MOG - Spencer Owen's Posts

Matmos - Supreme Balloon

Spencer Owen — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:06:19 GMT

Matmos - Supreme Balloon
(Matador, 2008)
9 out of 10

Supreme Balloon is a Disneyland of synthesized music, its listener given a choice of many lands in which to play — electro-funk, house, Baroque, classic video game, minimalism, and more — with an overall architecture designed for fun, harmless thrills and the eating of color-striped unicorn lollipops. I won't pretend to know what most of the synthesizers featured on the album do, so I won't name any of them. Sufficient is to say that the sonic palette is full of, and consisting of nearly nothing but, shaped waves. These are bright, shiny, fabricated, oscillated tones that describe themselves as nothing more than electronic mirth-makers. It is the considerable talent of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt — a talent for dramatically sculpting a piece and making influences their own — that allows this stylistically-guided content to transcend basic amusement or any signifiers of kitsch. In a mostly-outstanding discography full of unique sonic and conceptual approaches, each of which worth exploring, Matmos's LP7 is their finest.

The first half of the album throws you beats, and you catch them like the flu. In the four-track run from "Rainbow Flag" to "Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band" (perhaps the best song title in the Matmos discography), you are Super Mario 3, jumping on music-note-adorned cubes that bounce you like jello trampolines. Glissandos quick and slow, smooth and chunky, surround blips that quite often arrange into lovely chords and tunes. "Zemoi" slows down the formula somewhat, even taking a couple of moments to feature a padding synth strain that strongly evokes certain David Lynch film and television scores; "Orban" then takes the relatively subdued tone and brings the tempo back up for a dubby house excursion. (Keep in mind that any defining structural "formulas," by the way, are more those of the methods of Matmos than the genre with which they might be dallying at any given moment.)

Phase two gets darker, airier, more slippery and no less juicy as the funk more or less drops out. The shift is marked by "Les Folies Françaises," a short composition by Baroque composer François Couperin, originally written for the harpsichord and performed here on (okay, I'll name just one) Korg MS2000 by the contemporary classical pianist Sarah Cahill. The solo piece is turned into a duet as M.C. Schmidt alters the attack and decay of the instrument, and the breathing, organic nature of the performance is somewhat incredible, more vibrant and nuanced in its tone than even the most accomplished of Wendy Carlos's groundbreaking classical arrangements for Moog. From my perspective, their take on "Les Folies Françaises" quietly and uniquely both characterizes and deepens the achievement of Supreme Balloon.

From there, it is onto "Cloudhoppers" and "Staircase," two psychedelic, ambient pieces for keyboards swimming in delay; falling between them is "Hashish Master," which opens with an Eastern-tinged solo from the Terry Riley and morphs into an ominous, devilish, house-influenced jumble of minor-key menace. These three pieces prepare those who have stayed on board (and why not?) for the ultimate reward of Supreme Balloon, the 24-minute title track. "Supreme Balloon" is a pulsing meditation in F major, ostinatos fading in and out while other synths take solos, electronic tabla being manipulated not unlike the way the piece itself manipulates the basic form of a raga. The piece, in essence, is fresh new age music, informed by both Indian classical and 20th century minimalist, but without falling into a single "new age" trap, completely untied from the stale approaches of soundtracks for massage or yoga. Better yet, it appears to be inexhaustibly listenable. Believe me or don't, but I insist: this is how it should be done, just as Matmos consistently present, on the whole of Supreme Balloon, exemplary, elevating work in (and above) the field.

-Spencer Owen

NOTE ON VERSIONS : The CD issue contains eight songs (one hidden), while the vinyl contains eleven, the one hidden and three extra tracks interpolated into the running order. If you buy the album on iTunes, you get all four songs as "bonus tracks" stuck to the end of the album. I took the iTunes route and then, after getting acquainted with the CD version, I reordered it under the vinyl edition's specifications; I've replicated both CD and vinyl listings below. M.C. Schmidt claims that he prefers the CD version and Drew Daniel prefers the vinyl. I think both versions of the album are basically flawless, and as such, will gladly take Drew's, it being the one with more songs on it.

Supreme Balloon (Schmidt edition; CD):
1. Rainbow Flag
2. Polychords
3. Mister Mouth
4. Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band
5. Les Folies Françaises
6. Supreme Balloon
7. Cloudhoppers
8. Orban (hidden track)

Supreme Balloon (Daniel edition, review version; vinyl, modified-iTunes):
1. Rainbow Flag
2. Polychords
3. Mister Mouth
4. Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band
5. Zemoi
6. Orban
7. Les Folies Françaises
8. Cloudhoppers
9. Hashish Master
10. Staircase
11. Supreme Balloon

Elvis Costello & the Imposters - Momofuku

Spencer Owen — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:22:35 GMT

Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Momofuku
(Lost Highway, 2008)
6.5 out of 10

By the chorus of "Turpentine," the third song on Momofuku, I was grinning and actually laughing to myself. Ten minutes into the new Elvis Costello record with his Imposters, it seemed, for some reason, as if he hadn't had this much fun making a rock album in his life. Or maybe — I'd bet on this — I just hadn't had this much fun listening to one this year. Summery harmonies (led by Jenny Lewis, former child-star) crown Costello's still unweathered voice; the tunes are exuberant, expert, and easy; exceptional opener "No Hiding Place" even makes an ending move out of the late-'70s Fleetwood Mac playbook.

These opening three numbers (or side A of the four-sided vinyl release, now two weeks old on the occasion of the CD issue) are the best of what Momofuku has to offer. Since there's nothing even close to unlistenable present here, and the tone remains playful throughout, it could be quite a bit worse. The facts, as I call 'em, cast Momofuku in the role of Costello's weakest pop effort in two decades, but he'll have to slip more than this to deserve a serious judgment. For the most part, Momofuku is no less than a pleasure.

Okay, maybe it's showing: Elvis Costello is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. He's blessed with a remarkable consistency of quality when leading a rhythm combo with his original material. At times, Get Happy!! and Trust have each sat in the #3 slot of "all-time favorites." When I Was Cruel was a post-2000 benchmark, a stellar set, especially for a man who'd been at his craft for a quarter-century; in fact, Costello's hardly ever put out any subpar pop records, and the last one was Spike in 1989, which happens to have about an album's worth of good songs on it. In the '90s, he slowed down the pop output considerably in favor of various collaborations and non-pop dalliances with arguable quality ratings; perhaps that's the magic trick.

Momofuku is Costello's solo-McCartney record, a breezy catalogue of the sounds that have made him who he is, albeit with a bit more noise and higher standards than Paul tends to display. "Mr. Feathers" is the only song that directly evokes Mr. McCartney, the kind of piano-based moment that people throw the words "cabaret" and "parlor" at, when they likely mean Beatles and Harry Nilsson; though "Harry Worth" takes a sideways hit at the Latin accents McCartney occasionally works with (and does it better). "Flutter and Wow" is a mid-tempo 6/8 soul burn at the midpoint, to which I'd give higher marks if it weren't for the semi-unwelcome borrowing from the Beach Boys' "In My Room" for the verse's opening motif; luckily, Costello's not normally one to hang a song on a fragment, and it goes very nice places, the best places since the opening trio, in fact.

The penultimate "Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve" sinks the album below "pleasure" for four minutes with an unfortunate excursion into Bible imagery and a dirgey country tune without any country signifiers in the arrangement. Thankfully, "Go Away" swoops in at the close to re-elevate the mood with a classic Attractions-style (if slower) garage-rock track and Jenny Lewis duetting on the choruses. And though Momofuku stands lacking the mood dynamics of some of his better albums or the blatant consistency of others, it will nonetheless bring a hardcore like me, and likely even casual fans, back to the beginning at least several more times before the newness wears off and a few favorite songs stick.

-Spencer Owen

The Roots - Rising Down

Spencer Owen — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:16:36 GMT

The Roots - Rising Down
(Def Jam, 2008)
8 out of 10

This band deals, as participant-observers, in turbulence. "The Pow Wow" opens the scene in 1994; we get a glimpse of a band conference call, discussing some shit that went down at a Geffen meeting, pre-major-debut, and quickly shit starts to go down at this meeting, at least one man screaming. Not a shocking consequence of a conversation featuring this sentence: "The Roots' product is not just the Roots' product anymore." At first the screaming fit seems inspired by an inability to grasp the reality of the situation. More likely, however, it is the result of grasping it all too well, and this realization is a vital bridge to understanding the darkly-obsessed act of Rising Down.

The focus of the Roots is now laser-like. At eight studio LPs, thousands of concerts, and roughly two decades of work, the Roots are a beast, a hardened object of consciousness, drums, controlled anger, and deep music love. In concert, the Roots are a party band of showmen and showstoppers, a necessary part of their quest; but on Rising Down, there is no lack of confrontation, no lack of attention to detail, and no present interest in not playing directly over the heads of those in the cheap seats. I've been a Roots fan for some time now, and I actually even had trouble feeling it. My entry point into this album ended up being listening to it very, very loud, over and over again.

Black Thought is the ringleader of the 12 MCs that appear here; he contributes one verse per song. To wrap up the first third of the record, he takes a solo: "@ 15," a notably exceptional high school freestyle straight from Thought's archives, and the follow-up "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)," three minutes of constant, refrain-free fierceness from both Thought on the mic and ?uestlove on the kit. A comparison between "75 Bars" and 2004's "Boom!" — both sparse, old-school spit workouts, the latter a much more lighthearted affair — speaks very clearly as an example of the Roots' current razor-sharp embrace of darkness.

The rest of the record's circus of MCs, surprisingly, does not diminish the aforementioned focus; the focus appears to inspire them, in fact. Each vocalist brings their A-game. Both former Black Star members, Talib Kweli ("Lost Desire") and Mos Def ("Rising Down"), sound better than they have in years, and so does Common ("The Show"). The topics of the various characters include Earth-collapse, anti-patriotism, uncontrollable urges, family strife, being a criminal, not being a criminal (just black), and being entirely unapologetic. Yet it is not up to me but the poets to deliver the message, and they do so with enough vibrancy, grace and beat-interaction to completely engage.

The only aspect of the group that keeps them on that interesting brink between full-on conceptual success and utter pop failure is their almost total inability at this stage to create a captivating chorus hook. "I Will Not Apologize," an otherwise exceptional spin on a simmering, laid-back Fela Kuti sample, sounds too upfront in its refrain; "Rising Up," the otherwise exceptional triumphant closer, has a two-bar refrain from singer Chrisette Michelle that could be completely thrown out only to improve the song. Other songs' choruses are live-with-able and varying degrees of appropriate, but almost none of them are evidently necessary. (The marvelous synth-grind "I Can't Help It" and the obligatory party track "Get Busy" [yes, even this album has one] are the exceptions.) Luckily, the band's backing tracks and occasional instrumental interludes are absolutely necessary. So much good taste is on display that the problem becomes negligible.

