critical beatdown
We're in a music mood here at Sexy Results!, mostly because I'm too lazy to really put together a comprehensive bowl preview or a piece about UVA basketball...right now, that is. Could still happen. Right now, I'm reflecting on being possibly the only person to come out of a used CD store with a copy of Kate Bush's "Hounds Of Love" and the Kool Keith "Spankmaster" CD that I've probably been eyeing for six consecutive law school breaks.
This gets filed right next to "Sex Style." Sorry, ladies- I'm taken.
Much to everyone's surprise, Keith spends this album ranting about how wack other rappers are over the type of sonics that are rivaled in fidelity by Sega CD's "Make Your Own Video: Kris Kross." And it's actually pretty awesome. Yeah, he's in full "there's no way these lyrics were ever written down" mode, but he's not as angry as he was on say, "Matthew," so you're more likely to hear gems like "smoother than Rick Fox putting on his hair gel" and "I told James Brown to stop smoking angel dust in the piss stall." Which he then rhymes with "he wanted to go to Olive Garden and start a restaurant brawl." Plus, in the liner notes he misspells the names of popular producers and threatens some sort of vague vengenace on Andre 3000 for "stealing his wigs." Yeah- you'd spend $5.99 on it too.
On Monday, Stylus will be starting their 5-part "Top 50 Albums of 2005," and sometime between Tuesday and Thursday, you'll get to read the blurb for my #5 (no spoiler- besides, I don't even know where it ranks), representing my first output on a Metacritic-recognized site. I gotta tell you though- although Stylus is more down to earth than the 'Fork, it's also a lot more diffuse; there are probably 10-15 albums on the list that I've never heard of, and neither has All Music Guide. I'm not sure why, but it seems like Pitchfork has a more unified front when it comes to hype. Arcade Fire, The Wrens, The Rapture- they made it seem like they were all behind it, which probably helps their relevance as a site, but also makes them pretty grating some times. As for us, there's an album that's going to be in our Top Ten that originally got a C+.
But yeah, everyone's looking back on the best of 2005, which in generally was so piss-poor and lacking in consensus, it made 2001 seem like 1969. Focusing on what truly sucked is a lot easier, not to mention more fun. Thankfully, someone already did the job for me on the singles front. It's actually a pretty good list, although I'd have to put "Hollaback Girl" on it. That, along with "My Humps," are two songs that you simply do not play in my presence. Whether or not this is somehow related to the fact that Gwen Stefani and Fergie are the two supposedly hot celebrities who do the "prom queen to prom fiend" switcheroo in the morning is unknown. That's right...I made a "New Jack City" reference. And it made sense! Kneel before Zod, Scoop!
My picture is as busted-out as Serena Williams and Alicia Keys gettin' it on to some classic Marvin while "Cooley High" plays in the blackground. That's why the racist Sixers are giving Kyle Korver minutes over my mello' Mark Macon, "Temple's T.I.," 'cause you don't know him.
I mean, I've always thought Fergie was busted; she looks like what would comeout if you spliced Carmen Electra's DNA with that of a leather ottoman. But "My Humps" seals it, for two reasons. First off, Hammer called 'em "pumps" or possibly a "bump," but she goes with "lumps." Okay, I think we can all agree that tits are good. I'm not saying bigger is necessarily better and I'm cynical enough to know that guys will often say they prefer smaller ones, because girls seem to like you more the moment after you tell them. Let's just leave it at this: regardless of size, you like tits and the fact that they exist. "My Humps" is the tits 9/11: by using the word "lumps," she's likening them to fucking CANCER. Tits=good. Hitler, cancer=bad. Aren't you actually supposed to feeling for "lumps" when you're giving yourself the post-pillow fight checkup? Now it's all lump?
Then there's the whole "junk in the trunk" thing. It has a certain retro charm to it, but if I had never heard the phrase before, I'd assume it meant someone needed to cop some Metamucil. So here we are...Fergie in 2004: not hot. Fergie in 2005: not only busted, but cancerous and constipated.
