But two particular bands dear to me have each announced their impending demise in the last two weeks: Mae and As Tall As Lions.  Neither is a pet band of mine, in that I don’t own a full discography worth of music from either.  I’d only be able to sing along to half of their songs at a show.

For that reason, my comments below will be largely from the gut.  I offer a eulogy for each band as the fan that I was, without actually pursuing the extra research that would be appropriate for a proper review of their careers.  If you’re in my age bracket and someone told you Counting Crows was splitting, you might feel sad and go listen to “Mr. Jones” on repeat for fifteen minutes, but you wouldn’t run to the record store and buy Hard Candy to see what you missed when you had the chance.  Just so, I’m encapsulating the experiences I already have with these bands for now without yet mixing in full knowledge of their careers.

Mae, originally or apocryphally an acronym for Multisensory Aesthetic Experience, is an indie band proudly hailing from Norfolk, VA.  If I remember right, they formed as students at Old Dominion University, a stone’s throw from my own alma mater.  Though never admitting to be anything more specific than “spiritual” as individuals and in their music, Mae was often cast as a Christian band due to the contract they had with Tooth & Nail at the time of their rise to fame.

Frankly, I have never been swayed much by the quality of a frontman’s voice, be it glorious or abysmal.  So the Dave Gimenez’s thin quality on Destination: Beautiful, which I picked up blindly on a girlfreind’s recommendation, was easy to ignore next to the album’s credible arrangements and cheery sing-along choruses.  (Want to know the secret to good arrangements?  Get a good bass player.  Every indie kid wants to play guitar.  If the last step of assembling your band is asking around to see who knows a bass player, it shows in your records.)

Destination: Beautiful was not a breakout hit.  Over many years, it grew on me.  Every time a Mae track came up in my random playlist, I liked it a little more than before, which I guess just means the album was “greater than or equal to average” paired with “my kind of music.”  After the release of Mae’s sophomore LP The Everglow, a few of those new tracks snuck their way onto my hard drive somehow.  The production value had leapfrogged to the point where Dave Elkins’s voice suddenly seeemed remarkable in a good way.

Oh, and Dave Gimenez had changed his name to Dave Elkins.  I don’t know which one is his real name.  I probably should have asked him when I got the chance to say hi after Mae played at the College of William and Mary back in early 2008.

Left to right: this author, Dave "Gimenez" Elkins, and the girlfriend who first recommended Mae

They played in an awful space on the second floor of the student center after opening act Tokyo.  Still, there’s little better than soaring in a crowd full of voices during the swells of anthems like “The Ocean,” “Suspension,” and “Anything” – though I’ll admit there were fairly few in attendance who actually knew Mae’s songs.

Even at that point, Mae had released a CD that I didn’t have.  I still don’t.  I did pay occasional attention, at least, when Mae undertook a “12 songs in 12 months” project that involved releasing a new song every 30 days that could be downloaded from their website for a donation that would go to charity.  Those offerings I streamed all sounded as high-quality as I hoped, but I never bought any.  Those 12 songs, along with an equal amount of otherwise unreleased material, composed a series of three EPs: (m)orning, (a)fternoon, and (e)vening.  How cute!

It was only within the last few months that I bought The Everglow and heard the album in its entirety.  My first listen was revolutionary.  The cohesion, range, and emotional force ranked immediately in my upper echelon among all LPs.  The conceptual design of the album is perfect in construction as the listener is walked organically through the course of an education in love.  The execution is entrancing if you’re willing to “fall into it.”

And now that I get it… it’s over.

In July 2010, Mae foreshadowed their oncoming departure from the scene, promising a “Goodbye, Goodnight” farewell tour.  The last two weeks brought the tour schedule, enumerating the band’s final shows, with the grand finale back home in Norfolk.  Amazingly, despite a line-up change that followed The Everglow, the band has reassembled in its original form for this grand seeing-off.  One lucky venue will even be treated to a cover-to-cover performance of The Everglow live.  Then, on November 28, the band will start “hiding away, embarking on new adventures, trying out life’s opportunities as individuals with freedom and anticipation.”

My involvement with As Tall As Lions was more brief and pointed.  They were an accident – the just-so-happens opening band at an Rx Bandits show.  I heard murmurs before the band came out from fans who had traveled far to see them without any fondness for the headliners.  The name “As Tall As Lions” meant nothing to me and my initial survey of their MySpace had left no impression.  I might have even been confused as to why a ferocious prog-punk-reggae-ska outfit like Rx Bandits would be touring with what looked like a bunch of low-key electric jazz musicians whose only use of a trumpet was for eerie feedback loops.

No such thought crossed my mind that night.  As Tall As Lions conquered me with a frenetic, tightly-woven opener named “Circles” that involved most of the band playing drums of one kind or another under a thick, milky vocal melody.  Go listen to “Circles” right now.  If you don’t like it, listen to it again tomorrow.  Also, you’re crazy.

Rx Bandits played a stellar set, but I bought As Tall As Lions’ You Can’t Take It With You that night instead of Rx Bandits’ new Mandala.  Days later, upon a spin, I felt betrayed.  Live, As Tall As Lions convinced me that they were a prog band of remarkable intelligence and texture.  My computer speakers were playing straight-up jazz fusion back at me.  (Albeit jazz fusion of remarkable intelligence and texture.)  You Can’t Take It With You got buried and I have never dug deeper into their past records.

Naturally, plays from a random playlist have accumulated since then, and a love equal to most of that original dumbstruck spark has been restored.  You don’t need to remind me that the line between prog and jazz is nonexistent.  These guys fill up the whole center of that Venn diagram.  They also make beautiful music.

And their bassist's face looked goofy as all get-out.

Word from headquarters is that these boys are calling it quits.  Thankfully, like Mae, their announcement had more dignity than a simple “Dear John”: three final concerts were announced for three major US cities, all right before Christmas.

The looming end makes me think about all the good times.  Remember that you’ve got to take the chance to love these guys while you’ve got it.  Remember that one ticket sold for a show benefits the average band far more than one CD sale.  Remember that it benefits the fan more, too.  I won’t be able to catch As Tall As Lions (ever) again, but I’ve got my ticket to see Mae in a couple of weeks so that I can say “Goodbye, Goodnight” to some brilliant musicians who couldn’t keep this up forever.

]]> http://earnthis.net/2010/10/the-end-of-two-eras/feed/ 0 http://earnthis.net/2010/08/green-day-live-and-under-review/ http://earnthis.net/2010/08/green-day-live-and-under-review/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:19:03 +0000 Grant J. http://earnthis.net/?p=1249 “Silence is the enemy.”

At some point on this past August 11^th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away.  At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a frontman in ways that few are today, while deducing that this band had become much more expansive and adventurous than their critics would admit, all of the Green Day hate that I used to store up in my head had drifted away.  It had been eradicated by the firework-propelled opening of the title track to their last album, by the seamless transition from songs written 16 years ago to ones written less than 16 months ago, and by the connection and genuine love felt from the audience to its entertainers.  There was nothing left but admiration.

In my formative music years, I had to deal with an internal Green Day disapproval meter that pointed to red less because of actual knowledge than from some nebulous perception that they were too popular.  I wasn’t enamored with many of their songs that enjoyed radio love, and so, outside of “Basket Case,” I gave their music little attention.  When the trio teamed up with U2 to re-make “The Saints are Coming” for the New Orleans Saints in preparation for the 2006 NFL season, I loathed the pairing.

Shortly after that, I felt inexorably drawn towards something I had tried to resist.  “Saints” turned out better than I expected, but, mostly, Fugazi happened.  I wore out their discography in that fall of ’06 (my freshman year of college), and Dookie was next in my iTunes library.  Every time I got to the end of The Argument, I would prepare myself to stop the music…until I heard “I declare I don’t care no more / I’m burning up and out and growing bored,” heard the band start running, and suddenly the pause button was the furthest thing from my mind.  The revolution was underway, propelled by the inescapable fact that over a half-dozen songs off that album had implanted themselves in my mind without conscious intention—indeed, probably despite some conscious intention.

And so, for much of college, my interest in Green Day slowly expanded, albeit reined in by the cognitive dissonance engendered by that fall and the knowledge of my earlier distaste.  As such, it took until the last 12 months to see them as more than a one-album band.

When 21^st Century Breakdown was released last May, I was compelled to listen only because a friend played it for me.  My initial thought concerned my inability to get “Know Your Enemy” out of my head after just two listens, and then I observed other details about the album that didn’t jibe with Green Day stereotypes—that songs were often broken down into sections with disparate sounds, that the band was incorporating elements from all sorts of musical genres—and some that should always have been apparent—namely, that Billie Joe has one of the most underappreciated gifts for melody of our time.

Rolling Stone put it well in their review of Breakdown: “What’s more bizarre: the fact that they sound so ambitious and audacious on their eighth album, or the fact that they even made an eighth album?”  And therein lies Green Day’s walking contradiction; punk bands simply don’t last as long as they have.  They don’t evolve the way they have.  Dookie dropped just weeks before Kurt Cobain killed himself; what other bands of their genre are still relevant?