In any case, what keeps me listening is the combination between the entirely exceptional musical creations behind each song and the thematic foregrounding that ties the LP, and both are as strong as (if not stronger than) ever. "Becoming Unwritten" introduces an effects-heavy, clipped beat that becomes more and more unnerving and built upon before Black Thought delivers three lines and then cuts abruptly at 36 seconds. Later, a fuller version called "Unwritten" begins with a sung chorus from Mercedes Martinez and a verse from Thought, yet the song cuts to silence twice, and the second time it ends the track, even still at only 1:22. Thought rhymes, at the end of both tracks, "The son won't face the father/ The gun won't erase the trauma/ Why you wastin' your time, son?"

Being "Unwritten" in both of these cases gestures to the possibility that though one soldiers on, one could get swallowed up into nothing, due to idleness, due to loss of control in yourself, due to loss of control around you. Here appears to be the theme of Rising Down. On a hidden track, we hear aftermath of the phone conference that opens the record, one voice venting justifications for why such an explosion of frustration might occur and why it would be prudent to watch for it. Then he stops. "Oh, shit," he says. "Somebody just hit the fuckin' rent-a-car." ?uestlove says, calmly, with a laugh: "Someone just crashed the car?" Flaws and all, the Roots keep writing their story and throwing parties.

-Spencer Owen

Al Green - Lay It Down

Spencer Owen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:58:38 GMT

Al Green - Lay It Down
(Blue Note, 2008)
7 out of 10

Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson did not make his love for Amy Winehouse's Back to Black a secret when it first came out, before "Rehab" was an international smash. He claimed on his Myspace blog that Black was the record he wanted Christina Aguilera to make. Thompson supposedly also wanted to produce the comeback of Bill Withers, but instead ended up with the Al Green project. Thompson's fascination with the feeling of some old rhythm records is not surprising. He is foremost a record collector, a DJ, a drummer who learned by studying records: a man who lives the music he loves enough to unapologetically let the obsession define, often, the music he makes.

I have listened to and deeply admired Thompson's work with the Roots for some time now, but my knowledge of Al Green's discography consists of 1972's I'm Still in Love with You, 1973's Call Me, "Let's Stay Together," "Take Me to the River," "Tired of Being Alone" ... let's say that's probably it. That, and I've heard snatches of his last two albums, which constituted a comeback to some degree, apparently, what with a reteaming of Green and vintage producer Willie Mitchell, though not a retrieval of the timbres and feels that the early '70s made seem so effortless. ?uestlove, his production cohort James Poyser, Al Green and Blue Note Records would all probably agree that this album, now, Lay It Down, were any of his post-classic works to grace my ears eventually, is the one for someone like me.

Willie Mitchell — I reiterate — did not, on this decade's I Can't Stop and Everything's OK, return to the sumptuous sound of his canonized Al Green productions. The buzz here, on this year's Lay It Down, is that Thompson and Poyser have pulled a Ronson/Dap-Kings and turned on the time machine, and then hired the Dap-Kings' horn players, one of those fabled "good measure" tactics. The buzz seems about right. The sound is warm 'n' funky, smooth 'n' heavy, just the way Mitchell turned it out on "Love and Happiness" (the stew-stirring train groove of which is nodded to at the coda of "No One Like You"). Everything is very subtle. Old-time session player, the now-late Chalmers "Spanky" Alford, joins the crew of youngsters and plays the guitar about as beautifully as I'd like someone in soul music to do; I had to instant-replay the sultry arpeggios in the not-as-slow-jam (they're all kind of slow jams, aren't they?) "What More Do You Want from Me," actually my favorite song on Lay It Down. John Legend, Anthony Hamilton and Corinne Bailey Rae show up and don't screw anything up. Meanwhile, idiots all over the world are losing bets against the odds that ?uestlove would deliver a flawless drum performance and sound, worthy of Mr. Green's stature.

Al Green? He writes and sings all over the damn thing and sounds like he did back when he made those inescapable records, and I mean inescapable now, I mean it's funny how I really just keep hearing that classic Al Green and people just can't get enough of it. Am I one of those people? Maybe you can tell by now that, oddly, no, I'm not. I am not sure what it is. It is a well-aged R&B thumbprint that pleases me, and it doesn't really penetrate that surface-level pleasure. It strikes me as oddly cerebral, a thing to appreciate for its arrangement, its uniqueness, more than a thing to move me. Perhaps it's that I gravitate towards James Brown, Prince, Sly, the more outrageous takes on R&B energy. Perhaps it's that the Reverend is the type of artist who seems to live and die by the sound of his records, no matter how much soul he puts out there through his singing or how many decent chord progressions his band can run through. Me, I listen to Lay It Down more as an appreciator of the varied efforts of Mr. Thompson, who does an undoubtedly exceptional job, and so does Mr. Green and so do their whole band 'n' crew. You can safely envision a higher level of enthusiasm from someone who more idolizes the work of this perennial artist.

-Spencer Owen

Lay It Down comes out on 5/29.

The Breeders - Mountain Battles

Spencer Owen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:26:52 GMT

The Breeders - Mountain Battles
(4AD, 2008)
7.5 out of 10

Singing "I can feel it!" over and over again, Kim Deal hurtles tumbling with her band out of the speakers on "Overglazed." Two minutes of this excited psychedelic revelry pass, evoking the Who as much as Throwing Muses, and then the Breeders land in the semi-glorious, scatterbrained mud that is the remainder of Mountain Battles. It is the fourth Breeders album, the third in a row featuring Kim's sister Kelley on vocals and guitar, and only the second in a row featuring their current rhythm section lineup. This is to say: the Breeders in 1990 are not the same band as this one, but Kim's singular, weird approach to song and arrangement both — more hazy, sparse and seductive than that of Black Francis and his Pixies, while carrying over some of that band's alien-rock edge — causes this to matter little.

Every song can be described with different terms, none of them necessarily sounding inherently appealing, but trust me: if you ever enjoyed unpretentiously strange rock music in the '90s, maybe if you've ever used the term "cough syrupy" to describe a record you like, ... how about if you liked any of the Breeders' albums before this one? pretty simple criterion, that one ... then Mountain Battles is an '08 landmark not to miss.

Here I go for trying on some of the more notable tracks, with nonetheless gusto. "Bang On" quietly follows the grabby jubilation of "Overglazed" with a muted major hook, a ploddy, muffled beat and Kim half-yelping, a bit strangled: "I love NO one/ And no one loves ME!" (See, that one's a personal favorite of mine.) On "German Studies," the Deal sisters intone, hilariously, poor pronunciation of Deustch phrases over a rough and ragged 2/4 backing, something like (but not really) a hardcore band slowed to half-speed. "Spark" eschews the percussion completely for, well, a "cough syrupy" dirge that vacillates between a soft lull and a softly distorted screech. (Another favorite.) "Istanbul" drops dubby melodica onto a bizarre ode, possibly, to its namesake; immediately following is "Walk It Off," a sunny college rock throwback sounding as if it were flown in from another album and time. This is the logic of Mountain Battles.

We dip into 13 different pools of Deal, altogether. The closing title track is a particularly inviting soak, luxuriating for nearly four minutes — a significant plot of real estate on this mountainside — in some droning organ and Kim's elegantly crooned poetry. Have I been giving this album enough credit? Have I taken it seriously enough? That's the dilemma that sets Mountain Battles apart from their previous albums, even the relatively irreverent Title TK; it's their least grounded record, their most head-in-clouds, feet-in-quicksand. For that, it might be their slightest effort — certainly not for lack of taste, charm, style and chutzpah. On the flip side, Mountain Battles might be the most fun you can have with the Breeders for all of these reasons. They're still just as good as ever, essentially, and I remain confident that the Deal sisters' world is one that will likely always be worth exploring.

-Spencer Owen

Semi-speechless.

Spencer Owen — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:19:18 GMT

All I can find to say about this blog article, aside from the fact that the music offered at the bottom is un-uniquely terrible, is that I don't think there could have been another year in history in which I could encounter phenomena (epiphenomena?) of this exact nature.

Striking. Perplexing. A bit horrifying. I wish I could cohere some thoughts about it. The best I could come up with is that it's an "anti-fractal," and that doesn't even mean anything. EDIT : I realized what's wrong with it. The writer has absolutely no sense of irony. He could even get hit by a bus powered by irony and he would not see the irony of that.

For something less confusing in a future-shock sort of way, take a look at this Salon guy's racially-confused take on Gnarls Barkley. He is confused, specifically, about why two guys who used to "keep it real," in his estimation of almost all hip hop, are making hit pop records having little to do with reality-keeping (almost all hip hop). (Reality = black, "surreality" = white, sort of, except not completely.) Another way to put it: based on numerous misconceptions and a significant lack of forethought (projected by me, at least), he thinks it's interesting that these two particular people are famous for their pop songs and personalities, when it isn't. Also, Gnarls Barkley's fans are mostly white (he's got the numbers) "practically by design," which can only mean, to me, that he has insight into the design committee responsible for Gnarls Barkley's demographic that figured it would be almost - practically - ideal for most of their fans to be white.

Meredith Monk - Impermanence

Spencer Owen — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:06:34 GMT

Meredith Monk - Impermanence
(ECM New Music, 2008)
6 out of 10

Meredith Monk has created works of beauty and challenge in every decade since (and including) the 1960s. She is a Monster of Ostinato-Laden New Music but is not exactly a minimalist; as new music hierarchies go, she should probably be placed above the living gods (Glass, Riley and Reich) and maybe even the other underdogs (Adams, Part and... well, Adams) for her consistency in both quality and vitality. Her "problem," of course, is that she's a woman who uses formidable extended vocal technique to honk, holler, whoop, cackle, mumble, needle, intone and, lest we forget, sing. For all of the singing in her music, each song cycle she debuts, to the delight of a relatively small audience, contains approximately 20 English words on average; every other utterance shall do with a non-lingual syllable. All this is to say: I love her music; others "appreciate" it, so I find myself a little bit lonely on this one. Needless to say, I do not mind, though I just might prosthelytize all the same.

It's been six years since her last major (in stature, not key) cycle, Mercy, and Impermanence seems to be formed essentially from altered blueprints created for Mercy; therefore it will be useful to compare them more than I would compare this to another work of hers. Impermanence is major in form, but minor in effect, especially to someone such as I, once and continuing to be struck by the effect of Mercy. She uses the same arrangement techniques here: piano, woodwinds, and eccentric percussion, with an ensemble of vocalists starring herself. Mercy is more epic, enigmatic, beguiling; Impermanence is slighter, "odder," more personal. It occasionally reaches similar heights of the ethereal, but the overall effect is more distant and light as opposed to the deep, dark pool that is Mercy.

The solo-Monk voice-and-piano number "Last Song" opens Impermanence, which, in case you haven't guessed, is overall focused loosely around the titular idea. Making a work about death and the temporary nature of all things has led her, strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely), to a more playful place. "Last Song" is one of the two songs that go beyond the playful stage into something evocative of more. Over a characteristically warm minor-key piano motif, her voice dances in an even more characteristic fashion around phrases based on the word "last" ("last dance/ last chance/ lalalalalast/ last minute/ last miniminiminiminimini..."). The second song that comes to fruition is an ensemble piece called "Liminal," in which 11 minutes are spent over variations on an ostinato for piano and marimba, while voices and percussive elements pointillistically drop in and out and clarinet lines slither in and out. Too many subtle surprises occur during "Liminal" to name them all; as a stand-alone song, it is one of those reasons to keep following her work.

