Three Days Grace: Old Music, New Marketing

October 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Twenty-five percent of the songs on Three Days Grace’s debut album ended up Top-5 singles.

Twenty-five percent of the songs on Three Days Grace’s sophomore album ended up Top-5 singles.

Do we understand each other?  There is no room to question the credentials of Three Days Grace.  As Canada’s premier alternative-metal missionaries, they bring the rasp in their voices, guitars, and outlook.

Last month saw the release of album number three: Life Starts Now.  The single “Break” is holding steady at #7 in its 6th week on the charts.  If it rises no higher, is that a letdown?  Would you say the guys are losing their touch?  To even ask the question reinforces how impressive their career has been from the very outset.  And no, it’s not a letdown.

Since Barry Stock was recruited in 2006 to relieve singer Adam Gontier of lead guitar duties, the band has been a quartet, and their increase in number has continued to represent an increase in sonic energy.  Life Starts Now shows not only meatier arrangements – the kind of rock music that expands to rattle every corner of a room – but also technical improvement on the part of each musician.  Focus on their craft has enabled more engaging drumwork and widened the range of pitch and timbre accessed during guitar solos.  Even the bass, normally the band’s weakness, has advanced to a level of competence.

Minor deviations from the normal songwriting framework make themselves known without disrupting the consistency of the band’s corpus.  Odd meters are subtly present and there is a greater emphasis on solo work than on previous offerings.  Still, verses and bridges are right where you expect them to be, you can scream along to every chorus, and an iconic guitar hook remains the raging heart of every song.

Two probable attempts at ballads remind us (and hopefully remind Jive Records) why the self-titled album didn’t have any.  “Lost in You” simply isn’t believable, as an honest Gontier can’t hide the anger that composes his soul despite lyrics bordering on sensitive and clean guitars resolving suspended 6ths into warm-and-fuzzy major triads.  The listener is given more credit by “Last to Know” as unplugged strings and a piano lead us through a tale of depression springing from frustration without hope.

Three Days Grace has a formula that works.  Life Starts Now shows an increase in talent with no drop in raw appeal.  By this time next year the hard rockers may have another set of Top-5 singles for their collection.

At the moment, there is a peripheral matter that catches my interest.  Maybe the aging and unchanging sound of the band concerns Jive, maybe Three Days Grace is trying to compensate for the recession, or maybe the guys just had a cool idea and made it happen.  For whatever reason, the band’s website is advertising a colorful variety of options for purchasing their new record.

For the iTunes-fed, blossoming young gorger of all things mainstream, “exclusive behind the scenes video downloads” are packaged with the digital download to entice a purchase directly from the website rather than through, oh, I don’t know, BitTorrent, which tends to be cheaper.

For the collector who doesn’t roll with headphones growing out of his pocket and around his ears like ivy, a hard cd can be ordered – again, with bonus media as thanks for cutting out the middle man.

For real fans, the kind who come out to shows and tell their friends about Three Days Grace, a limited-edition t-shirt can be shipped along with the album.

Beyond that, things get interesting.  The “Deluxe Package” (now sold out) is priced at $60 and includes a pile of swag – half physical, half digital – compelling enough to merit serious consideration even from teenagers living on an allowance or fast-food wages.  Towering above at $100 is the “Super Deluxe Package,” replete with bonuses from a cd signed and numbered by the band to a “smashed piece of a Three Days Grace guitar.”  That’s as exclusive as it gets.

I recently saw a similar gradient of offers posted by progressive rock outfit Spock’s Beard.  In an attempt to raise funds for their self-released tenth album, they put the album on presale before going to studio to record it.  Merchandise options included packages similar to those marketed by Three Days Grace, headed by a $200 “Ultra Package” with an intangible premier benefit:

“…And finally, [you will get] your name written into the lyrics of a new Spock’s Beard song.  This track will include a vocal section where your name (or someone you choose) will be sung by the band.  This will be a full band, fully-produced song that requires a long list of names be sung as part of the lyric.”

Deals like these intrigue me.  Have other groups been making crazy offers and selling their new releases in such intense tiered packages?  Ten years from now, if the economy is back to prime form, will we still see offers like these for the most ravenous fans?

The answers likely depend on whether the music industry follows overall market fluctuations or diverges as the onward march of the digital age changes the game.  Personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed that this is a trend with some wings, ready to take off.

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Bloc Party: Trying to be heroic in an age of modernity

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Bloc Party

 

Silent Alarm (2005) – 3 1/2 stars

A Weekend in the City (2007) – 4 1/2 stars

Intimacy (2008) – 4 stars

Bloc Party exploded right out of the gate in 2005 as one of the most acclaimed bands in this decade’s post-punk revival phase.  Their debut album, Silent Alarm, managed the tricky feat of garnering both critical and commercial praise, placing them at the top of the ranks that included Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, The Arctic Monkeys, and others.  Headed by frontman Kele Okereke’s engaging voice and atypical deftness with wordplay, this multi-national band transcends their new-wave and post-punk influences to create a sound thoroughly 21st century.

Indeed, they sound fresh, edgy, and modern on Alarm.  The wonderfully vibrant opening duo of “Like Eating Glass” and “Helicopter” captivate from the start, Matt Tong’s staccato drumming propelling the first and Russell Lissack’s stuttering, descending guitar line the second.  Yet several songs on the album titillate with untapped potential; overall, the ballads (“This Modern Love,” “Compliments”) fare better than the rockers, which tend to meander as the album progresses.  Future efforts would be enhanced by Okereke’s improving lyrics and a more focused attention to songcraft.  