And a large part of Green Day’s evolution has been their thematic interest.  American Idiot shocked everyone; the joke went something like, ‘Wow, things are so bad, even Green Day are writing protest songs.’  Yet, paradoxically, that album was the most ‘punk’ of their career.  And the rants against the Bush administration and 2004’s political climate enlivened critics and fans alike, cultivating a career renaissance that happened even without a sharp decline.  Without a massive change in sound or a fall from grace, their seventh album redefined their career, a more impressive feat than you’d imagine.

In fact, Idiot became so recognizable that I longed for more people to go back and listen to their earlier work, to understand that 2004 wasn’t the first good year of their lives.  And before this month’s concert, I hadn’t even bought the album, my youthful resistance still holding a bit of ground.  But the show did many remarkable things, not least of which was converting me to Idiot.  In the last couple weeks, I’ve determined it’s indispensable to own alongside Breakdown, both because the latter naturally follows the former and also simply because the former is stellar.

Both these albums’ strengths were amplified live; Green Day and Billie Joe, now at least, convince you that they take themselves and their music seriously.  In an age of insouciance and apathy, bands that do so stand out; this is a substantial reason why the Arcade Fire are the new media darling.  Green Day’s contradiction can be summed up as such: they give a shit—about the world around them, with or without Bush in office—and don’t give a shit—about people’s expectations for them, about their genre’s constraints, about their history.  I mean…9-minute, 5-part suites?  Over a minute of quiet piano slowly introducing songs?

The show also furthered a key point of Breakdown—how far the band has progressed from their punk roots (in all ways except their politics).  The genre’s ideology emphasizes minimalism; it would never approve of the elaborate, sweeping show GD put on, not the lengthy interludes during songs or the flames bursting forth during the loudest moments of the most impassioned numbers.  Billie Joe channeled the spirit of all great frontmen by running around like a controlled drunk, always emphasizing inclusivity.  Someone threw me a lei?  Sure, I’ll put it on.  Want one fan on stage?  Why not 30?  It all worked, splendidly, and it proved to be done by a band living on its own terms.

Over the course of the nearly 3 hours, GD pulled, by my count, four tracks from Breakdown (the singles: title track, “Enemy,” “East Jesus Nowhere,” “21 Guns”), several from Idiot, occasional quirky deep cuts like “King for a Day,” and, of course, juicy Dookie standouts.  I would have loved me some “Nice Guys Finish Last” or “The Static Age,” but the band threw out more than a few bones, namely “She” and Warning’s “Minority.”  Would I have preferred one or two additional songs to be played in lieu of some of the mid-song interludes?  Perhaps, but it’s hard to complain about anything in the presence of such energy, such ferocity, such charisma.  GD have entrenched themselves as a peak live band of our time, possessing the ability to transport audience members into another world, the way great films and books do.

Really, though, a look back on the band’s discography reveals a few patterns that might have clued us in to their potential longevity.  The music and lyrics are consistently smarter than one would imagine, every song managing to sustain independence from its brothers while yet maintaining propulsive drive. (Dookie, for example, is one of the great energizing albums out there, but it has a heart and soul.) Throughout their career, they’ve written indelible breakneck rockers (“Burnout,” “Nice Guys,” “Idiot,” “Holiday”), effortlessly smooth power ballads (“Having a Blast,” “Redundant,” Worry Rock”), and then occasionally pulled back for change-of-pace slow-burners (“Good Riddance,” obviously, plus “Are We the Waiting”; “Last Night on Earth” still blows, however).  Their use of tension and release, especially on “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Letterbomb,” is masterful.  Except for the underrated Warning, their albums are typically too long, over-loaded with trimmable filler, but that’s sort of the point: with nothing to lose and nothing to prove, they always seem to be tossing off ideas just to see what sticks.

Billie Joe’s lyrics, from 1994 until now, are stronger than casual critics will give him credit for (Dookie wrings humor and mischievousness out of nothing, and the last two have many quotable lines), and his gift for hooks is borderline criminal (“Jesus” reins in this category, possessing enough hooks for about 7 songs; see also “Basket Case,” “Coming Clean,” “Scattered,” “Church on Sunday,” “Brat”).  But it was only Breakdown that allowed me to see all of this, that allowed me to go back and listen to everything that came before, to realize that there was much more there than meets the eye.  That album’s staying power, frankly, stunned me; but it shouldn’t have, not with its diversity, smooth flow, and abundant creativity, hooks, color, and intelligence.

They’ve just never hit these peaks before—the epic bridges of “Static Age,” the second “Gloria,” “21 Guns”; the release when Billie Joe cries, “My generation is zero / I never made it as a working-class hero!”; the titanic drum lead-in back to the final chorus of “Enemy”; the passionate, inimitable Green Day gallop of the first “Gloria,” “Christian’s Inferno,” and “American Eulogy.”

On Nimrod’s “Worry Rock,” they declared, “Promise me no dead-end streets / And I’ll guarantee we’ll have the road.”  Well, Billie Joe, you should never fret about not having that road.

Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars  

In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (the infinitely more talented) All-American Rejects.  A genre that has now almost completely abandoned its Rites of Spring roots, emo’s path of change has traversed Sunny Day Real Estate and Weezer and Jimmy Eat World, coming to rest somewhere in between Fall Out Boy (ugh) and AAR, with an eye turned ever towards mainstream acceptance.   

In between those two is BLG, whose self-titled debut proved that there was a healthy market for such music, one likely appealing most to teenage girls.  A fair number of them ate up the predictably over-the-top emotions expressed on said album, which featured a couple sharp, exhilarating tracks that lifted off (“The Great Escape” and “Five Minutes to Midnight” most prominently), but which sank without a trace by the end. 

A 12-song work that should have been 2-4 shorter, with that many more re-worked, Boys Like Girls, at its nadir, exemplifies the worst traits of this kind of schmaltzy pop-rock.  The lyrics sustain that kind of immature, woe-is-me attitude—“Who said it’s better to have loved and lost? / I wish that I had never loved at all,” etc—that, apparently, people still find poignant.  When the melodies fade away, there’s not much left in the songs’ originality or sturdiness to make up for it, and lead singer Martin Johnson’s voice just gets thinner and thinner.  The aforementioned two opening tracks, plus a couple more, are worth downloading, but that’s about it.

All of which makes their 2009 sophomore release, Love Drunk, that much more surprising.  This is a massive step forward, though not via a significant musical shift.  Indeed, it’s merely the other end of the spectrum, projecting the best feelings in emo-pop.  This is what they should have always gone for, the kind of loud, hyper-melodic, blood-pumping, Top Gun-style-campy music that’s best belted out loudly from the car.  When they sing “We’re heading for a heart, heart, heartbreak” or “I used to be love drunk, but now I’m hung-over” or “I wish that I could turn this car around, but she’s got a boyfriend now,” they sound carefree instead of overly caring, closer to delighted than despondent, loose rather than lost. 

And THAT is the critical distinction—and the philosophical bent that really makes the album work.  Self-misery would have sunk this project—and it wouldn’t have fit with the music—but the freewheeling thoughts blend together perfectly with the anthemic choruses to actually uplift you.  When I saw some of these song titles (particularly “She’s Got a Boyfriend Now”) I nervously foresaw some Pinkerton or Narrow Stairs-esque lyrics; instead, they treat such situations as opportunities for freedom and novelty.

And they marry such sentiments to songs whose ability to withstand repeated playings, I’ll be honest, stunned me.  Thanks to the playfulness and energy, the vastly improved hooks, and the fact that the songs are now drenched in color rather than projecting the same boring hue, they’re able to stir up that feeling of grand romanticism to which many similar bands only aspire.  Despite re-using some elements (start-stop basslines, falsettos), their previously-dormant sense of songcraft masks flaws: Tracks like the opener and “Chemicals Collide” are as good of stress-relievers as I’ve heard. 

No, Allmusic, “Two is Better Than One” (sung with Taylor Swift, but whatever) isn’t the worst of the ballads on here, for at least it has some punch and a decent grip on melody.  It has tangible flaws, to be sure, but the real penetrating stares should be directed at the tracks that most recall the second half of their debut: “Someone Like You” and “Go,” which commits that crime of all music crimes, the limpid album closer. (Why, oh why, don’t bands just dance with what brought them?  I’m looking at you, Jawbox.   And Placebo.)

So, on some level, Love Drunk is what it is, but deep down, it’s not.  Much as the snobby will hate it, this kind of music can be bad or good, depending on its execution, just like all rock can be.  Their career has proved that.  But for the most part, this is very well-executed—and fun.

In a lot of ways, this kind of music compares with country.  There’s not a ton going on, musically, which redirects attention onto the vocals and lyrics.  And, perhaps for that reason, the attitude and philosophy of the genre—the culture, if you will—is presented so forcefully as to feel like it’s being shoved down your right.  Your appreciation, therefore, will be highly dependent upon your approval of that culture.  But if you’re OK with it—and you’re finished with all 3 All-American Rejects albums—turn here.