This is not to say there aren't reasons throughout the disc. "Maybe 1" and "Maybe 2," for instance, are lovely instrumental and a capella takes, respectively, on the same Arabic-flavored contrapuntal exercise; "Particular Dance" is a very bent and joyful dance not unlike a sort of, er, particular, vocal-driven take on Dave Brubeck's timing experiments, although it also is quite less unlike the superior "Urban March (Light)" from Mercy. Other experiments fail to fully engage, like the too-silly "Skeleton Lines" (here she truly seems to be making gibberish sounds; so rarely does that seem to be the case with her), or "Between Song," featuring too many lyrics that seem to be reaching awkwardly for the sake of concept.

Even these lighter-baked ideas, though, don't displease a Monk follower like myself. Nonetheless, before recommending Impermanence, I'd go with Mercy or Book of Days (1990), or for the more adventurous, Turtle Dreams (1983); the title piece is 18 minutes of organ and voice-quartet, and it is Meredith at her most enthralling. Once you've explored it all, Impermanence will catch you up and you'll most likely be left looking forward to her next work.

-Spencer Owen

(Incidentally, that's called Songs of Ascension and should debut sooner than six years from now... specifically, the 2008-09 touring season.)

Janet Jackson - Discipline

Spencer Owen — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:13:28 GMT

Janet Jackson - Discipline
(Island, 2008)
4 out of 10

I spent the weekend, and the Thursday/Friday leading to it, listening to "Touch My Body," the new single by Mariah Carey. Reminiscent of the finest sex-jam tradition — that being R. Kelly's, 1998-present — the tune writhes (you know, seductively, in a very sweet but sort of pelvis-grinding fashion, as it were) over a Wurlitzer loop of a basic eighth-note pulse and a snap beat. Producer "Tricky" Stewart and co-writers "The-Dream" and "Cri$tyle" aid Ms. Carey in presenting a Mariah sounding as au naturel as modern studio methods allow, not to mention more appealing, playful and sexy than usual, or maybe ever. "Touch My Body" has become the latest victim of my recently-favored style of music appreciation, playing songs countless times over several days until they whimper from indefinite exhaustion. It is a warm, banana-filled crepe slathered with Nutella.

My justification for spieling on Mariah for an entire paragraph before even getting to the Janet material: the charms of "Touch My Body" are reminiscent of a Janet of old, the inviting one, whether on the sunny "Runaway," the dusky "Got 'Til It's Gone," even the stage-light-y "What Have You Done for Me Lately" and many of her other smash hits or the finer tracks from janet. and The Velvet Rope. On Discipline, the closest to fun we've got, other than the stellar second song "Luv," is on "So Much Betta," in which Janet becomes robot-chimpunk-ified and asserts her robot-chipmunk self. Another bit of digression, if more on topic: Producer Jermaine Dupri samples — yes — Daft Punk's "Daftendirekt" on "So Much Betta." The effect of the Punk track's usage, the already-filtered voice drowned in yet another filter, is akin to having an atonal synth loop in the background. Decent PR move, maybe, but no points for the art.

Whereas "So Much Betta" nonetheless (barely) stands out for being a short cut of some vacantly fun electro-house, lead single "Feedback" fills the same void with hot air and packs a Janet of many voices into a fairly insipid Pussycat-par club number. To be fair, "Rollercoaster" does sincerely try to evoke the giggly, sparkly Janet, but oh so minimally, and thus easily evacuates the brain, especially due to its placement after "Luv" in the first 1/3. Aside from an irritating, overlong stab at "old school" vitality with Missy Elliott (whom I've liked!) and some ride-bell breakbeats (which I can like!) on "The 1," you have remaining an album of soft-spokenly unremarkable R&B music. For examples, I'll stick to the titles that feature clever transplants of capital letters for their homophonic word counterparts. "Rock with U" does its best to have almost the same title as her brother's classic disco hit, and succeeds. "Can't B Good" actually lifts half of its bridge right out of the refrain of "In the Closet" from MJ's Dangerous, and that is the best part of it. A song titled "Greatest X" should not be a sappy sponge in which the singer insists you are the "greatest ex ever." That is a backhanded compliment, Miss Jackson, and I'll thank you to keep it AND the tune you sang it to. ("Greatest X," by the way, was composed by ... Tricky Stewart and The-Dream? Two of the minds behind "Touch My Body"? Ugh! You people are so inconsistent!)

I've teased at a song called "Luv." It's a Darkchild production, and I have to admit, for a week or so, it occupied the slot that the slightly-superior "Touch My Body" eventually filled. Unlike Carey's track, though, or the litany of past Jackson songs that fit the bill, it isn't the gigglish fun or feminine wiles that charmed my [insert article of clothing according to degree of track's lubriciousness] off. Despite the similar mid-tempo groove delight to "Body," "Luv" is fully fat synths and saturation, a playfully-constructed mover that transcends its formula without even having to inject that human touch in the voice. In that way, it's more impressive than Carey's latest; in the other way, its pleasures are less visceral. (In a month, be on the lookout for what will most likely be a registration of disappointment in Mariah Carey's upcoming E=MC2.)

-Spencer Owen

Steve Reid Ensemble - Daxaar

Spencer Owen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:13:13 GMT

Steve Reid Ensemble - Daxaar
Domino, 2008
3 out of 10

It wasn't long ago that Steve Reid would have been on a list, if I had cared to make it (clearly I didn't) and think for a long time about it (I might have, had I cared), of “ultimate badasses” (apologies to Moss & Chigurh). It actually might have been about a week ago. In fact, if I'd decided to make the list last week, he would have been closer to my mind than usual, because here I was, buying the new CD by Steve Reid Ensemble, Daxaar, featuring on the cover the subtitle “(recorded in africa).” We're talking the legendary out-jazz drummer Steve Reid, with producer and now-constant sampler-collaborator Kieran Hebden (Four Tet, Fridge), mixing it up in Senegal with a group. Reid's kit-manning resume is star-studded, and I mean Ornette, and I mean Miles, and I mean James Brown; Nova and Rhythmatism (1976), for decades his only studio work as a band-leader, are now classics, if a bit under the radar; his work as a duo with Hebden over the last two years has been refreshing, a welcome, organic generation-gap-closure effort.

Problem with Daxaar being, though — oh, man — it's bad. Really bad. Can barely think of a kind word to say here. The man's got such a luminous smile, such a storied past, such an admirable attitude, it's difficult to feel right doing this, but I must. Daxaar could give a first-time Reid listener forever the worst-possible impression of Steve Reid's work; possibly worse still, Daxaar could mislead a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed initiate into thinking that this is anywhere near the best of what funk-based out-jazz can accomplish, when it is closer to a nadir. In the latter case, one could at least hope that the initiate would then explore Reid's '76 pair of explorations and begin to understand where he went wrong with Daxaar. Yet in no case shall I recommend Daxaar.

We open with a three-minute unaccompanied song of kora and voice called “Welcome,” written and performed by Isa Kouyate. The kora is the West African harp made known to the first world by Mali's Toumani Diabate. A web search for “Isa Kouyate” leads me exclusively to Daxaar references, which is unfortunate, since his piece is lovely and I would have hoped for more solo recordings from Kouyate. His overture is sweet but brief as he takes his bow and does not join the ensemble for the remaining five long-form pieces.

Like the sudden and sharp realization that you missed the last freeway exit for 40 miles, the tone undergoes a drastic change; these pieces would be more accurately served with the word “jams,” with all of the negative connotations one might bring to hearing the term. Reid's beats are occasionally on-point in the most basic sense, and else occasionally flaccid. From beginning to end of these sessions, rarely do I ever note the contribution of any particular musician as a benefit to the ensemble. The trumpet playing by Roger Ongolo is pointillist at best and would often be distracting if there was something of note to distract from. The guitar playing by Jimi Mbaye is textural filler when he isn't attempting a misguided lead (in fact the liner notes from Gilles Peterson correctly identify a Santana moment). Even Mr. Kieran Hebden, a boon to Reid's work and soul in the recent past, can't save this jam band from jam band hell; he offers up, in large part, the most wankish and irritating color choices from his electronic palette.

A key problem here may be that a man named Boris Netsvetaev, the most consistently obnoxious member of this band, not only attempts to anchor each piece with egregious Rhodes noodling or even-more egregious organ noodling, but also has been elected “musical director” of these Senegalese sessions. It will suffice to say, on the subject of song descriptions, that the second full jam on Daxaar (“Jiggy Jiggy”) sounds exactly like a Club Med band riffing on the Doors for nine minutes as someone with a recorder is strangled. The merits of the rest of the disc, Kouyate's introduction excluded, do not rise far above this. Steve Reid has, as far as I know, never put his name on something this tasteless before. I hope he has the sense not to do it again.

-Spencer Owen

Wait - now - what did they say?

Spencer Owen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:00:25 GMT

I don't know if this makes me an extraordinary geek, an extremely odd metal fan, neither, both, but The Dethalbum by the cartoon death metal band Dethklok, consisting mainly of Brendon Small (creator of Home Movies and the Dethklok-starring Metalocalypse), has been pretty much the only album I've listened to over the weekend, and it continues into today. In particular I've probably listened to this song upwards of 50 times now, mainly just to get the payoff in the last 20 seconds. Welcome to my world. It is strange to be me.

Scores at the Oscars: 2007 Edition

Spencer Owen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:36:49 GMT

The annual awards show inspires a tizzy of emotions in film buffs. Many of them will likely conspire not to partake in the event (or just do it separately, but at the very least all acknowledge that they are not sufficiently intrigued). Many others, like me, will be stupidly agog over any display of taste, especially considering this year's nominees, among them boatloads of nods towards any other year's best film, No Country for Old Men, as well as towards the best film in many years, There Will Be Blood.

The fact is — and here I assume that there's at least one person reading who doesn't know me all that well, so forgive me if you do — cinema is a passion of mine, but it is a passion informed more than significantly by my even greater passion for music. I've been listening to and critiquing the score as a crucial, grade-dependent element of a film for years now. Listening to music is a complete act, and so is watching a film, except that when you're watching a film, you're sometimes also listening to music, and thus you're engaged in two complete acts affecting each other. I champion any film (usually these are foreign) that eschews an original score to successful effect, when so many others use it as a crutch or without even knowing why; in many cases, I conclude that a movie, even a really good one, could have been improved by better music or, at the very least, more well-thought-out usage.

I only just started paying attention to the best score category at the Oscars last year. My Pulitzer-winning (not really) blog critiques on two of the year's nominees were posted on the Six-Reel Shuffle, my friends' short-lived collective web journal about whatever movies they were seeing. I wrote about Pan's Labyrinth, but here's the one I like better, about the travesty of Gustavo Santaolalla's win for Babel.

