Since the beginning of the band’s existence, in both songwriting and appearance, it was clear that the Jam owed an incredible amount of debt to the My Generation era of the Who. From their impeccable covers of “Disguises” and  to their preference for to appear in stylish Mod dress at all times, the Jam could very much have been considered the most authentic representation of true British punk in the late 1970′s, especially when considering their relative lack of success in the States. Where the Sex Pistols and the Clash (among others) became well-known ambassadors of the UK’s version of the genre, it was the Jam’s well-honed mixture of stylistic complexity and Weller’s witty, satirical lyrics a la Ray Davies, that the Jam were perhaps too smart to be the kind of punk that people expected.

But where they didn’t quite fit in with the rest, they excelled as a class of their own. But in one song in particular, the band shows that they’re perfectly fine being aligned with the older guard of British rockers, by being able to build upon their concepts and techniques and create something for the young gobbers to ponder to while they pogo.

After the Jump: Addressing an tired old theme for a new generation of mods and rockers alike.

By the time the Jam released their critically beloved All Mod Cons in 1978, Peter Weller had shown that he was capable, and ready for a more ambitious project. 1979′s Setting Sons was meant to be a concept album revolving around three friends who’ve spent time apart, and upon reuniting, reflect on the different directions their lives have gone. Due to a hurried recording schedule, the concept didn’t quite pan out.

But of the songs recorded, one in particular, “Little Boy Soldiers,” showed off Weller’s prowess for complex structures. With progressive phrases, multiple tones changes and aggressive changes in the points of view, “Little Boy Soldiers” was a mini-opera, much in the fashion of the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away,” or “Rael” before it. A bouncing Jam-as-all-hell poppy tune for the majority of the verse and chorus, it would be easy to call it a mod R&B song that eventually turns into a moral finger-wagging at the pressures of jingoism. It’s a theme that many British bands had addressed, most notably the Pretty Things in their concept album, S.F. Sorrow, but because it’s punk rock and the rules dictate that speed is a must, all of this speeds by in under three minutes.

What’s most rewarding about listening to these different phrases is listening closely for how many other bands the Jam make allusion to in each phrase. The shape of the song recalls the Who, of course, but there’s also a psych-folk lullaby section with a double-tracked whisper vocal that recalls Barrett-era Floyd (as well as the aforementioned S.F. Sorrow), and perhaps most subtle, an extended, droning bass that extends the song past half a minute past the last lyric, as the Beatles have done so many times in their psychedelic era (namely, “Penny Lane” and “A Day in the Life,” both songs of daily British life with dark overtones that hang in the shadows).

Listen for yourself and see who you can hear.

]]> http://electriccomicbook.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/the-jam-little-boy-soldiers/feed/ 0 electriccomicbook http://electriccomicbook.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/review-the-next-day-david-bowie/ http://electriccomicbook.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/review-the-next-day-david-bowie/#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2013 04:50:58 +0000 electriccomicbook http://electriccomicbook.wordpress.com/?p=1106 Continue reading →]]>

David Bowie will never have a ‘last album.’ Sure, in terms of time and effort, there may be a few more left in his corporeal being, but he’s the kind of dude who’s entire body of even half-hearted demos can last the demanding public centuries of musical debate. And that’s the other thing: when you’ve had a career as storied, legendary, and ever-changing as his, how do you cap it all off? It’s an impossible task, and I certainly wouldn’t ask  him to.

But what to make of this J.D. Salinger-esque reclusiveness in terms of creative output, besides his many film and television cameos and the occasional word with the press? To, suddenly, release an album out into the world with barely a month’s worth of advance notice, with two music videos to appear prior to the album’s full release, and with a cover virtually irreverent to the man’s own body of work? That cover should be the stuff of debates, given the music on the record and its own presentation of a sort of in-joke, as if the input after Heroes wasn’t worth remembering, and this is exactly what was supposed to follow.

The Next Day doesn’t quite follow that blueprint, though the cover certainly influences it. You can’t say this is the return of Ziggy, or the Thin White Duke, or any other variation of Bowie you can think of. In fact, it simply is The Next Day, but what that says — either as comment on the past or a continuation of Bowie’s impressive oveur — doesn’t matter as much as media types want to have you believe. Yet, I can’t help but feel like there was a twinge of frustration with this record, a need to just release something, just to move on past the speculation about what Mr. Bowie’s been doing all this time.

After the jump, David Bowie takes us to some very familiar territories via strange routes.

I make no secret that my favorite era of Bowie is the obvious choice of the Glam-era Bowie. Even for someone who will rant and rave about the awfulness of intentionally theatrical rock music, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona (and the music that surrounded that period) is the exception that proved the rule. Part of what makes that theatrical brand of rock tolerable for me is the quality of his voice — that unique instrument that has a defined range, sings of stars, space creatures and the like, but is uniquely human in his emotional presentation. The human part of his music and voice is what makes Bowie so special for me, even when the music surrounding him so wild and bombastic.

When “Where Are We Now” debuted on Bowie’s 66th birthday, I cringed initially, fearing a mopey old man rocker record with nothing but woe for the age that has claimed yet another eternally youthful man whose made his trade in the young man’s game. But upon hearing The Next Day in full, “Where Are We Now” is the most outstanding performance of that very instrument I find so vexing I’ve heard in quite some time. It’s a beautiful song that unfolds with every repeated listen into something simply beautiful. Granted, there was the unofficial leak of Toy from some time ago, that had Bowie’s relatively still young voice in fine form, and here on The Next Day, there’s a kind of gravity dragging it down a bit, but it’s not the age that his voice disappoints. Instead, there’s a resigned weakness to the songwriting.

