As you’ve noticed, we haven’t been giving SWR its due lately.  A short exchange of emails revealed no one has the time to make the writing what it ought to be.

We heartily thank everyone who read, commented, linked, and most importantly, listened over the years.

You may see us in the future when the Internet is obsolete and blogs are as outmoded as the telegraph.

Until then,

Jordy, Glenn, Adam, Phil, and Jeff

Cat Power: Moon Pix (1998)

Phil: A handful of winters ago I met up with an old roommate of mine at a Belgian beer bar for happy hour that happened to have half-off Belgian draughts from 4:30 to 6:30. So there we were, in the glow of yellow lights and green carpet, talking about those kids we hadn’t seen in forever, about ex-girlfriends and abandoned buildings and photographs, just getting pretty damn drunk. So I walk out of the bar, and stumble the few blocks to the bus station, trying to make sure I don’t miss the 500 because it’s pretty damn cold and I get to the bus stop and of course I miss the bus because I’ve been drinking and have completely lost track of time so I put on my headphones not remembering which damn album I left in my walkman and

there it was. I wrote about it then:

She starts and it’s backwards, American Flag coming in with a reversed drum kit, and the rest of the record is falling backwards as the world moves under you; the drums are off on pretty much every song they’re played and the jangles of the clean guitars cut through the fog while still adding to it.

And that backwards drum kit is actually sampled from The Beastie boys’ “Paul Revere,” but it’s slowed down enough to make it initially fresh and exciting.

Adam: I’ve written about my undying love for Cat Power on these pages before, so it might come as a surprise to some that I find Moon Pix slightly disappointing.  It was the third or fourth album of hers I acquired, and I bought it after hearing all over the place that it was her best.  My initial reaction to “American Flag” was disappointment.  I generally don’t like nebulous music that doesn’t seem to go anyhwhere, and that’s what I hear in “American Flag” and most of the rest of the first half of this album.

Where things really kick in for me is “Colors and the Kids.”  It’s the first song that holds my attention all the way through, despite it being, at six-and-a-half minutes, the longest song on the album.  I don’t know if it’s the simple piano melody or her sultry voice.  Her voice always gets me, but in this case it might be the combination of the piano and her voice.

Following “Colors and the Kids” is another standout, “Cross Bones Style.”  Far and away the most uptempo song on the record, it has a beat that is almost danceable.  The song is apparently about the injustices in the diamond industry, but I just like the general morbid tone of the lyrics coupled with the upbeat backing track.  “Say” and the original version of “Metal Heart” (the self-cover on Jukebox is superior, however) also stand out in my mind amidst the nebulous sound that dominates the album.

Phil: I’m not going to say this album is any better than her other albums, but for me, it’s the one I connect with most, the one that goes straight to my heart-ears. The nebulosity of the first half of the record reminds me of this space where you have feelings that you can’t quite articulate but then you have some words but those words are more signposts than anything, textures and sentiments and the feeling you have when you know what you want to say but haven’t found the words to say it yet.

It’s probably also because Jim White and Mick Turner (of Dirty Three) are her band for this record that I love it so much. Dirty Three is nebulous enough as it is, and the White/Turner side project (Tren Brothers) is even more so, making sense that this album, too would be so vague and ethereal. But Chan Marshall does such a nice job of making sure her songs come through. “Big Monster Lover/Hangerpusherover.” I don’t know.

Adam: I came up with a theory about this album while listening to it this morning on my way to work.  Its quality increases exponentially.  Each song is a little better than the one before it, and once you get to the two songs I mentioned above, they’re markedly better than the ones before them.  The final track, “Peking Saint,” is kind of a comedown.  It’s like the “Her Majesty” of this album.

With regards to “Back of Your Head,” I love the way she delivers the line “Couldn’t park that fuckin’ car.”  It just pops out of the arrangement and makes you pay attention to what she’s saying.

I like her next album of original songs, You Are Free more than Moon Pix, probably for the same reason you like Moon Pix, Phil:  the backing musicians.  You Are Free features Dave Grohl on drums and Eddie Vedder sings back up on a couple songs.  It also features Bad Seed/Dirty Three member Warren Ellis on a couple tracks.

Phil: Good points there, Adam. I’m going to go ahead and add “Say” because it may be one of the most direct songs about communication I’ve ever heard and “Metal Heart,” mostly because I think it’s a great song regardless of the performer. David Bazan did a really nice version on his 2004 tour EP.

4 Essential Tracks

“Colors and the Kids”

“Cross Bones Style”

“Say”

“Metal Heart”

Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. (1972)

Jordy: The history of the writing, recording, and mixing of this album is so convoluted as to render it fairly moot to the modern listener.  When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter one fig who was having tax, drug, or lady trouble or who wasn’t getting along with whom or who was bored with rock and roll.  What matters on Exile on Main St. are the songs and there are a lot of them here so let’s get to it.

Glenn: Songs is right, Jordy, and this record has the best of them. When I think Stones, I think nasty rockers, I think bluesy stompers, I think country-swing ballads, and I think soulful midtempo gospel jams. Exile has the Stones’ best attempts at each. I can’t think of a better Delta blues rip than this version of “Stop Breakin’ Down.” “Rocks Off” and “Rip This Joint” rock harder and nastier and murkier than anything else in the catalog. The second side, which might be my favorite, contains their absolute best countryish work: “Sweet Virgina,” “Torn & Frayed,” “Sweet Black Angel,” then topped off with the burned-out gospel yearning of “Loving Cup.” And my favorite “experimental” Stones cut is here, too: the murky-as-hell “I Just Want To See His Face,” which might actually be my fave tune on the record.

You know, we could probably just spend this review listing song titles and saying, “Yeah. Hell yeah.” When it comes down to picking four essential cuts, however, it’s going to be tough. Do we interpret Exile on Main St. as a scuzz-rock classic, a country-soul record, a gospel-rock record, a swampy bit o’ darkness a la Neil Young’s TtN? Or do we choose the best of each style represented here and then tell our readers to go listen to the damn thing, preferably at high volume and preferably with a glass of something strong in hand?

Jordy: True, Glenn.  Naming essential tracks here will be tough as Exile has been justifiably panned (including by some Stones themselves) for lacking hits.  It’s disparate to be sure.  But I would compare it to Pavement’s Wowee Zowee: long, inconsistent, exploratory, and really interesting.