Sophomore effort A Weekend in the City diverged from Silent Alarm and didn’t impress critics.  Never mind that, for it’s a soaring, incredibly atmospheric, often soothing work that proves BP aren’t just concerned with lighting up a club.  The instruments less spiky and more haunting, the production beautifully dense and lush, the vocals lovelier, Weekend makes it hard to think of Bloc Party as a post-punk revivalist band at all.  Swirling, heavenly choruses on songs like “Waiting for the 7:18” and “The Prayer” ensnare the listener, and the band pulls back for a couple of magnificent, wintry interludes on the closing duo of “Sunday” and “SRXT.”   

Frontman Kele Okereke provides touching vocals in “On” and contributes fine lyrics throughout.  His overall theme addresses various aspects of modern-day life in London, though most of his thoughts, including those on irrational bigotry in the fiery “Hunting for Witches,” could apply on this side of the ocean.  “Uniform” has an inconsistent hold on melody, but Okereke quietly singing “There was a sense of disappointing as we left the mall / All the young people looked the same” more than makes up for that.  His concerns aren’t always rock staples—the outstanding duo of “Kreuzberg” and “I Still Remember” address, respectively, dissatisfaction with commitment-free relationships and what is likely a homosexual connection—and he hammers home the unconventional motifs with unconventionally intelligent lyrics, completing the puzzle.

Last year’s Intimacy neither re-writes Weekend nor bows to critics by returning to the sound of the debut.  Indeed, it feels independent, as though it could have come out at any time.  Several tracks are among their heaviest, while they also make room for brooding dirges.  From tracks three through nine, the powerful, odd-numbered rockers easily outpace the sparse, even-numbered ballads.   The album’s difficult to get into at first, but it hits spectacular peaks: sharp, sexy come-ons meld with the sharp, sexy riff in “Halo”; “One Month Off” sizzles with righteous vigor; “Talons” whips up a frenzied, apocalyptic sound perfectly at home with the lyrics fascinated with the menacing (“I didn’t think I’d catch fire when I held my hand to the flame”); and the majestic and ravishing “Ion Square” marries an insistent, orchestral beat to Okereke’s demand for commitment in a relationship. 

Sounding both beaten-down and optimistic, he concedes that “the hunger of those early years will never return,” but that doesn’t make him want to run out to the next parcel of grass.  When the excitement has dimmed, when you’re too old for clubs and unable to see someone for the first time again, Kele says, it’s still not worth giving up.  “Let’s stay in, let the sofa be our car / let’s stay in, let the TV be our stars” he cries during the almost painfully emotional climax.  The drop into the second chorus at the end is so mind-bogglingly good that it elevates the entire album, making the song their finest hour and a perfect conclusion to an entire effort devoted to relationships.  These boys have been more accessible, but rarely so intense.

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Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown (2009): The music, if not the message, still inspires hope

October 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Rating: 4 stars (out of five)

Green Day offer up 21st Century Breakdown having done their fair share of conquering in both this and the previous century.  They dominated the alternative landscape of the post-Nirvana 90s (breakout album Dookie dropped just weeks before Kurt Cobain’s suicide) and then shocked the world with 2004’s concept album American Idiot, wherein Billie Joe Armstrong silenced those critics who assumed he couldn’t write about anything besides masturbation and boredom by tapping into Bush-era dissatisfaction.

Breakdown, arriving five years later, continues the concept album theme, even though there’s a new president and a little more optimism within the country.  But enough of that—what’s really worth paying attention to is the band.  The majority of these songs, especially the rockers, sound epic and alive, bursting with blood and vigor; Billie Joe sings with conviction, and the band sounds fuller than ever.  Though most of the slow songs sag (the flaccid “Last Night on Earth,” whiny “Restless Heart Syndrome,” and well-sung but cliché-ridden “21 Guns”), overall there’s a strong success rate among these 18 tracks.  Standout “The Static Age” has a perfect ear for tension/release.  “Before the Lobotomy” is filled with juicy melodies (and seems to give a shout-out to “Basket Case” with the line “I’m not stoned, I’m just fucked up.”)  Lead single “Know Your Enemy” is propelled by a heavy yet ferociously catchy, foot-stomping chorus and a titanic drum lead-in from the bridge.  The band hits remarkable peaks in the soaring bridges of “Little Girl,” “Static,” and “Guns” that elevate each track.

As is usual for Green Day albums, 21st Century Breakdown is long–too long–though the difference here is that the length allows for more diversity, making room for extended piano intros on songs like “Viva La Gloria,” a Middle Eastern-vibe on the groovy “Peacemaker,” and Queen-style drama on the title track, “Lobotomy,” and others.  “Last Night on Earth,” as Rolling Stone noted, sounds like Air Supply (not that this works), and of course several tunes invoke past, Dookie-esque grandeur.  Thankfully, the sonic doodling doesn’t sound forced; it just feels like the band, with little left to prove to the pop-punk audience, wants to experiment with new material to see what sticks.

What’s perhaps most notable about the musical variation is the way the individual songs themselves often contain distinct sections.  Sometimes this works—“Christian’s Inferno” opens with a thick, industrial-sounding drum intro before giving way to a purely Green Day chorus—but most of the best songs here (“Static,” “Little Girl,” “Murder City”) tell us that Green Day is better off keeping the sonic changes within songs to a minimum.  The title track starts off magnificently—you’d be hard-pressed to deny the power of Billie Joe’s line “My generation’s a zero / I never made it as a working class hero”—but after the second chorus devolves into an amelodic mess.  And, conversely, both “Gloria” and “Lobotomy” could stand to have their first segments cut; the latter is especially invigorating once it gets going, but that takes far too long.

Even though old target George Bush can no longer be used as a piñata, Armstrong hasn’t exactly embraced Obama-style optimism.  The conceptual theme this time traces two lovers, Christian and Gloria, as they make their way through this age with confusion, anger, fear, and some resolve.  Billie Joe skewers a few obvious targets (religious hypocrisy) and some less-obvious ones (prescription drug reliance) in his quest to find something truly meaningful.  There’s certainly no mistaking his feelings when he yelps, “Violence is the enemy / So give me, give me revolution!”  There are few great insights in the lyrics, but it’s nice to see that he’s continued to branch out a little, and despite an over-reliance on simplicity, he occasionally finds a nugget: “Do you know what’s worth fighting for / When it’s not worth dying for?”; “The traces of blood always follow you home / Like the mascara tears of your getaway.”

