the other was "mehhhh...."
Law school has a way of making a single day seem like an eternity and a year seem like a second, if that makes any sense. The problem therein is that my life has been so dense with detail that I can feel nostalgic for shit that didn't even happen a year ago because it seems like a different era. Today's episode was inspired by my iron fist that controls the office stereo sliding in "A Ghost Is Born." I've officially reached a stasis with my evaluation of that CD: I listen to it for enjoyment (save the irredeemable "Less Than You Think") rather than as a chore to determine whether it just needs more listens to sink in. And of course, that brought me back to its original testing lab: my empty apartment of summer 2004, where I'd drink Sparks and give "Ghost" and other new purchases a run while playing NCAA 2005 in between one of the greatest legal hustles out there, LSAT tutoring, which I recommend to anyone for whom standardized tests are supposedly rigged (i.e., white people, i.e., Sexy Results! reading audience).
Anyways, if you read this blog, you're familiar with my promise that I'd let you in on what I thought was my album of the year, at least until June rolled around. And I already told you what I thought was the detritus of 2005, and I'm feeling nostalgic because there have hardly been any CDs for me to have NCAA 2006 sessions with to feel disappointed by ("More Adventurous," "Achilles Heel," stand up tall!). All I'm saying is that the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah CD I got in the mail today better bring that heat. So here's the CDs, as best as I can remember, that were good enough to escape total dismissal, but not so much that I wouldn't have drilled a six-inch nail into my head if I had actually invested legal tender into listening to them:
Caribou- "The Milk Of Human Kindness"
- File this with albums such as "Ancient Melodies Of The Future," "The Invisible Band," "Deftones" and "More Adventurous." In other words, despite claims that there was a new element being added to a very successful template, the latest CD from a band I'm into gives me, in essence, the same thing as they did last time, except that almost all the songs aren't as good. They're not BAD, per se, but they'll be shelved for their predecessor every time, existing in a netherworld between your discman and the used CD store. Now I know what you're thinking, "but it's a new name, and they've got a big Krautrock influence this time instead of '60s psych!" That's all well and good, but it's still mostly instrumental tracks with some phoned-in vocals; i.e., the same basic format as "Up In Flames," just not as good, because Krautrock is the most overrated hip influence out there, and St. Peter won't be giving you a refund on the time you've wasted pretending/attempting to like Can.
Queens Of The Stone Age- "Lullabies To Paralyze"
- QOTSA is sorta kinda like the 'Sheed of rock, capable of just about anything, but always delivering the goods with a shade of "they can do a lot better than this...CAN'T THEY?" "Rated R," "Songs For The Deaf"...THISCLOSE to being classic. They SHOULD be classic. But as to be expected with someone who records everything he and his famous drug buddies do in the fucking desert and sells it online, quality control isn't one of Josh Homme's strong points. Despite the party line, I was actually glad to hear that Homme got rid of Nick Oliveri, as his contributions ran the gamut from unnecessary to slightly grating to full-fledged annoying, making his "necessary evil" presence the stoner rock equivalent of Robby Takac. Would his dismissal be similar to 'Sheed reigning in his tempers for the greater good? How about just another vaguely indifferent performance, unaware that so much is riding on it?
Edan- "Beauty And The Beat"
- I'm guessing that if I wrote this a week later, this CD could've very well ended up on the previous list, since it seems to get more irritating every time I listen to it. I need to stop assuming any hip-hop album with a cred pass is gonna be the next "Madvillainy" (see below). I like the acid-rock theme of the music and it never allows itself to drag, but the big problem here is Edan himself and his "intense white guy" flow. You know it when you hear it; it's the sound of someone refusing to be playful in his delivery regardless of whether he's talking about "seeing colors without the LSD" or a "fish fillet-o," lest he be deemed an Ad-Roc clone. But the worst offense here is "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme," a song which others have taken umbrage with for good reason. Can we just send out a decree that it's no longer acceptable to just rattle off names of ol skool MCs and call it a "lesson"? It's becoming its own cottage industry, fer cryin' out loud. Say what you want about Korn, but at least they were willing to cop to listening to Ice Cube's "The Predator." So watch Travel and I do the only song where Skee Lo, Three 6 Mafia, Mercedes and Domino get their proper due as father MCs.