Those of you who love the Berlin era of Bowie may find a lot to love about the flat plainness about a lot of songs. There’s no “Wham Bam, Thank you Ma’am!” moments here — not that I was expecting them, even, honest! — but it’s disappointing that I can’t remember anything that really hooked me to any individual song once I stop listening to it. It’s a mixed bag of the most bizarre order, knowing that a lot of the music is dynamic in very subtle ways, but it’s a challenge that’s hard to get over. The title track, which leads the album, is one of the moments where it disappoints — Bowie just can’t seem to pull off the anger, or even the resigned frustration that the music commands, surrounded by sharp, angular guitars, combined with a bouncing, building rhythm that evokes a menacing mood, only to led to this bizarre comic aping what should be a rousing chorus, followed by a second verse that clips in such a bizarre fashion, it’s more comical than effective.

Yet, “Love is Lost” is one of those surprising tracks where at first listen, it’s too flat to bother with a second time, but when it comes on, it becomes a unique mystery of so much of Bowie’s strengths coming together for the first time on record in ages. It’s a moody, dark bluesy piece supported by an organ drone that borders on paranoid. And yes, his voice reaches an emotional height that makes me scratch my head, wondering where that guy was during the session for “The Next Day.”

“Where Are We Now” is not only a beautiful display of the emotional softness Bowie is capable of displaying in his voice — think “Rock and Roll Suicide” or the verses of “Life on Mars?” or “Kooks,” — but also a classic piece of Bowie using his songwriting bag of tricks. Listen, and tell if the progression doesn’t sound like classic Bowie. But the build into the outro, which introduces a marching drum to back the poetic, beautifully constructed last words:

As long as there’s sun
As long as there’s sun
As long as there’s rain
As long as there’s rain
As long as there’s fire
As long as there’s fire
As long as there’s me
As long as there’s you

It’s sublime, and just as rewarding as anything else he’s ever recorded.

“Valentine’s Day” is a tricky track, which as far as I could tell may be about school bullying, but is about straight forward a basic rock song as we’ll get on The Next Day, compared to some of the far more challenging and radically different tracks. Like “If You Can See Me,” which has an introduction copped from an old U2 song, while the verses are a kind of stacco, techno mess. “Dirty Boys” may be my second favorite song on the album for it’s slow, stuttered pace, sharp guitars added strictly for melody, and deep sax melody that make me think this was meant to be recorded by Iggy Pop for Lust for Life, while the appropriately-titled “I’d Rather Be High” offers some fun 60′s style psych-guitar melody, even while (again) Bowie’s voice doesn’t quite fit the music 100% of the time. Perhaps “Dancing Out in Space” is a little more successful in the same regard, but it’s still like a gem you have to find so late in the album — though, I’d say it’s worth it for the alien-like Doo-Wop chorus that makes the track an incredible joy (please wear headphones when you hear it, okay?). And maybe it’s just my imagination running away from me, but the verses and riff of “(You Will) Set the World On Fire” may actually be a nod to Jack White as the next great torchbearer of great rock and roll, which makes its up-tempo, straight-forward style all the more like a delightful in-joke, compared to some of the denser songs on here.

Grade: B-. This is a challenging listen, but it’s not always. There are some moments of typical Bowie brilliance, but they’re few and far between. This is great for people who love Low, but who may get turned off by the few tracks where Bowie chooses for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars style sparseness or retro-sensibilities.

I’m not going to call this a career retrospective, nor is it the next evolution in Bowie’s constantly changing career. There are some songs better developed than others, and song songs performed better than others. It’s an up-and-down ride, and one that is not evidently great on first listen, and certainly rewards repeat listens, but once you stop listening to it, there’s no immediate draw to any particular curiosity to draw you back. You practically have to force yourself to want to listen to it, but when you do, oh boy!

It’s a complex, challenging album, but nothing to say that’s an absolute disappointment either.  By the time “Heat,” the album’s closer arrives, you don’t expect this heady mix of a moody, complex track full of thick swaths of bass and acoustic guitar, swirls of spacey synthesizers, and the most down Bowie’s voice has ever sounded. It works, and it’s a fine work of his art, but like most of the tracks, there are things to love, while the flaws in the same tracks are all too glaring.

This is an uneven effort made by an uneven artist — albeit, one who mastered the concept of never meeting expectations, whether disappointing them or far exceeding them.  For some, that may mean it’s the perfect Bowie album, while for others means we can always wait for more. Count me in the later, because even when Bowie underwhelms, he stills finds a way to impress.

On average, I do not have much of a stomach for anything close to the realm of power-pop. It’s far too conservative of a sound and approach to consider having but a few songs in your collection to think of it as ‘great’ or ‘ever-lasting.’ Regardless, when it comes to local talents, bands like Katie’$ Money, which I saw last night at Pete’s Candy Store here in Brooklyn, make terrific live shows good to take your best girl out dancing.