One wonders, however, whether his now ever-present world-weariness drags down his otherwise great sing-along choruses on tracks like “Century” and “Static.”  He’s flirting with Bono syndrome—sometimes, you just want him to forget about the world’s problems and sing about something enjoyable, relieving the ambivalent feelings that are engendered by energetic but polemic songs.

That feeling of slight hesitation getting in the way of a full-fledged adoration of the record has company.  Simmering gently below the visceral excitement that a listen provides is the desire to make tiny tweaks all over the place.  Man, if they just killed “Song of the Century” and “Last Night on Earth,” you think, how much better would this flow?  Why couldn’t “Breakdown” have kept going the way it started, “Lobotomy” have opened right at the 1:20 mark?  Why couldn’t Billie Joe have gone a little easy on the clichés in “Guns” and really made it a doozy?

If all that happened, then you’d have a stupendous album.  But that’s sort of always been Green Day’s M.O.  Their albums are typically overly long and sprawling, cathartic, flawed, and usually highly enjoyable.  21st Century Breakdown offers up more of the same.

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Jimmy Tamborello: Credit Where Credit Is Due

October 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

How many diehard synthpop fans do you think live in Canada?  Maybe enough to crowd one Toronto club, plus a few enlightened Inuits and a caribou.  Yet this half-frozen nation has given birth to perhaps the genre’s greatest Myspace-to-riches story in Valerie Poxleitner, known to her friends and fans as Lights.

At least, riches seem certain as she now releases her first LP, The Listening.  The number of plays she enjoys on a daily basis give public approbation to her Juno Award and the various other acclaims she has racked up prior to pressing a record.

Beating The Listening to stores by a full month is Ocean Eyes, the major-label debut of Owl City (nee Adam Young).  Born even further from the equator in the little town of Owatonna, MN, Young has experienced similar popularity and growth in response to self-sustained synthpop efforts.  The two are seen by many as each other’s other-gendered counterpart.

Rumors of varying integrity have labeled Lights and Owl City friends, collaborators, sweethearts, and doppelgangers.  What we know is that their homegrown brand of electronic melodies with softened, bubble-pop percussion and smooth, coasting vocals is catching on with the kids in every neighborhood.

As far as anyone seems to remember, the last softcore electronic artist to break into the mainstream so summa cum laude was The Postal Service.  While their only LP, Give Up, was reported by Sub Pop to be the label’s most successful release since Bleach (it has since been surpassed by Flight of the Conchords), a single supporting tour is all the wake it generated.  Some chatter has ensued, but passing years show further Postal Service tours and recordings to be dreams without wings.

There’s your overview.  Here’s my problem.

Our generation has never had a mainstream affinity for the buzzes and whirs and padsynth drums of adventurous electronic artists.  Naturally, the three crooners – or perhaps cooers – to break through are extensively sized up against each other.  But as adorable as Lights and Owl City are, they are not The Postal Service.

The Postal Service is commonly referred to as a side project of Ben Gibbard, the face of indie wunderband Death Cab for Cutie.  Despite the public’s impression, Gibbard is not Death Cab’s heart, soul, and guiding light.  In particular, guitarist-cum-producer Chris Walla plays a large part in their writing process.  And despite the fact that you hear Gibbard’s crystal pipes on every track of Give Up, it was not a solo effort.  As educated as he is in sonic development, Gibbard does not have the right skill set to take a chisel to a synthesizer and carve out such an wondrously glitchy album.

The first Postal Service song was released two years before Give Up hit the shelves on an album called Life Is Full of Possibilities.  If you’re confused, check Wikipedia, I’ll wait.  Make sure you catch the artist name painted across the ambulance on the cover.  That’s the guy who wrote all the other songs on Life Is Full of Possibilities, so we’ve got good reason to interpolate that Dntel is also responsible for – did you catch it, next to Ben Gibbard’s name? – (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan.

Dntel is mastermind Jimmy Tamborello, a synthhead who sprang out of California in the early 1990′s.  Under that primary penname and a few others, Tamborello has accrued critical acclaim and a handful of adherents by spinning out imaginative records loaded with electronica candy.  His style is of his own design.

Through a serendipity of geographical coincidence, Gibbard got an invite from Tamborello to lay down vocals over a tune he had crafted.  While Dntel had collaborated with many others before, Gibbard’s cachet with hipsters and the approachable style that later took Death Cab to more widespread fame gave The Dream of Evan and Chan unprecedented motility.  The pair hardly hesitated before plunging into a more extensive tag-team project.

First, Tamborello built a full album of instrumental material from the ground up.  He put the tracks on tapes and shipped them to the great state of Washington, where Gibbard tagged in.  The bespectacled twenty-something was given free rein to reorganize the beats as necessary while he plotted lyrical melodies overtop.  From there, extra hands came into play: significantly, Chris Walla appeared on one of the finalized songs playing piano and handled the whole recording process at his Hall of Justice studio.  Female vocals were courtesy of Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis and little-known indie songstress Jen Wood.

You might glean from the above that Ben Gibbard acted in a greater capacity than any other single contributer to shape Give Up.  I won’t press the issue because it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong.  Tamborello’s brilliant work is central to the spirit and polish of the album and his part in the partnership is chronically downplayed.

