Does it Rock? Static Jacks, "Girl Parts"

Please to enjoy this tune from the Static Jacks, which blends roots rock, power pop and screamo. It skirts being a conventional rock song, but cranks the lead vocal past warm and friendly up to howling mad. Nifty.

Hold Steady: Stay Positive

Stay Positive comes on like a great structure of brick and mortar. Really solid, really strong, really consistent, but upon closer inspection, full of nuance and structural complexity. A few of these it would be hard to miss on the first pass, but when you pay the album time, I think the respect grows: eventually you really take note of their knack for composition and clever observational lyrics.

Craig Finn's vocals come in like a jet fighter swooping in for a landing. He's bombastic, very Springsteenian, which is either a compliment or an insult depending on your taste. Mainly he talk-sings sermons or anecdotes, sometimes at length often fighting against the melody, giving several the songs a rough-hewn sermon-like edge to them. It's combative, very much in the vein of Springsteen or Elvis Costello or Mark Knopfler... not punk per se, but definitely carrying weight and attitude. More cultural criticism than sound and fury.

The bricks and mortar here are a bunch of solid rocking tracks throughout the album. "Constructive Summer" ignites the blaze in a fury of motivation and inspiration: "Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer... / We are are only saviours... / We're gonna build something this summer." The celebration of music-loving crops up throughout the album, like the Led Zeppelin shout-outs in "Joke About Jamaica," which is choked up and tense, and then staggered and weary as it rolls the album toward its close with a brief but blazing wah-wah solo. Earlier, "Navy Sheets" is full of bluster and platinum-bright fuzz guitars. "Yeah Sapphire" is one of many great instances of blended guitars and pianos throughout the album, and the title track froths with the Elvis Costello-like immediacy, helped along with organs and "woah-hos" that recur later. This is rock you can really sink your teeth into. "Magazines," one of various great character studies on here, has an excellent hook in "Magazines and daddy issues / I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you still let me kiss you."

All this is good, and a whole album pitched at this level would be perfectly fine, but as I said there is nuance between the bricks, moments of real architectural greatness. You could quibble with the listening pleasure found in "One For The Cutters" -- the harpsichord is contentious, but the song's mission isn't to be a pop classic, it's to create a nice, eerie, murder mystery vibe, a delicate web of intrigue spun by the testimonial vocals. "Both Crosses" might not win everyone over with its mystical southwestern sound, but provides a context on its own, Finn mumbles, "I been thinking 'bout both crosses..." and the worlds swirl around with those flamenco-like guitars. You feel the hot sun and wonder whether it's Albuquerque or Nazareth. "Baby let's transverberate." Got to love the rhythm section, all through the album, but here they do some really special stuff.

A whole album at this level would be a perfectly good disc, but an album is lucky to have three peaks as high as Stay Positive's. "Sequestered in Memphis" I'd say, is objectively the strongest effort here, marrying Finn's talent for storytelling lyrics and delivery with a rollicking riff and hook. It's the track most obviously meant for radio, but not sounding like other radio hits, with some really graceful horns helping splashing around in the background. It's the best showcase for his hoarse, wearied and skeptical but game-for-anything vocal. "Lord, I'm Discouraged" might be my personal favourite, proving the band can master the ballad as much as the rocker. Ballads are an easy place for a band to get lazy, but a good one is killer. It reminded me of the gut-wrenching "I'm Not The Sun" from the Arkells' Jackson Square album, which I looked at way early in the blog. It begins with shimmering, shuffling of feet and navel-gazing vocals as it attempts to delve into the story of one of those inscrutable females you never can seem to reach. It will ring absolutely true to anyone like me who has known such a character, had her pass through your life and watched sadly as she took a toll on herself. The chorus is deepened with gorgeous harmonies and it's pitched at just the right rhythm: "Excuses and fortified wine... there's a house on the South Side she stays in at days at a time" or even better, "The sutures and bruises are none of my business / She says that she's sick but she won't get specific... this guy from the North Side comes down to visit / His visits they only take five or six minutes," my heart grows cold just hearing it, and it launches into one of those pitch-perfect solos that caps the sentiment excellently, wordlessly. That last chorus does it to me every time. In fact, the sequencing makes it a little harder to appreciate the rollicking intro riff to "Yeah Sapphire." The towering last track, another fave "Slapped Actress," involves some great oblique lyrics, and one of the best summations I've heard on this piece of plastic, "Sometimes actresses get slapped / Sometimes fake fights turn out bad." Finn's lyrics often observe how things get out of control, how far away from understanding many of us are, and he does it deftly. Through this distance, through music, however, we are united.