Well, without my best girl to go, a good friend of mine and I sat and appreciated the sheer power that Katie’$ Money brought to the tiny Pete’s stage. In your face, pleasantly aggressive, and with one hell of a rhythm section (it’s always nice to have a bassist play double-duty and be both rhythmic rock and melodic-wave for your band), Katie’$ Money put on a fantastic set of dance-able rave-ups and spit-in-the-face ballads that still blazed by.

As far as I know, their next show is next Tuesday at the National Underground (where they’ve held a Tuesday night spot this month), but check them out on Facebook for future dates. Below, is their latest single, “Dutch Expectations,” but their website has even more! Dig it!

“Riders on the Storm” sounds like a lovely jaunt through a light rain shower with some potentially unsavory characters.

Much like the efforts we take to write more, exercise more, drink less, spend less, work harder, take more time for ourselves and family, etc. etc., we also make resolutions at the beginning of a new year to change our cultural consumption habits as well. Maybe you’d like to visit more art museums, or read at least three historical non-fictions by the end of the year. Maybe you also want to start listening to an artist that you never really considered listening to before. Here at Electric Comic Book, we are dedicated to helping you get the most out of your musical experience, and so, we’d like to offer this short Rock Primer on how to appreciate a classic artist that can seem daunting to jump right into. Our first subject to this new feature is the notoriously intimidating Captain Beefheart.

Whether you’ve read past essays on this site on the life, times, and death of the good captain (aka Dan Van Vliet), Captain Beefheart still remains a mystifying and daunting figure for both the myths and legends behind his personal life, but also what’s actually on the records. While many of them are worthy of acclaim after years of gestating in the critical back shelf, it seems that since his death in 2010, interest in Captain Beefheart’s music has enjoyed a slight upswing as other critics (namely, Rolling Stone, who, I’ll admit, put together a good list of songs, but not albums) pointed to his ‘best stuff’ in their  eulogies — many of which pointed to his masterpiece, 1969′s Trout Mask Replica.  However, because it does remain a haunting, challenging listen — even now, and after I published last week I would sooner turn that album on at a party before White Light/White Heat – the focus of his ‘best’ is not the intention here. This primer will be a guide for those who still look upon the Captain’s work with trepidation, and need a guide on dipping your toes in first before diving in to the rest of the Beefheart legacy. And even though many of your favorite artists will be quick to cite him as an influence, and usually point to Trout Mask Replica as the starting point (indeed it was for me), there are some who are still unable to make the plunge. Mind you, among the artists who consider Beefheart an influence include (but are not limited to): Tom Waits, Jack White, Kurt Cobain, John Frusciante, Black Francis, John Cale, Little Feat, the Clash, Johnny Rotten, Beck, the Black Keys, Beck, and Matt Groening — who got the Magic Band to reunite for the year he curated All Tomorrow’s Parties. And if you like any of them, chances are you’ll find something to love about the shambling, intentionally mad, silly darkness and intentionally ‘wrong’ music of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. And for that, we don’t start with his most well-known work, but in a some safer territory.  

After the Jump: Loving One of Rock’s Most Difficult Personas. 

Where Captain Beefheart and His (the?) Magic Band are concerned, it’s primarily in the sounds of traditional Blues rather than Rock and Roll. And even though the idea and personality of a Garage Rock band permeates throughout Beefheart’s entire legacy (he was on the re-released Nuggets collection, after all), what’s key is to realize that this is ultimately about the primitive blues at heart. It may go to psychedelic, or arty avant-garde extremes at times, but the Magic Band is ultimately about the blues, mostly of the Delta tradition. With that frame of reference in mind, it’s best to approach Trout Mask Replica as a kind of epicenter that you have to work your way up to, and instead find some of the more popular albums that work up to or follow that masterpiece, depending upon your preferences. If you’re more psychedelic/punk minded, it would help to start with Beefheart’s very first album, Safe as Milk. Released in 1967, and based on the relative success of Beefheart’s cover of Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy,” (Hey! that, and their B-Side, “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’?” earned them a spot on Dick Clark’s ‘Where the Action Is!‘), Safe as Milk is blues at it’s weirdest possible point. Known for tracks like “Electricity,” that mix electric blues and Beefheart’s brand of desert folk (and dare I say it, a vague sense of Prog Rock to come), Safe as Milk is easily the most successfully commercial of the Magic Band’s efforts. Beyond trademark tracks like “Electricity,” there’s also the brilliant R&B of “I’m Glad,” the sarcastic electrified-and-fuzzy folk of “Dropout Boogie,” and the pure boogie-blues (with some genre-parodying lyrics) in the album’s opener, “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do.” Though, it’s hard to say there was ever a finer moment for psych rock than “Zig Zag Wanderer,” in which Ry Cooder provides all the right color for a psych-guitar freak out, as does Jerry Handley’s bass stays right in your face for a brilliant breakdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayUqmladJuo

It merely hints at the avant-garde qualities that would mark the band as outsiders too weird for the hippie set, yet it is not as atonal and arrhythmic as Beefheart’s later efforts — though the grandeur of album closer “Autumn’s Child” certainly does play up that angle simply to fit in for the intensely stoned hippie set. And for the earliest incarnation of the Magic Band (plus Ry Cooder), it shows how tightly they could play together, both as a blues band as a band capable of recreating Beefheart’s crazed vision of the genre.