So anyways, here's my choices for THE WORST ALBUMS OF 2005! Of course, this is only a list of albums I've actually heard. I don't think I need to tell that you when a band that put out one of 2004's most unlistenable albums decides to have their grandma be the focal point of their new one, it's not even worth my time to confirm its suckitude. And I've actually come around on a few that I had in my earlier list; I still won't listen to "Arular" all the way through, but I've come to realize there are far bigger fish to fry than critics getting in a lather over something that hasn't really registered in the mainstream (Lil' Wayne on the other hand...). Also, I've actually come around on Antony & The Johnsons, although I must say it's not something you can listen to every day. You have to be in a really specific mindset for it, and if you never are, I understand. I realize that some albums take more time to sink in than others, so I'm going to refrain from including The Hold Steady in here. To me, it sounds like classic rock for assholes, the kind of people who ramble on about how awesome they think KISS is even though I rarely hear any KISS songs on the radio (it's Chuck Klosterman's favorite album of the year. Go figure). Besides, I need an audioblog to properly make fun of their songs. Making up Hold Steady lyrics like "then we got drunk off cheap gin and Ho-Hos and passed out in a bowling alley" isn't as funny if you don't do it in the guy's voice. And in case you're asking, any other shitty album I've already written about at length (The Game, Juelz, Three 6, Architecture In Helsinki, etc.) is included in spirit. Anyways...here you are: The Worst However-Long-This-List-Is Albums of 2005!
The Kaiser Chiefs- "Employment"
- There are times in our lives when we realize we've gone a little too far into our latest genre crush. This is a lesson that resonates with anyone who has owned a copy of "Coda," "The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions," or even Silkk The Shocker's "Made Man." Add "Employment" to this list of infamy. Yeah, I was totally down with Bloc Party, the Futureheads and whatever other British bands that played angular rock songs with Cockney vocals. And although I never heard a Kaiser Chiefs song in full, I was pretty sure I remembered the chorus of "I Predict A Riot" as being pretty catchy. So there I was, at a used CD store in one of my "I have to leave with something" moods. What did I have to lose? Playing a CD that opens with a song called "Every Day I Love You Less And Less" in the car with your girlfriend is bad enough; the moment he rhymes the title with "I can't believe that you and I did sex," that's when "what have I fucking done?" alarm bells start ringing. Add to that the fact that "I Predict A Riot" proves once again that calling a song "catchy" isn't always a compliment, since every song you've ever hated is catchy. Sorry, Maximo Park- these guys blew your chance with me.
Deerhoof- "The Runners Four"
- Everyone's got that one friend who absolutely loves sake. You've made attempts in the past to enjoy sake, but every time, you get past the first sip thinking, "I really, really don't like this." But that's not gonna stop you. Sophisticated people drink sake. So you go out and buy yourself a bottle, thinking that the problem is you never really committing to the cause. You have some. It's still awful. Not only that, but now you have an entire bottle that's gonna sit at your house.
Maybe it's appropriate that I use something Japanese to describe Deerhoof. You see, it's one thing to hype up something like "Echoes" or "Funeral." That's just one album. But there's the situation where you hear so much good things about a band's discography, you feel like you're in the wrong for not being into them. I left Deerhoof for dead after failing to make it past song four of any of their previous works, but this time...maybe it was different. I read the reviews calling them "more resonant," "slowed down," etc. So I gave "Runners Four" a burn at the radio station, put it in my car, preparing to be wowed. And by the third song, I realize that this is the same exact band that's applied the ice picks to my ears since the get-go. Not only that, but there's SEVENTEEN MORE SONGS. This is the sort of exasperated "this album is never gonna end!" feeling that people were once thought to only experience somewhere around the 35-minute mark of "Ghetto D" (or the approximate point when the "Captain Kirk" outro comes in). But there's no "Burbons And Lacs" waiting for you at the end of "The Runners Four" to justify soldiering on here.
Here's the problem: they've still got that annoying Japanese chick singing and a backup band that probably listens to a lot of free jazz, but don't really know how to play their instruments all that well. It's one thing for the Fiery Furnaces to make songs that sound like they were five tracks-in-development smashed together into one piece. Deerhoof sounds like they're four people playing different songs at the same time. Save your "they play with childish glee!" shit; every good parent knows when to tell their kid to shut the fuck up.
Wilderness- s/t
- One of my favorite parts of "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" is when Chuck Klosterman goes to a convention of music critics in Seattle. Like most people who write about music, he considers himself to rock ridiculously harder than everyone else, but is still willing to acknowledge that these are "his people." One of the most telling passages from this section relates him overhearing a couple of guys talking about whether The Avalanches are overhyped, "an odd question considering 98 percent of America has never heard of them." And that, in essence, is the biggest problem with dealing with "overhyped" albums like this; 99.9% of America has no idea Wilderness is actually the name of a band, and you can probably thrown in the fact that 98% of America will never meet anyone who has even the slightest clue that this album exists. However, due to the corners of the interwebs which I frequent, you have to deal with stuff like this.