Funeral (2004) – 4.5 stars

Neon Bible (2007) – 4.5 stars

Within seemingly 5 minutes of breaking onto the music scene, the Arcade Fire lost anonymity.  David Bowie immediately proclaimed himself a major fan, festivals like Lollapalooza snapped them up, and U2 not only asked them to share stages on their Vertigo Tour but also played one of their tracks as the lead-in to every show.  This acclaim within the industry was matched by the feelings felt by both critics and the public towards the band’s debut album, which currently sports a score of 90 on Metacritic.

Overreaction?  Hardly.  The group’s early EP didn’t show much promise, but 2004’s Funeral is the kind of album that everyone should like and yet doesn’t feel tailored to the masses, one that revels in its influences and yet still sounds utterly original, one that makes earnestness and sincerity cool again.  Full of heart and bluster and pain and energy, it’s one glorious and dramatic journey into…death?

Well, yes, as the album’s title, and overall thematic breadth, reflects the passing of several family members within the band, which is headed by Win Butler and his wife Regine Chassagne.  Joined by a bevy of other musicians and vocalists, they create soundscapes with a host of orchestral instruments.  Minimalist, they are not; and their ambitions are so wonderfully refreshing in a age of simplicity in music.  Starting things off is the first of 4 “neighborhood” passages that reflect the band’s wistfulness; on the opener, stately piano underscores Win’s gradually crescendoing vocals about the hope of children to escape family strife through friendship.

The band clearly wants immediacy, wants to cling to something positive, wants respite from torpor and sadness.  A couple songs submerge songcraft for instrumentation that’s too hard to parse (the second “Neighborhood,” for example, doesn’t stick in the mind); but the revelatory power put forth on tracks like “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” uplifts listeners, no matter how ambivalent the subject matter—yes, the Fire has that men-from-the-boys quality of being able to make darkness life-affirming.  Butler eschews the kind of detached, stoic cool that pervades much of 2000s music and hit peaks of intensity instead: when he cries on Power Out, “Is it a dream, is it a lie? / I think I’ll let you decide / Light a candle for the kids / Jesus Christ, don’t keep it hid” the feeling is overwhelming.

And then there’s “Wake Up,” the U2 fade-in that inspires no reservations whatsoever about that band’s taste.  An epic, pull-back-on-the reins rock anthem, filled with color and energy, it’s one of those songs that sounds as though it could have been written anytime in the last 30 years—or the next 30.  As he does on “Rebellion,” Butler encourages people to persevere through tragedy, once again expressing nostalgia for foregone innocence (“Now that I’m older / My heart’s colder / And I can see that it’s a lie”).

A few years in the making and less grandiose, 2007’s Neon Bible imparts a cloudier, murkier hue upon listeners, replacing epic feelings with more down-to-earth ruminations.  Like on all great sequels (Joy Division’s Closer, the second and third Bourne movies, etc), they’ve accurately determined just what to include and what to change.  You can hear Joy Division in its (occasionally) cavernous darkness, you can hear U2 in the earnestness and anthems, you can hear Bruce Springsteen (“Antichrist Television Blues”), but you can also hear no one.  Just as with the first album, Neon Bible doesn’t really sound like anybody.  It’s just The Arcade Fire.

I vividly remember my first listen to Bible, being blown away by the effect of the added atmosphere, not believing how macabre and gloomy and thrilling those first four songs sounded.  “Black Mirror,”—there’s your Joy Division ominousness, given liftoff—and “Keep the Car Running,” unleashing mandolins and all kinds of exuberant fun, eliminate any possibility of a let-down.  And when the bottom drops out of the breathtaking “Intervention,” at the 2:01 mark, the same thing will happen to your jaw.

In a somewhat similar vein as Funeral, the band still gets into trouble with their propensity for limpid, virtually guitar-free mood pieces (“Neon Bible” in particular; the best of these is “Ocean of Noise,” in no small part thanks to the excellent line, “You’ve got your reasons / And me, I’ve got mine / But all the reasons I gave were just lies to by myself some time.”)

Indeed, Butler’s lyrics have a way of covering up the band’s minor imperfections.  They’re a little broader than on Funeral, but still personal, still vivid.  The “Power Out” vocal intensity comes on “Intervention”—“Been working for the church while your life falls apart / Been singing ‘Hallelujah’ with the fear in your heart.”  But not every song matches them appropriately; when “Windowsill” accelerates, he cries, “The windows are locked now, so what’ll be it be / A house on fire / Or a rising sea?” an image that conjures up far more emotion than the instrumentation—they need a little less gray, a little more guitar.

But that line resonates with the listener, in part because it’s surprisingly reflective of the band’s career.  Funeral is the house on fire, Neon Bible the rising sea; but they’ve always taken their dystopia with a different bent than most.  Their worldview is best summed up by the top line on ATB: “Into the light of a starless sky / I’m staring into nothing, and I’m asking you why.”  Rather than simply reflecting misery, they’re always asking why, and always staring ahead, irrespective of what looks back at them.  With their pivotal third album set to be released this August, the world cannot possibly predict what they will see next.

This is a a reflection on Relient K’s career so far. It’s broken down in to eight parts.

Relient K (2000) – 2 stars

The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001) – 3 stars

Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right (2003) – 5 stars

Mmhmm (2004) – 4.5 stars

Five Score and Seven Years Ago (2007) – 4 stars

The Bird and the Bee Sides (2008) – 3.5 stars

Forget and Not Slow Down (2009) – 4 stars

Forget and Not Slow Down, re-interpreted – 4.5 stars

Pretty in Black (2005) – 2 stars

Lust, Lust, Lust (2008) – 5 stars

In and Out of Control (2009) – 4 stars

Formed in Copenhagen, of all places, the boy-girl duo The Raveonettes re-envisions rock and roll’s past into one endlessly entertaining vision of the present.  Named after the Buddy Holly song “Rave On,” guitarist Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo combine distorted washes of guitar sounds with stellar melodies, a concoction that’s a lot of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a little My Bloody Valentine, a little girl-group pop, and a hell of a lot of fun.

JAMC’s debut album Psychocandy is all over Chain Gang of Love, but that hardly makes the Raves’ version a boring retread.  The album is, however, noisy, tuneful, and vivacious—everything that has come to define them.  The opening bars of “Remember” sound like pure MBV- or Lush-inspired shoegaze, but other tracks, like “That Great Love Sound” and “Heartbreak Stroll,” sizzle with reverb and distortion that keep up with breakneck melodies.  It doesn’t get much sexier than Wagner singing “Get it all straight / ‘Cause you’re whistle-bait / Come on, baby, right now” over the chiming guitars and runaway-train pace of “Heartbreak”; or winking, “Let’s rave on ‘cause I know that you want it / Let’s make out ‘cause I know that you want it” on “Let’s Rave On.”

After such a promising beginning, Pretty in Black provokes just one question: What the hell happened?  For reasons passing understanding, the band turns it back on what it does best; gone are the heavy reverb, the dense washes of sound, the layers of guitar coating sugary melodies.  Somehow, in the search to write a pure pop album—lacking the white-noise guitar parts that would, apparently, turn off the masses—they forget how to be catchy, and this, combined with the vanishing guitars, leaves them with bland, acoustic-heavy songs possessing nary a hint of the grand beauty that defines the rest of their work.

A couple songs (“Sleepwalking,” “Ode to L.A.”) almost break free, almost hit that level of majesty, but you can hear the contradictions within the band, hear them too concerned with playing it safe.  The former starts off well, the line “Think you look good today / Pretty in black, you got it down“ married to that warm, cavernous bass and piquant guitar, but then, frustratingly, it pulls back.  Similarly, “Ode” thinks about digging in, before sticking with a forgettable chorus and Ronnie Spector (of the Ronettes) providing out-of-place backing vocals.

Newcomers to the band should essentially forget about Pretty in Black (though while noting its wonderful title, which describes a lot of what the Raves are all about) and move on to the career-defining Lust, Lust, Lust.  Exceptionally produced, Lust takes the formula of Chain Gang to new heights, with even sharper melodies, more meaningful lyrics, and sweeter washes of sound.  Full of dark and dirty undertones, especially in the lyrics, it’s still exceedingly colorful, with pristine melodies floating above druggy distortion and those thick riffs.  The guitar climaxes of “Hallucinations,” “Blitzed,” and “Blush” match up with anything written by their influences.

“Dead Sound” combines self- and partner-loathing lyrics (“And now you go through a million girls and try to pick what’s right / When nightfall comes and you’re still alone, do you feel it deep inside?”) with a beat so insistent and absorbing that it compelled multiple critics to write that the song was “anything but” its title.  “The Beat Dies” re-writes JAMC’s “Something’s Wrong” with a Slowdive-amount of lie-back-and-dream beauty; but, amidst all this excellence, it’s the incomparable “Blush” that supersedes everything else they’ve done, before or since.

Given the arrows pointed at unworthy partners throughout the album, it may actually be the hated perpetrator being channeled in the rather arrogant chorus, “I can’t keep you / I can’t hold you down / I can’t love you still… /  But I can still make you blush.”  The band phrases this question by way of the devastatingly cruel line “All I want from you is all I took,” before launching into the coda with their prettiest, Explosions in the Sky-esque guitar melody sliding in and out of that infinitely warm backing guitar.  A perfect song.