Yet, Safe as Milk is marred for it’s extremely muddy production qualities. It’s extraordinarily bass heavy, and the mix bag of genres, without Beefheart’s more demanding touches, can make the album come off as simply a weird collection of blues-rock tunes regardless of his surrealist lyrics. For this reason, it may be worth while to first dive into Clear Spot or Spotlight Kid first. Both released in 1972, though with two different rosters of the Magic Band, these would be the most successful-and-moderately-commercial albums released by Beefheart since Trout Mask Replica  and before his efforts in the 80′s. Nowadays, you can find both albums re-released separately on 180-gram vinyl, or sold together on a single CD set. What unites them, beyond the Blues and the record label is that both are slower to reveal their madness, fit to incorporate all of Beefheart’s lyrical ideas. On Spotlight Kid, the surrealism is split between his imagist fantasies and screeds that demand greater attention to environmentalism. Spotlight Kid standouts include the Tom Waits-like “I’m Gonna Booglaraize You Baby” and “Blabber n’ Smoke,” which features the marimba and such political screeds as “clean up the air / and treat the ahn-nee-mals fair!” on top of a consistent, swaying bass and guitar combo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLdRh7qdi_g

Still, both Beefheart and the members of the Magic Band were disappointed with what Spotlight Kid came to represent — Beefheart blaming the band for its’ failures, the band blaming Beefheart for trying to do something ‘commercial.’ After firing long-time collaborator, John “Drumbo” French, he hired Ed Marimba to play alongside the rest of the classic Magic Band line-up, Clear Spot has the clean production of Ted Templeton (who made terrific records with Van Morrison and the Doobie Brothers, among others) to its credit. Many critics wonder why the album was not as successful as its production values demanded it to be; with Beefheart reigning in a lot of his more experimental qualities, and even writing a couple of ballads, Clear Spot should have been a contender to break a top-100 record spot at the very least. Chances are, you’ve probably heard some of the covers (or name-dropped song titles) that come from this album, including “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles,” “My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains,” or “Big-Eyed Beans from Venus.” But beyond that, I consider Clear Spot to be a fine starting point because it’s the most commercial since Safe as Milk — if only for the incorporation of a kind of white-boy funk on tracks like “Sun Zoom Spark,” “Crazy Little Thing,” or like the aforementioned “My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains” — which really should be considered among one of the finer love songs written in the early 70′s, but I understand why it’s not. But this album is chock full of a wide variety of the kinds of music Captain Beefheart could comfortably take on stylistically, with only his own dedication to surrealism blocking him from true success then. Nowadays, the album sounds as fresh, revealing, personal (insofar as that he was willing to write ballads that seem based on true love poetry), and relevant as it ever could, and perhaps as it was intended. If there were a perfect combo to introduce Captain Beefheart, it would be Safe as Milk and Clear Spot before (but not without considering) Spotlight Kid.

After you’ve introduced yourself to the fringe elements of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, then comes the difficult time of becoming better familiar with Beefheart at his most unhinged, and his truest self. If you took in all three of the albums above and took in Safe as Milk as best, then it’s time to dive deep into the double album of Trout Mask Replica. Anything I could say about that album would only be redundant, as it is a masterpiece of exploration and fusion, a deeper, yet more anarchic sound on how rock and roll can cross over in the least accessible ways; and yet, certain tracks will surprise. In general, people tend to look at the album as a whole as a statement of uncompromising rock n’roll at the height of 60′s psychedelic madness. Groups like the Velvet Underground or took psychedelic to mean icy detachment and debauchery to a point of cartoonishness — or how British bands of the era instead indulged in pastoral poetry like modern day Wordsworths — these were bands that were wet with primitive details. There’s a kind of dryness to Captain Beefheart’s music that’s ingrained from his origin and environmental preference for the desert. Where Captain Beefheart does ‘color,’ he does it in repeating his stranger, more irritating ideas, and does so until you like it. As such, the few tracks that stand out from the overall masterpiece are the ones were the experiment is obvious — “Moonlight On Vermont” is the most obvious example, mostly in thanks to the work of the Magic Band. Despite the seemingly unattached vocal from Beefheart that sounds like it was added at the last second in haste, the band’s abstract togetherness — the lone key change in what may be a bridge, Zoot Horn Rollo’s fantastic slide work that keeps it together in another room while John “Drumbo” French does his best to add color with his aggressive, strictly-decorative drumming style. “China Pig” is the lone example of a pure blues that Captain Beefheart ever produced — almost shocking, considering the obvious adoration of the genre and its history, but a radical twist in terms of the Captain’s canon. But if ever there should be a testament to the Magic Band as being among the greatest garage bands of all time, it would be Trout Mask Replica closer, “Veteran’s Day Poppy.” Though it starts as disjointed as anything else on the record, there’s a more cohesive sense of the madness — as if the album were building up just to get to this final shot of dark, absurd madness. It’s the lone track besides “China Pig” where Beefheart’s lyrics line up with the rhythm to the song, and it’s the lone track where there’s a cohesive rhythm section that purely rocks out until the extended, melodically jagged jam at the end that is still chock full of color.