But if I must bite the bullet, I’ll echo Glenn’s praise for the side two country tunes.  ”Sweet Virginia” and “Torn and Frayed” show how the best of Gram Parsons rubbed off on Keith.  ”Sweet Virginia” is braced by a respectable country shuffle and, despite what Mick might say, I really like how his voice is muddied in the mix.  ”Torn and Frayed” is exactly how I think rock harmonies ought to sound: “Doctor prescriiiibes, drug store supliiiiies!  Whoooo’s gonna help ‘im to fix it!”

I’ll also plug “Shine a Light” if only for the Billy Preston piano and these skuzziest (to borrow a term) of rock lyrics:

“Well, you’re drunk in the alley, baby

With your clothes all torn

And your late night friends

Leave you in the cold, grey dawn”

Nice.

Check out the reissue of Exile in about 14 different formats (including [excited squeal] vinyl!)

Glenn: I want to point to Lester Bangs’s excellent review of this record, available as part of a Google Book. Here’s a tasty snippet:

Exile is dense enough to be compulsive: hard to hear, at first, the precision and fury behind the murk ensure that you’ll come back, hearing more with each playing. What you hear sooner or later is two thing: an intuition for nonstop getdown…and a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a dazed frenzy. If, as they assert, they’re soul survivors, they certainly know what you can lose by surviving….Exile is about casualties, and parting in the face of them.

But the best part of this review is that though Lester makes the case that Exile is the most personal Stones record — the one that makes you feel you know the band personally — it also points out that Stones followed it by ascending into impersonal, larger-than-thou rock royalty, with a limited tour and skyhigh ticket prices. In other words, the Stones as we know them today.

That, finally, is I think the appeal of Exile. It shows the Stones not as out-of-tune ravers ala ’64-’66, not as Between the Buttons fey wizards, not as Salt of the Earth (blech, could that be the worst Stones song ever?) blues-rockers, but as the wizened old party animals, quick with with a riff or a “Ha!” or a drum fill, ready to boogie, with some sort of resigned calm behind it all — the Stones of today. And while the Stones of today sicken me because they represent all the corporate bullshit that rock has become ever since, say, 1957, on Exile they exhilarate.

Adam: I’m not really sure what to say about this album.  I’ve owned it for several years, but never have listened to it all that much.  I always felt it was too long and took too much effort to really get into it.  Maybe I subconsciously don’t like that it doesn’t contain any “hits.”  I find Beggar’s Banquet and Sticky Fingers to be much more palatable for some reason.  That’s not to say that Exile is a bad album.  That’s not the case at all.  There are, as Jordy and Glenn have attested to, some really great songs on this album.  I remembered liking “Sweet Virginia” after only hearing it once or twice, and I really like Keith’s vocals on “Happy.”

Do I dare make the comparison between Exile and The Beatles?  Both are over-long double albums that transcend genres.  But I don’t have the same complaint about The Beatles that I have about Exile. I don’t find The Beatles to be a difficult listen at all.  Probably because I just skip over all of the bad or boring songs…maybe that’s what I should do with Exile. It surely deserves more attention on my part.

Phil: I grew up in a musically sheltered environment and therefore came to music that other people have known for years later in life, and when I was listening to Paul Simon and music by/for emos, I couldn’t stand the Stones. It is only just now that I am beginning to understand my mistake.

Last summer was a big one for me as far as expanding my musical palette: I got way into blues and jazz, and the summer before I bought all the Buck Owens records I could find, so I think my musical nerves had been prepared to finally give the Stones a shot. And the Stones are, to my thinking, the quintessential blues/rock crossover band. “Shake Your Hips” is  just a blues song, plain and simple.  Which is probably why I like it.

Exile is a big sprawling thing, but I hesitate to call it a mess; there is a coherent, underlying sensibility to the record even if it hops over a few stylistic lines (the songs come from genres and styles similar enough to remain consistent). The feeling of the record comes through, just as Glenn says: these guys are good at what they know how to do and this is these guys doing a damn fine job.

But the most exciting part of the album for me is “I Just Want To See His Face.” It sounds like a camp revival meeting at the beginning, all rhythm and choir and Mick Jagger sounding like a preacher under the influence of some un/holy spirit. This is music that excites me. It’s like the Doors, but not as rambling and incoherent, or like late-1980s U2 experimentation but more clear-headed. Even if you can’t understand Jagger at first, the music seems like a firm statement and, at 2:53, a concise one as well. (AA Bondy, recently of Fat Possum records, interpolates this song into a longer thought process on his American Hearts LP, which is worth checking out.)

But, God forgive me, “Rocks Off” just reminds me of Billy Joel. Or maybe I should say, Billy Joel reminds me of “Rocks Off.”

Essential Tracks:

“Rocks Off”
“Sweet Virginia”
“Torn and Frayed”
“I Just Want To See His Face”

Townes Van Zandt:  Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas (1977)

Adam: Legend (by which I mean Wikipedia) has it that the Old Quarter could “Comfortably accommodate 60 patrons” and that “More than 100 jammed into the room” for this week of shows in July, 1973.  Now, being the middle of July in Houston, it was tremendously hot.  Early on the album, Townes mentions something about the air conditioning being off, and how it’s really hot.  Thus, this album is best experienced on a sweltering summer night with no air conditioning.  In addition to the music (which I’ll discuss in a minute) the ambiance on this recording is second-to-none.  During quiet moments in the performance, we often hear beer bottles clinking together, and at one point a telephone rings.  These ambient noises do not detract whatsoever from the performance; they aren’t that loud.  In my opinion, the extraneous noise adds to the performances, in part because it allows one to understand how quiet those hundred hot, thirsty people had to be to allow those faint sounds to be audible on the recording.

At still another quiet moment, we hear what is most likely a bus passing by on the street outside the bar (The album’s liner notes mention that a bus station was nearby, and that the doors to the bar were kept open).  To me, this is the most fitting non-musical sound captured on the album.  Buses of course symbolize travel, and so the sound begs the question:  Was the bus we hear a local?  Or was it a Greyhound departing for some far-away destination?  I’m reminded of Jack Kerouac’s bus trip from Bakersfield to Los Angeles in On The Road where he meets the Mexican girl, Terry, with whom he spends two weeks having sex, getting drunk and picking cotton:

“I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the LA bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight.  She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a big sigh of airbrakes; it was discharging passengers for a rest stop.  Her breasts stuck straight and true; her flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside.  I wished I was on her bus.  A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

At which point I realize that this album is perhaps the perfect accompaniment for this novel.  Much of Townes’ music has restlessness at its core, just like Kerouac’s novel.  Both also give one a profound sense of loneliness.  Whenever I make someone listen to some of Townes’ music, I always tell them about how he was given electroshock therapy for depression when he was young, and as a result, his long-term memories were erased, and how I think that his not having any memories of the first 20-0dd years of his life is manifested in his voice.  He always sounds distant, like he has some kind of otherworldly understanding of humanity.