Quasimoto- "The Further Adventures of Lord Quas"
- Everyone has that friend who hooks up with fat chicks a bunch because he gets completely bombed before he goes out. Granted, there's the built-in excuse of "dude, I was drunk!" And then there's the reality of the fact he repeatedly hooks up with fat chicks, which gives the impression that the real problem is that he's scared of success. Such is the problem with Lord Quas here. One of the best features about "Madvillainy" is that the weaker tracks could fly right by you without really registering...and by "weak tracks," I mean anything that featured the high-pitched guy with that stilted flow, which you get 70 minutes of here. It's actually entertaining in bits, but goddamn, talk about blunted! This is an album with a panoply of built-in excuses, but none of that changes the fact that I've invested $16 on a CD which is more or less borne by the fact that Madlib is far more adept than most at remembering shit he thought up while he was high.
Bright Eyes- "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning"/"Digital Ash In A Digital Urn"
- I wish it weren't such a facile and glib comparison, but this is like a scrambled version of "Speakerboxxx"/"The Love Below." There, you had one CD that was lyrically solid, if not spectacular, but the music played it too safe (why was Big Boi rhyming over tracks Slimm Cutta Calhoun would turn down?), and one where the music was intriguing but underdeveloped and lyrically, it worked against the artist's strengths. You can pretty much guess how each of those landed here. "Wide Awake" tried to be Conor's bid for credocracy, but too much of it seems staged; did he go to New York thinking that anything would result other than a sad album about being lost in the big city? This guy's getting more trim than Edward Scissorhands. Let's put it this way: I found "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" a far more plausible song viewed through his personal prism of songwriting than "Lua."
And let's not forget the increasingly irritating necessity for every aspiring alt-countryteer to have Emmylou Harris do her "I just heard the song five minutes ago" non-harmonies; tell the Temptations that sloppy equals soulful. But for the most part, it's a decent collection of songs, except EXCEPT EXCEPT "Land Locked Blues" which I'd be doing a favor if I merely called it Conor's worst song. Let's just get this out of the way: Conor Oberst is a terrible political writer. Always has been, too: check the Desparacidos CD, where he rattles off "No Logo" nuggets like he skimmed it in a couple hours because he had a date with a women's studies major the next day. If his "money shot" line about fucking his girlfriend while the war plays on TV doesn't make you either crack up or lose your faith in musical sincerity, just make sure you make Conor double-bag it when he's doing you doggy-fashion at the afterparty.
On the other hand, wayyyy too much was made of "Digital Ash" being Bright Eyes' "techno" album. This has far less to do with the Postal Service than it does the Smashing Pumpkins' "Adore"; excepting "Time Code," just about everything here sounds like a Bright Eyes song with more drum machines, and the synths are more goth than glitch. Moreover, it's not Postal Service because Bright Eyes was never about melody to begin with. He's got about three melodic rhythms in his repertoire, but that's not necessarily a crippling problem when he has the right accompaniment; "The Calendar Hung Itself" begat "Method Acting" and "The Movement Of A Hand" did likewise with "Lover, I Don't Have To Love," and "Haligh (Cubed), A Lie" got laced with hilariously shallow, Ben Harper "Burn One Down"-stylee metaphors for smoking coke on "Down In A Rabbit Hole," and those are some of his best work. The reason that this album still has legs is that it is far more in the realm of what Conor Oberst does best: writing songs about meaningless fucking, drugs, drinking and himself. He's not the new Dylan. He's not even the new Ryan Adams. Really, put "Heartbreaker" tete a tete with "I'm Wide Awake"...it did the being young, high and sad thing so well it named a freakin' song after it.