2009’s In and Out of Control proves, thankfully, that the Raves aren’t going anywhere near Pretty in Black again.  Though not quite so noisy (or flawless) as Lust, Lust, Lust, it’s nevertheless another winning effort, wherein the best songs—”Bang!”, “Last Dance,” “Suicide”—sound romantic and glorious.  The production is a tad looser than on Lust (occasional oddities like glockenspiels and fewer oceanic washes of sound) and the songs aren’t quite as consistently excellent, but—despite a preponderance of amateurish song titles—they’re just as dramatic.  The Raves kick down the doors with the devilishly inviting opening line “Bang!  You’re so vicious baby” and maintain that level of visceral excitement throughout.

On Lust, a song called “Suicide” might have been morbidly depressing, but here, they demonstrate the capability to get past their wounds; “Run, run, run away, little girl / Get your fun in this trashy world / Empty-hearted boys by your side/ Lick your lips and fuck suicide,” sings Foo over an irresistibly lilting haze.  “Wine” approaches “The Beat Dies” for album-closing, sleepy quietude, but the real winner is “Last Dance,” a joyous, unashamedly sentimental paean to simplicity.  As long as it doesn’t refer to themselves.

[out of four stars]

Toy Story (1995) – 4 stars
A Bug’s Life (1998) – 3.5 stars
Toy Story 2 (1999) – 4 stars
Monsters, Inc. (2001) – 4 stars
Finding Nemo (2003) – 4 stars
The Incredibles (2004) – 4 stars
Cars (2006) – 2.5 stars
Ratatouille (2007) – 4 stars
WALL•E (2008) – 4 stars
Up (2009) – 4 stars

Many, many thoughts on the first decade and a half of my favorite film studio of all time, after the jump.

First, the obvious: Pixar is the best, most important, and most influential animation studio — if not movie studio — of the past decade and a half. 1995′s Pocahontas marked the beginning of the end of Disney Classic’s run as king of animation, the year that they handed the torch over to Pixar.

Nowadays, with no fewer than a half dozen high-profile CGI films released each year, it’s easy to forget just how jaw-dropping the original Toy Story was upon its release. There’s a shot in the opening moments where we see Woody come to life, his face moving and making very human expressions. It was stunning (almost terrifying) at a time that a computer could generate these images and make them seem so alive.

Computer animation carries a real sense of space and depth and pseudo-realism that can’t be matched by hand-drawn animation. Toy Story wisely introduced us to this new visual sensation by giving us a world intended to be a bit stiff and lifeless: Even when the toys “wake up,” they have a level of artificiality about them. They’re still wood and plastic and fabric, after all.

Because Pixar didn’t have to work with highly complex character models, they could focus their processing power on creating a vivid world. It pays off; every visual, every shot, every scene in the film immediately feels fully-formed and completely realized. Nothing is bland.

Surely Pixar was still working out kinks in its technology (*), but it was never distracting simply because the busyness and detail of each shot prevented glaring flaws. I only wish I could’ve been a few years older in 1995. I really wish I could’ve appreciated how groundbreaking and breathtaking it was at the time compared to anything else in film.

(*) I’ve seen Toy Story at least ten times, and have only detected two scenes where it’s painfully obvious this technology was imperfect. The most glaring is a shot of Spike the dog turning around to chase Woody.

Having said all of this, I’m more concerned as a film-viewer with whether the film stands the test of time rather than whether it was impressive so long ago. Thank goodness, then, that Toy Story is just as golden fifteen years after its release as it’s always been.

The film fires on so many cylinders at once. Only in my late teenage years did I start to appreciate that “cowboy vs. space ranger” cuts a little deeper than the surface. Woody’s loss of importance in Andy’s life not only serves as a metaphor of America’s loss of innocence and patience, but serves as an oblique metaphor for death (something fleshed out into even darker terrain in the sequel).

It’s also a film about the simple bond between a child and his favorite toy. Pixar has always had a knack for big ideas and unique worlds, but their films are founded on an appreciation for the small. You see this in the extraordinary detail of the visuals, but also in the purity of the characters and plots. They did this first in Toy Story.

Of course, any discussion of Toy Story would be remiss without mentioning Woody and Buzz Lightyear, two of the greatest characters in animation history. These animated characters have palpable chemistry the way two great live-action actors might.

If you don’t believe me, watch the classic “you are a toy!” scene, which is one of my top ten favorite movie scenes of all time. It also has one of my favorite movie lines — “you are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.” The play between Allen and Hanks is hilarious and classic (and notice how expressive Woody’s face is; it’s phenomenal for the first stab at a CGI feature). Truly, one of film’s great odd couples.

If Pixar’s sophomore effort, A Bug’s Life, feels like a little bit of a slump and one of their least memorable films, it’s just because the bar was set so high. A Bug’s Life follows a bit too closely Toy Story‘s formula of crafting a world that’s familiar but subhuman and breathing sentience and order into it — here, an ant hill instead of a toy box.

Further, A Bug’s Life plot — act 1: oddball struggles to fit in, causes trouble; act 2: oddball discovers remedy to troubles, builds confidence; act 3: oddball makes matters worse, saves the day anyways, is finally accepted — has been aped so many times (which is not entirely a bad thing) by DreamWorks and Sony Animated Pictures that it feels a bit retroactively tired.

Yet, with the possible exception of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, no CGI film with this formulaic plot structure has had so much polish and perfection. I can’t think of a major flaw in A Bug’s Life other than “it’s not Toy Story” and “people stole the premise and made it into a formula.”

The broad cast of characters is colorful, perhaps even stronger than Toy Story‘s, the dialogue is consistently hilarious, and the film captures a feeling of danger and thrill in its brilliant set pieces. Overall, A Bug’s Life is a delight that crackles and inspires, even as it lacks the poignancy of most Pixar.

Toy Story vs. Toy Story 2 is a debate not unlike Godfather vs. Godfather 2. The former is classic, iconic, fun, and a piece of instant nostalgia. The second is darker, more complex, and a bit more profound. Really, there’s no right answer. It depends more on a person’s mood or preference than anything. Toy Story 2 is certainly one of the greatest film sequels of all time. It not only lived up to the original, but it sent Pixar to the stratosphere as a golden standard of film-making.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for their hesitancy towards Toy Story 2 before they saw the film. At the time, it probably seemed like the laziest move Pixar could’ve taken. I could see how the announcement of a sequel would’ve caused worry that Pixar would be plagued with predictability and sequel-itis.

Instead, the film is a mature and complex reflection of the original. It still has wit and energy and an astonishing level of detail, but it also has a somber, contemplative center. Most memorable is cowgirl Jessie’s musical number “When She Loved Me” that alters Woody’s perspective. Chronologically and thematically, that showpiece is the center of the film and the trilogy.

The central conflict of the film is a struggle of perception, like the original, but instead of one patently incorrect paradigm, two compelling and difficult perspectives are presented. They boil down to career and material prosperity (the museum) versus family and non-material success (returning to Andy’s).

While the philosophical elements of the film are compelling, the film is just as much fun as Toy Story. The script is sharp and the action is breakneck. Toy Story 2 is really the point where Pixar films took the big leap forward in terms using CGI’s lack of physical limitations as a way to realize set pieces of astonishing scope, detail, and imagination.

Finally, it’s a rewarding sequel because it has a deep reverence to the original film. Lines and scenes from Toy Story are recreated, twisted, reversed, and reapplied to Toy Story 2. It adds another layer of depth to an already-deep film. In my book, Toy Story 2 is nothing short of a masterpiece.

In 2001, the beloved Shrek came out, which stole some of the limelight from Monsters, Inc. Two years later, Finding Nemo, Pixar’s highest-grossing movie to date, came around. Being sandwiched like this has almost ensured that Monsters, Inc. will go down as one of Pixar’s more forgotten films. This is a shame; Monsters, Inc. remains a classic.

The most obvious strength of MI is the nonstop comedy. The visual and verbal jokes flow at a rate that seems inspired by classic Looney Tunes. The ironic set-up – scary monsters who are terrified of little kids — plays out in absolutely hilarious ways.

Billy Crystal’s hyperactive voice is conveyed visually by the antsy Mike Wazowski — one of the funnier character names in recent cinema, by the way. The contrast provided by John Goodman’s calm, deliberate Sulley, who makes Wazowski’s hysteria even funnier.

The next strength of MI is relevance and urgency. As they would famously do later in WALL•E, Pixar makes a political commentary with this film that will likely fly over the heads of youngsters, but resonates strongly to anyone mature enough to see through the metaphors. The message is this: Dealing with a power crisis — or any problem of a diminishing supply — requires a paradigm shift and a reinvention, not the invasive use of mechanical force.

