The Breeders - Last Splash

For me the Breeders are an act cursed by their contemporaries. Formed by Kim Deal of The Pixies, their most successful era saw them open for Nirvana and become darlings of what was then known as the alternative scene. This was also, it should be noted, the time when “Alternative” implied some form of avant reaction against the mainstream, and not chick folk for chick folk people.

In many ways this is my problem with them. That period in indie/ alternative has contained some really fascinating, important, challenging music; music that revolutionized what it meant to write music. And a lot of it is really hard to listen to. Don’t get me wrong; compared to acts like Husker Du and The Minutemen, The Pixies were a study in making crazy music palatable for sane people. Their combination of the lessons of the 80s indie scene with song structure and pop hooks has ensured their place in history, and my record collection. On the other hand there are some really hard edges and intentionally grating sonic choices, and as much as The Pixies captured a lot of the energy of punk they do have some slower songs that, well, bore me. None of them are on Surfer Rosa, which is perfect in every way, and I WILL FIGHT YOU, but yeah.

It is much worse for Nirvana. I have talked previously on this blog about how I hate musical sludge, and Nirvana being something of a fusion of punk and underground metal in an 80s indie rock context, has it in boatloads. To their credit they balance it with shining melodies and pop hooks in a way that creates a wonderful framework, a kind of gothic cathedral of poorly tuned bass decorations hanging depressingly from a noble, vaulting framework. They are not responsible for the fact that their disciples kept the sludge, lost the punk hooks, and forgot about technical merit. Nonetheless I rarely turn to Nirvana for fun time listening, saving them instead for moments of more careful, challenging sonic exploration.

Having an album by someone who is not just a contemporary of these acts but a band member is not a great way to make me come running. To make it worse, most people’s reaction to The Breeders is some variation of “oh yeah, they’re good too.” So I am not running to The Breeders as fun music, and when I am in a serious music mood I tend to go to the stuff that is more widely recognized. The thing that really saves this album from total obscurity in my record collection is that it is brightly colored, and I have just enough ADD for that to matter. So it is that every couple of months I get into a Serious Music Mood, forget who The Breeders are, and get taken in by the album art. The result is always complete and total enthusiasm.
            Its not that The Breeders are without musical sludge, nor are they free of the influence of their times/ outside bands. Indeed the first track, New Year, is kind of a wonderful example of what you get when you combine influences from The Pixies and Nirvana. When Cannonball’s intro starts you think you are in for more of the same- until the bass comes in. That iconic, absurdly simple, slide from the first to the sixth frets on the A string was freaking ubiquitous in 1993, but in retrospect it was way before its time. Some tonal elements foretold Alternative’s slide into one-hit-wonditry and chick folk mediocrity, but the song itself sounds absurdly modern. The subsequent songs on the album can only be described as the foundation of the 90s indie scene. Songs like No Aloha and Divine Hammer foretell the mad energy and musical craftsmanship that, in my oh-so-humble opinion characterizes what works about modern indie rock.
            So yeah, give The Breeders a try. I think they get too lost in the shadows of their contemporaries, whom they surpassed in many ways. The bright side of this is that their cds are usually pretty cheap. Good times.  

Whale - All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones

All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones is a great name for an album, if somewhat ungrammatical. I thought for a very long time it was the name of the band, which would be even better. It did set me some mistaken expectations. With a name that long I figured it was probably an indie band in the vein of …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. It’s not the name though so I excuse them for not living up to my expectations, though the world would be better with more …Trail Of Dead. This confusion also explains why a band named Whale is being reviewed at the beginning of the alphabet, although admittedly my adherence to the strict ABCs has been somewhat scattershot as a result of the move.

What Wale is, is as interesting as a …Trail Of Dead clone that does not exist. They are a Swedish pop band in the alternative genre that had some success in the 90s. “Disco Dance…”  was one of their successful albums, which shows what I know about the European pop charts. Musically it is not what you would expect from Swedish Pop. Although in our post-Hives era this assumption may be incorrect, I think most people associate all Scandinavian countries with Death Metal, and Sweden in particular with overly cheerful ABBA clones, such as Ace of Base. Though there is somehow a black dude who will insert raps, the rest of the band sounds like Massive Attack. They are more energetic, and they have a kind of a Grime edge, but they have the same ethereal vocals and melodies floating over subtly complex rhythms that occasionally swell to a high energy foreground. They do depart from this formula with some regularity, and the results are often spectacular. For example, the Pixiesesque “Puma Gym,” and the dance pop “Deliver the Juice” which in many ways predicted a lot of the tools in the Gorillaz musical handbook. Overall the biggest difference between Whale and Massive Attack is much better rapping. I say this without any malice towards Massive Attack, but Whale’s rapper is pretty great. It’s a shame they only trot him out on one or two songs. Whale’s lyrics are also quite good, though Massive Attacks may have a bit more of a biting edge.

