomble’s thick accent and the band’s clear avoidance of anything resembling a blues chord gives Idlewild it’s distinctly British sound. Chances are, the young guys in this quartet don’t count Boston as a major influence in their music, and thank heaven for that.
If anything, Idlewild draws on enough punk to give its incredibly tuneful pop some guts. Songs such as “Little Discourage”, “I don’t have a map”, “Mistake pageant” rock hard while still delivering indelible hooks.
The band’s lyrics certainly keep with British bands’ art school tradition of crypticism. “Gertrude Stein said that’s enough,” Woomble sings on “Roseability,” evidently knowing the late poet’s current state of mind.
100 Broken Windows is good stuff. There’s really no other way to describe it.
So. Marilyn Manson is now a record mogul, and Godhead is his inaugural signing. Does this band give Orgy a run for its money?
Maybe. Maybe not.
2000 Years of Human Error has been described (by Wall of Sound, I believe) as a “connect-the-dots Goth rock album,” a predictable sort of album full of thundering guitars, synthetic effects and robotic rhythms. And pretty dang enjoyable if you let it entertain you.
Make no mistake — Godhead’s debut for Manson’s label is no grand artistic statement on the level of Antichrist Superstar or, stepping back further in time, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral.
If anything, 2000 Years of Human Error almost seems to be following in the footsteps of Orgy’s Candyass, right down to the cover of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, reimagined as a four-on-the-floor, hard-rocking exercise in studio glitz.
Perhaps the eeriest thing about this comparrison is that Godhead’s version of “Eleanor Rigby” doesn’t come across as crass as it could have. If New Order’s “Blue Monday” worked for Orgy, how can Godhead go wrong with McCartney and Lennon?
2000 Years of Human Error is the sonic equivalent of a formulaic Hollywood movie. You know there’s a scream coming after the quiet bridge. You know the big guitar riff gives way to the singer during the verses. You know the larger-than-life drums pause dramatically before the chorus hits.
And like a formulaic Hollywood movie, you can either despise the album or love the album for how well — or even how badly — it executes that formula. Godhead doesn’t fuck with said forumla too much, and it even delivers hooks that are immediate, memorable, even pleasing.
But in the end, 2000 Years of Human Error won’t change your life or enrich your soul. It definitely won’t get you on Oprah. It does, however, provide a good 40 minutes or so of escapist entertainment.
Hmmm. Goth-rock as escapism. Gotta think that one over.
Here’s the quick summary: Satellite Rides is better than Fight Songs, but it doesn’t knock Too Far to Care off its mantle.
Fight Songs wasn’t a necessarily bad, but anyone who was blown away by the get-up-and-pogo ferocity of Too Far to Care might have felt slightly disappointed by the relative mellowness of the Old 97’s’ 1999 outing.
For an disc with such a strong title, it certainly didn’t seem to have much “fight.”
Satellite Rides, as many other music press pundits have already
proclaimed, is a nice convergence of Texas quartet’s last two albums. The songcraft of Fight Songs still remains, but it has a lot more of twang and recaptures some of the pump of Too Far to Care.
On such tracks as “Rollerskate Skinny”, “Book of Poems” and the first single “King of All the World”, Ken Bethea’s guitars strongarm their way out of the speakers, not necessarily blaring but certainly establishing some beefy-ness.
“What I Wouldn’t Do” has a chorus every bit as catchy as “19” from Fight Songs, and “Can’t Get a Line” could have lost the twangy guitars and still be a good rock song.
Oddly enough, it’s the more overtly country songs that rock out the most. It’s a tough call to two-step or pogo on “Am I Too Late”, and “Up the Devil’s Pay” features some nice yodeling.
Rhett Miller is still a master of writing clever couplets, and his earnest, heart-on-a-sleeve voice makes potentially sappy line sound like poetry. “I believe in love in love, but I don’t believe in me,” he proclaims at the end of “Rollerskate Skinny.”
If you’re sitting on the fence on whether to drop $15 on this album, rest assured Satellite Rides is worth the price.
You know — the first time I heard At the Drive-In, I thought the vocalist was singing in Japanese.
That’s because I’d been listening to a lot of Number Girl at the time, and At the Drive-Inn share some similarities with the Japanese punk quartet.
At the Drive-In’s angular guitar work, as demonstrated on its breakthrough Relationship of Command, calls to mind the Pixies.
“One Armed Scissor” serves as a perfect example. The song starts with a dischordant crunch, and the first verse uneasily moves along in 3/4 time till it hits a screaming chorus in 4/4.
In other words, there’s some smart stuff happening on this album, and it loses none of its visceral power. If anything, At the Drive-In performs the kind of punk music that doesn’t recognize that grunge ever existed.
Cedric Bixler growls, screams and belts his way over the chaotic guitar work of Jim Ward and Omar Rodriguez. The two guitarists weave a tapestry of dissonant lines and fist-pumping, head-banging riffs against a thuderous rhythm section.
The result: an intense 44 minutes of unbridled rage.
It’s hard to single out any one song — “Invalid Litter Dept.” has the most memorable chorus with the line “Dancing on the corpse of ashes” — because it’s all hard, all fiery and all good.
Korn producer Ross Robinson gives At the Drive-In a Nevermind sheen to Relationship of Command, but no amount of studio trickery can tame the band’s rough delivery.
It’s too bad the band announced an indefinite hiatus from touring and recording (although after seven years of non-stop work, it’s certainly deserved.) At the Drive-In deserves all the recognition its earned up till now.
Last time around, m-flo delivered an album that was big on beats, hooks and singles. Threaded together by an imaginary interplanetary flight, Planet Shining introduced the world to a group that easily navigated R&B, hip-hop and even electronica.
With its new album Expo Expo, the Japanese trio deliver another hour of more of the same with one distinct difference — more filler.
Which is to say that the singles from Expo Expo — “How You Like Me Now?”, “come again” and “orbit-3” — stand out as stellar tracks against the not-as-insanely-catchy album tracks.
m-flo does try to stretch its musical muscle here and there. The title track zooms in and out of a dizzying array of tempo changes. “Yours only” showcases Lisa balladeering up there with Mariah Carrey and Utada Hikaru.
But when Verbal takes the mic and Lisa is nowhere to be found, Expo
Expo loses momentum. “Dispatch” is dead weight. “The Bandwagon” does an OK job of winding down the album, but it doesn’t have that sense of closure “been so long” possessed.
The remaining tracks on the album require a few listens before they reveal their appeal. “prism” makes for a sensible next single with its driving beat, and “magenta rain” has a really nice, jazzy, laid-back feel.
m-flo is no slouch in producing glossy, polished R&B pop, and Expo Expo is still light years better than the assembly-line teen craze
gripping the U.S. at the moment. But compared to the band’s shiny debut, this second album has a minor case of the sophomore slump.
Fans will love this album, but some of us part-time admirers can stick to putting “orbit-3” on repeat.