Anyway, so the music on this album is just great.  Many of Townes’ best songs are included, his guitar playing is outstanding, his voice is in top form, and he cracks a few jokes in between songs.  My favorite songs are the sad ones, like “Don’t Take It Too Bad,” “Two Girls,” “Why She’s Acting This Way,” and “Only Him Or Me,” which, on the surface seems to be about a relationship, but I think it’s ultimately about the passage of time.  If the album has any weak point, it would have to be the talking blues songs.  Not that they’re bad songs in and of themselves.  They showcase Townes’ sense of humor and the breadth of his musical ability, but I typically skip them over when I listen to this album, because the talking blues song is not Townes’ forte.  When it comes to sad, lonely songs about love, loss, and the passage of time, though, there is none better than Townes Van Zandt.

Glenn: I’ve only just acquired Live at the Old Quarter a few days ago, and I confess to not knowing much of Townes’s work before. So I can’t really speak in depth about these songs, since I don’t know them very well. What I can talk about, however, is how immediately impressive this record is. My initial impression of the album, which I’ve listened to mostly while running (very odd but effective exercise music, this is) is, “Damn, here’s something I’m going to be listening to for a long, long time.”

There’s just so much to take in here, so much to process. Townes’s understated but goddamn lovely singing. His wicked deployment of imagery and syntax to create a world of longing and desire and strange beauty (as an English teacher I’m a big fan of “All the poets do push-ups/On carpets of rubber foam”). “Tecumseh Valley” stands out to me, as does “She Came And She Touched Me,” which enters Dylan territory with its absurd imagery, mystical feeling, and 6/8 time. But Townes’s song pushes the narrator and the singer into the background — where Dylan never retreats — and letting the song (melody & lyrics) come to the forefront. The songs and performances on this album are easy to lose yourself in, because they are use such simple means to cast a spell: a guitar, a few chords, a voice that hardly sounds like singing. Pretty soon you’ve run 4.3 miles and you’re ready for a cold Lone Star, a starry night, a trip to the cigarette machine (“upstairs”), and another spin or two of Live at the Old Quarter.

Jordy: Most of the Townes discography was out of print for so long that you’re hard-pressed to find many fans who even have a favorite album.  A lot of people simply forgot about this lanky, Tony Perkins lookalike.  That’s a shame and, according to Steve Earle, mostly the fault of Townes himself.  It is a tribute, however, to his songwriting and to the tireless ambassadorial efforts of Earle that Van Zandt has had a resurgence of late.  And to all those burgeoning or potential fans: Live at the Old Quarter is the best collection of the man’s work and, without a doubt, his best live record.

By the Summer of 1973, Townes (in his late 20s) had written the bulk of his greatest tunes.  And the wonderful thing about the Old Quarter show was that he really enjoyed playing them and playing them well.  His trademark understatement never sounds like boredom.  Like one of his great influences, Hank Williams, Townes sings each phrase with a deep richness of emotion that rewards the attentive listener.  I’m particularly fond of “For The Sake Of The Song” for its gentle finger picking and touching, flawless depiction of a doomed relationship.

They’re all pretty perfect – all four sides: “Pancho & Lefty,” “If I Needed You,” To Live Is To Fly,” “No Place To Fall,” “Tecumseh Valley,” etc.  And I’d like to defend the two talking blues tunes: I think they’re both pretty funny and fit in well with the jokes he tells during the set.  I’m personally very relieved that Townes had a pretty sharp sense of humor.  I find it very endearing amongst the gravity of his other songs.

Live at the Old Quarter is recently available on two handsome, 180 g LPs at a reasonable price.

Adam: Glenn, that’s interesting what you said about Townes retreating into the background of his songs and letting them speak for themselves, where Dylan never does that.  I hadn’t thought of that before, but it’s very true.  With Dylan, you’re always conscious that you’re listening to a Bob Dylan song.  Dylan is/was such a huge personality and has such a large, rabid fan base that such self-conscious listening is probably inevitable.  Dylan typically loads his songs with as many words as will fit, but Townes is able to say, with far fewer words and simpler imagery, at least as much as Dylan at his best .  That’s not to say that none of Townes’ songs are (for lack of a better word) “Dylanesque.”  “She Came And She Touched Me” is a good example from this album, as is “Fare The Well, Miss Carousel” from Townes’ self-titled 1969 album.  Perhaps part of the reason Townes is able to fade into the background of his songs is that the Townes Van Zandt “myth” is significantly less developed than the Bob Dylan “myth.”  As Jordy mentioned, Townes was not very well-known during his lifetime.  I recently read that he didn’t seem to care if his records sold at all (and to a large extent — they didn’t sell).  Also, the fact that Dylan’s career has gone through so many permutations adds to his myth by making everyone constantly wonder who the real Bob Dylan is, while Townes was always just a guy with a guitar singing some really great songs.

Finally, with regard to the talking blues songs, I do think they’re funny, but I guess I feel like they interrupt the flow of the sad, serious songs that I ultimately like better.  That, and they’re really just simple songs that you can fully understand after hearing them once, so I don’t find them very interesting.  With most of Townes’ other songs, I find the lyrics so interesting and the emotion so palpable that the songs reward repeated listenings, and I really don’t think that’s the case with the talking blues songs.

Jordy: Not to jump on any sort of Joni Mitchell bandwagon here (her recent comments perplex and annoy me), but I’ll echo the above comments by saying Townes was a far more honest songwriter than Dylan. Dylan was more creative and prolific by many fold, but his songs came from somewhere very distant from Dylan himself. Townes’s writing was far more personal and, ultimately, more emotionally effective than Dylan’s. I’ll always be amazed at the volume, variance, and quality of what Dylan created but Townes’s tunes are infinitely more human.

Glenn: See, we’re getting into iffy territory here. What, exactly, does “honesty” mean in music? Jordy seems to believe that it is synonymous with earnestness and self-revelation, which seems to me to be wrong. (Dylan’s songs can’t be called “personal” but he does cultivate a “persona” — is this sophistry?) At any rate, I have no answers to this question, but I’m curious about what readers think: What, if anything, does honesty mean in and for popular music?

Adam: I tend to equate “honesty” in music with earnestness and, perhaps more so, with whether or not I can relate to a song.  I feel a song is “honest” if it contains a true assessment of the human condition.  But then, what is truth?