This year, I saw only two of this year's nominees in the scoring category, and I'm sure I'll never see the other three, but I've sampled their soundtracks. Unwatched by me:

- Atonement, composed by Dario Marianelli, the ultimate in empty baroque schmaltz, topped off by egregious typewriter effects — and, oh, "featuring piano solos" (read: endless, meandering arpeggios) "performed by Jean Yves-Thibaudet," so get excited.
- The Kite Runner by Alberto Iglesias, pan-Middle-Eastern stylings that could honestly be much worse than they sound, and so I cannot comment aside from that aesthetically, the production's awfully wet and dramatic, and would sooner ask for recommendations of other Afghani/Persian/Pakistani music closer to my sensibilities. I do, however, admire Iglesias's work for Talk to Her and The Constant Gardener in particular.
- 3:10 to Yuma by Marco Beltrami, dull, rote chamber textures mixed with dull, rote Western "genre" textures. Cool.

The ones I did see are Ratatouille, one of my favorite movies of the year and a highly competent cartoon score by Michael Giacchino, whose score for Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World was, I note as a digression, one of the strangest and possibly worst I've witnessed in theaters. I won't argue about that nomination — cartoon music is hard! — but I will cap it off with the surprising first-ever nomination for James Newton Howard and his work on Michael Clayton, surprising because he is a hack who probably should have been nominated several times over by now. Well done to the Academy at last, since they've managed to nominate him for a film in which his soundtrack is by far the worst part. Howard's music for Michael Clayton would be better suited for a prime-time drama starring Heather Locklear, or maybe even the car commercial during it; I found it a little bit difficult to take the movie seriously when the score was on, and it actually nearly ruined the ending's otherwise refreshing impact for me.

A question arises out of all this muckity muck. Exactly which of these movies has been as highly-regarded for its score as Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood? By now, it's fairly common knowledge that Jonny Greenwood's stellar work for Blood was considered "ineligible" by the Academy. If you want to see a fairly exemplary piece of unfair journalism, by the way, check out this piece on the AP about the scandal!

"Turns out it wasn't eligible — because it wasn't entirely original... Some of the score came from a performance Greenwood had done for the BBC , titled 'Popcorn Superhet Receiver.' Some of it came from Estonian composer Arvo Part; still other parts came from a Brahms violin concerto." Glibly they cast Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Anderson as phonies for even suggesting that his work was worthy of Academy recognition, despite it being evident that Greenwood's work for the film was clearly substantial enough by any merit aside from irrelevant statistic-based guidelines. Then they (now speaking to both the Academy and the press) operate as if — as if! — no score intermingled with previously composed or otherwise sourced music could be up for this award. Clearly rules are made to be broken (please consult last year's Babel win; if they are trying to apologize for that, this is the wrong way to go about it). Anyone who's seen and appreciated the merits of There Will Be Blood should find this preposterous. There's a feature-length album of music written for the movie in stores; how is this much not enough?

I'm going to take up a radical position, and if what I've heard from my friends who frequent film discussion boards is any indication, I could be laughed off the internet for doing this. Not only is the music in There Will Be Blood, both the amount of it and the quality, substantial enough to receive a nomination (and win) the Oscar for best score, but I will also claim an equal right to nomination — nay, a greater right than all present nominees — for Carter Burwell and the Coen Bros.' use of his music in No Country for Old Men.

If you think there's no score in that movie, well, I'm not playing a trick on you; Burwell and the Coens did. There are several minutes of music in it, probably even over 10. Burwell's contribution consists entirely of synth pads swelling darkly and at times almost inaudibly. Each time it seeps through the sound design of the desert or the interior of a car, it rings utterly true to the film, contributing just that extra, near-subliminal kick to the mood of the moment. The synthesizer patches have a warm, analog-style texture, as well, helping to place the film in its era (specifically, 1980). It's as if Brian Eno edited a score by Vangelis down to a single track of the mix that Vangelis didn't even remember recording. Burwell's work for No Country is ambient, minimal, and as fitting to the movie as it is in essentially every previous effort they've done together. The film is critically decorated for almost every other aspect of its craft; the effect of its score, an already underlooked element of cinematic analysis in general, is so ambient that no one thinks it's even there. In reality, it is as unorthodox and thoughtful a technique as the editing and structure already displays. To me, this is scoring as an art. It takes the already daring "no music" aesthetic, almost completely missing from American filmmaking, and ups the ante by actually including some, and it's nice.

Do I think that No Country's score is more daring than the one for There Will Be Blood? Ultimately, I do not; the stylistic breadth of Greenwood's compositions in the film, especially how good and memorable each of them are, is remarkable for a soundtrack work. It is Greenwood's first score for a traditional feature, and to be truthful, as phenomenal as the music is, my standards are high enough that I think he could even do better with another round. I hope that the Academy's outdated, wrongheaded concept of what the best of scoring can be does not discourage him from forging ahead in the field. Burwell, luckily, has already made his name with the Coens, with his excellent work for both of Spike Jonze's features, and yet more; the total snub of his oeuvre thus far is perhaps more indicative of the overall attitude the Academy has towards music than either of these films being shut out (and let's be realistic; No Country wouldn't get nominated even in a more ideal world). Yet it remains true in my estimation that both of these films, the two best of 2007 and two of the most acclaimed, have it within their bragging rights to claim a unique and exceptional approach to the soundtrack, and until this sort of effort is recognized on equal footing with the films' other achievements, the potential for the art of the score in cinema will continue to be slighted.

School of Language - Sea from Shore

Spencer Owen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:08:32 GMT

School of Language - Sea from Shore
Thrill Jockey, 2008
7 out of 10

Two stereo-separated, constant and synchronized recitations of monotone vowel sounds from the UK's David Brewis, the almost-fully-solo artist that makes up School of Language (and one-third of the on-hiatus Field Music), run along the first and final five minutes of Sea from Shore. It's an idea torn from mid-20th century new music, and though it's the only idea here that has been, it speaks to the fresh attitude with which Brewis attacks the ragtag assemblage called "indie rock arrangements" as we've known them since the mid-'90s. It's also listenable because the timbre of Brewis's voice — a pleasing, well-rounded and well-enunciated tenor — is inherently so, and so it is an element I am willing to take for granted and barely discuss.

Here is an album that I admire more than Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (last year's exemplary "smart-alec indie" record) in most ways except the part in the middle where my interest level drops for a few songs, and so it is more or less its equal. Said songs that start and end Sea from Shore are "Rockist Parts 1 and 2" and "Rockist Parts 3 and 4" ("1" and "4" are different versions of the same song). This is a strong action and buoys the record as a piece, despite the regrettably skippable middle trio. The album's "playlist tracks" are the instrumental "Rockist Part 2," which soothes the beast in me that craves a simple, well-crafted, percussive studio piece begging to be dropped into a film soundtrack; and "Disappointment '99," a beat-distorted rock song ranking alongside the finest rock moves of 2007 and recalling a golden era of Dischord bands like Smart Went Crazy or the Dismemberment Plan.

Though one could live with the thesis that Sea from Shore is comprised of a set of well-performed indie rock ideas, with their references traveling back to Archers of Loaf and Pavement, stopping along the way to Jim O'Rourke and other previously-mentioned old friends, it's possible to see the album from another perspective. Forgive me for speaking of the Beatles; I don't see how their being the most influential band in history doesn't stop them from being the most over-referenced group in history as well, so I try to avoid it, but here I can't avoid it. The lull of tracks five through seven can be explained with the thought occurring to me, as rarely as it does, "I could easily be listening to Abbey Road instead of these songs." There, Brewis introduces an odd approach where at times, elements of the basic instrumental arrangement, though never the vocal, could easily be performed by the members of the Beatles in their final stages, with their accompanying aesthetic. It's not a total homage, but it's reminiscent enough to be an easy distraction and a hallmark of the milquetoast quality of these tunes.

Then he does something funny by utterly perfecting the approach. Track eight, "This Is No Fun," is a complete trip wherein the 1970 Beatles arrangement is both completely faithful — really, just imagine it, John and George on guitar, Paul on bass, Ringo on drums, with that backwards reverb, that lush acoustic motif, the unrelated coda — and also could be an utter fluke, just as solid and heavy-hitting as any exceptional modern power pop. Though "Rockist Part 2" and "Disappointment '99" are still the record's "hits," the novelty value of "This Is No Fun" is nonetheless unrivaled by the rest of the material here; I have not heard such a successful stylistic coup of this era of Beatles music, and its success as a song that stands apart from this rubric can be measured by the relative failures of the trio of songs leading up to it.

Really, just to cut through the chaff, School of Language's debut, Sea from Shore, is on Thrill Jockey Records, so in truth, you should probably already want to hear it. Luckily, it's worth keeping, too, particularly for anyone fond of Field Music. It is the hope that with more toil on Mr. Brewis's part comes more music and maybe even a more consistently original effort; his intelligence has already been substantially proven, and it's early yet.

-Spencer Owen

"The Great Stare (for Paddy McAloon and Marie Falconetti)"

Spencer Owen — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:57:05 GMT

I'm e-mailing people this song and I'm uploading it all over the internet and this will be no exception. I completed it last night. Fun facts about the song:

- If you call my cell phone and get my voicemail (and if you have done so over the last several weeks), you've heard the loop that this song is based on. Through painstaking usage of the most modern technology, it has gone from a looping pedal in Santa Cruz, CA, to an outgoing voicemail message, to the background of this song.

- Paddy McAloon is the songwriter for Prefab Sprout. In the past week, Steve McQueen has become an all-time favorite.

- Marie/Renee Falconetti is the star of Carl Th. Dreyer's silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. Do a Google image search on her.

- I didn't like it until I listened to it about ten times. Hopefully you won't have to do the same thing.

Artist of the decade (a tear-stained note)

Spencer Owen — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:46:54 GMT

As I write this, I am technically a day late (though by no means a dollar short). February 7, 2008: J Dilla, Jay Dee, would have been 34. Donuts came out on this day in 2006 as well, and I bought it from Amoeba on that very day, completely unaware of what it would do to and for me as a music listener.

I sit here listening to track 5 from "beat CD '05 #1" on repeat and am moved indescribably. (UPDATE: 8:25 AM - now it's "So Far to Go," the instrumental from The Shining, with D'Angelo's jazz-angel piano-playing.) It is not unsafe for me to say that over the last two years precisely, no single artist has moved me as frequently OR as deeply as Jay Dee. My eyes moisten; bless this man, love this work, love music.

...

Oh, and as a nice coincidence, I've also been at MOG for two years now. Much love.

Requisite advertisement.