And yet, if you’re not willing to jump right in to the Captain’s masterpiece quite yet (and you should),  it doesn’t hurt to visit his work in the late 70′s and early 80′s first. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is a return to form after the slower paced and more commercial efforts of Unconditionally Guaranteed and Moonbeams and Bluejeans.  Doc at the Radar Station, meanwhile, is arguably the closest to the ideals of Trout Mask Replica as he could possibly get at the time without the original Magic Band behind him (though, Drumbo French was among the personnel). Anyone with a relative interest in Zappa would appreciate the colorful approach of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), which is also less dependent on the Captain’s rhythmic experiments and jagged melodies. Doc at the Radar Station, meanwhile, boasts some impressive reactionary tracks to the punk movement that the Captain largely ignored (yet obviously influenced). You only have to look at the stuttering, screaming, and irresistible fun, performance of “Ashtray Heart” (later covered by the White Stripes) to realize this — but tracks like “Sue Egypt” certainly have that appeal as well, and perhaps an indication that the Talking Heads were Beefheart’s clue into what ‘punk’ was truly all about, as it’s one of the few times where Beefheart’s vocal is front-and-center, no matter where it goes — and it goes between his trademark Howlin’ Wolf growl and his deep Shamanistic whisper. But perhaps most surprising is how “Sue Egypt” seems to incorporate hip-hop’s sampling technique to bring in an odd, seemingly backwards flute part that sounds patched in from another source.  But where it comes to Doc being more akin to Trout Mask Replica, look no further than ”Brickbats” — a disjointed, challenging track that sports an aggressive sax melody throughout.

As for Beefheart’s final record, Ice Cream for Crow, is a magnificent attempt at what may as well would have been his final statement as an artist, as it does a fine mix of his past while making a present and (hinting at) a future simultaneously.  Beefheart’s production finally is as colorful as his lyrics, but retains the cleanliness of Doc at the Radar Station. Arguably his brightest sounding record, Ice Cream for Crow is also the most fun of all of Beefheart’s records. For all of the absurd, surrealist imagery to be found in his lyrics and reflected in the angular jags and ferocious percussion of his output since the beginning, Ice Cream for Crow perfectly mixes the commercial attempts of Unconditionally Guaranteed and Moonbeams and Bluejeans (more on those in a second). With Ice Cream for Crow, Beefheart finally finds that sweet spot between his vision of rock and roll as a personal, primitive exercise, and the bright color that makes for great pop music — the kind of music he achieved with Safe as Milk, but has forgotten since then, chasing a greater art than just making something commercial, or intentionally trying to make his work for a cult following that inevitably followed. If anything can be said for Ice Cream for Crow as a record in and of itself, it is a perfect encapsulation of what Beefheart would have been doing if he weren’t moving on from such a deep, beloved legacy as Trout Mask Replica demanded: it’s uncompromising blues-rock, mixed with skewed takes on punk, funk, and where blues-rock went without him. Look no further than “Semi-Multicolored Caucasian” as an example of his excellent composing skills, and perhaps a parody of himself as he was able to record a song that wasn’t remarkably aggressive or uncompromising in any way, yet still has the hallmarks of his style in structure.

Ultimately, the only places you shouldn’t start with would be the blatent attempts at making something commercial. Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeams lack the spark that make Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band not only engaging on an intellectual level, but they’re also stripped of the uncompromising fun that makes a Beefheart record, even with the surreal nightmarish darkness that his lyrics are capable of reaching. However, if there were one album preferred over the other, Bluejeans and Moonbeams at least enjoys a kind of ironic love, as the one record that Beefheart later dismissed so vehemently, encouraging listeners to return it for a refund, or a free live concert in their living rooms as an apology to make up for their wasted money and time. But considering the kind of slowed-down, unchallenging dreck that makes Unconditionally Guaranteed, I can still appreciate some of the weirder elements of Beefheart’s soft-rock approach on Bluejeans and Moonbeams, mostly for his lyrical content being weird even for that realm. “Party of Special Things to Do” may be his weakest, but still popular song, it still enjoys the capable performance of studio musicians taking the Captain’s directions into a funkier place than he previously imagined — through, the White Stripes version is maybe slightly closer to what Beefheart would have wanted.

Though, I’m still on the fence about “Captain’s Holiday,” being a fine example of his skill as a harmonica player, but also what may as well have been the Eagles recording something on an acid trip. But considering the incredibly dense work of Captain Beefheart, that’s damn near a compliment.

And if you still aren’t into Trout Mask Replica, at least watch this documentary, okay!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBa8bS_vZkM

Without any kind of expectations, without anything in my slate of things-to-do, my roommate and co-writer of a potential comedy troupe/series has fostered upon me a Very Lou Reed Kinda Christmas this year. Er. . . Hanukkah, in my case.

After scouring the record shops that he and I regularly frequent, he bought a copy of White Light/White Heat behind my back, and offered it to me on the fifth night of Hanukkah.  Indeed, it is missing from my collection, but it’s one I did not think I would so readily miss. I bought the album on CD, and short of one awkward car-ride listen and several attempts to reconcile the album’s extremely polarizing nature (both within itself and in criticism of the Velvet Underground’s avant-garde improvisation and their lyrical content), I haven’t really had the chance sit down with it and judge it for what it is: The 293rd entry on Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 list of the ‘greatest albums ever made.’ For those of you playing at home, that means that (in the immediate sense), the MC5′s Kick Out the Jams is slightly worse than White Light/White Heat, which is marginally better than Bob Dylan and the Band releasing The Basement Tapes. But hey, it’s Rolling Stone, so take what you will, with many grains of salt.

After the Jump: A good reason why everyone should try heroin at least once, okay? Okay? Here we go. 

Balloons: The apex of ironic cool.

