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January 19, 2010

BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #5: CLEM SNIDE - YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC

(FYI: This album might have actually been released in 1999 - according to the Wikipedia anyway. If you care about this, let me know and I'll mail you an apology sometime before my best of the 2010s list)

Nothing about Eef Barzelay, or the band he acts as an almost non-existent primary factor of, the rotating entity called Clem Snide is fairly original. Eef is a poet of melancholy, as were many others, and his band plays something between Alt-Country and standard Indie-Rock - this very fair Pitchfork review says so, and it's right. The band is neither particularly innovate or interesting in terms of what its been doing in a period when bands hop to the forefront by being innovate and interesting. Which is why you may not have heard of YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC, my favorite Clem Snide album (BTW, Pitchfork gave this a hyperbolically bad 2.1, saying it "begs for laugh tracks").

If Bob Dylan's melancholy was contrived to sound original, Eef's is so original it sounds contrived. When he sings, "Tonight we're going to party like its 1989," he reminds listeners like me that he participated in the same pop cultural phenomenons, and has been just as disappointed in them as harbingers of the exciting new era they were supposed to bring. 1989 had the Berlin Wall falling, and yet it was still kind of boring - there are things going on here that you might at first scoff at; like Clem Snide is being funny in the same way everyone else is. But they aren't.

THE GHOST OF FASHION, the album that followed, largely eschewed the somber melodies of this album and was their most critically and commercially popular - it featured the opening credits song to the cult-TV hit ED, but it was scrapped for the Foo Fighters song from the first season. GHOST rocks a little harder. I like listening to it, along with 2003's SOFT SPOT and 2005's END OF LOVE. But YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC combines both intimate sadness with Eef's recognition that he has to explain it. "Your Favorite Music," the title track only "makes you sad" - this is as trenchant an explanation as Nick Hornby's opening question from HIGH FIDELITY (paraphrased): "What came first, the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or Am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"

I wrote an unsuccessful statement of purpose for grad school around Eef's transcendent "I Love the Unknown," a loose narrative about a guy who quits the job his dad gave him, refuses to love the girl who loves him, rides buses to nowhere, and tells a psychiatrist that he's afraid of "going through life feeling numb." And when he tells us in "Messiah Complex Blues" that "I wouldn't die for your sins," it's at once a rejection of faith and an endorsement of the idea of a Messiah. Nobody working in popular music has dealt with issues of faith and spirituality like Barzelay; as a cultural commentator, he's incisive without making each song a polemic. It's a shame Johnny Cash died before he could cover "Messiah Complex Blues" (or a number of CS songs; my dream album would be AMERICA V: CASH COVERS CLEM SNIDE).

Maybe, like the "favorite music" to which the title indicates, this album is supposed to make you sad. But it ends up always making me feel like I have a fellow traveler, someone who can't really articulate what's going on, but wants to bring the night alive with laughs, as he suggests as an anecdote to the awful party in "1989." I suppose everyone doesn't want to spend time with that guy, who realizes that the party isn't any fun but anticipates making fun of it later. He's kind of like that "Debby Downer" character from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but I think you can see that mixed in a with a desire for something awesome, something "unknown," that creaks out from behind the sad violins and ironic horns. You feel like you know him.

So there's one last shoutout for my favorite band who no one has heard of.

Posted by Andytown at 1:07 PM | Comments (2)

January 4, 2010

TOP 50 ALBUMS OF THE DECADE: 10-6

10. The Strokes, IS THIS IT?

I immediately caught onto The Strokes, hopping on an already full-to-capacity bandwagon, because they seemed loud, disgusting, and vaguely untalented. But they've proved anything but - after a few years adopting the personas of lounge singers, they're something an elder statesmen to bands who are much, much worse than them, and maybe Julian Casablancas reformed by seeing what junk he spawned. Yes this album is influential and its influence is, mostly, not very good. But I like to think of it in terms of ITS influences - Velvet Underground and Guided by Voices among them. And while this album probably isn't as incendiary as it seemed in 2001 (wow), what with the gloved hand touching the woman's bottom and all, it is only bad if you've listened to it 200 times. And I have and I still like it.

"Hard to Explain" remains one of my favorite songs of the decade - a loud homage to the kind of music they liked -

Raised in Carolina, she says:
" I'm not like that"
Trying to remind her
When we go back

I realize that devil-may-care is usually used to refer to profligate sons of extremely religious shopowners from the 1800s, but it seems to fit the vibe of the Strokes lyricizing. When they announce, in "Hard to Explain," that "this place is a zoo," they are not technically speaking in the pejorative. And "grandsons" may not understand what happened "Last 'Nite," but that - to ape Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs - is what makes it fun.

PS - you should find the bootleg copy of "New York City Cops," a song they often play live which states the titular subject is simply, "not very smart." It's so stupidly subversive . . . I saw them play it live and it was a highlight.

Best Song: "Hard to Explain"

9. Josh Ritter, THE ANIMAL YEARS

Josh Ritter falls uncomfortably into a category of singer-songwriters who lack his ambition or experimentation with lyrics. First, let's forgive him for being named "Josh" - and not "Bob" or "Bruce" and recognize that on his signature he channels them both without aping either. And that he seamlessly enters references to Laurel and Hardy that make those two black and white goofs a haunting allusion. The lack of pretension in Ritter is what makes him endure, he churns out effortlessly lines like "the keys to the kingdom gets lost inside the kingdom" (Bob) and "Packs of dogs and cigarettes For those who ain¹t done packing yet" (Bruce)

"Lillian Egypt," "Girl in the War," "Here at the Right Time," and "Good Man" are a fine introduction to Ritter's work, but many might be put off by the gravitas and poetry of the second to last song, "Thin Blue Flame."