Returning to Lights and Owl City, take a test drive on each of their lead singles – Saviour and Fireflies, respectively.  Then play Such Great Heights, the first Postal Service single.  If you focus on the voices, you’ll notice that Adam Young and Ben Gibbard sound remarkably alike, while Valerie Poxleitner manipulates her vox with a touch of artifice.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you focus on the electronics underneath, you might come to see why I feel Tamborello dominates the newcomers.  His choice of sounds shows a greater willingness to take chances and a greater depth of experience from chances taken over an inventive career.  Subtly, he employs irregular three-measure phrases throughout Such Great Heights, even overlaying them with standard four-measure phrases in other instruments to create a drawn out polyrhythmic effect.

Dntel provided the fundaments of The Postal Service, and his influence on Give Up is still the element that sets that landmark album apart from young imitators.  Over time, I’m sure Lights and Owl City will grow their talents.  They may exchange their in-your-face rocktronica choruses for more adventuresome techniques, or they may diverge from Dntel-style beats rather than aspiring to them.  But at the moment, there is no comparison.

In closing: The Postal Service was Dntel’s side project.  His idea, his beats, his project.

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Ursa Major was released in August, 2009

September 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I have no right to review Slippery When Wet.  I can’t break down Born to Run.  To me, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds are beyond approach.  I lack the bona fides to critique such eternal landmarks, not least of all because I wasn’t there to experience them.  Awareness of the musical zeitgeist of a decade is no substitute for being a part of a movement.  I want to be there when the next album that defines its time drops.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

This was wishful thinking from the start.  Third Eye Blind already had their breakout.  The self-titled debut sent fully a third of its tracks coasting into the Top 20, including Semi-Charmed Life, the No. 1 hit famous for the shock it creates when your sing-along is shattered by the realization of what the verses are describing.  Still, the six-year hiatus that followed their third release (throughout which there were no signs of a break-up) served to infuse the band with mystery and hype.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

Available only by digital download, the Red Star EP heralded a return to the band’s true form.  Then a new website appeared, 3eb.com, that put community interaction at the forefront.  The fan-centric aesthetic and an “Assembly” full of blogs, along with claims from frontman Stephan Jenkins that the upcoming album would be their most political yet, steered the hype away from melody.  Why would a band whose cornerstone was a song with overlooked lyrics and a hook for the ages predicate their overdue return to the limelight on opinion and activism?  New grounds trembled in anticipation of breaking.  Maybe…

“I want a riot, yeah!”

The rallying cry of the lead-off track has my fist in the air!  The guitars are surging back with familiar energy.  The pitch is rising, so I crank the volume and get caught up in the rasp of passion in Stephan’s voice:

“Yes I am dying to be freaked!”

Yes, I am d– wait, what?

Instantly I’m back in 1997 reliving the shock.  So, what kind of riot was he talking about?  A quick check of the lyric liner tells me the whole song is open to at least two interpretations: grassroots firepower or a plea for sex.  Alright, Stephan Jenkins, you got me.

But the music goes on.  Brand-new hooks revive with full confidence the old Third Eye Blind swagger.  Rolling snares and bam-bam rhythms lead you in and carry you like a wave from verse to verse.  The slurred lilt of the vocals are so instantaneously familiar that I had little trouble singing along not just on the first listen, but even at the first iteration of a chorus.  Then again, I was a pretty big fan.

Weren’t we all?  Who among us, born on the far side of the great divide that is the year 1990, wouldn’t hop on board at the first chord of Jumper?  Thank your lucky red stars, because fully a third of Ursa Major could have coasted into the Top 20 at the end of the last millenium.  Not to delude you; without the full promotional force of a major label (they recorded on their own as Mega Collider Records), these singles won’t see multi-platinum sales.  Besides, kids today are much more taken by their angry Seethers and their dreamy Jason Mrazs.

But the punchline is missing.  The melodies are what we all want, but this was supposed to be an intellectual firestarter!  Members of the Assembly may dissent, but what I heard was less a call to action and more what I’ll label “forward-dating.”

Through lyrics that remain as fluid and deft as ever, Stephan Jenkins has attempted to emphasize that he is here and now.  Explicit references to online dating, flat screen tv, and mp3 players appear distinctly unromantic amidst the surrounding metaphors and emotional outpours.  An entire song about “trying to flip butch chicks” and (elsewhere) an isolated mention of “Africa where life is cheap” might equally elicit groans from apathetics who find vocal activists oppressive.  Opening the cd case, you run into an advertisement for Third Eye Blind ringtones before you find the cd itself.  But all of these prove to the listener when Ursa Major was written.  Right now.

The Assembly – in fact, the overall intent and form of 3eb.com – now makes perfect sense.  Third Eye Blind is not retrieving the roots of political rock and roll by emerging from their hiatus reborn as Bob Dylan in three persons.  Instead, they’re eschewing the traditional way in which musicians relate to the public.  This record wants to kick off a new era; not of what music is, but of how it is communicated.

Thoroughly modern issues feature alongside buzzwords that are neutral but strictly contemporary in order to engage the listener.  We are meant to feel that Ursa Major is our album.  And to leave posterity with no doubt as to the exact date of its release, Jenkins sings: “Wanna be hustler school M.I.A. / Make a paper plane and then you fly away,” a shout out to last year’s multi-platinum single.  He even slips in “I’m your mega collider” which, as I mentioned, is the band’s invented label.

Finally, notice that the website tries to use open membership and encourage blogging and forum posts in order to hand over the reins of Third Eye Blind’s web presence to the fans.  This is our album, because the focal points of our daily lives make guest appearances in the songs.  This is our website, because we provide 95% of the content, unedited.  This is our time, defined.

Maybe, I thought.

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U2 – How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004): I prefer the U2 that drops bombs

September 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

Today marks the beginning of the second leg of U2′s 360° Tour and the tour’s first shows in America.  In honor of such an occasion, let’s examine U2′s biggest hiccup and an effort from a band who will be opening for several shows of this leg, Muse.

HTDAAB: Not even the cover art inspires hope.
HTDAAB: Not even the cover art inspires hope.