As the A.V. Club’s Jason Heller noted, White Light/White Heat is “utterly uncompromising,” and there is no other description necessary for this album. Even at almost 45 years since its release, it is a record that demands attention. Perhaps not for attention to its innovative nature, but for being one of the earliest records for being so willing to push any and all kinds of buttons. Sure, its chock full of flat out great rock and roll, as well as some soothing element of folk-psych that doesn’t ruffle the feathers too harshly, but White Light/White Heat is still radical to listen to, even in 2012 — this year of supposed enlightenment and advancement over the tragically boring music of 2011. But let’s not talk about politics, friends. What I really mean is that it’s not really as challenging as its reputation purports it. In fact, it’s far more expansive than its reputation wants to offer, delivered tautly over 40 minutes and only six tracks.

Where The Velvet Underground & Nico was a somewhat forced spectacle of Andy Warhol’s prowess as a producer of the fine arts alongside some borderline avant-garde garage rockers, it was still a record of these brave musicians who took on New York City’s art scene with gusto and detached-but-present sense of debauchery.  White Light/White Heat is truly the first album by the Velvet Underground, going beyond Warhol’s influence and the presence of Nico, but also being a record of such extreme defiance to the very idea of “mainstream music,” that it remains such a challenging listen regardless of its influence.

Forget for a moment, if you will, that old chestnut that Velvet Underground & Nico helped launch a thousand bands in its wake, despite its relative lack of mainstream success. And, forgive that Nico was a character shoe-horned into the Velvet Underground’s initial success — and really, for better or worse depending upon your perception of quality experimental rock. White Light/White Heat exists as a document of a band capable of these wild, jazz-like improvisations, but keeping in mind the equally wild and erratic qualities that could only come forth through a live rock show. The record, for all intents and purposes, is a live album made within the confines of a studio and the time allotted to let someone like Lou Reed scream out the lyrics of “Sister Ray” — much of the album was done in single takes, after all. More than uncompromising, it is a record that reveals a kind of truth about being young and living in New York City in the late ’60s, and being from the kind of ‘people are people’ gospel of the folk scene at the time. But it’s a standpoint that is exaggerated by its aggressively avant-garde sound. It doesn’t have the kind of commercial appeal that Basic Blues Magoos would have had at the some moment,  and yet, for whatever reason, it is considered closer to rock ‘n’ roll canon than that record, despite the Blues Magoos (or any band of 60′s New York) being infinitely more accessible than this troubling, disturbing, uneven, under-produced, miserable record could ever be, even when comparing it to similarly “uncompromising” records of the era. Indeed, I would sooner play Trout Mask Replica – a record chock full of disturbing surrealist lyricism, irrational rhythm, and uncontrollable stray melodies –  at a party with my closest friends than I would White Light/White Heat. And, damn me, this comes down entirely to a matter of how fuckin’ long it is!

Opening with a tribute to amphetamine,  and the album’s title-track,  is a misleading song. It is a reckless, near-ramshackle, rock n’roll basics tune that is far more inviting than the Velvet Underground’s last opening track, “Sunday Morning.” Beyond the matters of being  ’light’ or lacking the control that “Sunday Morning” does, it lays the basic blueprint for what the Velvet Underground is about, being the very concept of recreation in its extremes. Throughout White Light/White Heat in particular, there are no moments that simply so-so. Though many critics and fans alike consider “Here She Comes” as the lone moment of sane pop performance on the album, “White Light/White Heat” comes from a similar starting point: this is pop music, but it is done so that’s fun because it’s reckless, done as a record of not just a song, but of a moment. This is what the band is doing in this studio, and that we’ve done before on stage, but now we’re committing it. Also, we’re talking about drugs. So there’s that. Deal with it.

There is nothing revelatory about the Velvet Underground’s work as ‘art-rock.’ There are, maybe, ten songs of their entire catalog that could be considered legit ‘art-rock,’ and simply as a matter of generosity, because even their stabs at being ‘avant-garde,’ ultimately consider the inevitable marriage of jazz improvisation to rock ‘n’ roll abrasiveness, with both ideas having an invested knowledge in doing things that are ‘incorrect.’ I am not saying that the Velvet Underground were frauds that got lucky — that’s a heresy I’m not willing to take up. But when it comes to a this album’s more extreme experiments, being “The Gift” and “Sister Ray,” they still manage to display a fine mix of pop songcraft and rock’s basic structures. “The Gift,” in particular, being an improvised, bass-and-fuzz heavy jam while John Cale reads a short story Reed wrote in his college days, still manages to land at a proper cadence, even while what may be the most depressing story every written goes on in your stereo’s left channel. (It must be said: “The Gift” is perfect college writing — guaranteed he got an ‘A-’ on that from his writing prof, I’m sure.) “Lady Godiva’s Operation” works in a similar fashion, but with more organization and an actual melody to be sung — primarily by Cale again with some rejoinders by Reed — but isn’t necessarily too pushing beyond that, besides Cale resorting to imitating operation tools that come off more comical than threatening or serious.

It may be that “Here She Comes Now” is about Lou Reed’s guitar. And I like that theory, based entirely on Reed’s tendency to shout ‘Here she comes now!’ before a solo during their live sets at the time, because it would not only be the lone moment on the album that is straightforward pop, but the most innocent of all the songs. Yet, leave it to the audience that has built up the Velvet Underground’s reputation to think that it’s something much more sinister, but that just may be what they were going for. But, of course, it’s a song from a band whose reputation outweighs whatever realities they were going for, so it’s kind of telling that this was the lone VU song Nirvana covered, or that it’s been sampled by a French ambient-pop artist (below).

