Billy Talent - Billy Talent II

Billy Talent came to my attention in the summer of 2007 when their song “Red Flag” started popping up in my Pandora station for Mclusky. They aren't actually that similar to Mclusky except that they play high energy punk rock and are pretty angry. I kept intending to buy the album but their videos were kind of emo so it never was at the top of my list. This week I happened to find it in a Newbury Comics for a song, so I took it home after a stirring barbershop rendition of The Chemical Brother’s “Star Guitar.”

This album came out in 2006 and like most Canadian things it sounds like the best possible version of things that were happening on the US pop charts five years before. Musically they are pop punk, but with a strong admixture of late 90s Emo and early Nu-Metal. None of these are particularly inspiring genres. But just as their “pop punk” influences tend more toward awesome acts like The Living End* instead of urethra-shatteringly terrible acts like New Found Glory, Billy Talent pulls the best from these other, similarly tarnished genres. This mixture of really troubling influences makes for stressful listening if you care about music. It is like watching a movie where the protagonist keeps doing things that could result in their death, but don’t. "Look Out! Why are you picking up a hitchhiker? oh good he's just a mild mannered college student going home for thanksgiving. No you can't go inside! Oh good they're just thankful their boy got  home ok. What are you DOING?! You can't keep turkey leftovers inside the car for the rest of the four hour drive! That is not responsible food handling technique! The food has not been kept below 40 degrees! That food is in the danger zone! oh how nice they put in an ice pack, everything is OK. DON'T MICROWAVE THAT! THERE IS A BIT OF TINFOIL ON THE BAKED POTATO!" 

Many of the songs have a very Coheed and Cambria aspect, with a use of varying tone colors, tempos, interspersed with fun driving guitar driven sections. Though there are some vocal similarities I am happy to report they are mostly restricted to the backing vocals, which was always a Coheed strong suit, and do not pertain to that special sound of being raped by a weasel that Coheed seemed to love so very much. The lead vocals show more of a pop punk influence from acts like The Living End.# The Nu Metal influence comes in the rhythm section, where the use of double bass drums kind of off-sets the simple bass guitar parts, and in the song writing, with a certain over-reliance on textured hooks. Unlike Nu Metal, where these hooks tend to be the only thing that happens musically in a given five minute period of sludgy bullshit, where you come to love the hook as the desert nomad comes to love every grubby, filthy spot of water in the desert because they represent the only variation in the unremitting theme of bareness that surrounds him on every side, pressing into his skull with the monotonous drone of strums and bass parts that seem to have been invented only to give the musicians wrist exercises between masturbation sessions spent stroking the flowing locks of their Chad Kroger Real Doll...uh...

Unlike any of that, Billy Talent’s music has things going for it other than the admittedly varied hooks, such as melodic sophistication, a superb use of tone color and dynamics, and at the very least is over quickly. As a result, Billy Talent’s songs are not like engaging in an awkward 8 minute conversation with a depressed person you just met, who insists on telling you every aspect of their objectively mediocre childhood, from their parents who were mean but not abusive, to their friends who were just kind of cold, to their own continued obsession with the talent of musicians whose phallus they are too busy methaphorically felating to even try to emulate... Which is a good thing. Unless you like that kind of thing.I dunno. 

Musically the band has some obvious flaws, some exposed beams in the final structure, but I kind of have a hard on for the way they stray so close to the flame and survive. How many pop punk albums use polyphony? That’s pretty fun. How often have you listened to polyphony and thought "wow! polyphony! that isn't sad or pretentious at all!" It is a delicate balance Billy Talent maintains surprisingly well.  

Still, I must admit, what puts this band over the edge onto the positive side is the lyrics. Its not that they are particularly brilliant, or walk in any new fields. It is that they are political in a kind of old school punk kind of way. They aren't singing about the democratic party or anything, or how much they love Canada’s healthcare system, but about youth in revolt, lack of identity, and how much they hate hipsters (hey, it was 2006, we all hated hipsters). Old standards, sure, and delivered with only a workmanlike level of talent, but by focusing on things other than themselves it elevates the music beyond any of the genres they drew from into an area where it is possible to respect them. I don’t want to say that they transcend their influences, as that might imply a higher level of achievement, but they have certainly integrated their influences and used them to produce something new and uniquely their own. If you absolutely hate all manifestations of their influences, you will probably find more to hate there than love, but there is a spark here that makes this music more than a homunculus crafted from Pop Punk, Emo and Nu Metal. At this stage it may be a Frankenstein’s Monster, but the creation lives and breathes and longs for more. For my money the result is fascinating and maddening., and I am intregued to see if anything else they produced was as good. 