And although it's a more modest hype than usual, if you were to take the whole of Wilderness reviews, you might come up with the dream sum of Interpol's rhythm section playing Talk Talk songs with David Byrne as the vocalist. And despite all the terms that critics used to describe their sound (most of them use "post-rock." Isn't hip-hop "post-rock"?), they could've done the job with the one word that most accurately describes what this band does: bullshit.
I mean, I like toms and things that go drone in the night as much as the next guy who refuses to lend out his copy of "Disintegration," but you can't get past the vocals here. You know "She Blinded Me With Science," right? Cute song. But imagine if there was a guy whose vocal acumen consisted solely of saying stuff like "oh face the facts, oh fact the face" in that "Science!" voice. At first, you figure that you just have to get used to it, and they certainly give you enough opportunities to grow accustomed, what with doing the same exact thing ten times. But no matter how hard you try, it just becomes painfully clear that when you guess at what asshole record store clerks listen to at home, it usually sounds like this.
Fiona Apple- "Extraordinary Machine"
- A couple of nights ago, I won the 4-DVD "director series" collection from the GLA Auction. Mostly because I refused to be outbid by a UGA Law grad named Spalding. But it turned out to be a good purchase, mostly because each DVD has good songs directed by people who know what the fuck they're doing. During the Mark Romanek DVD, Fiona Apple's "Criminal" comes on. Now, usually three things happen when this video pops up. Either you have the never-ending debate about whether or not she's hot, make the "just another night at R. Kelly's" joke or you get to hear about how we have that same brown yellow and white bedspread that's prominently featured.
This time, things were a little different. Since I first heard it, "Extraordinary Machine" sounded tuneless and inert. Hearing "Criminal" for the first time in years made it all the more obvious that she doesn't have to write tuneless, inert songs. I think I'm seasoned enough in the industry game to know that a lot of times, the label's right. If these songs were called "non-commercial," it's because they're boring as hell. Too obtuse to be catchy, too dull to be "pretty," too always-starting-with-lyrics-like "I'm undecided about you again."
Of course, you're probably gonna tell me how I need to hear the Jon Brion sessions, and to be honest, I haven't looked that hard for them, seeing as how his more recent collaborative misadventures (see, "Registration, Late") serve more as cautionary tales about the futility of turd polishing.
The Orange Peels- "Circling The Sun"
To me, Third Eye Blind's "Never Let You Go" is the ultimate power-pop song. Not the "best," but the "ultimate." They always seemed like a band that read its own press, and anyone familiar with modern criticism is very aware that everything that otherwise be utilized in critiquing an album goes out the window once the word "power pop" comes in. You might figure that "power pop" is a term that's too vague to be of any use, but like emo, you know it when you hear it. And often, a band will throw out a little nugget like "Never Let You Go" to get these plaudits; I-IV-V progression (the more it sounds like "Sweet Jane," the better), lightly distorted guitars, lyrics that are far more simpler than you're used to from the band, maybe a falsetto...you get the drill.
The strange thing is, I don't think bands make these kind of songs to get popular, mostly because these songs don't become popular anymore (that's Fall Out Boy on the cover on Spin, boys). They do them because you can get the critics on your side; they'll likely assume that writing a song like that has to be due to the fact that, like them, you're a student of "perfect pop." And when the song doesn't become popular, they'll riff on how radio has forgotten what "perfect pop" is all about, and they'll throw out a bunch of never-weres that were relegated to deep cuts on "Nuggets." Their work's already done. Trust me: as much as critics love to prove how cool they are, they'd rather profess love for bands that are easy to write about, because it makes the job easier. Trust me, a lot of the 5-star reviews you've seen for "Elephant" and "Late Registration" are due to the fact that the White Stripes and Kanye West are probably the easiest artists to review, because you can spend 3/4ths of the piece talking about them before you actually get to the album itself.