Spencer Owen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:55:41 GMT

TOMORROW / WEDNESDAY , FEBRUARY 6
9 PM sharp! (doors at 8:30)
SEAN SMITH AND SPENCER OWEN - DOUBLE RECORD RELEASE SHOW - FEATURING JAMES BLACKSHAW AND COLOSSAL YES
CAFE DU NORD , SAN FRANCISCO
$10

This is probably the most useless advertisement I've ever done for one of my shows; my good friend Sean Smith is headlining and he, with his new album Eternal (on which I played), has recently received a good amount of local press - SF Chronicle, SF Weekly, East Bay Express and even the Palo Alto Daily News (yes!!). Most if not all of these stories have mentioned the upcoming show. We're hoping, then, for an exceptional turnout. What's fun about this for me is that I get to play too, not only in Sean's band as the drummer but also as my own self, and it's my record release party as much as Sean's. (Remember Logic, back from a year ago? Some lucky moggers got to download it for free for approximately one day? Here we are, one year later, and it's on vinyl available for pre-order!)

So, I'm doing a bunch of songs (listen to at least some of them at my Myspace page), Logic will be available for sale on pink vinyl (with some limited edition CDs included), and I'm starting at 9 on the dot. Sean's the third of four acts and you shan't miss it either. I'm looking more forward to this show than any I can remember playing. Please come on time and don't be afraid of being the first one there; otherwise you really might be too late.

I can't wait!

The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

Spencer Owen — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:53:29 GMT

The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
(Nonesuch, 2008)
3 out of 10

The "3" is for "Three-Way," the opening track on Distortion, the Magnetic Fields' eighth album and by far the worst album to which Stephin Merritt has ever put this project name, or any of his names. "Three-Way" is also the only song on the tracklist that doesn't offend me; it is an instrumental, and has a sort of decent joke-surf-rock idea behind it. To go on at lengths about Distortion would be for me to merely quote lyrics from songs that I find particularly insufferable, or stress how I don't enjoy the milk-sludge timbre of Shirley Simms's voice (who sings lead on half of the tunes, with Merritt's baritone on the rest), especially set to these chunks of "pop song," these tin cans of petrified bubblegum, pre-chewed by Phil Spector and John Cale yet evoking nothing more strongly than Merritt's superior, past glories.

This reviewer loves the Magnetic Fields, whose 69 Love Songs is among my favorite albums. i, from 2004, appeared to be a partial misstep, the first album by the band since their debut that bowled an incomplete spare by contrast to the last decade's series of strikes. One could have hoped (one did hope) that the featured tendency for unmemorable songwriting on parts of i was short-lived. In fact Distortion is laden with songwriting that, when memorable, is only so because it is induces cringes. "California Girls": does it get more clever than the refrain, "I hate California girls"? No, it does not. "Zombie Boy": does it get more clever than the title? No, it does not. "The Nun's Litany": it's a list of not-nunlike things that a nun wants! Do not get me started on "Too Drunk to Dream," the only song in Stephin Merritt's formidable - formidable - catalog of released songs that makes me truly angry to hear. (Well, okay - I also get incensed at "Zombie Boy.")

Why do I, a supporter and even sometimes fanatic of Merritt's work, find so much objectionable about Distortion? Why don't I find 69 Love Songs this condescending, this wrong-headed? It's a thin line, a line of cliche, cleverness, straightforward tunes (with just a tweak now and then) and experimental arrangements - those precious qualities of post-modern pop. Merritt has almost always danced on the correct side of the line; where he might have faltered on 69 Love Songs, for instance, he flourishes with ambition, taste, and just enough cheekiness. With Distortion, he accidentally trips over the line and falls down splayed across the entire other, wrong side.

The record is near-impossible to listen to all the way through; the sound halfway approaches a noise album but tempers the ferocity of one by being based on cabaret songs in the style with which your grandmother might embarrass you. The execution of the concept is as unlikable as it could be, and for me to be focusing on the lyrics as much as I have been is almost itself an indictment of how uninspiring the tunes and walls-of-sound behind them are. He has attempted to sonically crib from what he calls "the last significant event in pop music production," the Jesus & Mary Chain's Psychocandy. The incorrect shortsightedness of his statement, something he has inexplicably been saying for years despite seeming to have a general open-mindedness, has finally caught up to his method; his freshness has therefore temporarily expired. If, as Merritt sings on "Too Drunk to Dream," "sober, it's ever darker," while "shitfaced, the moon is nearer," then I call this Merritt's hangover album.

For the delight of inebriation under the influence of the Magnetic Fields, look at The House of Tomorrow EP or Holiday; these, at least, are albums that go for a similar bubblegum flavor to Distortion's but instead pass my line-crossing test with flying colors.

-Spencer Owen

Wikipedia: why?

Spencer Owen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:08:44 GMT

If you're like me (i.e. you're a musician and you aren't famous but there's a Wikipedia page about you because, well, why not), you should check your Wikipedia page. Mine was flagged with a deletion notice. Reason: I am a "non-notable musician."

It's been five days since the message was put up, and it also says that after five days, the article can be deleted without notice if appropriate changes are not made. So what did I do? I added the word "notable" to every single sentence. What did they do? When I came back three hours later to make this post, they had already reverted it back, with a message sent to the IP I 'm using saying that the edits were not constructive. The deletion warning is still up.

I don't care if I have a page on Wikipedia; it was fun while it lasted. I also expected that response to my absurd "fix" of the article to fit the guideline (although I didn't expect it so soon). The question stands. Why, Wikipedia? Why is this in your guidelines? Who are we hurting? Is it busy work for your employees? What makes a musician "notable"? Being "famous," being "signed," going on tour? Is it pressure from the major labels? (Probably not, and god, I hope not.) Or is it an attempt to define some subjective, impossible-to-agree-upon definition of "notability"? What is the game?

If you're like me with the exception that you do care about your page on Wikipedia, go check yourself out before they wreck yourself. Meanwhile, I may take to referring to various musicians as "notable" or "non-notable" from here on out.

Meshell Ndegeocello: The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams

Spencer Owen — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:22:51 GMT

Meshell Ndegeocello - The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams
(Decca, 2007)
9 out of 10

The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams is the finest recording of R&B/jazz musician Meshell Ndegeocello's career. Previewed on an EP called The Article 3 from 2006, her seventh and latest LP delivers on every promise of that release.

Ndegeocello's first two records can be defined by a contemporary mid-'90s sound with a hip hop spirit and a defiant edge, anchored by her sultry alto and always-solid bass playing. She then spent the next decade exploring different facets of her sound. There are aspects worthwhile to all of these recordings (particularly 1996's Peace Beyond Passion, her sophomore album and until now her defining work), but something has always been missing: a consistency and coherence that would enable one to call her more than "intriguing." On The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, she is now officially and thoroughly spellbinding. Her most eclectic and risky work has paradoxically resulted in her most consistent and coherent album. Though the production is heavily adorned with stellar studio tactics, her voice and bass still take the reins.

Ndegeocello does more than refuse to compromise the boldness of her approach to music and the text she sets to it; she invites you in with warmth and a kind of sweetness. Exemplary to the approach is the surprising manner in which the record's two most dynamic songs manage long, twisting, verbose and true hooks out of their enigmatic choruses - hooks longer than just a several-note motif or a well-placed "love you, baby." Opening song "The Sloganeer: Paradise" hurtles forward with a rock beat that bests Nine Inch Nails' "Perfect Drug," plunging into the uncanny valley - too robotic to be human, too human to be robotic - while Ndegeocello sings over 12 bars, "Get a bang out of life/ Suicide, straight to paradise/ If you're the chosen, why don't you just/ Kill yourself now, kill yourself now?"

Even better, album centerpiece "Elliptical," the first song on the record I fell head-over-heels for, floats in the slow-jam cosmos with this unlikely refrain: "I received a message from God/ In the form of a rainbow/ Instructions from Captain Girard, it said:/ 'See how they respond when they make love'/ And you look into their eyes..." Part-crooned by R&B-soprano guest vocalist Sy Smith, part-sung-spoken-intoned-vocodered by Ndegeocello, "Elliptical" is one of the most uniquely compelling slow jams this reviewer has ever had the pleasure of encountering. I would even kill for a full LP's worth of "Elliptical"-styled tracks (though it would be something like a fresh take on her own Comfort Woman from 2003), but Ndegeocello would prefer to offer her own path, and I offer no complaints in reply.

"Lovely Lovely" is a spoonful of sumptuous reggae-funk with a left-field Latin jam bridge. "Solomon" ups the dub ante with a wet melodica lead over its effect-soaked 'scape. Cousin to "The Sloganeer" with its brain-skipping beat concepts and three-chord funk-rock structure, "Article 3" (featuring, like "Solomon," a tasteful appearance by the often-not-so Pat Metheny, on his trademark synth-guitar leads) would be the hardest track on The World if it weren't for the pounding album-climax "Relief: A Stripper Classic," in its first half a near-metal sludge, but in its second half a ballad in which the pounding beat remains while jazz piano transplants the guitars. The U.S. gets a bonus track called "Soul Spaceship," which strips away any loftiness and gets down to the gritty in the best way that the idea of "ridin' in my soul spaceship" can.

In a sense, I have short-shrifted the record by discussing only its arrangement concepts and structural elements. The latest album in a career very strongly defined in one sense by the artist's political and spiritual beliefs, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams seems to be as much of a personal statement from Meshell Ndegeocello as she's ever crafted, and the character of Meshell is as worthy of study as her musical techniques. What moves me more than content nine times out of ten, however, is the series of sounds that the music is, and for that series to be this moving, no matter how sincerely and intelligently she has always delivered her persona, is what makes The World her major achievement thus far. My breath is bated with anticipation for her next move.

-Spencer Owen

Top 15 albums of 2007

Spencer Owen — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:13:12 GMT

MUSIC : TOP 15

01 Goodbye the Band - Sky Tiger LP [download it here, free]

Goodbye the Band (download many more of his other albums here, free, as well) is my longtime friend and couple-of-times roommate, the New Jersey-born John Acquadro. He and I have bonded (and occasionally tussled) over the last near-decade about the music we make (among other things), and it is safe to say I've rarely (if ever) been more consistently astonished with a single person's musical output than I have with John's. He has a completely singular worldview and expresses it through completely singular music, no matter how many of his influences show through (over the years: Beck, Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails in his "formative times" and so on). He has hundreds of songs, and I like and even love hundreds of them, and he works fast. When he puts together albums, I often wear them out.

Sky Tiger LP isn't worn out yet; I'm savoring it. My highest praise of the year had recently gone to Rise Above by Dirty Projectors - incidentally, John's 2nd favorite album of all time, according to a list on his Myspace page - but his own work has triumphed in a way I've not quite seen it triumph before. The title track is a nine-minute fantasy, delivered with the passion and background of an autobiography (which it also is, abstractly), with a patchwork composition comparable to some of the most enjoyable prog rock while in no way resembling it sonically; it's as if They Might Be Giants (another influence of his) had some even more psychedelic imagination to stretch out with. It's completely unique, and the more astounding part is that it fits onto a bizarrely structured album, following a five-minute speed-demon also-fantasy that would have served as the climax of any other record ("Amazing Marsheen") and bracketed by two versions of the same song ("I'm Insane") in which John raps hysterically with a pitch-shifted voice over, respectively, cartoonish industrial beats and a cartoonish J-pop bounce. These are almost false descriptions of what the album sounds and feels like; luckily, it's available for free download above (okay, here's the link again) sanctioned by the artist himself, so you can give it a try and see if it doesn't strike you as remarkable as it strikes me. Maybe it's my years of familiarity with the man and his method, but Sky Tiger LP beats the rest of the new music I've heard since J Dilla's Donuts came out nearly two years ago.