Aqueduct- "I Sold Gold"
- Pretty decent, but top-heavy album guaranteed to slay the mixtape circuit like a synthpop Juelz Santana. But look, if you're heavily featured on "The O.C.," and I don't know what you look like a couple months later, something's gumming up the marketing works at Barsuk.
Mike Jones- "Who Is Mike Jones?"
- It always seems like I forget the lessons of "Rotting Pinata"; somewhere between "200 km/hr" and "OK Computer" lies the realm of possibility where albums can exist with two good songs on it. That's why I'm not as mad at this CD as I used to be. Let's face it; after hearing "Back Then," I probably would've bought the damn thing any way. It's actually gotten better with age(?), as I've come to grips with the fact that repeating the same lines twice or more in a row is just a cheap way of doing Screw-style music without actually screwing yourself (nhjic), and he's one of the most charismatic MC's I've come across recently. He's literally selling himself, and doing quite well at it. Now let's get "Cuttin'" as the next single!
Stars- "Set Yourself On Fire"
- This year's "Bows & Arrows," in that one song ("Ageless Beauty," "The Rat") is so fucking good that the rest of the album is rendered irrelevant. Seriously, this could be "Revolver" for all I know.
The Russian Futurists- "Our Thickness"
- After the Architecture In Helsinki debacle, I was a little wary of investing time in a CD which includes a geographical proper noun that brings those tennis-racket snowshoes to mind and finds the word "twee" in nearly every one of its reviews. But lo and behold, I'm digging that hi-fi/lo-fi combo production that finds room for that clarinet that you gave up on in 7th grade, but is recording on gear that I probably have. The problem here is that the songs, as catchy as they are, take as many unexpected turns as a Mike Jones verse. This is about as A-B, A-B as my report card.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy- "Superwolf"
- If you can't deal with R. Kelly singing about sex because he MAY have adulterated a high-schooler (Jigga! Kelly- not guilty!) because you always filter music through the prism of its author's personal life, don't give me shit about not enjoying a potbellied beardo singing tunelessly about his "horny horn." Ignore everything this guy's done with the exception of "I See A Darkness," and your life won't suck. Trust me. "White Ladder" held more universal truth about life and love than most of the stuff Will Oldham's done.
Anyways, if you read this blog, you're familiar with my promise that I'd let you in on what I thought was my album of the year, at least until June rolled around. And I already told you what I thought was the detritus of 2005, and I'm feeling nostalgic because there have hardly been any CDs for me to have NCAA 2006 sessions with to feel disappointed by ("More Adventurous," "Achilles Heel," stand up tall!). All I'm saying is that the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah CD I got in the mail today better bring that heat. So here's the CDs, as best as I can remember, that were good enough to escape total dismissal, but not so much that I wouldn't have drilled a six-inch nail into my head if I had actually invested legal tender into listening to them:
Caribou- "The Milk Of Human Kindness"
- File this with albums such as "Ancient Melodies Of The Future," "The Invisible Band," "Deftones" and "More Adventurous." In other words, despite claims that there was a new element being added to a very successful template, the latest CD from a band I'm into gives me, in essence, the same thing as they did last time, except that almost all the songs aren't as good. They're not BAD, per se, but they'll be shelved for their predecessor every time, existing in a netherworld between your discman and the used CD store. Now I know what you're thinking, "but it's a new name, and they've got a big Krautrock influence this time instead of '60s psych!" That's all well and good, but it's still mostly instrumental tracks with some phoned-in vocals; i.e., the same basic format as "Up In Flames," just not as good, because Krautrock is the most overrated hip influence out there, and St. Peter won't be giving you a refund on the time you've wasted pretending/attempting to like Can.