If you can, pick up the version with three bonus tracks, "Ask Her for Adderall," "Cheyenne Sunrise" and "Two-Handed Handshake." The first of those is an excellent basic punk workout that was probably only left out because it feels less fleshed-out than the proper album tracks. "Two-Handed Handshake" describes a lot of people you probably know, maybe you yourself, and leaves the album with a few words of encouragement and an awesome horn-based hook. Lovely.

This album might not work for everyone (nothing good probably would.) It has that earthy, everyman feel that, as I mentioned, will appeal to fans of Springsteen and Costello. It's rebellious without being angry or showy, catchy without being poppy, and takes risks with its instrumentation. Finn's voice is hardly radio tested standard, but that's the charm, and I consider it my duty to look at what an album wants to be and see if it is that, as much as if it works for me. I do love it, incidentally, but even if I didn't, I'd respect it. In any case, it's important to stay positive: and, in the face of a work like this, not that hard.

Buy this album now: // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca

Serious Contenders: Jeff Buckley, "Lover, You Should Have Come Over"

While we're thinking of Jeff Buckley, let's do this. From a sweetened set of pipes and a calm rainfall, to a thrashing wildstorm of emotion in 6 searing minutes, this song encapsulates the ruminations of nostalgia, of loss and regret and lovesickness and anger at a missed chance... "Lover, you should have come over." What a lyric, and what a song to hang around it. Everything I said about Buckley's performance of "Hallelujah" goes here, too, from his voice to his guitar to that ineffable quality of "realness" when just the right notes are hit.

Cover: Jeff Buckley, "Hallelujah"

Not, strictly speaking, one of my favourite songs. I have a problem with it being done to death and with the fact that every cover I ever seem to hear treats it as this precious thing, these meaningless pretty words to trawl out when something sad happens: Vitamin C's "Graduation" for grownups. Blame John Cale for putting an easily-replicated melody to Leonard Cohen's more naturalistic version.

I mean, if you're a competent performer, you can get it down fine. And if fine is good enough for you, it works. The song is strong enough that it'll do most of the heavy lifting and if you've got a good voice, you'll make it really beautiful, sure. But Jeff Buckley was the only one I heard who ever seemed to me to have any personal attachment to the song, any stake in its expression, and his entire soul in his rendition. Maybe it's that strange minor-key noodling that opens the track like an alarm in the back of your skull. Maybe it's just his quivering voice, his staggering pace, his minimalistic guitar... whatever it is, it seems to be genuine, to be raw and naked. This was before the song was encoded enough that every AC artist had to have it in their repertoire. When there was an element of danger and darkness and sex, not just sentimentality. I don't make it my business to insult others in praising something, most of the time, but this happens to be one case where I've really got a bug up my ass.

The other version I really like was Steven Page at Jack Layton's funeral. He knew what he was doing: it was not one of the prettier ones, but it was one of the most real. KD Lang, sometimes, maybe. But not Neil Diamond.

Serious Contenders: Gene Vincent, "Be Bop a Lula"

The early rock and roll standards feel cliche by now, but trying to put a fresh ear to them helps you realize how well they stand up. Listen close to the halting rhythm of the verses: there's your Rock. Listen to the easy flow of the chorus: there's your Roll. Back in the 50's, you couldn't really address the idea of sexual attraction directly, so you had to be creative, and a lot of the time when you get a nonsense word or a grunt or a "hey," that's what it's standing in for. "Be-Bop-A-Lula," manages to come out of nowhere and stand in perfectly for that space between "We're doing it" and "We're in love" -- a place where much teen romance, the type mythologized in early rock and roll, occupies. Rock and roll is often in saying it without saying it.

The Coral: Butterfly House Acoustic

Here's a problematic review. Not long after I set out on this adventure of a blog, I learned that The Coral (a band I much admire) had just released a new album, Butterfly House, and it was getting very positive notices (after a few tepidly-received releases.) So I promptly placed an order at my store, and long, long after, it arrived. Except it wasn't.