02 Dirty Projectors - Rise Above [review here]
03 Boredoms - Super Roots 9 [review here]
04 Meshell Ndegeocello - The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams

I've been following Ndegeocello for a while and hope to have a review up for this record soon. This is her finest work and a shining beacon for American "black music" in dire times for hip hop/R&B radio and what I consider to be some wheel-spinning in the underground.

05 Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
06 The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City [review here]
07 James Rabbit - Coloratura

I would be remiss not to describe another friend's album that made my list. James Rabbit is the compulsion of Tyler Martin in Santa Cruz, CA, and Coloratura (contact him here for a copy) is definitely a most impressive production and a very personal statement. He is also a wonderful melodist, and some songs here are his best from that perspective as well. Featuring lots of talking (not rapping or sprechstimme-ing, but talking) and incessant catchiness, the 18 tracks comprise a suite and a multi-faceted mood of a man who loves and lives pop music. His brother-drummer Conor and friend-pianist Max are the constants, and voices of his other friends pop up, but despite his fine and encompassing control over the material on the album, the album is about his struggles to connect/collaborate with his friends and his "audience" as a musician and a person, and the joy and depression that results. Starts with joy, ends with depression, like many good works; also like many good works, the joy lingers.

08 Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
09 The Sea & Cake - Everybody [review here]
10 Radiohead - In Rainbows
xx Antibalas - Security [review here]
xx Colombiafrica - The Mystic Orchestra - Voodoo Love Inna Champeta-Land
xx Thomas Mapfumo - The Long Walk
xx Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric 36
xx Robert Wyatt - Comicopera

MUSIC : 10 ARTISTS WITH SONGS WITHOUT ALBUMS

Bjork - "The Dull Flame of Desire (featuring Antony Hegarty)," from Volta [review here]

I enjoyed Volta for the most part (currently I admire Bjork a bit more than I listen to her), but the track I come back to is "Dull Flame," quite possibly Bjork's finest moment in song, and Antony's as well.

Manu Chao - "Tristeza Maleza" and "Politik Kills," from El Radiolina

Manu Chao did not make a full record that engaged me this year, despite his last two efforts and his work with Amadou & Mariam causing me to label him "my hero." Nonetheless, he still has a way with a tune and a feel, and these two songs explain it best; a whole album of them and I'd be raving.

Daft Punk - "Human After All/Together/One More Time/Music Sounds Better with You," bonus track from Alive 2007
Fulborn Teversham - "Beachtune" and "You and Me," from Count Herbert II

This obscure British group somehow found its way to me... okay, it was Tyler Martin of James Rabbit that told me about them; he amasses knowledge about pop music like no one else I know. These are his two favorite songs, punky and poppy though not pop-punky (the lineup is vocals, organ, sax, drums), and they're mine too, even though the rest of the album is a decent post-rock thing. They remind me of Need New Body, except these two songs are better than any NNB for tune and musicianship both.

The Good, the Bad & the Queen - "Three Changes," from The Good, the Bad & the Queen

A kind of sad album, in that though it was nice, it in no way fulfilled the potential of its supergroup lineup (Albarn, Simonon, Tong and Tony Allen), except in this song, and even then only about halfway.

Jay-Z - "Roc Boys (and the Winner Is...)" and "I Know," from American Gangster
Kassin + 2 - "Agua" and "Simbioticos," from Futurismo

Kassin + 2 is the weakest of the three + 2 albums, a Brazillian post-tropicalia band that so far has had all three of its members take a turn as singer/songwriter. The previous was under Domenico + 2, and the first one was Moreno + 2; that's Moreno Veloso, son of Caetano. Veloso's was surely the best of the three, and if their plan goes through for the next album to be a hybrid of all three, I will be looking forward mainly to his songs. He's truly the son of his father.

R. Kelly - "Leave Your Name," "The Zoo," "I'm a Flirt (Remix)," "Real Talk" and "Sex Planet," from Double Up [review here]
Kylie Minogue - "In My Arms" and "Wow," from X

I've got a weakness for ripoffs of the song "Holiday" by Madonna (which may be itself a ripoff of something, and if it is, please let me know, I want to hear it), and "Wow" is the best one I've heard, even better than Kylie's previous "Love at First Sight." Kylie lives and dies by her production and the songs she gets, no matter how sweet and sexy she might be, and these two songs are as good as she's gotten yet.

Prince - "Future Baby Mama," from Planet Earth [review here]

Top 15 movies of 2007

Spencer Owen — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:37:38 GMT

Here's my top 15 (and, uh, bottom 1) movies of 2007. Later in the day (or tomorrow), my top 15 albums of 2007 and another album related list.

I don't talk about movies on here, really, so only if you know me do you realize how mad I am about film - that is to say, not #1 or even #2 film buff (too much attention paid to music, making and listening and learning, to join those ranks), but nonetheless a full-bodied, full-brained lover of movies.

There Will Be Blood is the best movie of the year, and I am willing to bet anyone $14 (the price of a weekend ticket at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood) that it's better than what will be the best movie of 2008, too. I had a fever for David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE in early '07 and since haven't hesitated in calling him my favorite American director. I don't know what to call Paul Thomas Anderson yet, but There Will Be Blood, his collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis, surpasses INLAND as well as the Coens' sublime No Country for Old Men. What these three movies have in common is that I have seen them all in theaters four times; Blood will probably get a fifth, if not more. No matter how much I love all the movies on the following list, and I really do, it does more than surpass them. It's an instant favorite of mine. It's more than flawless; it's bold without pause, from start to finish, and certain sequences stun me to stillness and an open mouth even on viewing number four. Daniel Day-Lewis can't be merited enough for his habitation of the story and of each scene and of each shot. Jonny Greenwood's score and Anderson's use of it is exemplary. Magnolia moved me in '99 as a high school student; Punch-Drunk Love dazzled me in college; the towering achievement of There Will Be Blood haunts me. No one can say how Anderson will follow it.

MOVIES : TOP 15
01 There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
02 No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007)
03 I-BE AREA (Ryan Trecartin, 2007) [watch a clip from it here]
04 Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)
05 Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
06 Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
07 Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007)
08 The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)
09 The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007)
10 Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
xx Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)
xx Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)
xx Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007)
xx Rock the Bells (Denis Hennelly & Casey Suchan, 2006)
xx The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007)

BOTTOM 1
Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
When it comes to each year's fare, I try to avoid the bottom of the barrel; usually, for instance, I barely go to the theater to see new movies until March or so. I don't have a particular fondness for Danny Boyle's movies, nor have I seen them all (just Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, no real problems in either case), but I didn't know much about Sunshine and I didn't have a reason to expect just how abysmal it would be. The original Alien should have been re-released simultaneously in theaters just to shut everybody up who tried to say Sunshine is "smart." It is not smart. It is nonsense. It filters scenes, devices and structures from both superior and D-grade sci-fi/horror movies to cobble together an assemblage of poorly-acted (even by the often-good Cillian Murphy) nonsense. It has "cool effects." Don't see it.

Andrew W.K. is still the metal ABBA.

Spencer Owen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:05:35 GMT

In honor of the new MOG , I thought I'd write a post about Andrew W.K., since I am in a gushing phase over his body of work.

After writing a paragraph or so, I thought that I might as well check to see if I've done this before. Lo and behold, 17 months ago, I wrote almost the exact same post I was just about to embark upon. My final sentence: "Perhaps, Mr. W.K., I've misjudged you all this time." Now I'm sure of it. I Get Wet and certain hits from The Wolf ("The Song," "Totally Stupid") get maximum rotation from me lately. Reading interviews with him from the beginning I should've known even then he was leading up to even greater things, but I guess I just wasn't prepared to put him on my radar yet.

But I've been obsessed mostly with tracks that never fully bloomed for me even when I was fanatical at first about Close Calls with Brick Walls - the South Korean bonus tracks "Can You Dance with Me," "I Want Your Face" (admittedly, that one was a favorite from the start), "This Is My World" and "Let's Go on a Date." These are his most ABBA -like creations, in that here the pop instinct overwhelms him. The man's far too charming. And now that I have a record player, I've purchased the double LP version of Close Calls which features an entire side of songs that aren't available otherwise. I only truly love one of those songs, entitled "We're Not Gunna Get Old." Please, listen to it here. Be captivated. It is epic. It is a five-minute grin.

For some classic and neglected AWK , I've utilized the new MOG functionality (which I've been having a blast with, by the way) to embed a Rhapsody link to "Totally Stupid" from The Wolf, and the song "I Get Wet" from the same album is in my "Songs You Should Be Listening To" widget right now. I would suggest a listen to Close Calls with Brick Walls, as it is the perfect gateway to his work for a tastemaking pop fan who doesn't get it yet, but unfortunately you'll have to track it down by means other than Rhapsody, since it's only available on import or domestic vinyl. Shouldn't be too tough.

p.s. In other news, Weasel Walter's Flying Luttenbachers project is, according to Weasel, as dead as Ike Turner. Sad, in a way, but I can't imagine he's quit making music, and the last FL record was a solo effort anyway. I still haven't heard it. Could be list-making material.

Donald Fagen - Nightfly Trilogy

Spencer Owen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:37:52 GMT

Donald Fagen - Nightfly Trilogy
Reprise Records, 2007
The Nightfly (1982)
8.5 out of 10
Kamakiriad (1993)
4 out of 10
Morph the Cat (2006)
5 out of 10

Donald Fagen spent a decade with writer's block, but before that happened, he crafted a personal postscript to the classic years of Steely Dan with 1982's The Nightfly. Here Fagen sidestepped the world created by him and his usual writing partner Walter Becker - male city-slickers with all their hang-ups and defenses - and called upon his childhood, his adolescence, and other things that inspire soft, romantic adult feelings. As a result, it's the warmest and most inviting record ever cut by either Fagen, Becker or both. Produced by Gary Katz, a man peerless when it came to handling the whims of the dictators behind Steely Dan (he cut each of the prior Dan records), it remains unmistakable nonetheless in its aesthetic, arrangements, and naturally Fagen's inimitable vocal stylings, as soulful as they are caustic.

