Thorough Music Reviews

Scott Hardie | July 13, 2005
I won't lie: I still hope someday to get that "TC culture club" off the ground so we can talk about books, movies, and other forms of entertainment to our hearts' content.

But for the moment, I'm wondering what y'all think of recent music releases. Somebody here has to have the new Foo Fighters album. Kris, heard the new Garbage yet? Please share your comments about any new music you're enjoying.

I already mentioned that I bought the new White Stripes (link) and it's nowhere near the mess that so many fans are complaining. Just because it lacks a solid rock number like half of "Elephant" doesn't mean it's a total loss; listen closely and you can hear the elegance and playfulness in Jack's musicianship. I still don't know what's up with the damn sound effects, except that both occur in songs about a woman named Rita and might be intended to draw a thematic connection, but that's a lousy way to try it. Anyway, great rock album, with enough diversity to have wide appeal.

The new nine inch nails CD (link) is fantastic. It crosses the appealing pop hooks of "Pretty Hate Machine" with the patient, brooding complexity of "The Fragile." Because it's not a concept album, and because Trent no longer needs to push the boundaries of his niche genre, there are no lulls nor annoying feedback, just 13 great songs that get better and better. Just like "Fragile," I anticipate being able to listen to this dozens of times through and still discover new things each time.

I like the new Black Eyed Peas (link) less each time I hear it, but I started out liking it a lot, so now I'm thinking it's sort of ok. :-) I dunno; it has a good sense of playfulness, and some amazing lyrical flow, and I may be one of the few people who likes "Union." But like most dance music, it just becomes boring after a few listens. The spark is quick to fade. (In case anybody wonders, I published the Will.i.am goo before I heard my first BEP song two weeks ago. Honest.)

Billy Corgan's first and possibly only solo album (link) doesn't exactly grab your attention, sinking fairly well into a soothing synth ambience, but the good news is that Billy's gag-inducing artistic pretensions mostly stop at the ridiculous song titles. He's serious about staying vital as a rock star, or at least as vital as he can stay five years after he broke up his cash cow, so the album is mostly free of the alienating artistic tangents that sometimes made Pumpkins a chore to like. It's a good album for fans but I wouldn't bother otherwise. :-\

Also: It would be a stretch to call them new, but I've been liking the new Shivaree (link) and loving the new Le Tigre (link) – the former is so melancholy and lacking in melody as to limit its appeal, but the latter is so exuberant and catchy and good plain fun that nearly every track has gotten stuck in my head from over-listening. Sample a few tracks and see what you think.

Dave Stoppenhagen | July 13, 2005
I have the new Foo Fighters on MP3 and have been listening too it most of the morning, it's pretty good what I've heard so far. The mellow stuff I'm not sure I expected. If you want I can try to send some of them across or burn you a CD.

Erik Bates | July 15, 2005
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Scott Hardie | July 18, 2005
It does, Erik. :-)

Either of you: Is the new Foo Fighters album really loud? That keeps me from listening to "There is Nothing Left to Lose" more than the little bit I already have. When comes up in my CD changer in shuffle-all mode, it's so LOUD compared to the other discs that I reflexively jump for the remote to skip to another disc or adjust the volume. Drives me crazy.

Dave Stoppenhagen | July 18, 2005
It's a dual disk and disk 2 is a more mellow one but damn good. Disk 1 has some harder stuff and just as good.

Scott Hardie | July 29, 2005
Kris, I wouldn't run out to buy the new Garbage. (link) After a few listens, not one song has grabbed my attention yet, for better or worse. That's really a backslide, since nearly every track on their last album was so compelling. On the other hand, I'm digging the new Aimee Mann (link) which is also best relegated to the background but has such strong feeling to it. And it helps that Aimee finally seems to have found a way to blend her nasal voice into the music as if it belongs; on her other records I have often been struck by the unpleasant thought that she just doesn't have the right voice for singing, but on this one she's a natural. I suspect these songs were primarily written for her voice, whereas eariler songs were primarily written to sound pretty on their own, but I don't know. I like the album anyway.

Kris Weberg | August 2, 2005
Oh, I, ah, "acquired" a few songs from the new Garbage album and realized my onetime love of the band was not love for this hideously cheesy new album.

Scott Hardie | October 22, 2005
Holy crap, Kris, were you ever right. I finally picked up Garbage's debut album and I'm entranced; by comparison it makes "beautifulgarbage" weak and "Bleed Like Me" unlistenable.

