Tag: Rock

DEVO – Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology

Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology

DEVO – Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology Rhino R2 75967 (2000)

Well, Pioneers Who Got Scalped is a real mixed bag.  Disc one starts out great, but listening to disc two is a real chore.  In their early days, DEVO had sharp songwriting skills and a clever, absurdist sense of humor.  People call them a punk band, but I see them more as a disco band strongly influenced by punk rock–not that those genre distinctions really matter.  The band’s earliest recordings that open disc one satirize popular culture, often by way of clever new arrangements of well-known pop songs that frequently deploy mechanized, angular rhythms.  However, all that didn’t last.  By disc two, though it is apparent towards the end of disc one as well, the band just ran out of ideas.  Their recordings were still well-crafted but their songwriting became confined to unremarkably generic 1980s synth-pop, their sense of humor common.  I suppose it becomes difficult to skewer pop culture the more you become a part of mainstream pop culture.  And looking back it is hard to see DEVO as anything but a part of mainstream pop culture, from “Whip It” onward at least.

The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties Request

Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties Request Decca TXS 103 (1967)

The Rolling Stones made one out-and-out psychedelic album. It was Satanic Majesties. The record is a non-stop creative journey. While perhaps the most idealistic Stones album, Satanic Majesties also has a gritty, cynical realism just under the surface. Somehow this lends power to the dreamy psychedelia. It makes the music more legitimate. The uplifting qualities aren’t escapist.

“She’s A Rainbow” is such a wonderful song. It opens with an electronic and found sound segment before leading into sweet piano melody. John Paul Jones (future Led Zeppelin) provided string arrangements. While there is a lot of effort to organize the music, this is still more instinctual than perfectionist. It feels so natural. Even the eeriness seems to belong where it is. The array of instruments used, from horns to a xylophone, make songs like “Sing This All Together” vibrant. Each little sound contributes something unique.

Two more of the very best songs are “2000 Man” and “2000 Light Years from Home.” The disillusionment and desire of “2000 Man” make quite a potion. The acoustic guitar seems to merge with the sitar. I sometimes think it is a song about a homosexual in a heterosexual marriage, but I see that as only one of many interpretations. It also is about modern alienation and the desire to cure intractable loneliness. The spooky “2000 Light Years from Home” has a Moog synthesizer slinking along a rather hip rhythm.

“Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” tends to get a critical thrashing, but this is unfair. This post-modern sound collage went down before Captain Beefheart, Funkadelic, Miles Davis or just about anyone else in rock, pop or jazz dared actually try such a thing–though The Mothers of Invention did some similar things around the same time.

“Citadel” is a rocking song about New York City. Jagger throws in some references to some locals including Candy Darling (also the subject of The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says”).

“Gomper” and “In Another Land” tend to wander a bit, though they still are for the most part good songs if taken on their own terms.

People tend to dismiss this album as a failed attempt to match The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  I have never been convinced Sergeant Pepper’s is so great an album, even if it has a few great songs.  But more to the point, this album is more like Pink Floyd‘s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn than Sergeant Pepper’s anyway.  In any event, Satanic Majesties is a wildly unique, modern and enjoyable album–not just among Stones albums.  I start listening to it to try to entertain myself but then I always go further and open my mind to new ways of hearing and thinking.

Neil Young – Neil Young

Neil Young

Neil Young – Neil Young Reprise RS 6317 (1968)

Neil Young’s debut album might be his least memorable.  It isn’t his worst, exactly.  But it is an album that lacks the indomitable personality that made his later albums so great.  This sounds like a typical late 1960s album from L.A.  In fact, there are a lot of similarities to Harry Nilsson of the era.  There are tunes that have a heavy psychedelic folk sound, a psychedelic rock sound, and a country rock sound.  Rather than have Young sound like himself, he’s sounding like what was popular at the time.  This is the same problem with most of the first part of Willie Nelson‘s career.  There isn’t much of an attempt to register dissatisfaction here, which is really Young’s strength.  Anyway, Young accomplished a complete turnaround with his follow-up with Crazy Horse, the excellent Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969).