"I.G.Y.," a litely-swingin' pop single with decidedly ironic intonations regarding the beautiful and wonderful world of freedom, opens The Nightfly with Fagen aged pre-double-digits: 1957-58, the International Geophysical Year. As far as referential material goes, musical and lyrical, not many years pass. "Ruby Baby" is a Lieber-Stoller cover tune whose pleasures are growers once the kitsch factor wears off; now it's the song that gets in my head most often. "New Frontier" features a discussion about Dave Brubeck at a party in a bomb shelter. "The Nightfly" is sung, fondly and comically, from the perspective of an indie jazz DJ in the middle of nowhere, and the chords on this one really kill. Despite being mired, however delightfully, in the age of atomic terror, Fagen and his arsenal of session players do not disappoint those looking for "the latest cutting-edge jazz-pop ditties." "New Frontier" and "The Nightfly" would slide right into the tracklist of Gaucho, the last classic Steely Dan album, if it weren't for their relative topical sincerity, and "Green Flower Street" should lead off a definitive compilation of effective "white funk" from the era. By the time the final track is describing a miraculous "Walk Between Raindrops" back to Fagen's Miami-dwelling girlfriend's door, one begins to wish for a double LP, so distinctly pleasing Fagen's debut solo effort has been to hear.

The Nightfly would unfortunately be the last hurrah of the Gary Katz era, since here is when the writer's block set in. In 1993, Kamakiriad, produced by Walter Becker in a move foreshadowing their return to the project that brought them fame and glory, broke the silence of new material from Mr. Fagen. It is a loose concept album, again with the autobiographical character but this time regarding a cross-country journey in the future. "Trans-Island Skyway" describes the vehicle, a fictional car called a Kamakiri that in 2007 someone in California is probably trying to produce: powered by steam, vintage design but with a clear dome rather than the usual build, featuring a GPS and a vegetable garden in the back. Other lyrics on Kamakiriad are likewise silly and/or thoughtful, but most notably the album is the first to showcase the self-produced, sterile, funk-without-funk sound that would characterize the next-millennium Steely Dan records as well as Fagen's 2006 recording, Morph the Cat.

One need only look, however, towards 2000's Two Against Nature, the record that won S.D. their only Album of the Year Grammy, for an effort that transcends the affected sound and attains something on the level of past glories. Kamakiriad does not, and comes close only with the single "Tomorrow's Girls," the Muzak version of which I am mildly delighted to hear each time it plays over the sound system at Oakland International Airport, since the chorus twists into a fairly irresistible hook. There are a handful of pleasing moments and ideas on the record, but they generally stay there, and I actually had a better time listening to the promotional interview that comes with the the bonus DVD audio disc, since it intersperses long stretches of audio from the album with Fagen's significantly more entertaining anecdotal insight.

Morph the Cat, produced by Fagen, does better but by only a smaller margin, reminiscent more of Steely Dan's Everything Must Go from 2003, less exciting than their 2000 return. The title track, which opens and closes the record, is sly and slinks along somewhat compellingly, and "Mary Shut the Garden Door" actually achieves a paranoid sort of funk about a dystopic coup d'etat. The Morph libretto is superior to and more evocative than that of Kamakiriad, but again they are made less effective than they could be, by and large, by their musical setting.

By packaging his entire solo catalogue thus far all together as the Nightfly Trilogy, Fagen insists that they follow an arc: The Nightfly, youth; Kamakiriad, middle age; Morph the Cat, older age and death. Yet the newly-monikered trilogy just so happens to bear the name of the set's strongest work by far, and unless you are an audiophile and/or Steely Dan fanatic with $60 to spare (admittedly not a bad price for four CDs and three audio DVDs, including surround mixes), my recommendation is to enter the bright and shiny world of The Nightfly and explore the latter entries only if you simply must comb them for their highlights. To paraphrase Mr. Fagen from the DVD -only liner notes (should've printed 'em, forget being "green"), he was glad to have been inspired enough to record The Nightfly before all the youth was beaten out of him, and no matter how glad I am that he's still around, I must say I agree.

-Spencer Owen

back in a week

Spencer Owen — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:48:35 GMT

Writing from the kitchen floor of Mariam from the amazing Wildbirds & Peacedrums in Göthenburg, Sweden. I have not forgotten about MOG , and here is a tale told to another, posted here in public, about something we did in Iceland almost two weeks ago. (The interim week was spent in Spain, where they loved my music, especially in Zaragoza, where our show was advertised as a pre-Wilco event.)

(quote)

Yesterday, our friend Úlfur took Fletcher and I back to the Golden Circle of Iceland. (These are popular tourist attractions and the people we know were basically bored stiff by them, even Úlfur, though he was happy to take us.) We had already been to the very historical Þingvellir on our first day, and so yesterday we completed it by looking at Geysir (the geyser that named every geyser) and Gullfoss, an epic, massive waterfall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullfoss - take a gander at that baby

Okay, so now, picture that we went to do these in darkness. When we got to Geysir it was about 6 PM, so it was basically dark. When we got to Gullfoss, it was completely dark.

Okay, so now, picture that when we got to Gullfoss, it was just about at/below freezing, and it was windier than I have ever, ever experienced. Raining with some ice, battering our faces, the wind literally pushing us around, as we attempted to walk on paths patched with ice next to this rushing chasm. (The 20-year-old Úlfur told us he had only been in winds this strong a couple of times in his life.)

Now, picture that despite how popular these attractions are, we're alone, because nobody would be crazy enough to do what is being done here.

They went about 50 feet farther down on the path than I could muster - I was scared of the wind pushing me over the rope guard into the depths, since the path got narrower - but even despite that, I managed to get extremely close.

All this in darkness, the darkest blue hues that made it look and feel like we were visiting the end of the world!

(unquote)

Radiohead - In Rainbows

Spencer Owen — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:08:30 GMT

Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007)
8 stars out of 10

The last decade of Radiohead, as defined by the internet:

In Rainbows (no leak; first officially released on mp3 with pay-what-you-wish policy, 2007);

Hail to the Thief (pre-mastered version leaked, 2003);

Amnesiac (leaked despite Napster's impending demise; album reception significantly altered by song-at-a-time downloading, 2001);

Kid A (officially streamed pre-release, 2000); and

OK Computer (depressing album about the technoculture that made all this possible, 1997).

Yes, everybody cares about Radiohead. Everybody cares so much that the mere fact of the label-free, pay-what-you-wish mp3 release for In Rainbows, the band's LP7 , is rocking the music industry with seismic shockwaves, as at least one article I've read has put it. Everybody cares so much that the band has made enough money at this point from sales and concerts to be totally able to make the price flexible. Everybody cares because Radiohead started with a couple huge rock records and then took a left turn, just not too far to the left - certainly not Metal Machine Music-left. They were now drawing from equal parts esoteric (IDM, 20th century classical, Krautrock, Eno) and mainstream (Beatles, R.E.M., U2, also Eno) sources. In other words, they make strange but normal pop albums - normal enough to get everybody listening, then strange enough to get everybody talking.

In Rainbows is very normal - for Radiohead - and everybody should, by now, know what is normal for Radiohead. What comes as a pleasant surprise, and I love this band so I don't know why, is how great it is. Maybe I expected a downturn from Hail to the Thief, their weakest (if still a mostly enjoyable album) since debut Pablo Honey. Really, though, that's silly - they took a four-year break to ensure that this one had the proper focus, and it does. My two words for this album in the last two days of unceasing discussion, both online and IRL , have been "groove" and "focus." The album starts and ends with electronic drums, but only as bookends to Phil Selway's crisp, insistent and organic beats throughout the song sequence. He stays off the tom-toms almost completely. The electric guitars (could be Jonny Greenwood, could be Ed O'Brien, could be Thom Yorke), to contrast, are either softly picked or messily rocked but wholly blurry-edged. The synthesizers and strings continue to ooze as they have done. Colin Greenwood's bass is Colin Greenwood's bass. Thom Yorke wails, moans and croons over his trademark piano clusters. None of it is for radio play.

The musical content is not really built to hook, only to please and evoke. There are fast songs. "15 Step" opens the record in 5/8 and is punctuated three times by the shouts of a classroom full of children. What a groove, and what a punctuation to the groove! "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," my favorite, is like the Sea & Cake performing on Saturday Night Live. "Jigsaw Falling into Place" brings the college rock pickin' that the band has been known to fetishize. There are slower songs. "Nude" is Radiohead's sexiest song ever, a "Visitor"-like (with the middle dropped out) slow-jam about disappointment that's been around since 1997 and finally fits on one of their albums. "House of Cards" lopes like reggae and would fit tidily onto a Wim Wenders soundtrack CD from the '90s, complete with a Bono-esque falsetto move that makes me swoon. Come on, I'm being serious. "Videotape" ends the record by bringing it down to the grave by bringing it up to the heavens; the second best effect on the album (first best: children shouting) is the deeply stirring percussion track on this song, bouncing on studio-monitor delay.

But what are my descriptions? You're listening to this album right now, and if you're not, you can - right now! - receive a copy immediately at no cost. So you can read these descriptions and reactions and say "I agree," "I disagree," "I don't care" or "I don't get it," and thanks to this resulting hubbub, Radiohead are still making music and figuring out ways to get it to their widespread, caring audience. I say everybody's right to care. In Rainbows may not be the best album of the month or even the week (thanks, Fiery Furnaces, for spoiling the party), but it adds a delicious and substantial chapter to an eminently listenable catalogue of music. These smart guys know what's up.

-Spencer Owen

The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City

Spencer Owen — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:26:59 GMT

The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City
(Thrill Jockey, 2007)
8.5 stars out of 10

Six albums into their career, they've done it at last. Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger have finally shed the image that has dogged their band for so long, no longer satisfied to be trapped by their past boundaries, sick as they must be from being pigeonholed as merely baroque, abstract blues-indie-prog-psych-folk-pop-art-rock oral-historians/poets for the NPR /Chicago/New York (Brooklyn)/Pitchfork/indie-prog-mp3-blog set...

Heh, heh. Of course the truth is that the Fiery Furnaces manage to be just as comfortably confounding as they've been since their second album, and first "epic," Blueberry Boat; they've mostly seemed like epics since. On Widow City, the Friedbergers continue to do everything in their power to maintain their status as serious, multi-hyphenated jesters. With a strange, cool mixing job from Thrill Jockey resident engineer/drummer/genius John McEntire (check out all the drum sounds), Widow City either veers or breezes, depending on how used to Frank Zappa's Apostrophe you are, from tempo to tempo, from metal riff to Chamberlin keyboard joke-fantasy. Eleanor's vocal performances - in which she spiels upon
"Navajo basketball coaches and blonde ladies" and other topics best described, by the remarkable press release which you should read, as having come from an imaginary Ouija board - tie all of Matthew's wild musical ideas together.

All of this is hilarious, albeit without making me laugh out loud. So entertaining is Widow City that I have never once been bored by a moment of any of many listens. So brilliant is the band that I have never, until now, read a press release that is so humorous and accurate as to eliminate any need for most any description from an enthusiastic record review, especially one published in blog format which can thereby link to said press release. What I can say, so you know where I'm coming from some more, is that I felt Blueberry Boat was way too "unfocused," which is to say too many parts easily ignored and skipped, but until 2005's Rehearsing My Choir, it was their most promising work. With the oblique grandmother-granddaughter dialogue of Rehearsing and the relatively "poppy" follow-up Bitter Tea, the Friedberger Furnaces confronted me with two faces of wonder and their two best works to date.