The proper version of Butterfly House was not released here. All they had for me was this stripped-down acoustic version. I was skeptical. Even now it's taken me a long time to sitting down to collect my thoughts on the album. The sound of the album, the constant plucked acoustics and mellow crooning, means it fades into the background not only of your life but of your mind. I found myself hard pressed to remember even the songs I liked hearing. I would remember a snippet here or there and have trouble placing it. But when you hit play it starts to come back.

The 13 songs on this album are, from a songwriting standpoint, among the finest the band has served up. I don't mean to denigrate the band's other releases, but there's a striking difference here. The band left a lot of its manic energy behind after the first few albums, but here I finally get a sense of what path they wanted to take out of it. It's sentimental and delicate and very sweet and honest and accessible. The acoustic guitars overlap and melt sweetly into each other.

The acoustic sound is great. It's not bare or stark sounding at all. It's very lush and well-instrumented. It never feels like a demo or an interpretation, or even close to raw like Nick Drake or something. The album's warmth is helped by some beautiful harmony vocals and James Skelley's strongest overall vocal performance. The songs all take a very innocent, doe-eyed tact toward romantic relationships (and memories and moments) that evokes the 60's as strongly (or stronger) than any of their previous albums. Sometimes on their previous release I'd sense something exciting happening and then they'd take a turn that broke the mood for me, but here's probably their first record I can listen to straight through. And I loved those first ones, and the later ones all have highlights too. While they may have better individual songs on every album, I think no set has been as consistently good.

In researching for this review, I did listen, just once, to the full-out proper versions of these songs. A lot of the tracks translate well. Some, like "Sandhills," "She's Comin' Around" and "North Parade," being most electric-driven, lose something, but also take on a new character. "Coney Island" feels totally different.

None of those songs is worse the wear for the acoustic treatment, but there are a lot of songs here that particularly lend themselves to it. "Walking in the Winter," "Falling All Around You" and "Two Faces" are moments of real beauty. I think the thing about an acoustic album is that our brains are wired to interpret those sounds as being honest, from-the-heart and off-the-cuff statements, unfiltered by studio production (even when they are.) Here, being so exquisitely orchestrated only enhances that feeling, that even peeling back the layers of performance, you still have something very showy and glossy, and very personal at the same time.

Buy the Regular version or Acoustic version from Amazon!





And since the proper album is a bit tough to get a hold of, it's all on YouTube. Here's what we're talking about:

Serious Contenders: R.E.M., "Losing My Religion"

Opening with one of the most -- that is, probably only -- famous mandolin riffs in pop music, "Losing My Religion" is the one of the songs R.E.M. is best known for, and rightly so. Its lyrics wind their way around a tale of betrayal and hurt, obscuring feeling and worrying about showing your own self. How very poetic, that phrase, "Losing your religion," Michael Stipe once explained, is a southern expression meaning losing temper or composure. It's not as much a loss of faith as it is a loss in appearance. And we all put up fronts, don't we?

For a band that had previously made its bread with incoherent mumbling, it's incredibly articulate and incredibly effective. And catchy as all hell, which is when alt rock just becomes rock. An alternative way of rocking to be sure, but here we get into those heady waters of what's mainstream and is it even important to make distinctions (for my money, no.) And there's that mandolin, distinctive and holy spiritual in its own way.

It's maybe not exactly my most favourite REM song, but there's a lot more to say about it than "Stand" or even "Orange Crush" and I'm fairly certain I'm the only person who enjoys "Shiny Happy People" totally unironically. Well, that's life.

Serious Contenders: Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

A spellbinding, simple statement of insight and honesty. The gift of one of the greatest poet-lyricists of his time or any. Dark and true, with that stark, pulsing backing track and Cohen's characteristic husky song-speech.

It's rather upsetting how cutting the lyrics to this song are. That the world carries this dark underside we all have to confront. "Everybody knows the dice are loaded / Everbody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost." Cryptic, but deep down, you know. You know.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Cohen.

Unironic Rap Monday: Weckx-N-Effect, "Rump Shaker"

Unironic Rap Monday: Because I'm not sure Pitbull is an improvement over this.

Cake: Showroom of Compassion

Cake's Showroom of Compassion is, somehow (and perhaps unbelievably) a complete package. On a first pass, it might seem merely shallow and laconic, but by the time you get halfway through, around "Sick of You" or "Easy to Crash," you begin to sense how many levels the band is actually working on. Then the album becomes a grower.