4 Essential Tracks

“Don’t Take it Too Bad”

“She Came And She Touched Me”

“For The Sake Of The Song”

“Rex’s Blues”

One our goals with this newishly re-booted So Well Remembered blog is to highlight excellent music writing around the web. Here’s today’s entry: a brief review of the new crop of Destroyer reissues.

“Destroyer is involved in the same exercise but in a different medium: world-building. Not a world in which there is necessarily a narrative to tell, but rather one in which patterns are created and fleshed out, a world in which connections are made between songs and albums, where characters and words repeat, and repeat often enough that they gain meaning with each repetition.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Destroyer’s Rubies has been a favorite for me since it came out, and this article explains why.

Posted by Glenn

Rancid – …And Out Come the Wolves (1995)

Jeff: What, you might ask, is the prestigious and well-esteemed SWR blog doing reviewing a derivative 90′s pop-punk-revival album? The answer is multifaceted but the first component of it is that it’s an amazing album. Another part of that answer is that I for one first began coming of age in musically the mid-’90s–the major labels were well into their signing spree of “alternative” bands, and MTV was playing music that was like nothing else I’d ever heard (it’s not Debbie Gibson, it’s not Guns ‘n’ Roses, it’s something else entirely). Weezer, Green Day, the Offspring, and Hole seemed like a breath of fresh air to a kid who wouldn’t hear indie music for another four years.  It was an exciting time to be a 7th grader.

I first heard about Rancid via the “Salvation” music video from their previous effort, “Let’s Go”–a mostly-skate-punk, 23-track romp with some pop-punk and heavy oi influences that had for one reason or another caught on. I picked up that cassette immediately and memorized every song (including where to turn the volume down so my parents didn’t hear the swears and confiscate what had quickly become my dearest earthly treasure). There was a song about helping Marvel superheros prevent soup-kitchen closures in your dreams, a couple songs about going to hell for some reason, the classic “Radio,” co-written by Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong, and mostly a bunch of character sketches about the groups friends and the shit they did for kicks. So much about this record was instantly appealing — Matt Freeman’s always busy (for pop-punk) walking, blues-influenced bass riffs (Mom & Dad had just bought me my first electric bass for Christmas), the rockabilly-style guitar solos, fast tempos, gang vocals on the chorii — this record had it all.

A few months later, Rancid released another album that I still own (the CD I borrowed so often from my brother that he gave to me, that is — I lost the tape) and listened to at least monthly for a solid two or three years. They had largely ditched the skate-punk of their first two albums and instead dove whole-heartedly into ’70s punk, pub-rock, and street-punk/oi songs. The clearest influences on their “new” style in my mind are the Sex Pistols, the Clash (who the band are oft-accused of ripping off entirely–but there’s too many chunk-a-chunk-a eighth-note guitars [a la "I Wanna Be Sedated"] to really sound like the Clash whose guitars are much sparser and staccato), and perhaps most importantly, the bluesy pub-punk of the UK Subs and the early r’n'r harmonic palette of Social Distortion. As for the lyrics (and this was always the best thing about Rancid for a teenager), they again told stories of people the group knew, places they’d been hanging out forever, and observations about both their city and their cultural scene.

That last part is important. Nothing can be understood about Rancid without knowing that the group was founded by ex-Op Ivy members (that band is still legendary) who’d been drifting around the ska-punk scene at 924 Gilman St in the Bay Area since ’87, forming bands and leaving them to form other bands. They had mostly the same friends who were all in punk bands and they toured together, went to the same shows, traded roommates, traded girlfriends, and shared their lives together. THERE ARE TWENTY BOOKS OUT RIGHT NOW (see the Merge Records & Dischord books as examples–fuck! there’s even a 924 Gilman book apparently) about this exact same experience through the glorious beginnings of some home-grown indie scene and how deeply cemented those years are in the lives of the participants as the best they’ve seen, the most energetic, optimistic, and idealistic they’ve been, etc. And of course some “scenes” get a lot more critical cred than others — usually the older ones (“yeah man New York in ’74 was REAL punk,” “no no Detroit in ’68 — so much hash, free love, etc.,” “no way man, how about living in fucking Clarksdale, MS in 1925? Everybody was an inch above slavery and starvation and people still got polio all the time! Those were the days!”) But the interesting thing about Rancid is this scene they sing about — interesting to me anyway.

Growing up 5 hrs north of Detroit, 6 from Chicago, in Northern Michigan meant that I would never see a rock concert unless it was “1964 — The Tribute” at the annual Cherry Festival at some outdoor stadium. I didn’t even live close enough to our 100,000 person tourist town to know if there was or would ever be a punk rock scene (I found out in high school that there was one at least by then), and my friends who liked “alternative” music mostly didn’t play instruments. Kids in my grade didn’t like Rancid (in a way that gave them even more appeal because they were “mine”)  yet the music was all about something that I desperately wanted and didn’t know where to find.

“Roots Radicals” begins with Lars Friedricksen (who had actually been in a later incarnation of Charlie Harper’s UK Subs before signing on with Rancid) singing “Took the 60 bus out of downtown Campbell/Ben Zanoto he was on there he was waitin’ for me…” about hanging out with his childhood friend, drinking downtown, running out of cash, etc. The song continues with Tim singing about riding the bus drunk while somehow listening to Desmond Dekker on the radio (was it his radio?  Does BART have radio playing on the bus?  How many reggae/ska stations are there in the Bay Area?) — it’s just a song about some shit that happened one time when they were hanging out.

This sought-after community reinforced my already latent desire to be a touring rock musician and I think in many ways still underpins the angst I feel for not having stuck with it — when you listen to this record you don’t hear ANY loneliness, urban isolation, self-pity, or anything else out of fuckin’ Durkheim or Weber (they do sing about poverty, drug-addiction, alcoholism, political hypocrisy, and racism) — you hear friends singing about people they know, about “hanging on the corner,” or about meeting someone downtown and when I hear it I think of every day I’ve had with best friends when no one had to work and we were just gonna walk to the record store and then go get drunk in the park — no agenda, no responsibilities, just friends. Interestingly, my favorite track on here is both about the nostalgic glory days of the 924 Gilman scene and the difficulty people in such a scene or community can find when it changes or unravels.

“there wasn’t always a place to go
but there was always an urgent need to belong, yeah
all these bands and all these people
all these frieds and we were equals but
what you gonna do
when everyone goes on without you?
…man came from far away from New Orleans into the East Bay
he said this is a Mecca
I said this ain’t no mecca man
this place is fucked.”

I seem to have turned this record review into some Blake-esque bullshit about lost innocence.  Maybe Glenn can discuss the actual songs.