Even more than the laughs and the message, the sheer amount of imagination in Monsters, Inc. is its most powerful and enduring element. Pixar’s first three films all originated from the real world. Monsters, Inc.‘s environment — while it has a few scenes in the “real world” — is pure fabrication. Seeing an invented world that seems to operate with an almost postmodern typicality is the film’s biggest pleasure.

The level of detail and development in the world is astonishing, especially after the film takes a left turn at the beginning of the third act, and the main characters are banished from their society. From there on out — and especially during the flying door climax — Monsters, Inc. is extravagantly fun and ambitious.

Monsters, Inc. found Pixar making a film with layers of allegorical meaning. Finding Nemo, like A Bug’s Life before it, is much more thematically direct. Where A Bug’s Life failed to achieve poignancy, though, Nemo is one of Pixar’s most powerful films — in part because of its parochial simplicity.

A lesser film might have used a lost child as a McGuffin for some zany adventures. Nemo uses the conflict as an emotional core, however — as well as a way to drive the plot. It gives every scene a sense of urgency and importance.

More than any other Pixar movie, Nemo is episodic. Especially in Marlin and Dori’s half of the plot, it’s one five-minute adventure after another. This allows the viewers to see a multitude of sea creatures and landscapes (*). By the end of the film, we really feel like we’ve been on a long, eventful quest.

(*) Finding Nemo spawned two of my favorite posters. One of them featured virtually every sea creature encountered in the film. The other is just a fantastic piece of visual design.

Every Pixar film has felt visually advanced for its time. But Nemo‘s ocean is phantasmagorical. The colors are vibrant, the scenes detailed, the characters distinct (and relatively accurate to marine biology). Seven years later, I still think Finding Nemo is the most beautiful animated film ever.

The movie is fun to just look at and listen to. It has incredible visual design, but also some of the funniest, richest sound you’ll hear in cinema. The voice acting – highlighted by Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush, and writer/director Andrew Stanton – is first-rate.

Only rarely does a film with visuals as stunning as these pack the level of emotional punch that Nemo does. It all adds up to a Pixar masterpiece, one of the best CGI films to date.

Brad Bird and Pixar are a match made in heaven. On the one hand, you have a storyteller who excels visual comedy and adventure. He composes stories at once complex and brisk. All of his work is mature and thematically rich.

On the other hand, you have an animation studio willing to give him creative free reign to use the best technology and teams in the business. The studio thrives on bold, challenging work of tremendous imagination.

The first Bird-Pixar film is a rousing success. It was longer and more adult-oriented than any Pixar film at the time of its release, and it remains one of the studio’s high points.

The Incredibles owes a lot not only to Watchmen and the Fantastic Four — the obvious inspirations for the plot — but to classic spy movies. The soul of the movie is its chases and trickery and intrigue. But, thanks to CGI, these characters can pull off moves far more dazzling than any Bond or Bourne or live-action superhero ever could. The filmmakers do a great job using animation to make the physically impossible become possible.

Like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles really feels like a long and loaded adventure. From the noir-ish prologue, to the escape from the jungle, to the climax in the big city, Incredibles is two hours jam-packed with spectacle and fun.

Still, the portrait of a most unusual family — and their superhuman takes on very human problems — is just as strong as the adventures (*). No matter how you slice The Incredibles, it’s one of Pixar’s strongest entries. It also marked The Great Leap for Pixar, the point when their films became complex and mature enough to start getting recognized as “superior cinema,” instead of “superior cinema-considering-its-target-audience.”

(*) The balance of characters and adventure are so good that I really think The Incredibles needs a sequel. It’s really the only Pixar film that has given me that hunger. The superhero premise is ripe for another story arc. Plus, the film ends on a note that essentially promises a plenitude of excitement to come for these characters. Make it happen, Bird and Pixar!

Cars seemed destined to go right; the last time John Lasseter breathed life into inanimate objects, Toy Story was born. Instead, it was a bloated, barely above-average affair that nearly imploded the Pixar recipe.

The biggest problem with Cars is its length. If it had been 90 minutes, it could’ve been brushed off as formulaic but polished diversion (like A Bug’s Life). At 116 minutes, it’s Pixar’s longest film, but it has less happening than any other Pixar work.

First, the characters are not as interesting as the ones in any other Pixar film. Mater seems to be the character we’re supposed to love because of emphasis placed on him, but he’s just not as engaging as a Mike Wazowski or a Buzz Lightyear. I think the most interesting personality here, the only one I really like, is Paul Newman’s retired racer.

Cars has a meandering pace to it. At times, it makes the film feel entitled, as if we should just be in awe of this latest Pixar film simply because it’s pretty, long, and ambitious like The Incredibles. Every part of Cars, though, is a step down from The Incredibles – the concept, the voice acting, the complexity, the visuals, the energy, etc.

It’s not to say the film is bad. It’s decent storytelling that’s polished and mostly harmless. The visuals are still very impressive. It has a few creative moments and good thoughts. The celebration of middle America feels a bit hypocritical, coming from a major conglomerate and a film apparently intended to be a franchise — but the overall message is kind-hearted and well-executed.

It’s just that the movie isn’t quite Pixar-good. It’s the only film in Pixar’s oeuvre that has felt like a let-down to date.

Three years after his first Pixar classic, Brad Bird returned with Ratatouille. It was a rocky development for the project — and the final product has a few scars to show for it — but Bird’s late reinvention of the project really paid off.

Ratatouille is jumbled and bursting with with often contradictory ideas, but the overriding accomplishment of the film is the portrayal of an unlikely artist. The chef rat Remy is perhaps the most sympathetic Pixar character since Marlin of Finding Nemo.

The reverence the film has for the “art” — in this case, fine food — is pretty stunning. The filmmakers went to Paris to study the delicacies of the area, and it shows. The food is quite appetizing for a computer graphic.

The film also dissects the psychology behind art appreciation. The critic Anton Ego plays a small but memorable role as a “villain” who eventually comes to appreciate Remy. Of course, it doesn’t hurt the character that he’s voiced by Peter O’Toole.

Speaking of the voice acting, it’s superb all around in Ratatouille. Furthermore — like The Incredibles before it — the voice acting is never distracting. There’s no voice actors (with the possible exception of O’Toole) where the character makes me think of the actor. I can’t say that for most non-Pixar CGI films. It enhances the film’s engrossing nature that the voices are barely recognizable outside of their CGI counterparts.

Like The Incredibles, Bird’s second Pixar film has a huge reverence to visual comedy at its core. That’s apparently what drew Bird to the film when its development was uncertain: the fact that he could tell a highly emotional story with a series of visual set pieces.

There’s so much happening in Ratatouille that it’s sometimes too much. Some of the subplots feel a bit excessive or overwrought. But the sum effect of the parts is one of the most moving and unique films of the 2000′s. It has its quirks, but Ratatouille might be Pixar’s best movie to date, and that’s saying something pretty strong.

The boldest move — and maybe best move — ever made by Pixar was the stark opening act of WALL•E. Truly, the first half hour of WALL•E is a marvel of cinema operating at its most fundamental level: moving images and sounds. The cheeriness and playfulness of WALL•E the robot provides a powerful contrast to the apocalyptic setting.

The best word to describe WALL•E the character is that he is animated. He’s lively, responsive, and curious despite his dingy exterior. He’s also lonely; besides a weirdly cute cockroach, he begins the movie as the only entity on the planet. So when the shiny Eve lands on Earth, he can’t help but be entranced.

He eventually departs from junkyard Earth on a quest to win Eve’s electric heart and save the fat humans. The film loses some of its momentum here. It’s still strong storytelling, but it lacks the grace of the first act. Fortunately, the movie ends with a powerful conclusion.

The film’s message — we should limit waste and materialism — is pretty clear. The near-preachiness would hamper the film if WALL•E wasn’t bursting full of adventure and romance. I did detect, though a few subtle jabs at the “green” mindset, even as the film endorses it.

Because the core of the film is a love story between two robots, the heavy-handedness of the environmental message becomes secondary. No matter what scenario he’s placed in, WALL•E is full of life. There are a few amazing scenes – such as the “dancing” scene with the fire extinguisher – that really develop the bond between two supposedly inanimate objects.

There’s also a darkness to WALL•E that really elevates it above other animated fare. The grim portrayal of humans’ post-Earth existence would be a bit disturbing if it wasn’t so bizarre and, at times, goofy. The film also takes a bit of time to contemplate WALL•E’s sentience and flirts with a very dark and depressing conclusion.

But WALL•E ends on a very moving note and has gone down as one of Pixar’s most revered films by critics and fans alike.

Can Pixar do no wrong? Cars notwithstanding, every release has only further cemented the studio’s legacy as one of the most efficient in the biz. Nearly every film they’ve produced has felt like an instant classic, and Up is no exception.

Really, Up secures its greatness in the first fifteen minutes, particularly the silent montage that absolutely floored critics and fans to tears. Up establishes a powerful emotional link between viewers and curmudgeon Carl instead of using Carl’s age primarily for comedy’s sake. We understand why he’s grumpy, which makes him a very effective protagonist.