"I became a thin blue flame" begins a song full of endless ambiguity that never gets unraveled. It's sublime - both wonderful and terrible, full of clouds, clowns, and God - if he's up there - "in a cold dark room." Questions are being asked without being phrased as questions, and Ritter lets the modernist imagery take over along the way with a relatively simple sound. It gets louder, then softer, then louder - Springsteen's Nebraska mixed with Dylan's imagery without, and I have to emphasize this, stealing from either. Were it an actual poem, it probably wouldn't be published in the NEW YORKER, but its great stuff nonetheless, reaching transcendence through some pretty weird passageways - unlike some of these guys, Ritter doesn't sound like he's too enamored with his college creative writing class.

"The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts They were coming together they pulling apart And angels everywhere were in my midst In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed I wondered what it was I'd been looking for up above Heaven is so big there ain¹t no need to look up So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air Only a full house gonna have a prayer"

Ritter's next album, THE HISTORICAL CONQUEST OF JOSH RITTER, was something of a letdown, but I know people who love it (update: I listened to it again and enjoyed it more). But this album nears perfection in a way that a guy this new to the world shouldn't be able to.

Best Song: Thin Blue Flame

8. Destroyer, DESTROYERS RUBIES

Yes, Dan Bejar is a troubadour - that's not a back-handed compliment. His lyrics are dense, vaguely melodic, full of wild abstractions and lines that seem lifted out of Finnegan's Wake. It isn't, obviously, for everyone; the songs Bejar sings are usually the weirdest on any of the New Pornographers albums, and occasionally the most awesome (as on Challengers). And Bejar has a cult like no other - the scarily exhaustive Destroyer Wiki takes some of the mystery out of what should be endlessly complex: telling us, for instance, that the lines "typical me, typical me" in track one ("Rubies") are ripped from a Smiths song. In fact, the Wiki records about six references to iconic bands or singers in "Rubies" alone.

But no matter what you can tease out of a typical Destroyer song, what remains magical is what you cannot. And it's wild poetry, indeed - carried along by an epic sense of place and mood. Each song on "Rubies" captures the feeling that Bejar strives for on all of his albums, as Andy Battaglia writes from the AV Club, "a literary exercise in just how far songs can stretch to make sense of the words within them."

Bejar teases us by making the songs sound so DAMN meaningful - each one capturing a memory that we'll never be able to decipher, so we have live in the moment he captures musically. But his images, while approaching some kind of redundant imagism for its own sake, always reflect rather than deflect his creative urge, his desire to do something that no one else is doing. And it that, he is wildly successful.

Best Song: "Your Blues"

7. Radiohead, KID A

There is nothing else to be said about this album. I agree with all the praise it gets. It did what few similar projects did: built on an agreed-upon masterpiece with something new and equally celebrated. KID A did all the things we expected of Radiohead, while doing them in ways that none of us imagined they would. My narrative with Radiohead, unlike most, begins with KID A - it was the album I understood all the rest of them through: the earlier poppier sound of THE BENDS and the grand achievement of OK COMPUTER, followed by the dissonant dissent of HAIL TO THE THIEF. That its B-Sides, as of yet unloved by me, make many top 50 lists is an understatement to the creative capital this band possessed in the early ots.

I confuse a lot of people with my insistence that VANILLA SKY is a wonderful, albeit extremely flawed, movie and it was hearing "Everything In Its Right Place" as Tom Cruise drives through an unoccupied New York that only exists in his dreams, that made me give KID A another listen; I got it. So did everyone else. Thanks Cameron Crowe.

Best Song: "Everything In Its Right Place"

6. Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Another album that really doesn't need much revisiting from me, but I'll reflect on a few songs.

"Heavy Metal Drummer" is one of the songs that makes me happier about music, and the opening lines, "I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands I used to go see in the landing in the summer" could begin a novel. It hints at a memory at once lucid and elusive: there's a girl who loved those drummers, and there's innocence that paints the landing and the music that happened there as an impossible paradise: that is EXACTLY the way we reminisce about our teenage years: that Wilco goes for the shameless romanticism of this song is why so many people love them, I think, and it's the harbinger of their last two albums, each of which have taken this wistful moment and elaborated on it. And fittingly enough, there is some pretty superlative drumwork.

But there's also the deep, simple longing of "Poor Places" ("I really want to see you tonight"), the coded dissent of "War on War," and the giddy euphoria of "I've the Man Who Loves You." I'm always struck by how the bizarre lyrics of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" gradually become more cohesive, how it moves from the surreal nonsense of an "American Aquarium Drinker" to "What I was thinking when I let you back in."

The story behind this album is more momentous than the album itself, but the drama behind its production and release, and the way it seemed to be a mirror for every artist/"the man" dichotomy that ever played out, tends to be unnecessary background noise for the album itself. That's unfortunate, yet necessary. Too many people have seen I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART and saw the band at their most griping (which, all things considered, was handled with considerable maturity). Jeff Bennett's recent death was an unhappy ending to that narrative, but it should not challenge the best album they've ever made.

Best Song: "Poor Places"

TOP 5 TO COME (Individually wrapped)

Posted by Andytown at 2:37 PM | Comments (0)