Glenn: Sure, Jeff. I’ll bite, though I’m not sure I can come up with anything more eloquent or accurate about this record’s very particular (yet very broad) appeal. It’s a part of my favorite type of rock record — one that conjures a specific time and place. But the songs…

You say that, on …And Out Come The Wolves “you don’t hear ANY loneliness, urban isolation, self-pity, or anything out of fuckin’ Durkheim or Weber,” but I must beg to differ. There is something lonely — not existential despair, but simple loneliness — all over this record, and that’s what gives it it’s charm.

Take my fave song, “Olympia WA.” It’s about “something burnin’ deep inside” of Tim “Lint” Armstrong, the song’s speaker (drawler? moaner?), and that something is loneliness, nostalgia, wanting to be somewhere, anywhere but where he is (which turns out to be NYC, with Puerto Rican girls, at “a funhouse/where we played a lonely pinball machine,” a pretty exotic and awesome place to a coupla Michigan boys like you & me). That feeling is fucking universal, and the song, with its pleading vocal captures the pathos of all bored teenagers perfectly. And without too much sorrow — I mean, try not to sing along with this shit.

Elsewhere, …And Out Come The Wolves tackles the isolation and sorrow of marginalized (“Junkie Man,” “Time Bomb”) with perhaps a little bit of cheese (Jim Carroll?) but also real understanding. You get the sense from the lyrics that despite the expensive guitars and tats, the slick production sheen (which has in fact aged well), the white skin (this guys are friends with skinheads, just sayin’), these are guys who are singing about real friends of theirs, with real problems, real struggles. You get the sense that these aren’t just bohemians but people who’ve had to live on the streets.

My argument here is that if Rancid really wanted to pull the ol’ heartstrings on, say, “Daly City Train,” they would’ve thrown in a sappy minor-key bridge, maybe a key-change, maybe linger on the vi chord or something. They keep up the positive skankin’ vibe while singing “Jackal was one a the ones who perished, yeah.”

Somewhere I read a review that compared Wolves to mid-’60s Dylan, and I think, in a very general sense, that it’s a fair comparison. Both artists draw on friends and a particular scene to paint pictures of various feelings: sorrow, nostalgia, romance (great love songs on this one), art, and, above all, as Jeff mentions, joy. This is a portrait not just of the San Francisco punk underground but of the wide range of human emotions. “Wide range of human emotions” sounds ridiculous in what is supposed to be a review of a mid-’90s pop-punk album that got heavy rotation on MTV, but it’s true. Wolves transcends its context to become a real work of art. And yet, like all the best art, its feeling depends absolutely on that gritty, concrete context.

Of course I was surprised to much later find references to some of the same places (East Bay, the Mission, the Tenderloin, Daly City) in the work of William T. Vollmann, where underground SF comes off much less romantically.

Jeff: I think I meant to say there’s none of the immaterial problems out of Durkheim/Weber (Rancid sings about poverty, homelessness, drug-addiction, racism, political hypocrisy, etc. – definitely), but of course there are those immaterial things too, I just don’t feel them on this album — at least not very for very long. Or the way I feel them is that they are acknowledged as part of what human life has to offer, but the sadness in them is used to say something celebratory about experiencing as much as one can from life.

The best example I can give I think is the end of the bridge to the ska-influenced “Old Friend”: everything cuts out except the organ and in a song in which Tim has been characterizing “heartache” as his old friend, he finally admits to himself that “it was gonna be alright” and then thrashes his way through the most joyful rockabilly guitar solo I’ve ever heard. While kind of cheesy redemption doesn’t happen all over the record in such an obvious fashion, I think elements of it are there throughout, and the very choice to put this stuff in what is essentially hang-out/drinking music makes that same statement. Bill Callahan this ain’t.

4 Essential Tracks:

“Roots Radicals”
“Olympia WA”
“Journey To The End Of The East Bay“
“Old Friend”

Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night (1975)

Glenn: There’s a spot on I-77 between Fancy Gap, Virginia, and Lambsburg, just north of the North Carolina border, where the road rises sharply to summit the Blue Ridge. The interstate clings to the hills and winds along steep edges and narrow passes for 10 miles. The air gets wet up there — fog seems to rise out of the rock — and if you are lucky enough to be heading south and riding shotgun you can look southeast from the hills, out over the flatlands of Carrol County, Virgina and Surry County, North Carolina. It’s farms and gas stations and exurb subdivisions — very few lights — but at night, just after dusk, from the height of I-77, the long stretch of dark land sometimes looks like Los Angeles, as viewed from Mulholland Drive. A sparsely populated L.A., an L.A. without smog or skyline, without superhighways. You’ll have to trust me here. Because even though the rural counties of the N.C. Piedmont are nothing like L.A., this stunning view kindles something in the collective memory to remind you of the L.A. you know from movies, from books, from hints, from mid-’70s rock albums maybe most of all. The sheen and glamor, the nightclubs and stubble, the cocaine, the hazy smoggy dawns and the never-night of streetlamps. The stars holed away in the hills. This is what I think of when I descend from I-77 headed south toward home.

Tonight’s the Night captures all that.

Tonight’s the Night, the central entry in Neil’s “Ditch” trilogy, is heartbroken and numb, a wake of a record for two ODs: Neil’s old guitarist and a roadie. But Tonight’s the Night also, like many great albums, captures a time and place — or seems to — with both specific lyric imagery and in a more mythic sense. The record sounds like what you’d imagine ’70s L.A. to sound like: dark, hungover, tired, with moments of brilliance (these are true professional musicians) and bum notes (these professional musicians are coked out of their minds).

This is all coming from someone who has never been to Los Angeles or to the 1970s, you’ll understand.

Jordy: Tonight’s the Night was recorded in the dog days of Summer 1973 after the brilliant (but ill-fated) Time Fades Away tour with the Stray Gators. Reprise Records rejected TtN at that time and didn’t release it until June 1975. In the meantime, Young wrote and recorded On the Beach. Of these three “Ditch” records, Tonight’s the Night is the most coherent in its nihilism. It’s sloppy as hell — very clearly rehearsed in shitty bars and recorded between the busted-out walls of some practice rooms at an instrument rental shop in Hollywood. The vocal harmonies are way off, the band is looser than most professionals would find acceptable, and Young bumps the mic a few too many times during harmonica solos.

But it’s a magnificent record. A deliberately bleak and shambling masterwork. I get tired of crusty rock fossils saying “We had so much fun making X album! It was a great time.” No one was having a good time during Tonight’s the Night, least of all Young himself. His friends were dying in their 20s, he was fucked up from fame, and he was probably doing a depressing amount of cocaine. That he could so deftly wield this pain and write these songs is a testament to his ability and vision, albeit blurred.