David Bowie – The Best of David Bowie 1980/1987

The Best of David Bowie 1980/1987

David Bowie – The Best of David Bowie 1980/1987 EMI 09463-86587-2-6 (2007)

The Eighties were when Bowie took a turn for the worse.  He was still popular, but quality wasn’t always there.  That said, there is actually some good stuff here, but it’s not enough to fill out the disc.  I would rather have a “Best of 1980/2010.” [Note: this collection was originally part of The Platinum Collection]

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Mature Themes

Mature Themes

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Mature Themes 4AD CAD3230CD (2012)

You could say that Ariel Pink’s music is based on some form of corollary to historian Marcus Lee Hansen‘s so-called “Hansen’s Law” about immigrant assimilation (it’s really just a theory): “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.”  That’s because he dredges up material from the 1960s through the 1980s to re-purpose for his own music.  But there is more to his music than just that.  He constantly juxtaposes high and low culture.  This guy has studied pop culture.  On the opener, “Kinski Assassin,” he intones, “who sunk my battleship / I sunk my battleship.”  This recalls a TV commercial from the 1980s for the game “Battleship” in which a kid cries out, “You sunk my battleship!”  But elsewhere in the song Pink is singing, “We’ll always have Paris,” like a line from Casablanca (1942).  Fitting these together, with lines like “Blonde seizure bombshells and the blowjobs of death / Bring on the bog and she-males hopped up on meth” refuse to let this come to any sort of equilibrium.  At times it almost does.  “Only in My Dreams” seems almost like The Byrds.  Then “Farewell American Primitive” references the music collector obsession with “American Primitive” guitarist John Fahey.  But Pink sings, “fuck it, I’m high…”  He also drops in lines like “Native American Immigrant” and “If that isn’t me, North Korea is me.”  In all this, Pink refuses to let his music settle into any sort of comfort zone.  The juxtapositions of the incompatible just keep coming.  This is basically the same approach that the radical elements of the French nouvelle vague movement in cinema pursued half a century earlier.  After all, isn’t the aesthetic that Ariel Pink deploys here almost the same as what Godard did on Filme socialisme (2010), with its oversaturated digital video clips, sudden jumps to different characters, and offhand comments on philosophy, art, and work?

And let’s clear something up.  The term “hypnagogic pop” has been thrown around a lot to describe music like Ariel Pink’s.  But the term is a bit misleading when applied here.  The philosopher Hegel wrote about a concept that became known as “beautiful soul syndrome”, in reference to Goethe’s chapter “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship].  Hegel took up Goethe’s story to expand upon it and explain the vacuity in the forgiveness of evil by the “beautiful soul”.  As a J.N. Findlay wrote about Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomeology of Spirit]:

“It [the “beautiful soul”] then tries to cultivate goodness in solitary isolation from the actual social whole. *** The very rejection of objectivity is the only achievement of the ‘beautiful soul’, and is held to be the greatest triumph of its self-conscious freedom. It flees from concrete moral action, and luxuriates in a state of self-hypnotized inactivity.”

In this context, the jarring discontinuities of Pink’s music become the key to its success–the reason it avoids “beautiful soul syndrome”.  There is always the threat of a lulled hypnosis, but that is always and consistently disrupted by the strange juxtapositions he invokes, which almost everywhere in the real world are held part.  Mature Themes is maybe less jarring than much of Pink’s prior work.  The violent discontinuities are still there, though, more subtly.  Because they force the listener to confront and reevaluate the elements, they are what keep the album from becoming mere inactive nostalgia for subjective experience.

The Rolling Stones – Goats Head Soup

Goats Head Soup

The Rolling Stones – Goats Head Soup Rolling Stones Records COC 59101 (1973)

After the artistic triumph, and commercial failure, of Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones brought forth the thoroughly mediocre Goats Head Soup.  It is essentially an entire album filler (though “Dancing With Mr. D.” is at least good quality filler; it would have fit on Let It Bleed).  “Angie” shows up on some best-of compilations though it is a very weak song.  On many of the songs the guitar solos seem downright lazy.  This was their worst studio effort so far by quite a large margin.  It rocks about as hard as gym class, and the songwriting flirts with inspiration only on a momentary basis.  Mostly this feels as contrived and inauthentic as a political photo op.  Sorry sports fans, but this set the stage for a lot of what came later.

Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions

Monoliths & Dimensions

Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions Southern Lord sunn100 (2009)

Uneven, yet also showing the promise that doom metal might be able to expand to entirely new territory.  First the bad, then the good.  The album’s weaknesses are that “Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)” is a rather poor song and that the cheeseball vocals on “Aghartha” tarnish an otherwise decent song.  As for the good, “Big Church [megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért]” shows the band trying new things, in this case adding vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place on Steve Reich‘s The Desert Music.  The real highlight, though, is the closer “Alice”.  Rich in its sonics and surprisingly light on guitar rumble, it is something totally new.  Jazz legend Julian Priester makes a guest appearance, and perhaps the most astounding thing about Monoliths and Dimensions is that the last track makes comparisons to fusion, like Priester’s Love, Love, seem, if not directly relevant, like something plausible enough for consideration.  In the end, the good outweighs the bad, and at the very least this album opens a door for things yet to come, should the band be willing.

The Rolling Stones – Out of Our Heads

Out of Our Heads

The Rolling Stones – Out of Our Heads London LL 3429 (1965)

There was something in early Stones records that wasn’t in early Beatles records. The Beatles seemed to pick up Afro-American songs and meander through white bread renditions that tended to conform to a white bread middle class lifestyle, tending to unwittingly bleach the black out of them. The Stones had more enthusiasm in what they did. Playing a Marvin Gaye or Solomon Burke song gave the Stones opportunity to share in a “break-free” attitude that was becoming a centerpiece of rock ‘n’ roll. The Stones added their own personality to their records, sometimes by accident, but they always found what was eternal in the soul of American rock ‘n’ roll songs. Just because Mick Jagger and Keith Richards became such noted songwriters doesn’t mean the beauty of their performance of others’ songs should diminish.

“The Last Time” is side one’s hit. Side two opens with “Satisfaction.” The songs of less popular distinction are still amazing. “The Spider and the Fly” is a fantastic delta blues number probing the immobility of the moving rhythms. It was the B-side to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It also is the kind of song the Stones needed more of in the years after Brian Jones. “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotions Man” is a smooth number at a medium tempo. That song wouldn’t work as a single but it does so much for side two of the album. There is positive energy always coming through.

This is a record with no pretensions. Later Stones albums get more hype but they generally don’t have the offhand, hurried and unguarded charm of Out of Our Heads. The high and low cool of Keith Richards’ guitar is like no other joy. Set against the unidentifiable genius of Brian Jones the Stones ramble on with Mick Jagger strutting past his agony as if he would never consider whether it could overtake him. On Sam Cooke’s “Good Times,” Jagger sings with credulity. His voice feels right–graceful enough. In a way you don’t ever consider proving since every instinct says you can trust it, it comes from a good place.

[Note that the UK version of Out of Our Heads, which came out after the US version, did not have the hit singles on it and added tracks from December’s Children (And Everybody’s), which was not released in the UK. The UK version of Out of Our Heads may be the better album.]

The Dirtbombs – Ultraglide in Black

Ultraglide in Black

The Dirtbombs – Ultraglide in Black In the Red ITR-079 (2001)

Pretty good album of garage-rock-oriented soul covers.  It makes for good party music.  Mick Collins has a good voice for this stuff, even he is a bit rough around the edges.  Highlights are “Your Love Belongs Under a Rock,” “Ode to a Black Man,” “Got to Give It Up,” and “Do You See My Love.”  It’s kind of funny that the song “Kung Fu” opens with a nod to Bauhaus‘ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”.  These guys kick the crap out of some similar but lame bands like The Detroit Cobras.  Try this if you’re into garage rock from Oblivians, The Gories, Reigning Sound, etc.