 

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

Having successfully entered their third decade together with 2000’s acclaimed All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 may have been forgiven for thinking they didn’t have any challenges left.  Having already changed up their sound enough times to stay relevant and popular for over 20 years, they’d silenced the Pop naysayers and once more inserted themselves into the national consciousness.

Such contentment, indeed, may be responsible for the limpness of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.  Despite arriving after what was to date the longest layoff of the band’s career, Bomb represents the most uninspired, superficial, and, quite frankly, boring record they’ve ever made.  They’ve lost both the interesting sound of their past and the songs themselves (ATYCLB at least had the latter).  The unfair reaction to Pop has apparently compelled U2 to distance themselves from their experimental 90s as much as possible, but in the process they’ve forgotten what made them great.  AllMusic Guide hit the nail on the head in saying, “They’ve overcorrected for their perceived sins, scaling back their sound so far that they have shed the murky sense of mystery that gave The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree an otherworldly allure.”   

The sound on Bomb, thus, invokes generic, meat-and-potatoes rock that has never, ever been U2’s specialty.  Producer Steve Lillywhite was behind the boards for the taut and fierce War, but now that they don’t write songs with the passion of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Like a Song…” the straight-ahead production doesn’t serve them well.  The songs need the post-punk influences evident on Boy, the wintry atmospherics of The Unforgettable Fire, the wide-open desert feel of The Joshua Tree, or the danceable but dark stylings of Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop.  They don’t do meat-and-potatoes well, at least not anymore.  The Edge isn’t captivating enough, nor is Bono, who’s voice has never sounded worse and yet is placed too far forward in the mix.

Meanwhile, the rhythm section is relegated to the distant back, as Lillywhite and the band have apparently forgotten that most of U2’s best songs feature memorable contributions from bassist Adam Clayton and/or drummer Larry Mullen Jr.  At the end of the first verse of “Miracle Drug,” you can feel the rhythm section trying to kick in, but they’re buried too deeply in the mix that you can hardly hear them over Bono’s cries.

Yet, as ATYCLB proved, sonic innovation is not a pre-requisite for a successful album, but this collection of tracks is without question the weakest U2 has ever put forth.  The songs lack heart and energy, relying on recycled sounds and those repetitive bridge solos.  “A Man and a Woman” informs us—in case anyone was still straddling that fence—that U2 should never attempt an R&B crossover.  Everyone sloughs his way through the turgid “Love and Peace”; and “One Step Closer” and “Yahweh” have neither the lyrics nor the melody to justify their instrumental minimalism.  

Our esteemed frontman, for his part, does little to quell concern (at least in myself) that his ever-increasing amounts of public activism have degraded the band’s music.  The band has acknowledged that Bono’s studio time has decreased over the past few years; and although they claim that his absence isn’t a problem, he—not the Edge or anyone else—is the band’s heart and soul.  Without him in top form, little else matters.      

None of this is to say that Bomb is unlistenable.  Indeed, the feeling provoked by a casual listen easily supersedes the lingering, unpleasant aftertaste.  “City of Blinding Lights” is so far and away the standout that it feels as though it belongs on different album, a gorgeous, elegiac song the likes of which they’ve never written before.  “Miracle,” about a paraplegic former high school classmate of the band who was able to write poems with the help of drugs, features similarly pretty chiming guitars and an ecstatic-sounding bridge.  Yet, besides “City,” all the pleasures here are moderate—“Vertigo” may get your toe tapping, but its best environment remains that fantastic 30-second iPod commercial; “Crumbs From Your Table” pleasantly meanders; and “Original of the Species” has the album’s prettiest melody but suffers from its words. 

Indeed, though I would take stronger melodies for a start, Bono’s lyrics unquestionably dampen the album, as he spits out lines that make you want to tear your hair out.  The subtlety and genuine emotion from earlier in his career have been completely wiped away.  Nonsense lyrics are fine on “Vertigo,” but by the time you’ve heard “Freedom has a scent / Like the top of a newborn baby’s head,” or “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at / Like smiling, crying, or celebrity,” or found Bono trying to rhyme choice and tortoise, romance and distance, you’ll want out.  (What, exactly, would be wrong with being too good at smiling?)  13 years ago, he wrote on “So Cruel,” “I gave you everything you wanted / It wasn’t what you wanted.”  Now, he writes “I’ll give you everything you want / Except the thing that you want.”  The first is poignant; the second, faux profound and merely contradictory.
 
The most surprising misfire, however, is “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own,” the ballad written in memorial of Bono’s late father that took up the most studio time and garnered the most hype.  For Bono, and some fans, it was the heart of the album, but it’s remarkably uninviting.  Their love songs now all sound too calculated and safe, lacking the quality lyrics and/or musical elements necessary to ensnare the listener.  It’s hard to say whether U2 will ever find that part of themselves again.  One can only hope they haven’t completely lost the desire to be different—an ambition that took them to the top in the first place.

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Muse – Absolution (2003): I still feel dirty

September 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

absolution 

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

You can’t read eight words on Allmusic’s biography of Muse without reaching the word Radiohead; and given lead singer Matthew Bellamy’s obvious love for Thom Yorke, that’s not a surprise.  Musically, though, Absolution, the band’s third album, doesn’t really resemble any Radiohead discs.  There are hints of The Bends here, but with its dark stylings and heavy dose of drama, Absolution reminded me more of Placebo.  The problem, though, is that Muse, a relatively unknown band quickly gaining in prominence, sounds like Radiohead- and Placebo-lite, without the skill to transcend their influences. 

Absolution is filled with Bellamy’s paranoid and stark observations about the future of the world lined up next to the band’s oppressive sound.  The two forces fit each other, there’s no doubt about that, but the combination just doesn’t work.  This is largely because the music, and the production, sounds horribly claustrophobic.  The songs are not allowed to breathe whatsoever, and by mid-way through the album, the listener craves a break.  More talented bands and producers have created albums that are depressive and/or haunting, to be sure, but here Muse miss that target and end up sounding swampy and muddled.  The production further becomes a problem because there is very little melody anywhere to be found here; these two facts leave Muse playing intense but indistinctive and sludgy rock.