There is something special in each song here, but I’ll pick out “Albuquerque” as my representative track. It features Young’s signature guitar sound – fuzzy and percussive but restrained here. Ben Keith’s slide guitar conjures the openness of the landscape while Young’s vocal and harmonica overlays the loneliness. It’s a sad portrait of an isolated man who has no intention of coming in from the cold.

I could make the argument that Tonight’s the Night is my favorite Neil Young record because it’s his saddest and most distant — it’s outsider music. He didn’t seem to even expect anyone to understand it. In the original liner notes, he wrote of the album: “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.” But it means something very important. It means that despite all of the horrible experiences and feelings in our lives, we are still capable of creating beauty.

Adam: I’ve been enjoying a Neil Young renaissance lately, so this post is rather timely for me. Allow me to explain: after playing the drums for many years, I picked up a guitar for the first time this past January. I had heard that the guitar playing on Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 was exceptional, so I started listening to it incessantly for inspiration. That led me to get my hands on Neil Young and Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, and now  my acquisition of Tonight’s the Night fills what was a gaping hole in my Neil Young collection. I’ve known several of the songs on the album for a long time, but never got around to actually buying it until we decided to do this post.

Anyway, on the Massey Hall album, Neil delivers a long spoken introduction to “The Needle and the Damage Done” that clearly illustrates how upsetting the trend of musicians using heroin was to him. The subject of that song was Danny Whitten, whose death precipitated the recording of this album. So the two pieces combined are a very interesting document of the effects of drug addiction.

In short, I don’t have a lot to say about this album because I’ve only had time to listen to it a handful of times. Is it my favorite Neil Young album? Probably not. I’d probably give that honor to After the Gold Rush or maybe even Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. But is Tonight’s The Night a great album? Most definitely.

Glenn: I don’t know about you fellows, but I’m having a hard time picking just one essential track. Maybe that’s because Tonight’s the Night is actually more stylistically diverse than I remember — it’s got scuzzy garage rockers, bluesy jams, folk hymns, and country rock. I’m going to go with “Speakin’ Out,” which might not be the best song on the record, but I think best represents the feeling of the album: groovy, strung-out, tired, trying desperately to have a good time despite the darkness. The guitar solo is pure exhilarating joy but the rest of the tune is deeply lonely.

Jordy: I’ll second your “Speakin’ Out” choice, Glenn, if only for that Nils Lofgren guitar solo. That kid could rock. He played piano on After the Goldrush when he was 17. Anyway…

In his biography, Neil Young is quoted as saying fairly early in his career that he wanted his sound to be somewhere between Bob Dylan (obviously) and the Rolling Stones. The Dylan influence is pretty clear throughout most of his work. But the Stones didn’t really appear in NY’s music until Tonight’s the Night. Apart from the very clear admission of “Borrowed Tune,” the grand, wasted majesty of Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main St. (1972) was playing heavily on TtN. Yet Young went deeper and darker than the Stones, leaving out almost all revelry (save maybe “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” recorded years earlier). Jagger and Richards, despite their alleged heroic excesses, have always been professionals committed to producing tight records. Only Young and his motley, unnamed band dared to record the disjointed ramblings that resulted from their excesses. Thank God it turned out.

4 Essential Tracks:

“Tonight’s the Night – Part One”
“Speakin’ Out”
“Borrowed Tune”
“Albuquerque“

The Kinks – Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround:  Part One (1970)

Adam: The Kinks’ early career closely resembled that of most of the other British Invasion bands.  They were singing blues-based songs about girls (e.g. “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and all of the Night”).  In the late 1960′s, as the themes that rock music addressed became ever darker, the Kinks went the opposite way with the Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which focused on nostalgia for simpler times.  By the time The Kinks released Lola in November 1970, The Beatles were history, the Rolling Stones were a few months away from releasing Sticky Fingers, and most other British Invasion bands had faded into obscurity.

The Kinks were banned from performing in the United States from 1965-69 for reasons that are unclear.  By 1970, the band (or at least it’s main songwriter Ray Davies) were bitter at the music business, and this bitterness was channeled into Lola.  Case in point, the following lyrics from “The Moneygoround,” about record executives:

Do they all deserve money from a song that they’ve never heard
They don’t know the tune and they don’t know the words
But they don’t give a damn

The album is full of acerbic lyrics like this, but the music industry is just one of the themes on an album that includes songs about disenchantment with modern society, organized labor, and what has got to be one of the first rock songs about a transsexual (one earlier possibility is Van Morrison’s “Madame George” although that’s about a plain old transvestite).

What does everyone else think of Lola?  Anyone care to comment on Wes Anderson’s pillaging of the Kinks’ catalog for his film soundtracks?

Phil: The mix on this album is really good; the songs are different enough and placed really well together and they sound really good. Everything is very clear and balanced, with the notable exception of those gd congas at the end of “Lola” (I could go on here for quite a while about my intense disdain for hand drums in rock and roll, but I’ll hold back).

But the thing that really stands out about this album is how much of a precursor it is. Or maybe not a precursor, but a cameo, a nutshell of the sound of this era and things this era would later shape. It sounds like contemporaries (the Stones, but calmer), like immediate successors (Bowie) and like bands they would apparently prove to influence (The Verve). It’s all British-Invasion-Era, but I think the reason the Kinks are so interesting is because they use things like banjo prominently in their songs, and not just as an affectation. Plus Ray Davies’ songwriting is really catchy, even though my favorite song on the record is the only one that Ray Davies didn’t write.

As far as Wes Anderson is concerned, I think maybe the nostalgia-mining that the Kinks are accused of musically is pretty much the exact same thing that Wes Anderson does cinematically.  Thoughts?

Jordy: Despite the aforementioned anti-establishment title and a few tracks, there is not a real unifying theme to the Lola album.  And although this was the glory days of album rock, this one is not greater than the sum of its parts.  Indeed, I find the whole “Moneygoround” thing distracting.  Nevertheless, in the individual highlights of this album, the Kinks brilliantly built on an ass-kicking streak that started four years earlier with Face to Face.  See:

“Strangers” – Phil scooped me on this one but I’d like to second his adoration.  A really touching song that is fun to play on guitar with a friend singing harmonies.

“This Time Tomorrow” – A great vocal performance from Ray and terrific use of both banjo and piano.  See the comments section of my earlier post on this song for a debate about Wes Anderson.

“Powerman” – A really muscular, tight tune.  Sort of hearkens back to the Kinks’ riffier days.