*fuck you and you're "The Living End is Rockabilly." I love them but if The Living End is Rockabilly then my underwear is a Chevy because of the pair of fuzzy dice I hung there

#As Rockabilly as Taylor Swift is country

+there is no third footnote. 

Baxter - Self Titled

The thing I know least well how to deal with is mediocrity. It is a perennial truism of reviewers that the worst things are neither good nor bad but uninteresting, but it does not really help one resolve what to DO with the boring ones. It is not a problem we have in daily life. Let’s say you have a coworker, let us call him Mike, who shows up every day, usually on time, does a decent amount of work with only a few glaring errors, and is not particularly unpleasant to be around. How do you feel about Mike? He’s alright, you will probably get to know him, ask him the odd question around the office, maybe he goes out to lunch with the gang once a week. You would probably not recommend that they be fired or killed. Conversely, if you have a coworker, let us call him Steve, who comes in when the fuck ever, always leaves early, has heinous flatulence, and whose work was so bad as to be counter productive, you would want them fired, not placed in some kind of “so bad it is good” category.
            Baxter is definitely a Mike. The band is another Sweedish electronica outfit in the vein of Massive Attack, except with none of the interesting features of said outfit. While Massive Attack has intricate, fast paced rhythms expertly layered with rich, creamy melodies and deeply insiteful lyrics, Baxter has moderately interesting beats backing perfectly acceptable melodies in support of lyrics that are, you know, ok. They aren’t bad. They aren’t even predictable. They’re just not that interesting. Its not like they are rhying on “ing” or some other heinous sin against god and nature, and the songs are musically competent. I would say that they even use their tools well. There’s some interesting literary construction on “Television,” and a very nice use of overdubbing on
Political.” There’s just so many other bands out there and I dunno if I seem myself ever going “Man, I really wanna listen to Baxter!”
            So what do I do here? Do I sell off this CD? Gift it? Leave it in a public place for someone to find? It’s a shame cos there are interesting things I could say about this band. Like the fact that the main song writer was in a previous band called Salt that made some waves in the American charts with a song called “Bluster.” Except I looked up “Bluster” and it was to grunge what this album is to cool electronica. I dunno it’s fine, I guess, if you are into grunge you’d probably like it. Its not genre defying or anything.
            So Fuck. I mean I only bought this album because it had a minimalist cover design and the band had the same name as Ron Burgundy’s dog. But it turns out the album art was like that because apparently in Sweeden all album art is designed by Ikea, and the band is certainly not a tiny Buddha, covered in hair. Meh. 

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!

The Birthdays – A Spirited Rendition

 This album is pretty much what I needed. I spent 7 hours on my feet today in the box factory, picking things up, putting them down, and occasionally slashing them with poorly designed box cutters. My feet hurt, as do my legs and back, but its all ok, because this album in the sonic equivalent of weed. 

Its folk pop. Nothing really out of the ordinary for that genre, though certainly lush and well written. The production quality is quite good, and the album art is whimsically inoffensive. It’s a bunch of guys with hanglebar moustaches and top hats. The back is a song listing with a pile of top hats. I think everyone secretly loves top hats, so that’s a plus. Lets return to the song writing.

So theres definitely some Beatles in here. Bliss in a basket has this flute breakdown/ trumpet filler background that is pretty much right off of Abbey Road somewhere, but they definitely bring their own spin to the work. They use tempo changes and breaks to bring a fusion jazz feel to the song that clearly makes it much more tribute than rip off. The album is full of fun little hooks like that, things that sound familiar but are warped by other influences to create pop hooks that are addictive and comforting at the same time. The music demands nothing from you, but will reward any listening you may do. The lyrics are well done and the vocals are clear, but if you just want to kind of coast on the music you will still have a good time.