The new KMFDM (link) is both better and worse than I expected. Musically it's the same exciting adrenaline burst they always deliver; nothing but love for it there. But the lyrics are so relentlessly anti-American that even the few tracks that aren't explicitly so begin to seem that way. They have become obsessed with Bush's war, the death penalty, and other things they think are wrong with our country, and I wish they'd get out of their own way.

Sorry, Erik, but I can't even get all the way through the new Queens of the Stone Age. (link) It's bland and boring, as if the title is a cautionary warning. It's oddly Top 40 rock from a man with impeccable artistic integrity, so I don't really know what to make of it. I'll listen a few more times. Anything I should be listening for?

Same goes for the new Blues Traveler. (link) After several listens, it has yet to offend, but it has yet to make any other impression either. They're a band whose charms have to be drawn out gradually, so I'll keep listening and hoping something comes to dawn on me. (I don't know how professional music reviewers can sum up a whole album after only one or two listens, when so much good music takes time and repetition to appreciate.)

The truly worst music I've bought recently is the much-dreaded "new" Fiona Apple release. (link) As I wrote two months ago (link) I loved the Jon Brion version leaked to the Internet, and I was apprehensive about the hiring of a hip-hop producer to tweak it until Sony believed it could be commercially viable. Boy were my fears justified: This jerk has so many canned drum beats shoved up the album's ass it barely limps through your speakers. Where Brion's version was kooky and playful and elegant and unpredicable, this new version is lead-footed, clunky, and watered down, as if somebody thought Beethoven would be improved by a boring drum loop. It's a massacre. This will probably be Apple's last release as she retires in justifiable frustration, but here's hoping that someone with an artist-friendly record label like Aimee Mann can bring her back and give her intelligent, beautiful music the treatment it deserves.

Kris Weberg | October 22, 2005
I'm just not big enough on new stuff to be much beyond a retro member of a culture club. I've been acquainting myself with the Buzzcocks over the last month or so, for instance. It's stunning to hear good pop hooks over all those feedback effects, and they do teen angst better than any other punk combo I've heard. If the Clash are the politically-minded punkers, Joy Division the genre's poets of psychic torment, and the Sex Pistols the ostensible founding fathers, the Buzzcocks are a demonstration of how to do accessible punk rock without doing it pop or dumbing it down.

Last new album I bought was probably Franz Ferdinands's first, eponymous album, which I think is a solidly-executed, impeccably-produced, but ultimately pretty safe post-punk CD. These guys are the other end of the spectrum fromt he bands I mentioned above -- they've rehearsed, assimilated, and polished what the original generation of punks generated spontaneously and almost desperately. These Scottish lads with the Austro-Hungarian name have plenty of nicely-structured songs and some fine and witty vocals, but thoe same qualities render the music infinitely safer -- and less exciting -- than its influences. This one's in heavy rotation for me, but as background music.

But the album I'm most excited about these days is the recently discovered 1956 Carnegie Hall performance by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Local NPR's been playing it a lot for the last few days as part of their fundraiser drive, and it's simply thrilling. The recording is astoundingly high quality, and Coltrane's bold and pitch-perfect tenor sax somehow merges with Monk's deliberately jarring piano technique. It's never predictable, always beautiful, the impression one gets from this post-bebop collaboration is like that received on viewing the best of the modern art that was a part of the same broader American cultural movement. Breathtaking, in a word.

In comics, I was quite pleasantly surprised by Mark Millar's Wolverine #32, a cleverly written, self-contained story of concentration camp commander Herr Bauman driven into his grave by a familiar-looking prisoner who just won't seem to die. Built around suggestions from the late comics pioneer Will Eisner, MIllar's tale isn't much of a Wolverine story -- wisely, the character is kept silhouette (often in a deliberately artificial fashion) and doesn't speak -- but Bauman's narration of his gradual breakdown carries the story's broader point quite nicely. Refreshingly, too, Bauman isn't portrayed as a foaming lunatic, but, infinitely more disturbingly, as a born bureaucrat who considers the performance of atrocities as little more than a grindingly dull job with career advancement possibilities. A warning, though: Millar's brief, irrelevant and rather offensive shot at the War on Terror/Struggle Against Violent Extremism (or whatever Rumsfeld is calling it this week) with a clumsy effort to parallel responses to the Reichstag fire and 9/11 should and can be ignored.

All the books I read these days tend to be academic theory or "high culture" stuff from the first half of the prior century. If anyone wants to read me waxing rhapsodic about Joyce or Borges, let me know :)

Erik Bates | October 28, 2005
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