I also love “Lola.”  I know it’s renowned because it had edgy content back in the day but it really is a boner fide rocker.

Phil: I think the last twenty-five seconds “Powerman” sounds like Pavement. Or GBV. Second to Jordy on the cohesion of this record. “The Moneygoround” is a show tune in an album of pre-Britrock and it’s weird.

Glenn: I’m with Phil on the sonic awesomeness of this record. I hadn’t heard the non-Wes Anderson tunes on Lola until about four days ago and was immediately struck by how rock this record sounds. I mean, “The Contenders”? Hell yeah! That’s what I like my rock and roll to sound like! Phil hits it on the nose when he says that Lola is a kind of blueprint, sonically, for ’70s rock. Ray Davies screams sometimes, but he screams on pitch. The guitars are buzzy and skronky, but backed with sweet banjo and steel-top guitar. The drums punch and pound but they also swing.

Speaking of comparisons, last night at a party, somebody put on the Who’s Tommy and immediately, before I recognized it, I thought, “This sounds just like the Kinks…only way worse.” Thoughts?

Adam: It seems we’re mostly in agreement that this is not really a “concept” album.  Rather, it’s just an album that happens to have a couple of songs about the same thing.  Which is fine.  Village Green certainly has a more cohesive concept than does Lola, but despite my undying love for Village Green, I think I like Lola just a tiny bit more.  I think that’s because Lola is  a bit more musically diverse, which paves the way not only for the Kinks’ contemporaries, but for the Kinks’ own future efforts.  I’m specifically thinking here of their next album, Muswell Hillbillies, which I admittedly have only listened to a couple of times.

Also, upon perusing our discussion of Wes Anderson in the So Well Remembered archives (see Jordy’s link above) it seems none of us have any qualms with these songs being used in films (myself included) so my comment above about his “pillaging the Kinks catalog” was meant to stir up angst that does not exist.

4 Essential Tracks-

“Apeman”
“Strangers”
“This Time Tomorrow”
“The Contenders”

The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)

Jordy: Of all the great musical leaps forward in the 1960s, none is as beautiful or as much fun to listen to as Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys certainly did not have the sustained and focused creativity of Bob Dylan or the Beatles, but they were superior vocalists and more aggressive in exploring contemporary studio possibilities.  Consequently, Pet Sounds stands above any other album of that era, both technically and melodically.

Glenn: Let’s focus on the sonic aspect first. What I am continually amazed by with Pet Sounds is the harmonic complexity of its arrangements. The liner notes suggest that Brian Wilson sketched out “feels” on the piano (incidentally, I’d imagine this is where Animal Collective got the title for their best album) which were then transcribed to anything from traditional orchestral instruments (strings, oboe, and tympani, most memorably) to plunked water bottle to Coke-bottle-slide guitar. The result is that Pet Sounds has a sheen, a veneer, in which is sometimes impossible to pick out individual instruments. That sheen is responsible for much of the album’s emotional power.

Take my favorite song, “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder).” At first, the mix is dominated by an ear-encompassing organ, swirling strings, and a simple electric bass line (which the liner notes to my reissue suggest is the sound of Brian Wilson’s heartbeat). But, just before the “Listen, listen, listen” (circa 1:47), the organ drops out and the mix melts into rising strings with a lovely cello countermelody. The sound is full of yearning (and complex chord changes) but soon closes with a few simple tympani beats that return us to the sighing chorus. The record is full of magical moments like that. You really have to hear it to appreciate the subtlety and power behind these thoughtful arrangements.

Another area in which Pet Sounds excels pretty much all else in its broad appeal. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t (at least) like this record.

Adam: Pet Sounds is phenomenal.  It is a mammoth album, both sonically and in terms of its influence.  The Beatles said many times that Pet Sounds was a big influence on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, incidentally, is the only album that Rolling Stone ranked higher than Pet Sounds on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.“

I bought Pet Sounds about 4 years ago and was hooked almost instantly.  I was familiar with its most famous songs, but what really pulled me in were the deep cuts.  “That’s Not Me,” “I’m Waiting For The Day,” “Here Today,” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” are my favorites, although really I could list just about every track on the album.  I don’t like the instrumentals so much, but they’re so short that I don’t really bother skipping them when I listen to the album.  Which brings me to another point.  Every song on this album is less than three and a half minutes long, and only three are over three minutes.  Very few artists are able to pack so much greatness into such a short album.

The album is both comforting in its empathy and dazzling in its complexity.  The lyrics are some of the most nakedly honest that I know, and as my fellow bloggers are well aware, I love stuff that is unabashedly honest and sincere.

Phil: I think the most essential thing about Pet Sounds is its influence, both for musicians in the studio and for, oh I don’t know, the entire country for decades. I grew up in the eighties and the nineties and this album is still ubiquitous; it’s in the water. And I think the reason it’s stuck around so long is what Glenn points out, it has a really gigantic appeal. The chord choices aren’t exactly garage rock or simple pop (see the end of “I’m Waiting For The Day,” before the drums come back in), but somehow the whole album is undeniable. It reminds me of Burt Bacharach with imagination and balls.

I think the issue I had with this album for so long was that veneer that Glenn’s talking about. While it polishes the whole album to a cohesion rarely achieved by even the finest studio musicians (except maybe Idaho‘s Jeff Martin or Albini, but he does it on purpose), that polish smooths everything to the same level, so I think it’s harder to pay attention to the really amazing parts. They just sort of poke out every now and then, and you say “Oh, there’s saxophones on this song?” It’s a trade-off, and I don’t think this album would be as timeless without the veneer, but I’d love to hear this album with a different mix, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

Jeff (guest contribution): I actually bought this album on a trip to England with Jordy and Glenn in 2003 after having read about it for a couple years and was immediately struck by the opening track–the PERFECT description of most things I’ve felt that I called love and what I had thought would be perhaps the most audacious opening track on a mix for someone.  My God.  The next thing a lot of people notice about this album is the orchestration–which I think is complemented by something else Wilson nicked from Phil Spector: mono.  It definitely makes the instruments harder to pick out but I think both Spector and Wilson had this obsession with packing the mix to the point of confusion (the famed “wall of sound” which Spector was always on about).