Queens Of The Stone Age- "Lullabies To Paralyze"
- QOTSA is sorta kinda like the 'Sheed of rock, capable of just about anything, but always delivering the goods with a shade of "they can do a lot better than this...CAN'T THEY?" "Rated R," "Songs For The Deaf"...THISCLOSE to being classic. They SHOULD be classic. But as to be expected with someone who records everything he and his famous drug buddies do in the fucking desert and sells it online, quality control isn't one of Josh Homme's strong points. Despite the party line, I was actually glad to hear that Homme got rid of Nick Oliveri, as his contributions ran the gamut from unnecessary to slightly grating to full-fledged annoying, making his "necessary evil" presence the stoner rock equivalent of Robby Takac. Would his dismissal be similar to 'Sheed reigning in his tempers for the greater good? How about just another vaguely indifferent performance, unaware that so much is riding on it?
Edan- "Beauty And The Beat"
- I'm guessing that if I wrote this a week later, this CD could've very well ended up on the previous list, since it seems to get more irritating every time I listen to it. I need to stop assuming any hip-hop album with a cred pass is gonna be the next "Madvillainy" (see below). I like the acid-rock theme of the music and it never allows itself to drag, but the big problem here is Edan himself and his "intense white guy" flow. You know it when you hear it; it's the sound of someone refusing to be playful in his delivery regardless of whether he's talking about "seeing colors without the LSD" or a "fish fillet-o," lest he be deemed an Ad-Roc clone. But the worst offense here is "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme," a song which others have taken umbrage with for good reason. Can we just send out a decree that it's no longer acceptable to just rattle off names of ol skool MCs and call it a "lesson"? It's becoming its own cottage industry, fer cryin' out loud. Say what you want about Korn, but at least they were willing to cop to listening to Ice Cube's "The Predator." So watch Travel and I do the only song where Skee Lo, Three 6 Mafia, Mercedes and Domino get their proper due as father MCs.
Quasimoto- "The Further Adventures of Lord Quas"
- Everyone has that friend who hooks up with fat chicks a bunch because he gets completely bombed before he goes out. Granted, there's the built-in excuse of "dude, I was drunk!" And then there's the reality of the fact he repeatedly hooks up with fat chicks, which gives the impression that the real problem is that he's scared of success. Such is the problem with Lord Quas here. One of the best features about "Madvillainy" is that the weaker tracks could fly right by you without really registering...and by "weak tracks," I mean anything that featured the high-pitched guy with that stilted flow, which you get 70 minutes of here. It's actually entertaining in bits, but goddamn, talk about blunted! This is an album with a panoply of built-in excuses, but none of that changes the fact that I've invested $16 on a CD which is more or less borne by the fact that Madlib is far more adept than most at remembering shit he thought up while he was high.
Bright Eyes- "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning"/"Digital Ash In A Digital Urn"
- I wish it weren't such a facile and glib comparison, but this is like a scrambled version of "Speakerboxxx"/"The Love Below." There, you had one CD that was lyrically solid, if not spectacular, but the music played it too safe (why was Big Boi rhyming over tracks Slimm Cutta Calhoun would turn down?), and one where the music was intriguing but underdeveloped and lyrically, it worked against the artist's strengths. You can pretty much guess how each of those landed here. "Wide Awake" tried to be Conor's bid for credocracy, but too much of it seems staged; did he go to New York thinking that anything would result other than a sad album about being lost in the big city? This guy's getting more trim than Edward Scissorhands. Let's put it this way: I found "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" a far more plausible song viewed through his personal prism of songwriting than "Lua."