For a start, Cake opens the album by exploring their style. Positive or negative, no reviewer could deny the fact that the band has a distinct sound. On "Federal Funding," the elements drop into place one by one. At a rocking pace, John McCrea sings corporate buzzwords in an uninterested tone, while a sharp guitar lopes along in the background. The horns noddle around. Then at three minutes there's this moment of release where the band explodes out into a jammy outro with a cry of "Go!" It's a rousing start. Even in the nondescript early tracks, like the slinky "Long Time," the band has ideas about its songcraft. The bass is slinky, and a subtle keyboard, which gets its best moments later, whirs underneath. I listen to the album and I hear the band pulling back the curtain slowly, track by track. Take the lyrics of "Long Time," which are loaded with nostalgic references ("It's been a long time since you gave my butterflies / It's been a long time since I saw it burning in your eyes") and neutral ones ("It's been a long time since you wore your pillbox hat / It's been a long time since we drove your Pontiac.") McCrae deserves a lot of credit both for his delivery and (if he's responsible) the lyrics themselves. They say a lot without saying it too obviously. They're guarded. That's the point. Like I said, it might be a bit confusing, but it makes sense in light of what comes later.

The album is largely concerned with the passage of time, with its usage and movement. "Mustache Man (Wasted)" features awesomely impatient breathless motormouth lyrics, and an epiphany of a chorus: "I have wasted / SO much time..." McCrae sings those verses like he can't quite cope with everything that's coming to mind, and the chorus like he's suddenly realized there's no point. There's also a Frank Sinatra cover, "What's Now Is Now." In the original, Frank sang against a swell of strings, declaring forgiveness boldly and ostentatiously. Cake, true to form, is a bit more reserved. The guitars cue up the song like frantic pacing. The vocals come in like "Okay, this is really hard for me to say, but here I go." Harmony vocals in the chorus (I'm not sure if it's double-tracked or what, I think it's self-backed though) choke McCrea's voice up and seems to practically strangle him with his own words, especially his delivery of the title line. Gaudio's words and Cake's instruments sound like gorgeous match. There's such complicated emotion being wrung out of it, but it's all under the surface. "Got To Move" manages to be both critical and sympathetic -- or at least lending the appearance of sympathy. This is, after all, the showroom of compassion. All throughout the album, representations of emotion are called into question: is it real or just a display? Do you mean what you say or is it just pretty words?

The album breaks open in the wordless "Teenage Pregnancy," where the band gets a lot of mileage from its instruments. Beethovenlike pianos give way to spaghetti western horns and plastic, midi keyboards, blending warm and open with cold and difficult and building higher in intensity with dark, growling guitars.

Probably the best track on the album is "Sick of You," where it all comes tumbling out. After half an album of dancing around the idea of emotional honesty, the opening lyrics say it all: "I'm so sick of you, so sick of me, I don't want to be with you... I wanna fly away." This cathartic declaration is set against a cocky rock swagger reminiscent of 70's Stones. It revels in the ability to just fucking air one's grievances. "Easy to Crash" makes for the best one-two punch after this, capturing all the boredom and frustration with the modern world we've all probably considered, and the temptation to just defy the chains of society by doing something reckless. It's pretty clear to see when he observes and sings, "It would be easy, so easy to crash." This is a great song, the way the verses are written underscore how boring the world can be, and the chorus beckons you on. They really hit it as much as they do anywhere else on the album.

With those two tracks as the apex, the album takes a good while to circle the tarmac. Havign gotten a lot off its chest, the band is free to be open without being brutal. "Bound Away" bears out my theory that, whether it's Cake, Lissie, Jack White, Hollerado or Neil Young, the best country songs are often by artists that aren't country artists. "The Winter" is probably the most beautiful song on the album, with terrifically sentimental (yet non-sappy) lyrics, a quivering vocal delivery that echoes as though sung from a foot away from the mic, and a keyboard/horn arrangement as delicate as anything heard on this record. The piano keys sound like falling snowflakes (okay, those don't have a sound, but that's a metaphor.) It just sounds a bit more emotionally invested than other tracks.