The next thing is the harmonic structure of some of these fascinating songs (“Don’t Talk,” and especially “God Only Knows”)–this stuff is called “baroque pop” but people didn’t use those changes in the baroque era.  “God Only Knows” in particular with its finding-a-way-to-fit-pop-chords-into-a-chromatic-scale bassline, is really interesting.  If you look up the tab, it’s not a song many non-jazz-balladeers-who-studied-theory would have written.  Apart from that, the highlights for me are: “Here Today,” the snare rolls in the chorus of “I Know There’s An Answer” (and the general ornamental and classical feel of much of the snare, timpani, and electric bass parts–these guys are NOT playing rock’n'roll!), the a capella bar in “Sloop,” and the second vocal part in “I’m Waiting For the Day” (I kissed yo’ lips and when yo’ face!looked!sad!…), and “Wasn’t Made For These Times.”  Really the whole album except “That’s Not Me” and the instrumentals.

Also, if anyone has the older mono CD release there may be a fantastic “essay” by BW about dreaming of a halo over his head, believing himself to be the first person to put the word “God” in a rock song, praying for the album to give people “positive love vibes,” and calling the record a teenage symphony to God, etc.  Not a brilliant essayist or philosopher, but a helluva composer/orchestrator.  Also, this album is way the hell more interesting than that British-music-hall-revival-meets-Merseybeat album mentioned above.

Jordy: Well put, All.  And a special thanks to Jeff for punching this post up a peg or two.

Our consensus reflects the general good will towards this record as well as an admission of its vast influence.  I think the readers at markprindle.com shortchanged Pet Sounds by voting it only the tenth best of all time.  Abbey Road, I can see.  But Doolittle?!  Spiderland?!!  Bunch of idiots.

4 Essential Tracks:
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”
“Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)”
“I’m Waiting For The Day”
“Sloop John B”

If you already own it, buy one of the 57 special editions!

Beck – Odelay (1996)

Glenn: Odelay‘s stylistic diversity, junkyard-dada sampling aesthetic, and anticipation of the mash-up have been justly praised. However, what strikes me 14 years out is the sheer range of moods Beck’s masterwork strikes. Is there any other record with this much emotional variety? From the goofball hick-hop of “Sissyneck” to the monster-movie drone of “Derelict” to the melancholy sigh of “Jack-ass” (a personal favorite) to the sheer fun of “Hotwax,” Odelay makes you feel joy, fear, sadness, confusion, and flashdance-ass-pants dance lunacy all in equal measure, sometimes in the same song.

Take “The New Pollution.” At first: a Christmas carol backed by Tom-and-Jerry sound effects and touchtone telephone (remember those?). Cool. Fun. Goofy. Then the “Taxman”-ish drumbeat takes us into bodyrock territory (Awesome! Let’s Party!) but the under-the-breath chorus (Huh?) and echoey saxophone sample (Ooh, Spooky!) contain an encroaching eerieness that eventually empties and washes into the bleak “Derelict.” You’ve gone from point A to point Z in 4 quick minutes. The entire record works like that. From the trashcan-Dylan wordplay to the mishmash of Pavement-style guitar and hip-hop rudiments to the many, many samples that make up the sonic background of the album, Odelay works on juxtaposition.

Adam: I remember back when I had a CD case that only held 12 CDs. This was one of the first 12 CDs I acquired, and I used to listen to it a lot. My first exposure to Beck Hansen was, like many people’s, in 1994 with “Loser.” I liked the song, and then summarily forgot about Beck until the summer of 1996, when the video for “Where It’s At” (which, upon rewatching just now, I realize that, at the 2:25 mark, there is an homage to William Shatner’s famous “Rocketman” performance, which means that Beck did it way before Family Guy did it) received heavy airplay on MTV. My family never had cable TV, so I’d get my fill of MTV in hotels on our summer vacations. This video was on all the time, and I remember my whole family enjoying it. The “two turntables and a microphone” chorus was catchy as hell, and the video was, for lack of a better word, weird. I think the “weirdness” was what initially attracted me to Beck and thus to Odelay. In 1996, Beck was doing things that nobody else was doing.

Glenn: He was doing things that nobody — or almost nobody — was doing. And yet I remember thinking, back circa ’97, that Odelay, along with other sample-heavy records like DJ Shadow’s Entroducing… and Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), plus sonic forebears Paul’s Boutique (produced by the Dust Brothers) and De la Soul’s Three Feet High & Rising, would usher in a movement of genre-hopping psychedelic hip-hop meant for deep listening.

However, that never really came to be. Lawsuits and copyright prohibited the economic viability of densely sample-laden music, and Puff Daddy proved in the late ’90s that obvious samples of recognizable hits, not subtly interwoven snippets from obscure cuts, were the stuff that chartbusters were made of.

And yet the influence of Odelay and its brethren (plus electronica and rave music) now pervades popular music, albeit differently. Though most pop hits today aren’t really sample-based in Odelay-fashion, a spin of the Top 40 dial shows that today’s hitmakers share Odelay‘s anything-goes-so-long-as-it-works ethos. From Fall Out Boy’s emo-meets-schoolyard-chants-in-da-club to ringtone pop to Kanye West’s Jon Brion-slick chipmunk soul to Taylor Swift’s very pop-rockish country to, I don’t know, Beyonce, pop music today is made of many, many different styles and sounds. (I’m not saying that’s good, or bad — just that it’s there.) Ten years ago we would never have heard so many different styles on the same station, much less in the same song. While popular music has been a music of fusion since, well, forever, the fact that you can sometimes hardly tell whether you’re listening to a singer raised on rock, soul, jazz, gospel, hip-hop, or pop, is a sign that Odelay has triumphed. And, with the cultural and social implications of the fused-genre pop value system (equality! dialogue! cultural exchange! meritocracy!), one has to hope that it’s a good thing.

Adam: To shift gears slightly (no pun intended), I remember reading or hearing an interview with Beck shortly after this album came out saying that when he wrote a song he always drove around and sang it to himself because he liked his songs to be good driving songs. And I find that Odelay is a very good driving album. I’m thinking specifically of the heavy downbeats on “Devil’s Haircut,” the steel guitar on “Lord Only Knows” and especially “Novacane,” which is expressly about “semi-trucks haulin’ their asses” and has just enough distortion applied to the vocals to make it sound as if they were recorded through a CB radio. I will admit, though, that “Novacane” drags quite a bit in the second half, with a boring melody made up of electronic beeps.

Since we’re talking songs, Glenn, I’d have to agree with your sentiments above regarding “Jack-Ass,” and I have to mention what has long been my favorite song on Odelay: “Lord Only Knows.” I won’t venture a guess as to what the song is really about, but the lyrics seem to hang together quite nicely.  I especially like the line “Don’t call us when the new age gets old enough to drink.” The steel guitar is stellar as well. The only song I really have no patience for is “High 5 (Rock The Catskills).”

4 Essential Tracks:

“Hotwax”
“Lord Only Knows“
“The New Pollution”
“Jack-ass”

Buy it here