And let's not forget the increasingly irritating necessity for every aspiring alt-countryteer to have Emmylou Harris do her "I just heard the song five minutes ago" non-harmonies; tell the Temptations that sloppy equals soulful. But for the most part, it's a decent collection of songs, except EXCEPT EXCEPT "Land Locked Blues" which I'd be doing a favor if I merely called it Conor's worst song. Let's just get this out of the way: Conor Oberst is a terrible political writer. Always has been, too: check the Desparacidos CD, where he rattles off "No Logo" nuggets like he skimmed it in a couple hours because he had a date with a women's studies major the next day. If his "money shot" line about fucking his girlfriend while the war plays on TV doesn't make you either crack up or lose your faith in musical sincerity, just make sure you make Conor double-bag it when he's doing you doggy-fashion at the afterparty.
On the other hand, wayyyy too much was made of "Digital Ash" being Bright Eyes' "techno" album. This has far less to do with the Postal Service than it does the Smashing Pumpkins' "Adore"; excepting "Time Code," just about everything here sounds like a Bright Eyes song with more drum machines, and the synths are more goth than glitch. Moreover, it's not Postal Service because Bright Eyes was never about melody to begin with. He's got about three melodic rhythms in his repertoire, but that's not necessarily a crippling problem when he has the right accompaniment; "The Calendar Hung Itself" begat "Method Acting" and "The Movement Of A Hand" did likewise with "Lover, I Don't Have To Love," and "Haligh (Cubed), A Lie" got laced with hilariously shallow, Ben Harper "Burn One Down"-stylee metaphors for smoking coke on "Down In A Rabbit Hole," and those are some of his best work. The reason that this album still has legs is that it is far more in the realm of what Conor Oberst does best: writing songs about meaningless fucking, drugs, drinking and himself. He's not the new Dylan. He's not even the new Ryan Adams. Really, put "Heartbreaker" tete a tete with "I'm Wide Awake"...it did the being young, high and sad thing so well it named a freakin' song after it.
Aqueduct- "I Sold Gold"
- Pretty decent, but top-heavy album guaranteed to slay the mixtape circuit like a synthpop Juelz Santana. But look, if you're heavily featured on "The O.C.," and I don't know what you look like a couple months later, something's gumming up the marketing works at Barsuk.
Mike Jones- "Who Is Mike Jones?"
- It always seems like I forget the lessons of "Rotting Pinata"; somewhere between "200 km/hr" and "OK Computer" lies the realm of possibility where albums can exist with two good songs on it. That's why I'm not as mad at this CD as I used to be. Let's face it; after hearing "Back Then," I probably would've bought the damn thing any way. It's actually gotten better with age(?), as I've come to grips with the fact that repeating the same lines twice or more in a row is just a cheap way of doing Screw-style music without actually screwing yourself (nhjic), and he's one of the most charismatic MC's I've come across recently. He's literally selling himself, and doing quite well at it. Now let's get "Cuttin'" as the next single!
Stars- "Set Yourself On Fire"
- This year's "Bows & Arrows," in that one song ("Ageless Beauty," "The Rat") is so fucking good that the rest of the album is rendered irrelevant. Seriously, this could be "Revolver" for all I know.
The Russian Futurists- "Our Thickness"
- After the Architecture In Helsinki debacle, I was a little wary of investing time in a CD which includes a geographical proper noun that brings those tennis-racket snowshoes to mind and finds the word "twee" in nearly every one of its reviews. But lo and behold, I'm digging that hi-fi/lo-fi combo production that finds room for that clarinet that you gave up on in 7th grade, but is recording on gear that I probably have. The problem here is that the songs, as catchy as they are, take as many unexpected turns as a Mike Jones verse. This is about as A-B, A-B as my report card.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy- "Superwolf"
- If you can't deal with R. Kelly singing about sex because he MAY have adulterated a high-schooler (Jigga! Kelly- not guilty!) because you always filter music through the prism of its author's personal life, don't give me shit about not enjoying a potbellied beardo singing tunelessly about his "horny horn." Ignore everything this guy's done with the exception of "I See A Darkness," and your life won't suck. Trust me. "White Ladder" held more universal truth about life and love than most of the stuff Will Oldham's done.
posted by Ian at 10:24 PM
<< Home