Where was I? Oh yeah- the Orange Peels. In the same way that "Never Let You Go" was the ultimate power pop song, this seems like the ultimate power-pop album. They've got the Mel Bay chords and the lyrics that constantly try to evoke summer at all costs. Voila- 4 1/2 star review in All Music. Except one problem: these songs are not catchy, which I assume is what pop is supposed to be. These progressions have been done millions of times, and yet they can't find one decent melody to put over them. You may not like Fountains Of Wayne or Jimmy Eat World, but what they do is actually very difficult. Anyone can throw together a G, a C and a D...but can you sing something over it that you can remember? Can you do it twelve times? When was the last time that actually happened? "Circling Around The Sun" is like a banana that's too old: yeah, it's sweet, but also kinda sickly tasting, not to mention overly mushy.
Lightning Bolt- "Hypermagic Mountain"
In my Intellectual Property exam, we dealt with cybersquatting cases where someone registers a name like "sonysucks.com." In my reasoning for why there wouldn't be likelihood of confusion in the hypo, I stated something to the effect of "no one would ever use the term 'sucks' in conjunction with its product. While that may have been something Primus encouraged in the '90s, their time has fortunately passed." And yes, our IP professor's a cool guy. Maybe not as cool as my idol Judge Kozinski or noted tastemaker Justice Souter, who talked about kids who "wanted to download the latest Modest Mouse album" in the Grokster case. But cool enough to think he wouldn't be lost on my logic.
Anyways, Primus' time has in fact passed, and I think we can all agree that they actually did suck. And yes, I can't wait for your comments if they choose to defend Primus. And it's likely because of Primus that I approach bands with a great deal of caution if they've been recommended on the basis of their bassist. It's supposed to be in the background; most of the time, a band's bassist is someone with a top-notch drug connection or just a friend they wanted to be in the band.
And while it's great to have someone who can take the bassline for a walk, throw in some well-time slaps or utilize a wah-wah (I haven't heard wah-bass since "Superunknown." WTF?!?!), it is not meant to be a lead instrument. So, here's Lightning Bolt and their set-up is a drummer and a supposedly badass bass player. How is said bassist badass? Well, he runs his axe through fifteen distortion boxes and wails aimlessly in a tone that's painfully familiar to anyone who had to work extensive amounts of time in the effects pedal section of Guitar Center. What results is pretty much in the same league as drum circles, jazz and masturbation: fun to participate in, but awful when you're a spectator.
You'll notice that Lightning Bolt got an 88 rating at Metacritic, which is pretty strange considering I listen to this and wonder who could possibly call this good music. Really, download one of their songs and ask yourself in what situation could you play this CD. You know, to 99.9% of us, "noise rock" isn't really a compliment.
This gets filed right next to "Sex Style." Sorry, ladies- I'm taken.
Much to everyone's surprise, Keith spends this album ranting about how wack other rappers are over the type of sonics that are rivaled in fidelity by Sega CD's "Make Your Own Video: Kris Kross." And it's actually pretty awesome. Yeah, he's in full "there's no way these lyrics were ever written down" mode, but he's not as angry as he was on say, "Matthew," so you're more likely to hear gems like "smoother than Rick Fox putting on his hair gel" and "I told James Brown to stop smoking angel dust in the piss stall." Which he then rhymes with "he wanted to go to Olive Garden and start a restaurant brawl." Plus, in the liner notes he misspells the names of popular producers and threatens some sort of vague vengenace on Andre 3000 for "stealing his wigs." Yeah- you'd spend $5.99 on it too.
On Monday, Stylus will be starting their 5-part "Top 50 Albums of 2005," and sometime between Tuesday and Thursday, you'll get to read the blurb for my #5 (no spoiler- besides, I don't even know where it ranks), representing my first output on a Metacritic-recognized site. I gotta tell you though- although Stylus is more down to earth than the 'Fork, it's also a lot more diffuse; there are probably 10-15 albums on the list that I've never heard of, and neither has All Music Guide. I'm not sure why, but it seems like Pitchfork has a more unified front when it comes to hype. Arcade Fire, The Wrens, The Rapture- they made it seem like they were all behind it, which probably helps their relevance as a site, but also makes them pretty grating some times. As for us, there's an album that's going to be in our Top Ten that originally got a C+.
But yeah, everyone's looking back on the best of 2005, which in generally was so piss-poor and lacking in consensus, it made 2001 seem like 1969. Focusing on what truly sucked is a lot easier, not to mention more fun. Thankfully, someone already did the job for me on the singles front. It's actually a pretty good list, although I'd have to put "Hollaback Girl" on it. That, along with "My Humps," are two songs that you simply do not play in my presence. Whether or not this is somehow related to the fact that Gwen Stefani and Fergie are the two supposedly hot celebrities who do the "prom queen to prom fiend" switcheroo in the morning is unknown. That's right...I made a "New Jack City" reference. And it made sense! Kneel before Zod, Scoop!