“I Heard Her Call My Name” was also done in a take trying to capitalize on the spirit of their live shows. This is a track unfairly considered difficult because of its atonal qualities (the over-distorted guitar solos) and Lou Reed’s frantic, speedy recitation of the lyrics. But rarely do the Velvet Underground’s rhythmic  section get any credit for keeping it all sane: Maureen Tucker is a fantastic, time-keeper-style drummer, free of the flashy fills that so many believe to be key to being even a ‘good’ drummer. Instead, her insistent, constant beat-keeping actually manages to reign in on the insanity of the wild soloing that captures some of the true heart at the era’s best psych bands. In the song’s intro, it’s not hard to think of the uncontrollable noise as being a cousin to something like the Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of the Mind” — with the insistent beat behind it being similarly propulsive. But by the second verse, Reed shouts out hey-eys and extends his phrases the way any other Little Richard-worshiping teenager might try to ape in the comfort of their own bedroom mirrors. Even with a finish that’s based in in Reed’s endless streaks of stabs at guitar friction and metallic mistakes, it ends in a far more organized place than where it began — the extended feedback noise ending in a fade out done in the studio, comfortably enough to say ‘this is where it should have ended.’

But then, what to make of the epic, legendary tale of unending debauchery of “Sister Ray?” Perhaps more than any other song, this is the one Velvet Underground tale lurid enough to give the bands its reputation to casual fans and casual critics alike for being obsessed strictly with morbid, disturbing, socially unacceptable topics. At a seemingly interminable length of 17:25, the song lets the Velvets stretch out their noise-jazz experiments to the max, with John Cale switching from his traditional bass/cello position to an electric organ. In some moments, he can find the sweetest brief line of melody to make it seem like the song could be reigned in around him — and with two competing, mistake-embracing guitars from Reed and Morrison, it’s the only other sound besides the cloudy, hazy mess of the guitars, Tucker’s snare beat, and Lou Reed’s shouted and slurred lyrics.

Much like the music’s free-improvisational style, the length of “Sister Ray” is what allows Reed to cram everything about his lyrical interests at once. It’s subtle and even satirical (“Shoots him dead on the floor / Oh don’t you know you shouldn’t do that / don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet?”), to the outright filthy and immature (the often repeated lyric, “suckin’ on a ding-dong.”) Of course, you could piece it all together, and hope that you’re hip enough to pick up on the lingo to know what a ‘main line’ is.

But unlike most bands of this ilk, there is no rallying point other than to embrace the noise and fracture. Rather than come to a focal point like most jams, it simply ends. Sure, there’s a point where it could have collected itself into a great, albeit, twisted pop song, but it simply dies. It may have been part of the point — the alternative zeitgeist of the times to the alternative hippie culture and uptight mainstream — but that’s a point made time and time again. Listening to this record umpteen times through the past two weeks has revealed more of the Velvet Underground’s commonground with the mainstream. It’s easy to focus on how they changed music and call it revolutionary, but it’s even more difficult to get anyone to admit that part of being so wildly different is to find the ins with the In-Crowd, and working to be so subversive. Fanboys and fangirls out there are quick to celebrate the differences that are legendary — and indeed they are — but what’s at the heart of White Light/White Heat are a collection of fragments of all the popular records of the bands’ peers in 1968. It’s a little garage, it’s a little traditional rock and roll, it’s psychedelic, it’s free-form jazz. It’s noisy, it’s folky, it’s got stories just as much as it does catchy choruses. It’s a constructed pop-album as much as it’s also a long jam on the second side of your favorite band’s live album. It’s an album that takes everything great about rock and roll’s own ceaseless exploration of co-opting other music and genres, and adds the sense of uncertainly and confusion to rock music’s built-in confidence and swagger. White Light/White Heat is a record whose reputation is greater than the simple argument of being rock and its most primitive.

Cut past the noise, and what you have is something for everyone.

Every once in a while, I get on these kicks for the Talking Heads. I was never a huge fan growing up, and I still prefer the primitive-but-arty qualities of their CBGB brethren, Television. But, unfortunately, Television’s relative inaccessibility compared to Talking Heads’ innate funkiness leaves me wanting more bootlegs than I’m able to find. There’s some out there, but not as many as I would hope — nothing like The Blow-Up or Live at the Old Waldorf, but those are also official. Oh well.

Still, hearing a bootleg from that era of any of the CBGB bands is something special to behold, and this one thus far has been my favorite. Blog-friend Sarah sent it over to me this morning, and it has vastly improved my mood despite being sick.

At this show, the Talking Heads seem to be embracing a little more of the wilder aspects of ‘punk,’ sounding far more aggressive than usual, while David Byrne is deeper into his nervous stage persona. He growls through his teeth, shakes, and sweats throughout the show, while the rest of the band match his fervor with intense attack and release. There’s tension in this show, and gives me reason to enjoy Talking Heads a little bit more.

Check it out over at Aquarium Drunkard.

“This could be the day that we push through / the day that all our dreams come through / For me, turning at the end just to look.”