Fans of alternative rock may find enough to like here, especially on “Time is Running Out” and “Falling Away With You,” but repeated listens reveal too many imperfections in the songs and the lyrics.  Tracks like “Stockholm Syndrome” arrest attention on first listens, but after a while they don’t seem to hold together, simply fading away into irrelevance in the listener’s mind.  “Blackout” sounds appealing at first, but by the end of the song, Bellamy’s words starts to grate.  He moans uber-pessimistic lines like “This love’s too good to last” without ever really telling us why.  “I’m too old to change”—really?

Elsewhere, he rants that “This is the end of the world!” and “The end is all I can see,” which represent the tone of the entire album, but none of it registers much of an emotional impact.  As “Blackout” makes clear, Bellamy doesn’t take the next step of telling us why he’s so paranoid, what makes him so pessimistic, what perspective he can offer us besides apocalyptic visions.  He also slips up lyrically on “Falling Away,” where a multitude of absolutist clichés (“I’ll love whatever you become”; “I know I won’t forget a thing”; “All of the hopes we cherished fade”) de-mystify an otherwise stately song.

“Time is Running Out” deserves keeping around, possessing both a melody and a skillful build of tension.  The mischievous lyrics—easily the album’s best—express that undeniable but often unexplainable interest in unstable relationships (“You’re something beautiful, a contradiction / I wanna play the game, I want the friction”). They’re less successful at relating to the album’s overall theme (as expressed in the song’s chorus and title) that we’re all doomed, as Bellamy likely wanted them to, but they work in the four engrossing minutes of the song.

But ultimately, Absolution, despite being just 12 earnest songs (two brief Morning Glory-style instrumentals not included), feels overwhelmingly long, a fact traceable to the oppressive sound and unmemorable songs.  Rolling Stone’s Album Guide describes an album by Scott Walker as “top-heavy with pretentious abstraction, self-consciously difficult and often actively unpleasant,” which sums up my feelings on Absolution pretty much to a T.  In small doses, Muse’s music works better, but they have a long way to go before an entire album is worth listening to.

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NiCad: In Search of Sound

September 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So – alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one – a German, an Israeli, a Chilean, an American, and a Japanese guy walk into the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in Holland. They all pull out experimental, one-of-a-kind electronic instruments and start jamming. Then after four years of touring and recording they come to Williamsburg, VA to play a badass show at my college.

The band’s name is NiCad. They bill themselves as a power rock band with homemade electronica instrumentation. They’re visiting my school for a three-day stay, culminating in a true concert. Tonight they presented a live demonstration of some of their toys.  Normally I would consider a review of an isolated live performance to be unfair or poorly informed, but in light of my recent exposition on the borders of music and the nature of this group, I couldn’t resist.

You see, the boys of NiCad didn’t play a single “song” tonight in the traditional sense. A brief introduction set the stage for Lyset Fra Nedenunder, a “tape piece” – a term they use to specify that it was pre-recorded and not interactive in nature.  Pause to process that.

The entire room was left dark and no musicians stood on stage while it played.  For fifteen minutes, we were treated to (in the artist’s words) “a thoroughly planned walk through the garden” of “sound materials originally generated for another of the composer’s electronic pieces.”  To my ear, it began with a robot breathing heavily, proceeded to electronic slurps and ribbits, then some harsh winds, a city-destroying robot laser battle, and continued with various other non-rhythmic, pitchless, otherworldly ambiences.  Listen to it here.

Several of the other pieces followed suit. In fact, the immediate follow-up was a one-man Study on Feedback. Here, interactivity was the heart and spirit of the work. Two microphones were pointed directly at the two speakers in the auditorium. The artist sat on stage at his computer – did I mention that most of the pieces tonight were presented by the individuals who made them rather than the band en masse?

The composer – or inventor – was Roberto Garreton, who used one hand to input occasional bips and whirrs via one of two handheld iPod-like devices and the other hand to control stereo volume knobs on a nearby hard electronics box. This, again, went on for what might have been 10 or 15 minutes. The variety of sounds produced in that time went beyond what your imagination is likely to conjure from my sketch.

Let me give one more example. There is a museum in The Hague that houses an exhibit of glowing neon tubes, installed there by Gilad Woltsovitch of NiCad. Each tube is damaged in some way: a wire may be frayed, a transformer may be malfunctioning, etc. The erratic electric signals due to the imperfections make noise, but that noise is far too faint for a person to ever hear, even if you held the source to your ear.

Gilad designed a device to pick up these “microsounds” and amplify them to an audible level. One of the pieces performed tonight was Hunting for Fireflies, a “tape piece” that was simply a 10-or-15-minute recording of sounds made by malfunctioning neon tubes in Holland.

To all the avant garde loonies out there (and I mean that lovingly) whose eyes are growing wide with thrills: I must now apologize.  There was a severe downside to this show.  Many of the pieces performed were concepted as both aurally and visually interactive, but the visual components were simply not available.  Hunting for Fireflies begs for the sensory stimulus of the crackling neon tubes themselves!

Watch Satoshi Shiraishi’s Hystere, featuring his invention, the e-Clambone, at work.  It’s “an aerophone supplied with haptic sensors and digital signal processing algorithms,” complemented in this piece by real-time video processing that “seeks moments of convergence and divergence.”  The entire visual component was absent at NiCad’s demonstration.

In short, this was a tragically incomplete presentation of novel and exploratory art.

See, NiCad makes albums filled with music that people can appreciate as such. But tonight was a demonstration of their deep personal interests, the sonic experiments they pursue voraciously in their free time. Clicks and bloops and buzzes and every manner of distortion came out tonight. These don’t add up to “music” by themselves the way we’re used to thinking about it. That’s not their point.