And then he gets sent on this whirlwind adventure to finish some unfinished business, and there’s no looking back. There’s a cast of colorful characters and dastardly villains. There are pitfalls and stumbles and glorious redemptions. And it all builds up to a conclusion that lends poignancy to the parenthood theme that permeates all 88 minutes of Up.

Up is pure adventure and pure heart. There are countless great set pieces, as well as the usual great voice acting and script from the Pixar wizards. Dug the dog is an immediate entrant into the pantheon of great Pixar characters, right up there with Buzz and Dori and Boo. He’s probably the funniest part of the movie alongside squawking, rainbow bird Kevin. The whole film has such a brilliant cast of characters, it’s hard to give on the edge over another.

What elevates Up into four-star and best-of-the-year status is the longing undercurrent in the film. Carl’s difficult goodbye and regret for not having given her a more exciting life or a child provides a moving contrast to the silly and fun adventures. Up is both tearjerker and barnstormer.

As always with Pixar, the film is a visual delight, bursting with detail and color. Pixar never skimps in the visual design department, which is why their movies will stand the test of time even as technology and processing power improves.

So where does Pixar go from here? They start their next era with Toy Story 3 to come out in the summer of 2010, a very appropriate way to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Toy Story. After that, the outlook gets a bit hazy. The studio’s expansion the next few years means the studio is able to release movies twice a year instead of once a year, with plans to alternate between sequels and non-sequels.

Monsters, Inc. and Cars have follow-ups that are officially announced, the former of which has much more promise than the latter, in my opinion. I’m still not sure why they’re ignoring The Incredibles. Perhaps they want to stick with Brad Bird if they do a sequel and he’s been difficult to lock down, which would be a reason I could accept.

Despite a new love for sequels and a more frequent release schedule, Pixar still has room for a few missteps before I cease my blind trust in them. They’re ten films into redefining animation, and have had a near-perfect average over fifteen years.

Repeater +3 Songs (1990) – 4 stars

Steady Diet of Nothing (1991) – 4 stars

In on the Kill Taker (1993) – 5 stars

Red Medicine (1995) – 5 stars

End Hits (1998) – 3.5 stars

The Argument (2001) – 4 stars

A “staggeringly powerful combination,” as Rolling Stone has called them, a supergroup to some, the culmination of increasingly impressive work done by two lead singers earlier in their careers, the immensely influential Fugazi always did things their way.  They rocked harder than most, thought more deeply than most, veered in unpredictable directions whenever the hell they felt like it, and in the process created some of the most visceral, thrilling, intelligent, and demanding rock music in existence.  Headed by the incomparable duo of Ian Mackaye (best known up to that point for Minor Threat, the prime example of hardcore punk) and Guy Picciotto (leader of the incredible Rites of Spring), they balanced rock with brains more cogently than just about anyone and should thus be required listening for all fans of modern rock music.  

A compilation of two early EPs (which has sadly provided a moderate level of obscurity to help keep it out of public consumption), 13 Songs remains one of music’s most thrilling debuts.  Coherent but not overly similar, dueling lead guitars pushing and pulling for your attention, it takes your emotions to the extreme—the faint of heart need not apply.  Fan favorite “Waiting Room” delivers a pulse-pounding bass line and exceptional use of dynamics and build-up—and that’s all in the first 21 seconds before that unforgettable drop into silence. (I’m serious—you’ll remember the first time you got to that part.) Few songs accelerate more smoothly, few hiss more bitterly, few make you want to get up off your feet any more persuasively.  Though not quite their best song, it’s a mind-blowing start.

On tracks like that one, “Bulldog Front,” and “Promises,” the band announces how little time it has for self-deception, for facades, for laziness, for bullshit.  Guy and Ian each take lead vocals on several songs, providing lyrics right at home to anyone feeling pulled in several directions at once.  On the spectacular “Give Me the Cure,” Guy wonders, “I never walked the side of dying before / And now I feel like I’m…” as the song patiently builds to a climax that’s danceable and disturbing all at once.

A hard debut to top, but on Repeater, Fugazi proves how much they don’t give a shit what anyone expects from them.  It’s remarkable how much this album sounds similar to 13 Songs—avoiding the you-must-branch-out-for-your-second-album cliché—and yet never feels like contentedly milking of a formula.  The songwriting has slipped just a touch, but that’s it; opener “Turnover” succeeds in more ambitious and shifty ways than anything before, and Guy’s “I’m not playing with you!” screams on “Blueprint” feel like they could shake the Earth from its core.  Tracks like that one and “Merchandise” find Fugazi beginning their trend of criticizing corporate society for anything and everything; with Repeater, they moved less personal and more political.  (Note: the album has subsequently been re-issued with 3 additional tracks; a bonus, since “Song #1” is one of its best.)

Steady Diet of Nothing is anything but, though it’s Fugazi with the first of their many twists.  Here they slow down the tempos, moderate the altitudinal changes, and add noticeable dub influences.  They make it work on tracks like “Reclamation” and “Nice New Outfit” with guitars a little less teeth-grinding and bass lines that often create their own melody.  The only problem is the diminished intensity; it’s hard to say whether that’s inherent in the changes or simply because they didn’t write the same top-notch batch of songs as before.  Still, it’s a compelling listen all the way through, a real grower that sounds better the more attention you give it. 

Released back-to-back, Fugazi firing on all cylinders in their mid-career peak, In on the Kill Taker and Red Medicine stake out their boldest claim to being 90s rock saviors.  Wildly different but both recognizably Fugazi, they find the band embracing the extreme, even more so than on 13 Songs.  Kill Taker makes ear candy out of harsh, grating, shaving-with-sandpaper guitar noises, like on the ending of “Walken’s Syndrome” and beginning of “Facet Squared.”  It’s probably their most stripped-down album, leaving room for nothing but their hardest, enhanced-punk melodies, Guy and Ian’s fiercest yowls, and breathless songs like “Facet,” “Great Cop,” and “Public Witness Program.” 

On ace track “Rend It,” Guy wants to feel raw pain—“I don’t care what you use / Just don’t ask me to choose”—and the seemingly sadistic tendencies serve as a metaphor for emotional nakedness and vulnerability.  “A light comes into my room,” he sings on the verses, with little instrumentation to save him, “Some shade of bruise-colored blue.”  Then Ian comes in during the chorus and the band explodes; over the ferocious ending of “My…love…song…went…wrong!” each pound of the drums sounds like it’s scraping another piece of skin off your face. 

Stopping then wouldn’t have damaged Fugazi’s Rock Pantheon credentials; instead, Red Medicine is even better.  Far removed from Kill Taker, Fugazi experimented in all kinds of directions—piano, clarinets, spontaneous bursts of laughter, no guitars on “Version”—bringing a dazzling array of color and depth that underscores their strongest batch of songs.  They lead off with three of their top five all-time songs, step back for a groovy midsection, and then, starting with the excellent “Target,” bring things back to old-school Fugazi.

Few albums hold together so coherently while still containing an almost embarrassing number of individual pleasures.  “Downed City” contains no wasted energy whatsoever, a punk song angrier and more resonant than any punk song ever written.  “Do You Like Me” opens with thick industrial noise, suddenly revealing all slashing, hurtling guitar lines that almost overpower Guy’s “I’ve got a question…” supplication.  “Latest Disgrace” channels the theme of “Rend It” over a slow burn, Joe Lally’s dominant, catchy bass line paving the way for the thunderous climax to which most other songs’ climaxes merely aspire.  

At this point, they’d figured everything out, taking advantage of both sides of every equation.  That’s true musically (“Bed for the Scraping” combines Lally’s thick bass line with Ian’s high-pitched yowls, producing a rallying cry even more persuasive than “Waiting Room”), lyrically (finding room to attack the modern music biz on “Target” and providing more get-off-your-ass cries as they did on 13 Songs), and vocally (Guy sounds ready to break apart when he screams, “downed CITY!” and the quieter moments are nearly as affecting).

Like a pitching change in the middle of a baseball rally, End Hits inevitably stops the roller coaster for just a moment, although the excitement still festers below the surface.  This is their what-the-fuck album and the one with the least cohesive theme.  On curious near-failures like “No Surprise” and  “Floating Boy,” Fugazi bring back those non rock-like bass lines from Steady Diet of Nothing, but they pair them with overly sparse and texture-like guitar and melodies that veer in all kinds of directions, few of them memorable or necessary.  And I have no idea what “Pink Frosty” was supposed to do for anyone.

Nonetheless, there’s about 2/3 of a great album here, namely in the back-to-back duo of “Five Corporations” and “Caustic Acrostic,” which would have fit well on Repeater.  Picking up where “Target” left off, lyrically, the former is one endless mind-fuck (in a good way), blending its verses and choruses together with jarring tempo changes, eccentric and entertaining instrumentation, anguished screams, piercing guitar—the Fugazi that we know and love.  “Acrostic” and “Place Position” prove just how impossible it is to listen to this band without wanting to move, to dance, to hit something, to fire back in some way.  Those parts of the album are like a golfer finding his swing after hitting a few bad shots on the range.