When you think of the title, and look at the album cover of Tame Impala’s second album, Lonerism, you build an assumption that this is a record that’s going to come across with certain attachments the whole ‘us and them’ mystique that a lot of prog and psych records peddle either so cheaply, or make it a hallmark of the genre. You’re not listening or experiencing a proper psychedelic album unless you’re turned on to what we’re talking about. The whole ‘are you experienced?’ trip, but combined with the kind of pastoral folk sentiment that makes me loathe to listen to stuff that concentrates on sounding like the product of a fairly entrepreneurial communal farm. Lonerism could have been that simple-as-fucking hell album, and in many ways, it is. But that’s also because Kevin Parker, the band’s chief architect for these walls of sound, gets it better than any one else who tries their hand at neo-psych these days. And while many will harp on trying to pick out the influences one by one (a fun game on any rainy day for those of us who care about the trivia), it’s more important to point out that he crafts this stuff like an old master, but still takes the time to get the record to sound painfully personal, and that is a task that goes beyond the intimacy of good lyrics.

After the Jump, Tame Impala shows that there’s not so much an ‘us’ and ‘them.’

There’s a good chance you’ll get two different feelings from this album, depending upon how you listen. On speakers, where people can listen with you, the bright, airy qualities offer up a fairly passive but effective expression of altered perceptions and states: Parker’s voice is a fair John Lennon-like moan that works best singing long extended melodic phrases and echoed against compressed keyboards that wheeze and whine through out the album. You could feel like there’s so much air to explore, and stare in wonder.

On headphones, all that air to discover and explore around in, is oppressive. There’s way too much out there to even begin to think of where to start, and you get caught in an odd tension between the microcosm in your head, and the whole universe that happens to feature that microcosm. In listening on headphones, you can enjoy the bass melodies that propel you slowly, but joyfully, through these dense fields of keyboards, and the vocals are less a part of this grand picture, but something you hear from two rooms away that happens to come in sync with this music.

Most of the tracks lock into each other, with similar colors and movements that convey that this is indeed an album experience, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking away any of the tracks and still having the same positive experience. “Be Above It,” the opening track, welcomes you with that phrase, whispered repeated as a droning bass beneath explosive swatches of keyboards and a propulsive drum beat that may as well also be a sample rather than the product of human hands. It’d be a great track to run to during a sunrise on Mars. That’s the kind of imagery that much of the album inspires. Many of the moments on the a bum convey that sort of silly-but-serious spaciness that makes it fun to read Kurt Vonnegut.

“Endors Toi” is a mostly instrumental track that shows off some great atmospheric guitar work (and there’s little guitar to be heard behind all the synths and the drums like that bash and propel like Keith Moon taking it easy for once). “Apocalypse Dreams,” the third song and the first to sound like a potential single captures a similarly relentless drum, even as the song slows and speeds between every verse and chorus, which is welcomes by a gorgeous melodic bass run that that moves with tension and yearning against the freeing, bright keys.

But there is a single, and it’s one hell of a single if you ask me — the lumbering, strictly dark “Elephant.” Scaling back on the keyboards and instant-ambient qualities that come with such dense walls of sound, it’s the one song where the pounding drums, steady and ominous bass, and a fuzz boxed guitar eventually lead the way back to those celestial keyboards, while Parker sings perhaps his most intentionally confusing lyrics about a character who has power and doesn’t realize he’s just as fragile and susceptible to the same laws of the universe as the rest of us. Finishing up with a short drum fill that borders on a solo, one last chorus of ‘yeah’ ends this bizarre tale, and we move back to that big oppressive air, this time with more shredding guitar work, still embedded somewhere in these washes of keys in the short coda, “She Just Won’t Believe Me.”

By the album’s end, Parker throws in what sounds like home recordings of personal conversations, dinner parties and a trip to the beach beneath all of this sound, as if the atmospherics weren’t enough to impress you. Instead, it reinforces all this wondrous exploration, as one of the voices cuts through, “I’ve been thinking about everything.” And clearly, it’s all too much to end on, as the album ends wraps up in “Sun’s Coming Up,” a mournful waltz played only on a piano mixed down while Parker sings of a man playing guitar while his father dies of cancer, memories long since past. But even then, that’s not the final note: that trip to the beach plays beneathe a twangy, echoing guitar that drives the point home, that it’s all slipped away, and what you have is what you have, and you’re not sure what to do with it, or if it’s even useful to you going forward.

GRADE: A. If I could play the ‘sounds like’ influences name game for a second, forgetting about where certain riffs or lyrics may have been lifted, but I will say that Lonerism is a perfect mirror of Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of  Secrets. In these two albums, elements of light combine and contrast with dark in these expansive fields of atmospheric sound. There’s very few riffs or motifs to hang onto or hum, but that’s because this is artful side of rock we’re talking about. The difference between the two albums, however, is that Saucerful plays as a record of produced by a band experimenting for the sake of their own talents and pushing the limits of what is acceptable for the consumer’s ears. But Tame Impala don’t have that responsibility to win you over with being weird or pushing your taste toward the avant-garde. Not that it should drive the focus of the work anyway, but Lonerism lets it work for the sake of including you in this mindspace that’s all Parker’s creation — one that you’re more than welcome to use for your own experience.

As with any Pavement live performance, the best part is where Malkmus doesn’t give any fucks.

But knowing that this was recorded just before the Tibetan Freedom concert, I can’t help but think that Bob Nostanovich’s scat singing after the second verse is kind of a dig at the Beastie Boys.