There are some weird things here. Firstly, I don’t know how many black rappers there are in Sweden, but they must all be in pop bands. There must be a fucking industry where the three black guys in Sweden cycle between bands, with a running pool on whether anyone will notice they are different between sets. This is not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is that this is a Swedish Pop group that sings in EXTREMELY articulate English, sounds like a British pop group, had most of their success on the continent, and shows some solid American influence. There are bigger examples out there but this is globalization gone batshit crazy. It must be really weird to be a Swedish teenager, turn on the radio, and hear your countrymen and women in bands that sing in a foreign language. And a language that is native to none of your neighboring countries, but which has become a lingua franca for the pop scenes of all of them. I wonder if this is why they made the title slightly off grammatically, because all their songs are spot on.

So bottom line, if you hate Massive Attack, you may not have much to like about this band. If you do like Massive Attack, this is an album that definitely will reward your patience. The more you listen to it the more they deviate from the formula, play with it, and make it their own. One really gets the feeling that they are pushing the boundaries of what they can do as a band, which may explain why this was their last album. Bottom line, these guys are more than a Massive Attack clone, though it’s kind of impossible to discuss them without the reference.

The Blues Masters - Slide Guitar Classics

To understand this album you need to understand Rhino Records. Started out of a physical store in the 1970s, the label specialized in re-releasing singles from the 1950s and 60s and pressing recordings of the best of the stand up comedy underground. The philosophy of the company rests upon making sure pop classics are fun and accessible to new generations. As such their business model was built on acquiring copyrights for undervalued, important works and repackaging them in a fun and accessible way.
            The original owner was eventually bought out by Time Warner, and the current iteration can no longer be said to represent this in its purest form, but even the modern incarnation specializes in re-pressings of the critically acclaimed classics of their parent company’s vast holdings. For example, many modern repressing of The Ramones are Rhino products, as are any and all pressings of The Monkees.
            So a best-of compilation by Rhino is going to be less an album than a curation: music selected, organized, and vetted with an eye for high quality recording and song writing, crystallized in tracks that represent an artist at their best, in context, but also in a way the listener maybe hasn’t heard before. The track listing has everyone you could want, from Muddy Waters to the Alman Brothers, and nary a boring moment in site. The tracks are clear enough to be understandable, but rough enough to preserve that gravely, spontaneous feel that gives blues its soul. The songs are about things blues songs should be about. Lust, love, social injustice, pain. The song I am currently listening to, “Dark Was the Night,” has been going on for a minute and a half and all that Blind Willie Johnston has said was a series of inarticulate moans. I approve.

And yet, it is still a best-of album. If you are already a huge blues aficionado, there is probably no reason to buy this, since the tracks are probably available on other albums. As someone who is Blues literate but still has an awful lot to learn i would usually try to figure out what artists are important on the internet, and then go to a store for their album. Having to wade through someone else's choices, especially since that someone is usually motivated by taking what is on hand and cheaply repackaging it, tends to strike me as dumb. 

But this is kind of great! The liner notes have all kinds of information on each artist, and a really fascinating description of slide guitar’s birth in Hawaii and subsequent wholehearted adoption by itinerant delta bluesmen. This is obviously the point of these albums. Begun in an era when albums were expensive, musical history hard to find, and radio often unhelpful, best-of albums served to help people find out what they should be listening to. Though subsequent generations of best-of producers have focused more on low costs, high quality products like this album once served to introduce music lovers to the history and context of new genres. Indeed, samplers and mix tapes, which are really just best-ofs by amateurs, were what gave punk rock and essentially all of its children their odd ability to self promote without the internet and without mass media support.
            But that was then. Nowadays we have the internet. I discovered the punk and ska movements from fan pages on Geocities. I sampled music by The Clash on Real Video streams posted on fan sites, and got into The Mighty Mighty Bosstones from songs they posted on their own site. Nowadays we get into scenes that are being created in foreign cities in nearly real time, and have an accurate record of the events for subsequent generations to follow if they chose. If you want an example i draw your attention to the explosion of Canadian indie bands and say good day.
            Perhaps we really have been missing out. I don’t see myself dropping a ton of money on best-ofs any time soon, and I will never be so déclassé as to describe one as a favorite album, but there is definitely something to be said for curation. Though we in this internet age often resent having other people press their views on us, a well done curation can help a viewer understand a subject with the kind of richness that could take a person years to acquire by trial and error or even through careful research. I have had the temerity to describe myself as a punk rocker for over a decade, and despite all the effort I have put into familiarizing myself with the genre there are still albums I kick myself for not owning. Though one could suggest that a person who can use the word “temerity” in a sentence is probably not that punk rock to begin with, there is a definite advantage to guided instruction, and I see no reason recent music history should be any different.

So yeah I guess I have to recommend this album. It does seem a bit like homework, as the album is 18 tracks long, each of which is by an artist whose albums I now have to buy, but I am glad I now know what to look for, and the liner notes will give me something to read in the bathroom. Cheers!