Widow City does not quite reach the narrative profundity of Rehearsing nor the lush heights of Bitter Tea's actually quite sweet invitations, but it also generally does not seem to try, instead opting for - gasp - something different and succeeding. The same ol' odd band hasn't left or been left behind; it's just their new album, in the best sense of "just their new album." If their longer records have left you behind in the past, I won't expect or demand that you scramble to re-evaluate them now. Otherwise, this ain't a letdown. It's stirring and exciting, but mainly, it's fun and funny.

-Spencer Owen

Dirty Projectors - Rise Above

Spencer Owen — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:49:48 GMT

Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
(Dead Oceans, 2007)
9 stars out of 10

So many ways to begin talking about such a great work - likely to be the year's best album - that it's unfortunate that I've got to pin it down to one, but I'll choose Jorge Luis Borges. In 1939, Borges published a short work of fiction called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (read it here) in which a writer takes on a major project: to re-create the original Don Quixote word-for-word without using it as a reference. The character Menard confesses to never even having read the entire book, but such a thing does not stop him from believing fully in his attempt. Borges was an exemplary postmodern artist, someone who deconstructs in a manner that creates a sea of potential subtext while nonetheless having a firm grasp on the basic desires of the audience: lightness; drama; and perhaps most importantly, the visceral: the awe inspired by a scene or figure of beauty.

With the latest Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above, David Longstreth wanted to remake the 1981 Black Flag album Damaged without using it as a reference. Two differences: 1) he'd been familiar with the entire album, just hadn't heard it in years, and 2) his aim was not to concretely recreate the songs but to reconjure them lyrically. With such a concept, not only does he pull a Pierre Menard, the stunning part is that he also pulls a Borges. Rise Above is a remarkable rock album. Despite all the high-concept talk I've slung so far, I also mean that it's so good, Longstreth should have had representatives from dozens of record labels knocking on his Myspace, each with a finely-chiseled offer, each of them impressing upon him the idea that his unique music is waiting to mean an enormous amount to quite a few people that don't even know it exists yet.

Longstreth has written music for rock lineup, chamber ensembles, and electronic treatments of both and neither, all of which have been featured under the Dirty Projectors name. At the moment, the Dirty Projectors are a rock band, and Rise Above uses the forms of classical and modern Western pop, rock, and R&B, and also occasionally summons varying "African" styles - Kenyan benga, Congolese soukous, and for one song ("Six Pack"), electric Malian music. (There are also, by the way, a couple of expressionist fragments for string quartet. Too much information?) Why say "uses the forms" and all this, rather than just "it's rock inspired by Africa"? I've heard the latter before, but this is different: the rock of the pop-omnivorous composer, contemporary to Deerhoof and Sonic Youth, and somehow as well in the footsteps of Prince, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder and Destiny's Child, with seamless "it's-not-world-music" integration of African styles. The songs shift restlessly, changing tempo and timbre but rarely losing focus.

As for the Rise Above ensemble, the rhythm section of Nat Baldwin (bass) and Brian McComber (drums), with additional guitar from Charlie Looker, seem to be game for anything Longstreth cooks up, as do the Pips to Longstreth's Gladys Knight, golden-throated backup vocalists Amber Coffman (also guitar) and Susanna Waiche. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, co-producer with Longstreth, helps to bring the warm reverb aesthetic from their critically acclaimed Yellow House; with the exception of a few studio tricks, some more subtle than others, the overall effect is of a live rock concert with a "great soundman" behind the boards. Over it all is Longstreth, proving his gifts never better on record than now.

For one, he is the perfect vocalist for his own mission, possessing a deadly R&B-invoking melisma, as dynamic and perfect to pitch as necessary, yet sharpened with a rock singer edge that occasionally, and unpredictably, results in a corrosive scream. In front of this band, the shit devastates. For another, I've already touched on his composition and arrangements, which are tuneful, twisted and endlessly relistenable. Then there are his lyrics, which, on this album, are Black Flag lyrics rearranged. Strikingly, in fact, the only credit related to songwriting in the liner notes to Rise Above is a copyright to Greg Ginn/Cesstone Music, particularly strange considering that the music is clearly only Longstreth's. Just as one does not need to read Don Quixote to appreciate and recommend Borges's reportage of the fictional Pierre Menard's efforts, I cannot stress enough that it is still possible to enjoy Rise Above completely without having heard Black Flag's original Damaged.

In Borges's story, his narrator is impressed by Menard's re-creation because, though it is a word-for-word copy of a 16th-century novel, it takes on a fresh relevance in a modern context. On Rise Above, essentially the same thing happens, and really, in both cases, it's merely the setting of a text. The words of a hardcore punk band become a composer's libretto, and so Rise Above is a compendium of 26-year-old punk emotions, statements like "this fucking city is run by pigs," "depression is gonna kill me" and "rise above" given an urgency less political and more abstractly visceral. The conviction of the performers, the dynamics of the music and the beat, urge themselves to you, such that you are physically compelled and drawn in. But because these performers are not, have no desire to be, and in many ways cannot be punk, the politics become images, and the imagery serves as the element of both tension and cohesion that pushes the work over the edge to become exceptionally engaging. And like powdered sugar on top, thanks to the source material being traceable, the history is there to be perused and compared and conjectured about - and, for those who were around, even remembered.

Shut me up, though. Put as simply as I can put it, Rise Above does its own title proud and cuts through the bullshit. After a few years of fascinating sound-searching, David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors are finally ready for prime time. This music is pretty amazing. Watch his space.

-Spencer Owen

P.S. Two songs from Rise Above are on the DP's Myspace.

Spencer Owen — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:22:43 GMT

Been a long time since I updated about my own life instead of just writing some kinda review, huh?

Well, get this, I've got a SHOW coming up!

Yeah, a show! It's my music and everything. I'm gonna sing a few songs and it's gonna be golden. I might even have a couple of lovely female backup singers for a minute. Who doesn't want to go see them?

Yes, it's a Sunday night, September 16, at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco (4th and Bryant) - a Sunday night to remember.

My MOG picture is of me performing in a book store; doesn't it look fun? I wear a blue sparkling sweater.

Here's a more recent photo of me, not that it really has to do with anything, but my friend Liz recently took some good pictures of me, and I haven't had a good picture taken of me (that I've obtained, at least) in like an entire year.

At my Myspace, you can hear two songs from my latest album (LP out in November on Gnome Life Records - a label run by my friend and Bird By Snow bandmate [Bird By Snow is also playing the show!] Fletcher), one of which will certainly be performed at the show.

This may be my last show in the Bay Area in 2007 because I really don't play too many shows. I might even have a new song prepared. See you, hopefully, the Sunday after this one at the Hotel Utah.

Junior Senior - new LP + EP

Spencer Owen — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:35:55 GMT

Junior Senior - Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
5.5 stars out of 10
Junior Senior - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye EP
7 stars out of 10

This is a handful of my favorite upbeat pop music: the second half of ABBA 's career; Madonna's Like a Virgin and Like a Prayer; Andrew W.K. (the metal ABBA ); Janet Jackson's "Runaway;" and Junior Senior's debut, D-D-Don't Stop the Beat.

Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" got a lot of play in 2003, but that was when Daft Punk (another recent favorite of mine) were also getting some decent play on the airwaves. Even then, they weren't really "a mainstream band;" the Danish duo of one straight and one gay respectively (as they put it indelibly in the even-more-indelibly-titled "Chicks and Dicks") just played extremely palatable, upbeat pop music infused with soulful '60s sweetness. Well, good news, I guess: they haven't quit yet.

Actually released in 2005 overseas, LP #2, Hey Hey My My Yo Yo, essentially slows down the style to more of a "groove," with some birth-of-rap-era ideas newly mixed in. It isn't an inherently bad idea for an album, especially with Junior as a mastermind and mic-sharing by the Velvelettes, every member of Le Tigre and both Kate & Cindy from the B-52's. I just simply won't listen to Hey Hey as often as I did (and still) D-D-Don't Stop. Considering their M.O., this album's exuberance and freshness just doesn't burst the same way, especially in the '60s-summoning throwbacks "I Like Music (W.O.S.B.)" and "No No No's," which don't even come close to matching the similar-minded "Boy Meets Girl" from D-D-Don't. That being said, the first three songs on the record are growers, and any decent club DJ with a sense of kitsch or flamboyance would do fine to mix with them.

Luckily, it doesn't please the boys just to take two years to release an old album stateside, and so they've included a brand new (as in 2007) seven-song EP called Say Hello, Wave Goodbye - hilariously, just over three minutes shorter than the LP (31 minutes to Hey Hey's 34). Though it does not lack Senior's presence, this EP appears to be the result of Junior stretching out in the studio, featuring only two songs under four minutes. By doing so, they consistently reach higher heights than those hit on Hey Hey, here generally using as a mold the spirit of Madonna's first couple albums. Funky "Me decade" dance-floor pop jams of many stripes are explored (funniest title, also a great song: "I Can't Rap, I Can't Sing, But I Would Do Anything"), and the finest effort is the 5-minute "Headphone Song," mixed immaculately and capped off with a kind of incredible, soaring coda. This is the kind of craft that rightly puts fellow dance-pop groups, all the "indie" rage over the last few years, to shame. With two extra songs of the quality found on Say Hello, Wave Goodbye tacked on to the disc, it would've been a great full-length record; as it is, Say Hello joins D-D-Don't in the pantheon of uber-listenability, and corrects the slight misstep of Hey Hey by making them into more than a one-album wonder and me excited to see what they'll be up to next.

If I may close with something of a tangent: Shiny, mainstream-worthy pop music is something else. A musical omnivore like me can often get the sensation that, more than with almost any genre, it can stoke the pleasure mechanism of both everybody (in the world) and nobody else (in the company one keeps). When I decided I loved Gwen Stefani and the Neptunes' smash hit "Hollaback Girl," I felt oddly alone, even though it was the most popular song in the country. I feel similarly about Junior Senior, even though a couple of my friends are on the bandwagon with me (and I actually got recommended them personally by one of said friends back when their debut hit). But this is something that I, as one who rarely feels shame regarding his tastes, have no choice but to accept; by pressing play on Junior Senior, I can just pretend they're playing over the PA at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where, when I worked there for a few months in 2003, I discovered the pleasure I could get from the Madonna and Janet songs that the rest of the world hears as wallpaper.

-Spencer Owen

p.s. As evidenced last night at Popscene in San Francisco, they're still nailing the old material and they're breathing life into the new stuff, especially those songs I called "growers," although sadly no appearances from Say Hello. On the albums, Junior handles all the songwriting, all the production and most of the instruments, but Senior's mustached, effervescent character is completely necessary, and nowhere is this more apparent than on stage. Their drummer locks into a click-track-guided groove and they just make you have way too much fun. Bonus: JD from Le Tigre made an appearance on her song from Hey Hey, "Can I Get Get Get" ("...to know-nuh-know-know you better-better baby?"). By the way, I do love the stuttering.

p.p.s. Hear the exceptional "Headphone Song" courtesy of Stereogum!