By the time of 2001’s The Argument, the band had nothing left to prove to anyone, and in some ways, it shows.  Here, they present perhaps their most diverse record from start to finish—in the songs that alternate between uncompromisingly harsh verses and lovely choruses (“Full Disclosure”), in the closed-fist punch of some (“Epic Problem”) and the brightness and openness of others (“Oh”), in the additional instruments ranging from a cello to a second drummer (on the phenomenal “Ex-Spectator”).  “Disclosure” updates “Margin Walker,” musically and lyrically, for the 21^st century; and when they grind everything to a halt, (“Life and Limb,” “Strangelight,” “The Argument”), they rejoin the party with some of their strongest melodies and sense of cohesion.  The critics who called The Argument the band’s best work went a little overboard, but this is a fascinating listen from a band at this point of their career.

All told, in the 87 songs contained on these 7 albums, Fugazi hit an astonishing success rate both in their exceptional peaks and avoidance of filler.  During its career, the band became a polarizing entity—for the perception that it was overly self-righteous, for charging $5 for concerts and kicking out patrons who were obnoxious, for maintaining its own record label and reminding everyone of their disdain for the corporate music business.  Despite their insistence on remaining untouched by “the man” and focusing on nothing but the tunes, these non-musical feelings that some felt threatened to overshadow the material they actually wrote. 

But you can hear their influence everywhere, from Jawbox to The Dismemberment Plan, from Cursive to other neo-emo bands.  Go back and find videos of them playing “Waiting Room” to a dingy club of feverish 20something devotees singing along to every word.  Note the impossibility of a song as ferocious as “Smallpox Champion” being only the fifth best on its album.  Listen to Red Medicine and wonder all the way through if there’s ever going to be a song that rates below excellent.  They’ll never be a household name to the general public, but whatever; Fugazi, I’ve found the cure, and it’s you.

Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007) – 4 stars

Humbug (2009) – 4 stars

Years before Radiohead invited yet another wave of critical fawning by offering an album for free download, the Arctic Monkeys cultivated a rabid following by giving away demos of early CDs and eschewing the radio for the Internet (especially MySpace).  Reviewers documented the shift as a potential vanguard of 21st century marketing, which may be true, but let’s have people attribute most of the Monkeys’ success to their talent, yeah?

A key band in the recently departed decade’s post-punk/new wave revival, along with The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand, the Monkeys revved up their engines for their debut album.  After giving it an inaccessible title and terrible cover image, they watched it become the fastest selling debut album in UK history.  Given that country’s success with music, the sales’ numbers are staggering, but much of the hype is warranted.  Indeed, they’ve had a stronger start to their career than obvious influence Oasis, whose Definitely Maybe they knocked off the aforementioned chart. 

2006’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not swaggers through dense, punky gems and the occasional pull-back-on-the-reins ballad, with the band’s frenetic, aggressive playing style naturally complementing frontman Alex Turner’s lyrics about those clubs and girls he can’t get into and those drinks and girls that don’t get into him.  On tracks like “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” “Dancing Shoes,” “Still Take You Home,” and the wonderfully titled “You Probably Couldn’t See for the Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me,” Turner skewers arrogant girls (“You’re probably just alright, but under these lights you look beautiful”) and the guys who play into their hands (“Those that claim that they’re not showing off are drowning in denial”), but never totally exculpates himself either.

Such tracks work so well because of his enviable gift for melody and the overriding sense that, despite whatever jealousy or bitterness gurgles over, they’re having fun.  The second half doesn’t quite match the first for original tunes, but by the time you hear Turner singing, “There’s only music so that there’s new ringtones” on the glorious “A Certain Romance,” you’ll probably be ready for another spin.

Follow-up Favourite Worst Nightmare finds the Monkeys, uh, dancing with what brought them.  Openers “Brianstorm” and “Teddy Picker” announce their intentions with a purpose, savaging the kind of preppy, obnoxious guys Turner can’t stand with more laconic wit and devilish hooks.  If they’d written those tracks in time for the second half of Whatever…, that would have turned into a veritable classic.  (Aside from the obvious reasons, watching them live is a treat, for the chance to see Turner stare out disdainfully into a crowd largely composed of preppy, obnoxious guys.)

The rest of this solid second album features more grinding, danceable riffs and quick wordplay; closer “505” once more shows off Alex’s skills at both writing a juicy hook and articulating ambivalent feelings about relationships: “I crumble completely when you cry / It seems like once again you have to greet me with goodbye / I’m always just about to go, I spoil the surprise / Take my hands off your eyes too soon.”

Unfortunately, aside from the aforementioned three tracks, plus melodic centerpiece “Fluorescent Adolescent,” much of FWN sounds vaguely indistinguishable—especially, again on the second half—enough so to encourage you to reach for its predecessor.  (The band has said they regret including inoffensive-but-fillerish “The Bad Thing” on the album instead of another track written during the recording.)

 
As Coldplay was putting the finishing touches on 2005’s X&Y, I recall reading a few music critics who noted that the third album often dictates the rest of a band’s career.  Sometimes you get Born to Run, London Calling, War, OK Computer, or Dookie and critics love you forever; other bands, like Oasis and the Stone Roses, can’t do much past two.  Perhaps aware of the stakes, the Monkeys enlisted Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme to produce and give their music a darker, more mysterious vibe.  For 2009’s Humbug, the pace has slowed, the bass has been cranked, and the musical palette gotten more colorful.  

In other words, as the digging-in, deliberate follow-up to two thrashers, Humbug is their Steady Diet of Nothing, with perhaps a hint of Red Medicine-esque color thrown in for good measure.  Within about ten seconds of pressing play, one will be able to tell that things have certainly changed.  “My Propeller” quite effectively demonstrates their newfound interest in atmosphere over aggression, while “Crying Lightning” quite simply strikes out territory they’ve never approached before.  Their heaviest (not fastest) rocker to date, the song makes good on its cleverly ambiguous title by exploring that irritating-yet-irresistible push-pull of unstable relationships; over a resoundingly explosive crunch, Turner alternates loving and hating those games, all the while providing more memorable lyrics: “You never look like yourself from the side / But your profile could not hide / The fact you knew I was approaching your throne.” 

Frustration over another’s flightiness mirrors the album’s overall tone; lyrically, Turner now strives primarily for consistent, adult connections.  Maybe it’s not true that “My propeller won’t spin / And I can’t get it started on my own,” but let’s find a partner anyway, no? (Indeed, “let’s make a mess, lioness.”  Rawr.) Elsewhere, the lovely “Secret Door” forms a paean to a celebrity unfazed by the bright lights (“She’s never been the kind to be hollowed by the stares”), while on the thickly bubbling “Potion Approaching,” Turner coos, “If I could be someone else for a week, I’d spend it chasing after you.” 

Despite the ten-song track order, Humbug has its share of duds, primarily the result of the band succumbing to boredom in the shift away from energy (“Fire and the Thud,” “The Jeweller’s Hands”) or not knowing whether to keep things fast or slow (the nevertheless quirky “Pretty Visitors”).  That keeps the album from climbing the heights of their debut, but all told, this is a more eclectic, interesting listen than anything they’ve put out to date.  And no quibbles, minor or otherwise, surround “Cornerstone,” the album’s second single and the one track all critics couldn’t stop talking out.  There’s a reason for that—it’s the band’s all-time high point, Turner proffering both his most indelible melody and heartbreaking lyrics yet. 

At first, it feels like merely a cute little ditty, with its protagonist running into all these girls who remind him of his ex.  But in the bridge, Turner uncovers his deeper thoughts and fears.  “Tell me where’s your hiding place,” he sings, his voice richer and more mature than ever before, “I’m worried I’ll forget your face / And I’ve asked everyone / I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along.”  The apparent confusion over whom he sees reveals a desperate desire for a lingering connection to hold onto and a fear that memories will fade too quickly.  No wonder that, when he smells that scent on the seatbelt, he “kept my shortcuts to myself.”  Tied together with impeccable restraint and undeniable style, the words bring about a spectacular song, one whose second 50 plays are better than its first 50.  They never could have written this song four years ago, and that realization, along with the increased musical range, is why, like Steady Diet and OK Computer, this third album will leave you feverishly anticipating what they’ll do next.

The Bends: 4.5 stars

OK Computer: 5 stars

Kid A: 4 stars

Amnesiac: 3 stars

Hail to the Thief: 2 stars

In Rainbows: 3 stars

Radiohead’s career trajectory resembles that of an old-time baseball slugger, before steroids fucked up the typical pattern of rises and falls.  They started out with promise, honed their skills in the middle of their career, and then gradually fell off as they got older.  In their prime, they demonstrated a flair for the dramatic that few have, but as they aged, they fell back into comfortable and less idealistic patterns.  How old-school of them.  It’s almost enough to make you pull out your dusty radio and rocking chair to listen to a game on your front porch.

Most critics see the band’s career differently, of course.  Indeed, their latest release, 2007’s middling In Rainbows, confirmed two sad realities: that Radiohead have pretty much reached that U2/Bruce Springsteen plateau whereby music critics apparently sign a contract forbidding them from criticizing any aspect of their new music simply because it bears their marks; and that they’ve never been farther from their peak.