My picture is as busted-out as Serena Williams and Alicia Keys gettin' it on to some classic Marvin while "Cooley High" plays in the blackground. That's why the racist Sixers are giving Kyle Korver minutes over my mello' Mark Macon, "Temple's T.I.," 'cause you don't know him.
I mean, I've always thought Fergie was busted; she looks like what would comeout if you spliced Carmen Electra's DNA with that of a leather ottoman. But "My Humps" seals it, for two reasons. First off, Hammer called 'em "pumps" or possibly a "bump," but she goes with "lumps." Okay, I think we can all agree that tits are good. I'm not saying bigger is necessarily better and I'm cynical enough to know that guys will often say they prefer smaller ones, because girls seem to like you more the moment after you tell them. Let's just leave it at this: regardless of size, you like tits and the fact that they exist. "My Humps" is the tits 9/11: by using the word "lumps," she's likening them to fucking CANCER. Tits=good. Hitler, cancer=bad. Aren't you actually supposed to feeling for "lumps" when you're giving yourself the post-pillow fight checkup? Now it's all lump?
Then there's the whole "junk in the trunk" thing. It has a certain retro charm to it, but if I had never heard the phrase before, I'd assume it meant someone needed to cop some Metamucil. So here we are...Fergie in 2004: not hot. Fergie in 2005: not only busted, but cancerous and constipated.
So anyways, here's my choices for THE WORST ALBUMS OF 2005! Of course, this is only a list of albums I've actually heard. I don't think I need to tell that you when a band that put out one of 2004's most unlistenable albums decides to have their grandma be the focal point of their new one, it's not even worth my time to confirm its suckitude. And I've actually come around on a few that I had in my earlier list; I still won't listen to "Arular" all the way through, but I've come to realize there are far bigger fish to fry than critics getting in a lather over something that hasn't really registered in the mainstream (Lil' Wayne on the other hand...). Also, I've actually come around on Antony & The Johnsons, although I must say it's not something you can listen to every day. You have to be in a really specific mindset for it, and if you never are, I understand. I realize that some albums take more time to sink in than others, so I'm going to refrain from including The Hold Steady in here. To me, it sounds like classic rock for assholes, the kind of people who ramble on about how awesome they think KISS is even though I rarely hear any KISS songs on the radio (it's Chuck Klosterman's favorite album of the year. Go figure). Besides, I need an audioblog to properly make fun of their songs. Making up Hold Steady lyrics like "then we got drunk off cheap gin and Ho-Hos and passed out in a bowling alley" isn't as funny if you don't do it in the guy's voice. And in case you're asking, any other shitty album I've already written about at length (The Game, Juelz, Three 6, Architecture In Helsinki, etc.) is included in spirit. Anyways...here you are: The Worst However-Long-This-List-Is Albums of 2005!
The Kaiser Chiefs- "Employment"
- There are times in our lives when we realize we've gone a little too far into our latest genre crush. This is a lesson that resonates with anyone who has owned a copy of "Coda," "The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions," or even Silkk The Shocker's "Made Man." Add "Employment" to this list of infamy. Yeah, I was totally down with Bloc Party, the Futureheads and whatever other British bands that played angular rock songs with Cockney vocals. And although I never heard a Kaiser Chiefs song in full, I was pretty sure I remembered the chorus of "I Predict A Riot" as being pretty catchy. So there I was, at a used CD store in one of my "I have to leave with something" moods. What did I have to lose? Playing a CD that opens with a song called "Every Day I Love You Less And Less" in the car with your girlfriend is bad enough; the moment he rhymes the title with "I can't believe that you and I did sex," that's when "what have I fucking done?" alarm bells start ringing. Add to that the fact that "I Predict A Riot" proves once again that calling a song "catchy" isn't always a compliment, since every song you've ever hated is catchy. Sorry, Maximo Park- these guys blew your chance with me.
Deerhoof- "The Runners Four"
- Everyone's got that one friend who absolutely loves sake. You've made attempts in the past to enjoy sake, but every time, you get past the first sip thinking, "I really, really don't like this." But that's not gonna stop you. Sophisticated people drink sake. So you go out and buy yourself a bottle, thinking that the problem is you never really committing to the cause. You have some. It's still awful. Not only that, but now you have an entire bottle that's gonna sit at your house.