The guys don’t imagine a sound – or tune – and go try to make it; they imagine a source and go find out what sound it makes.

What they find leads, in turn, to inspiration. They take the sounds they discover and use them in their construction of (slightly) more traditional music.

I will add that, to end tonight’s demonstrations, three of the five guys got up on stage to play an improvised jam. One of them had a mic, one a drum set, and one a guitar, but goodness knows there was more to it.

The mic had a keypad on its stand and operated essentially as an advanced Yakkity Yak, the old toy voice recorder. The German would gasp, click his tongue, stutter frustrated growls, and so forth, using his mic to record and play back loops of a few seconds or so, perhaps with volume, tempo, or distortion effects added.

The guitar had pads and pedals and extra buttons (oh my!) and rarely made the sorts of noises you would expect, sticking mainly to pick scrapes across strings, warm string synths, clicks, etc. The drum set was played very quickly and in no consistent time signature.

The German would sometimes lean his mic over to the drums to start looping their sounds instead of his own. It was equally likely that the mic would be used to crash a cymbal or that a drumstick would be used to play the mic.

This all was so out of the ordinary that I can’t possibly describe all the action on stage or all the sounds that were achieved.  If this rough outline of the show intrigues you, seek more information at NiCad.org.

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The Borders and Frontiers of Music Itself

September 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Some days I get the felicitous pleasure of correcting an idiot who thinks they like all music.  Have you met this guy?  When I ask what you listen to, I don’t mind noncommital answers like “a lot of stuff.”  Feel free to tell me that classical, country, rock, and rap are all fine by you.  Just don’t be ignorant enough to say that you enjoy everything.

Such headlong claims are propelled by one of two fallacious oversights.  Linguistic philosophy teaches us that operational definitions are prerequisite to coherent discussion.  In small words, we need to decide what we mean by “like” before we can talk about whether you “like” all music.  Muddled by your intuition, with no such leading clarification to guide you, it is tempting to overapply the word and convince yourself that you truly do “like” everything.  But these technicalities aren’t so interesting.

Allow me to walk you down the other troubled path.  Our lodestar will be the core question: When you say you like all music, what counts as music?

Don’t limit yourself to what’s familiar.  Realize that the word “everything” suggests far more than “everything I’ve ever heard.”  Maybe, when you said you like everything, what you meant is that you have yet to come across music that doesn’t work for you.  In that case we have a simple miscommunication and I won’t hold it against you.

Maybe you can’t name a genre without at least a few representatives in your last.fm “Most Played.”  So you like some rap songs, some pop songs, and so on, but not all rap songs and all pop songs.  If you fit that description, my apologies to you as well.

The people I’m challenging are those who  say something bolder: that they like (or expect to like) every last bit of music, even what they haven’t heard. They believe all music will, as if by definition or natural mandate, have enjoyable, appreciable elements.  For their schooling, we endeavor to answer (I repeat): what counts as music?

We’ll start with a simple parallel.  What counts as singing?  Easy, right?  All those words coming out of the frontman’s mouth!  But what if they aren’t words?  I doubt there are many who would deny that The Dissociatives are singing on the track Lifting the Veil from the Braille, which features only whistles and ahhhs.  What about the pitchshifted pornogrind stylings of Cock and Ball Torture?  Check out the track Enema Bulldozer and tell me if you think that guy is singing.  Come to think of it, do Cake songs like The Distance actually feature singing, or is that something else?

Even the liberal-minded individual might not know how to classify the vocal performance of Georgia Brown.  This Brazilian world-record-holder has been lauded for “singing” in the so-called whistle register, using a poorly understood physical mechanism a step beyond falsetto.

Still with me?  Nothing contentious yet?  Let’s go up a level.  Let’s build a box for songs and put all songs inside the box and anything that isn’t a song outside.  Oh – you’re alright with microsongs, aren’t you?  Because some people struggle with or deny “pieces” like the 1.316-second You Suffer by Napalm Death.  How about Green Carnation’s recent prog metal opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness?  The band declined to subdivide the 60-minute track into movements, but there are clear demarcations between passages.  Is that one song, or several songs presented wrong?

Again, terminology can get in the way here.  Everybody knows the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker, but is it a song?  It is one of several “scenes” from a single multi-part composition that spans an entire ballet.  Labels are tricky, but I want to avoid focusing on them.

To the heart of it, then.  People like you and I aren’t bothered by the foregoing ambiguities (as some unwitting fools are) because people like you and I are born with a mental knife for separating the fog.  Well, if you can handle what comes next, you’ve got a leg up on me and every historian of music in academia.  Polaris is still asking: what counts as music?

Exhibit A: the absence of a (discernible) beat.  When someone says they “like everything,” my go-to response is Panasonic Youth by The Dillinger Escape Plan.  Screaming and harsh licks pervade this hardcore ditty, but what’s more jarring is the deafeningly technical mathematic organization of rhythm.  No casual listener has an ounce of hope of tapping their toe successfully to the precise, plotted shifting of the time signature.  Can you digest music without a pulse?

Exhibit B: spoken word tracks.  Is the first track of Family Man, a classic Black Flag record, a song?  Exhibit C: noise.  Did avant-garde Japanese noise rockers Hantarash ever make a “song” in their career?  Arguably a generalization of this is Exhibit D: ambience.  If you stick your head out your front door, do you hear a song?

You should be familiar with John Cage, the bogeyman of western musical tradition.  If you’re not, Google him.  From a long career of questioning where people set their borders – with music on this side and chaff on the other – his best known heirloom to mankind is 4’33″.  Cage presents 4’33″ as a song in three movements.  There just don’t happen to be any notes.  He calls it “aleatoric” and emphasizes that the song is what each person hears while it is being played; thus, 4’33″ is different for each listener and upon each new listening.