Back in the 90s, though, the young prospect made you vibrate with the excitement of what was to come next.  Influenced by 90s alternative and early U2, debut album Pablo Honey works much better when most of the songs are played live.  (That fact makes it difficult to rate—if I listen to all its songs in their studio versions, it has to be docked at least half a star.)  Breakthrough hit “Creep”—at least when nailed live—is transcendent, a tough and moving anti-anthem on which Yorke’s lyrics (“I want a perfect body / I want a perfect soul / I want you to notice when I’m not around / You’re so fucking special / I wish I was special”) rewrite Ian Curtis for the crass and sarcastic (in other words, the 90s cohort).  The song of high school for me, and I doubt I’m alone.  “Prove Yourself” achieves similar success—“I want to breathe / I want to grow / I’d say I want it, but I don’t know how / … I’m better off dead” with another riveting melody.

Those aren’t the only songs of note, but the album’s lesser tracks reveal themselves as a band searching for its alternative niche.  But Radiohead hit the big leagues with sophomore effort The Bends, its Joshua Tree; mainstream enough to garner widespread acceptance, it’s full of anthemic choruses and a deft push-pull between Yorke and guitarist Johnny Greenwood.  The midsection sags a little, and it doesn’t sound as timeless as OK Computer, but it’s still an essential 90s landmark; the title track and “Fake Plastic Trees” hit cathartic instrumental explosions, and the drama is reined in wonderfully by tender ballads “High and Dry” and the sleep-inducing (in a good way) “Street Spirit,” on which Greenwood applies understated guitar texture at only the right moments.

They then proceeded to blow everyone’s minds with OK Computer, which frequently shows up in “Best of the 90s” lists.  The guitars hadn’t yet disappeared, but everything sounds darker, denser, more paranoid, more colorful, more experimental, and full of that indefinable it.  Many billed the album as a warning against technology and the future, but the real treasures lie in the intensely personal songs: “Exit Music” and “Climbing Up the Walls” are both legitimately haunting, while “Karma Police” unfolds with perfect pacing and genuine heart.

Yet nothing compares to “No Surprises and “Let Down.”  The glockenspiel on the former almost achieves the same degree of I-still-remember-when-I-first-heard-it awe as those chimes on Joy Division’s “Atmosphere,” and lines like “I’ll take the quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide / With no alarms, and no surprises, please” make quiet resignation feel like the only valid option in the world.

Similarly, on the breathtaking “Let Down,” their all-time best song, Yorke captures that in-between feeling of despondency, confusion, and search for beauty that has been fascinating singers (such as Curtis) for years.  His second-verse—culminating with “Don’t get sentimental, it always ends up drivel”—breaks my heart every time, but I’m lifted up by the gorgeous melody, the exquisitely placed guitar, and those heartbreaking, multi-layered vocals, spinning around from ear to ear over the conclusion.  These tracks possess that rare form of intoxication found in songs like “One”—they achieve incredible emotional climax without ever making you realize it until afterwards.

“Radiohead’s response to all the acclaim,” Rolling Stone wrote, “was to get even weirder,” resulting in the electronica-heavy Kid A and Amnesiac.  And that’s where the critical opinions start to diverge from my own, as most have seen such works as additional stops along the train ride towards revolutionary immortality.  The former is the better album, RH still hanging on and providing otherworldly peaks like “How to Disappear Completely” and “Idioteque.”  Yorke moaned “I’m not here / This isn’t happening” over end-of-the-world atmospherics, and then switched to a pulsating rallying cry of “This is really happening!”  But the album couldn’t always keep up, introducing filler (despite the 10-track length) such as the irritatingly overlong “The National Anthem” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack.”

However, sister album Amnesiac begins the band’s real decline.  Here, the atmosphere sounds somehow faded and less intense than Kid A, perhaps because the electronic sounds and keyboard tinkles have taken over for song-craft even more.  There’s nothing as compact as the two aforementioned songs, so you have to enjoy the individual elements—the pretty piano on “Pyramid Song,” or Yorke’s provocative, repeated line “I’m a reasonable man, get off my case” on the opener.  The album will work when you’re in the right mood, but that won’t happen very often.  It’s not aggressive enough for the bitter and paranoid—on too many songs (“You and Whose Army?” “I Might Be Wrong”), you really do just want the band to let loose—nor does it have OK Computer’s sonic, lamentable beauty.

On the bloated and scattershot Hail to the Thief, though, everything goes ass.  Here, the songs really only work if the piano sounds pleasing.  But the band sounds like they’re trying to experiment just for experiment’s sake, to be difficult listening just to be difficult.  Guitars feature more prominent than on the previous two releases, but the vitality of both Jonny’s axing and Yorke’s voice have been dulled, scraped off as though by a coin on a lottery ticket.  In their desire to be different, they seem to have forgotten the necessity of qualities like melody, emotional release, or sonic agreeableness.

Tracks like “We Suck Young Blood” and “The Gloaming” skitter along electronic sounds that never break out of their shells—really, it’s incredibly boring, even though it may be sacrilege to say so.  Radiohead seem to have settled into an unassailable niche, whereby one gets discredited as unintellectual and/or ignorant of quality music if he dares attack them.  SPIN Magazine bucked this attitude with a recent feature challenging the notion that their every move sparkles with gold.  Writing of a recent concert, they recounted, “Radiohead began their set with… “15 Step”: an open-ended groove with a quirky electro beat, two-chord motif, and airy, abstract singing.  Then they did the 2001 song “Morning Bell/Amnesiac”: an open-ended groove with a quirky electro beat, two-chord motif, and airy, abstract singing.  Then they kept going, one groovy tone poem into another…an immersive experience of sound, light, pattern, rhythm, and utter, paralyzing boredom.”

SPIN acknowledge that their opinion carries few supporters; indeed, the piece headlined an issue devoted to debunking popular rock ‘myths.’  And the pervasive critical adoration of In Rainbows (88 score on Metacritic) just confirmed the disconnect I now feel between popular perception of the band and my own.  Rolling Stone’s 4.5-star review, describing the album as “typically hard-rocking Radiohead,” makes me wonder whether I happened to buy a different set of tracks from everyone else.

From refusing to play “Creep” live after it jumpstarted their career, to turning their backs on adored albums, Radiohead have never particularly seemed to mind pissing off their core supporters.  And Rainbows, a hybrid of sorts between Thief and The Eraser (Thom Yorke’s solo effort released in 2006), proves they’ve completely forsaken the 90s.  There may be nothing wrong with that in theory, but, no matter what Rolling Stone says, the album abounds with mellowness, but not in that epic, Cure- or old Radiohead-way.

Instead, songs like “Faust Arp, “House of Cards,” and “Reckoner” all project the same dull, taupe-colored mood—a new manifestation of boring, if you will.  Yorke’s pet project, “Nude,” reminds me of U2’s “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”—it was worked on for years and hyped by fans as the Next Great Thing, and yet it registers barely a blip on the radar screen.  All throughout, a feeling of temperate melancholy dominates—and the apparent oxymoron of that statement explains a lot of my ambivalence about the album.

The band’s capabilities have now been reduced to providing calming tranquility, as they can do on “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.”  But if The Bends was a soaring flight over cliffs at sea, OK Computer a journey through an empty ocean, and Kid A a figure staring out over the cliff into the water below, In Rainbows is that person turned around, standing comfortably on dry land.  Yorke’s lyrical concerns have shifted towards such mundane things as being a girl’s lover rather than friend and getting someone’s number at a bar (the admittedly neat “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”).

In other words, with the reduced diversity and increased simplicity of the music and more day-to-day lyrical concerns, Radiohead have struck new ground once again—but not on solid footing.  On their best albums, Radiohead were never been easy to explain or understand, never created music that could pass without comment—good or bad—and never conveyed the feeling that they were content with themselves.  Sometimes they were too weird or too overbearing, other times exceedingly brilliant, but they never felt satisfied—until now.  And as the second half of their career has eschewed cathartic guitar rock for droning beats, prolonged songs that often don’t go anywhere, and vague wails that don’t resonate, it’s made me start to re-align their place in my musical pantheon.  No longer a band who can do no wrong, they’re simply one that recognized extraordinary potential for a brief span of time, but then fell short of other ambitions.  A sort of Michael-Jordan-playing-baseball thing, if MJ had been ‘only’ one of the game’s 2 or 3 best at his prime and baseball had accounted for about 40% of his athletic career.

As they’ve diminished both their muscular power and melodic grip, Radiohead have eliminated themselves as a band whose new album I’ll buy without hearing anything about it.  And maybe I’m harder on efforts like In Rainbows and Amnesiac than I would be if they came from someone else.  But the more I listen to their early work, the more I marvel at the specific emotion captured in a random, unhyped track like “Lurgee” or the masterful timing exhibited in the climax of “Fake Plastic Trees”; whereas, the more I listen to their later works, the less provocative they sound.  In various parts of the latter half of their career, one can still hear Radiohead’s talent, but the overall impact leaves me thinking that a band that was formerly mine has left me behind.