Maybe it's appropriate that I use something Japanese to describe Deerhoof. You see, it's one thing to hype up something like "Echoes" or "Funeral." That's just one album. But there's the situation where you hear so much good things about a band's discography, you feel like you're in the wrong for not being into them. I left Deerhoof for dead after failing to make it past song four of any of their previous works, but this time...maybe it was different. I read the reviews calling them "more resonant," "slowed down," etc. So I gave "Runners Four" a burn at the radio station, put it in my car, preparing to be wowed. And by the third song, I realize that this is the same exact band that's applied the ice picks to my ears since the get-go. Not only that, but there's SEVENTEEN MORE SONGS. This is the sort of exasperated "this album is never gonna end!" feeling that people were once thought to only experience somewhere around the 35-minute mark of "Ghetto D" (or the approximate point when the "Captain Kirk" outro comes in). But there's no "Burbons And Lacs" waiting for you at the end of "The Runners Four" to justify soldiering on here.
Here's the problem: they've still got that annoying Japanese chick singing and a backup band that probably listens to a lot of free jazz, but don't really know how to play their instruments all that well. It's one thing for the Fiery Furnaces to make songs that sound like they were five tracks-in-development smashed together into one piece. Deerhoof sounds like they're four people playing different songs at the same time. Save your "they play with childish glee!" shit; every good parent knows when to tell their kid to shut the fuck up.
Wilderness- s/t
- One of my favorite parts of "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" is when Chuck Klosterman goes to a convention of music critics in Seattle. Like most people who write about music, he considers himself to rock ridiculously harder than everyone else, but is still willing to acknowledge that these are "his people." One of the most telling passages from this section relates him overhearing a couple of guys talking about whether The Avalanches are overhyped, "an odd question considering 98 percent of America has never heard of them." And that, in essence, is the biggest problem with dealing with "overhyped" albums like this; 99.9% of America has no idea Wilderness is actually the name of a band, and you can probably thrown in the fact that 98% of America will never meet anyone who has even the slightest clue that this album exists. However, due to the corners of the interwebs which I frequent, you have to deal with stuff like this.
And although it's a more modest hype than usual, if you were to take the whole of Wilderness reviews, you might come up with the dream sum of Interpol's rhythm section playing Talk Talk songs with David Byrne as the vocalist. And despite all the terms that critics used to describe their sound (most of them use "post-rock." Isn't hip-hop "post-rock"?), they could've done the job with the one word that most accurately describes what this band does: bullshit.
I mean, I like toms and things that go drone in the night as much as the next guy who refuses to lend out his copy of "Disintegration," but you can't get past the vocals here. You know "She Blinded Me With Science," right? Cute song. But imagine if there was a guy whose vocal acumen consisted solely of saying stuff like "oh face the facts, oh fact the face" in that "Science!" voice. At first, you figure that you just have to get used to it, and they certainly give you enough opportunities to grow accustomed, what with doing the same exact thing ten times. But no matter how hard you try, it just becomes painfully clear that when you guess at what asshole record store clerks listen to at home, it usually sounds like this.
Fiona Apple- "Extraordinary Machine"
- A couple of nights ago, I won the 4-DVD "director series" collection from the GLA Auction. Mostly because I refused to be outbid by a UGA Law grad named Spalding. But it turned out to be a good purchase, mostly because each DVD has good songs directed by people who know what the fuck they're doing. During the Mark Romanek DVD, Fiona Apple's "Criminal" comes on. Now, usually three things happen when this video pops up. Either you have the never-ending debate about whether or not she's hot, make the "just another night at R. Kelly's" joke or you get to hear about how we have that same brown yellow and white bedspread that's prominently featured.
This time, things were a little different. Since I first heard it, "Extraordinary Machine" sounded tuneless and inert. Hearing "Criminal" for the first time in years made it all the more obvious that she doesn't have to write tuneless, inert songs. I think I'm seasoned enough in the industry game to know that a lot of times, the label's right. If these songs were called "non-commercial," it's because they're boring as hell. Too obtuse to be catchy, too dull to be "pretty," too always-starting-with-lyrics-like "I'm undecided about you again."
Of course, you're probably gonna tell me how I need to hear the Jon Brion sessions, and to be honest, I haven't looked that hard for them, seeing as how his more recent collaborative misadventures (see, "Registration, Late") serve more as cautionary tales about the futility of turd polishing.