Fewer students become familiar with Cage’s sequel to 4’33″, known as 0’00″.  If the former was a bastard of a piece, the latter is its mongrel son.  Free from notes, tempi, and (sometimes) even sound altogether, 0’00″ consists of this instruction: “Perform a disciplined action.”  Its first live performance – unsurprisingly, by Cage himself – consisted of the writing down of that instruction.

If you consider 0’00″ to be music and claim to “like all music,” you must have a bone through your head, because this taste of the extreme provides a hint that there is an unfathomable amount of space left to be explored in music.  To claim appreciation of the entire infinite domain would show an arrogant lack of skepticism of what might arise from it in years to come.

If you think 0’00″ is a fine piece but not “music” per se, then you’ve placed it beyond your border.  We can all set our borders how we please.  But once you say that Aerosmith writes music and John Cage writes something else, you’ve admitted that a line exists.  So where is it?

Yeah, I don’t know either.  I’ve been introduced to some wacky streams of sound in my time.  I tried to refer in this article only to songs accessible through an easy Google or YouTube search to help you probe your borders.  If you need me to suggest more outliers, just ask.

Gerrymander music however you like.  Put up a fence around it.  Leave it open to the wilderness.  But whatever you do, don’t look me in the eye and tell me you like “everything.”  You’d be lying to both of us.

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Oasis Mini-Retrospective: Tonight, I’m a rock and roll star

September 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

oasis2

If you haven’t heard, Oasis broke up last week. Even though smart money is on the band getting back together within a few months, I figure now is as good an opportunity as I’m going to get to reflect on the band and their work.

In their honor, here is a brief summary of the band’s history.

The heart of Oasis was and always will be Noel and Liam Gallagher, two brothers from Manchester. They make an incredible, explosive pair. Noel is the genius and the musical talent of the group. He has written virtually every song of import ever recorded by Oasis. Plus, he always plays the most interesting guitar parts and is easily the most naturally talented vocalist of the groupo.

Liam is the band’s true frontman, though. What he lacks in vocal range, he makes up for in swagger and the attitude. Many — including AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine — have called him one of the best, most distinctive singers in rock. The recordings make his voice sound more versatile than it actually is, and his songwriting chops are limited. But the most important part of the Oasis sound is that Liam snarl.

There’s a side effect to the Gallghers’ talent and attitude, though: egoism. The Gallagher brothers have said some of the cockiest, most self-absorbed remarks to ever to grace human lips. Liam compares himself to God on a regular basis, and Noel considers his songs slightly superior to the works Mozart.

Like Paul McCartney and John Lennon — Beatles comparisons are always abound when discussing Oasis, which Liam and Noel love — the Gallaghers have sharp, hilarious tongues. It’s always good fun to read about their hijinks and recite their always-funny quotes, but I can see how actually interacting with the two on a regular basis would be unbearable.

That’s why it comes as little surprise how many people have joined then quit the band. The Gallaghers notwithstanding, every founding member is long gone, as are a few generations of replacements. It’s hard to view the evolution of Oasis as anything other than the evolution of Noel and Liam Gallagher.

Fortunately, what those two bring to the records is incredible. The band stormed onto the music scene in 1994, steamrolling over trendiness with timeless, sexy, explosive rock and roll. As if a force of nature, the band couldn’t contain their incredible aptitude at producing great tracks. One after another, Oasis released not just singles but B-sides and demos that most bands would kill to have headlining albums.

Their effinciency at turning out great music is perhaps unprecented among great arena rock bands. For example, the band would sometimes release a monumental single off of an album with three previously unreleased B-sides — and have each of the B-sides be better than the single. Though the band collected many of the important rare tracks onto a collection in 1998, many of the gems remain in the vaults, with ripped or bootleg copies floating around the internet.

Eventually, the storm subsided. Reality came crashing down on the band. After two near-perfect albums — Definitely Maybe in 1994 and Morning Glory in 1995 — and nearly a dozen great singles, the band finally turned in a mixed effort in 1997 with Be Here Now.  The stream of great music became muddied with self-indulgence and excessive pride.

Matters only worsened after that. As original members started quitting, the band entered a three year hiatus after the Be Here Now tour. When they returned to the scene at the turn of the millennium, they sounded more depleted than ever. Their 2000 effort, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, gave the impression that Noel had taken complete control of the band and that he was trying too hard to be hip and important again — when, in fact, his ability to transcend trends was what made the band appealing in the first place.

After hitting this ground bottom with their 2000 effort, Oasis slowly but steadily recuperated. The 2002 album Heathen Chemistry was again beat down by critics and fans, but it’s a definite step up from Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. The band still dwelled too much in murkiness and psychedelia, but the powerful melodies were returning.

That recovery continued in 2005 with Don’t Believe the Truth, which included some of the best Oasis tracks in a decade. Though the disc lacked consistency, many of the hooks and best tracks were better than they had been in a long time. The recordings even showed Oasis regaining a bit of its stomp and swagger.

Finally, in 2008, Oasis saw a true return to quality with Dig Out Your Soul. Perhaps the big Gallagher babies were growing up; the album sounded like it came from battle-scarred journeymen instead of snarling youth. Instead of murky and diluted, Dig Out Your Soul was lean and muscular and nearly as towering a triumph as the band’s early masterpieces.

The recent tour cancellation and dissolution of Oasis — temporary though it may eventually be — is made particularly sad at this point in their trajectory. It seemed the band had really found some stability and could produce three or four more great albums. By my guess, the Gallaghers and their new companions have the chops, talent, and drive to make music for another decade still. Let’s hope they get back together as soon as possible and continue making music again.

Oasis is perhaps the most enjoyable rock and roll band to form in the past two decades. Their glory years in 1990′s saw the release of some of the best rock and roll to ever come out of England. Despite drops and spikes in quality since then, Oasis has a tremendous library of great music I’d recommend to any music lover.

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