It closes out with "Italian Guy," a bit of whimsy that I wasn't sure how to take. At first I thought, "How dumb not to end with 'The Winter,'" but I think there's a logic here. We started on the outside, dove as deep as we could, and now make our way back out again. We've seen the inside of McCrea's vocalist persona, but now he turns it on another subject. "He's making a point and it's very important indeed." Neither we nor McCrea know what the Italian guy is thinking about, but like watching people in real life, you try to figure it out based on the clues they provide. The album is back to avoiding grand statements, instead making small observations and letting them speak for themselves, because there's no firm judgment you could make. We never really do know about others. The horns that fade the album out sound both like an end and a beginning.

"Showroom of Compassion" isn't just a random collection of words slapped together as a title. It sounds to me like a good indication that the band knows what they've got on their hands here. In its music and lyrics, it deals with themes of honesty and feeling, and wondering whether there's anything behind the curtain, or if it's all for show. Maybe your natural inclination is that better music is expressive, but I've often thought there's as much expression in withholding as there is in, y'know, actually expressing. You seem too hard to seem sincere and it sounds fake. You do a good job sounding reserved and you become a mystery. The album does a great job playing hide and seek with feelings and meanings. Say it, but don't be so obvious about it. The music does a perfectly fine job speaking for itself. And of course, the band provides that music with lyrics that evoke those feelings with or without direct meanings, like a great modernist work. The meaning's there for those who seek it. I praise the album because the songs are deeper than they seem, and catchy as hell.

Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca

Serious Contenders: Pete Townshend, "Let My Love Open The Door"

Cliche romantic sentiment aside, I think it's significant that Pete "My Generation" Townshend wrote and recorded this chirpy peppy ode to a spiritual kind of love. It's sung, not from the perspective of a lover, but from a kind, loving God, and regardless of your actual religious beliefs, I think that's a nice expression. "I have the only key to your heart / I can keep you from falling apart." It's very sincere, very earnest, and I like the idea of putting material pursuits aside and getting back to that all-encompassing feeling of spiritual love.

I dig it.

Cover: Green Day, "A Quick One, While He's Away"

Now, if you were a punk band going to cover the Who, you probably wouldn't start with "A Quick One." This seven-minute mini-opera uses multiple passages of folksy hard rock to depict various characters in the story of a longing lonely housewife waiting for her man's return. It is, even amongst the Who's discography, pretty curious. And Green Day, a band that was once known to have a sense of humour, plays it pretty seriously. No, it's not as good as the original, but frankly I commend them that they even did it, and yeah, did it well.

That said, if this was your first exposure to the song, it would seem absolutely nonsensical. Not that the original recording is much less nonsensical. Truth is, this song is so ridiculous it plunges into absurdity and comes out the other side totally unharmed, and while this cover doesn't exploit that, it does take it as a given and do a faithful job with it. Hey, a cover doesn't always have to be a reinvention.

Serious Contenders: Who, "Baba O'Riley"

Granted, there's little doubt amongst critical circles that this is one of the greatest songs of all time. It isn't really under-appreciated, it doesn't need me pointing out how great it is and few comprehensive Best Of lists would be complete without it. It's practically unassailable, which is a good thing because with all the theatrics and the synths and the obscure lyrics, it seems to come out just this side of silly. But it is, make no mistake, a real contender.

What I love about this video of the Who performing it live is the energy flowing through the band as they perform and can't help but be moved by their own music. Moon's back there bashing away. Townshend shimmies and hops about like an excited child. Daltry marches like a conductor. Only staid Entwistle, like a learned guru, remains in a trance, focused on the task at hand, providing that rock solid basis. Music and motion becomes one.

The lyrics as I mentioned are abstract but they seem to mean a lot. They derive, I'm told, from a similar-but-different composition (actually entitled "Teenage Wasteland") meant for Townshend's "Lifehouse" project. I've heard that version. This is much more enjoyable. Here the context-lacking lyrics provide for great-sounding nonsense you can hang your own interpretations on, take as defiant and determined yet vulnerable and hopeful,resting all one's aspirations on walking triumphantly out of that "Teenage Wasteland." And all the while that burbling synth keeps flittering, providing you an audio recreation of all the continuous interconnected randomness of life. Of everything.

Moon's drums. Not too crazy, but they play well, organically, against the pre-programmed keyboards. Townshend's guitar break, brief, but important, like a distant hailing frequency beckoning you on. And that harmonica, standing in for accelerating violins, represents all the transcendent hopes and dreams.

Sorry, my prose got a little purple there. My point is, this song is a moment of peak expression. It's got everything and it sounds like nothing else.