The Orange Peels- "Circling The Sun"
To me, Third Eye Blind's "Never Let You Go" is the ultimate power-pop song. Not the "best," but the "ultimate." They always seemed like a band that read its own press, and anyone familiar with modern criticism is very aware that everything that otherwise be utilized in critiquing an album goes out the window once the word "power pop" comes in. You might figure that "power pop" is a term that's too vague to be of any use, but like emo, you know it when you hear it. And often, a band will throw out a little nugget like "Never Let You Go" to get these plaudits; I-IV-V progression (the more it sounds like "Sweet Jane," the better), lightly distorted guitars, lyrics that are far more simpler than you're used to from the band, maybe a falsetto...you get the drill.
The strange thing is, I don't think bands make these kind of songs to get popular, mostly because these songs don't become popular anymore (that's Fall Out Boy on the cover on Spin, boys). They do them because you can get the critics on your side; they'll likely assume that writing a song like that has to be due to the fact that, like them, you're a student of "perfect pop." And when the song doesn't become popular, they'll riff on how radio has forgotten what "perfect pop" is all about, and they'll throw out a bunch of never-weres that were relegated to deep cuts on "Nuggets." Their work's already done. Trust me: as much as critics love to prove how cool they are, they'd rather profess love for bands that are easy to write about, because it makes the job easier. Trust me, a lot of the 5-star reviews you've seen for "Elephant" and "Late Registration" are due to the fact that the White Stripes and Kanye West are probably the easiest artists to review, because you can spend 3/4ths of the piece talking about them before you actually get to the album itself.
Where was I? Oh yeah- the Orange Peels. In the same way that "Never Let You Go" was the ultimate power pop song, this seems like the ultimate power-pop album. They've got the Mel Bay chords and the lyrics that constantly try to evoke summer at all costs. Voila- 4 1/2 star review in All Music. Except one problem: these songs are not catchy, which I assume is what pop is supposed to be. These progressions have been done millions of times, and yet they can't find one decent melody to put over them. You may not like Fountains Of Wayne or Jimmy Eat World, but what they do is actually very difficult. Anyone can throw together a G, a C and a D...but can you sing something over it that you can remember? Can you do it twelve times? When was the last time that actually happened? "Circling Around The Sun" is like a banana that's too old: yeah, it's sweet, but also kinda sickly tasting, not to mention overly mushy.
Lightning Bolt- "Hypermagic Mountain"
In my Intellectual Property exam, we dealt with cybersquatting cases where someone registers a name like "sonysucks.com." In my reasoning for why there wouldn't be likelihood of confusion in the hypo, I stated something to the effect of "no one would ever use the term 'sucks' in conjunction with its product. While that may have been something Primus encouraged in the '90s, their time has fortunately passed." And yes, our IP professor's a cool guy. Maybe not as cool as my idol Judge Kozinski or noted tastemaker Justice Souter, who talked about kids who "wanted to download the latest Modest Mouse album" in the Grokster case. But cool enough to think he wouldn't be lost on my logic.
Anyways, Primus' time has in fact passed, and I think we can all agree that they actually did suck. And yes, I can't wait for your comments if they choose to defend Primus. And it's likely because of Primus that I approach bands with a great deal of caution if they've been recommended on the basis of their bassist. It's supposed to be in the background; most of the time, a band's bassist is someone with a top-notch drug connection or just a friend they wanted to be in the band.
And while it's great to have someone who can take the bassline for a walk, throw in some well-time slaps or utilize a wah-wah (I haven't heard wah-bass since "Superunknown." WTF?!?!), it is not meant to be a lead instrument. So, here's Lightning Bolt and their set-up is a drummer and a supposedly badass bass player. How is said bassist badass? Well, he runs his axe through fifteen distortion boxes and wails aimlessly in a tone that's painfully familiar to anyone who had to work extensive amounts of time in the effects pedal section of Guitar Center. What results is pretty much in the same league as drum circles, jazz and masturbation: fun to participate in, but awful when you're a spectator.
You'll notice that Lightning Bolt got an 88 rating at Metacritic, which is pretty strange considering I listen to this and wonder who could possibly call this good music. Really, download one of their songs and ask yourself in what situation could you play this CD. You know, to 99.9% of us, "noise rock" isn't really a compliment.
posted by Ian at 3:15 PM
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