I feel good. I just ate a really big dinner and I feel hungry again. I am worried that my sister gave me this album and is angry that I never thanked her. See, she’s living in Seattle and we don’t get to talk much anymore. I feel like when we do we end up talking shop since she’s all into Landscape Architecture and I’m into Urban Planning and that’s like if she were Leia and I was Luke and she was like I don’t understand why you just cant plant a garden to foil the emperor’s evil plans and I was like well you need a law to make people keep the garden. I worry everyone is disappointed in me. I don’t see even my friends as much as I would like and I moved to Massachusetts specifically so I could hang out with them more, but I still don’t have any money and I feel like any attempt to go out will be more expensive than I can afford. I am bad at being a grown up but it’s not my fault. If only someone would give me a job in garden related law making everything would be ok, and everyone would have to have gardens, and the emperor’s evil plans would be for naught. Oh also the band is from Seattle, that’s why I think she might have given it to me. Anyway its good go buy it. You guys have any fun-yuns you could email to my web zone? 

Arcade Fire – Self Titled EP

Remember a world without Arcade Fire?

Back in 2002 when this EP came out Franz Ferdinand had yet to come out, Modest Mouse had yet to sell out, and people were still willing to shell out money for boy bands and numetal. The thought that a Canadian music collective was going to lead the Indies into prominence for the internet generation would have sounded ridiculous, the fact that several made it to underground god-hood is basically a result of the Arcade Fire.

For us now, looking back, it is hard to see this album without reference to their subsequent work, especially since several of the songs were revived on later albums. Most people did not hear of this EP until after the band’s career took off, but such is the nature of EPs: they serve to introduce a band to a core following that they can build on. This core following then gets to tell subsequent fans “yeah, Funeral was good, but I still like the initial EP best.” I would look down my nose at these people but it took me a very long time to get into Neon Bible, given how different it was from Funeral. This occasionally happens with bands whose subsequent work is legitimately garbage but we will be talking about State Radio another time. Just trust me and buy Flag of the Shiners, and not a god damn other thing by Chad Urmston

In the context of their wider body of work, this EP is actually pretty similar to their work in The Suburbs and Neon Bible, which incidentally contains a remake of the song “No Cars Go.” Like many I bought this in the post-Funeral era, but I found it somewhat jarring. Funeral emerged in a period of indie dance music and was apparently lucky in that it happened to capture this moment perfectly. Emerging the same year as Franz Ferdinand, The Postal Service, and The Killers, Funeral is certainly more folksy and introspective than its fellows, but in retrospect still contains the energetic dance numbers and generous techno sensibilities that defined the 2004 class of indie. If there has been one trend in indie since 2004 it has been the mainstream’s appropriation of these techno sensibilities, even as indie rock shied away from pop hooks and dancability. This has certainly been the case with Arcade Fire and in this context Funeral stands next to other Arcade Fire albums as an oddly popular child in a family of anti-social eccentrics.

This is not to say I find Arcade Fire’s other work bad, but it is way less relatable on first listen. Listening to songs from Funeral in the context of Neon Bible, The Suburbs, and the EP, it’s like a different band. I honestly have no way to deal with this. They self produce all their work, so there was no Evil Label interference going on. Funeral had to have been an organic eruption. In some of the songs on the EP you can even feel it coming on. No Cars Go and Headlights Look Like Diamonds are full the pop sensibilities that make The Suburbs such a great album, and the latter even has the dace beat that completely infected Funeral. When listening to Headlights Look Like Diamonds you can see how this band produced Funeral. But then Vampire/Forrest Fire starts and you feel lost and confused.

The recording quality here is good. While you can tell it was a first effort and recorded quickly, especially in the context of songs like No Cars Go which were later re-recorded, this album could be taken to mark the era where cheap home recording equipment made it entirely possible for bands to record lush, professional sounding albums in their basement, and still have money for booze. Or in this band’s case yoga pants I guess. Anyway the album sounds great. It only comes off as a bit spare in comparison to the other albums.

The song quality is honestly top notch. Even as they are clearly building up themes to be dealt with more fully on other albums, these songs are fully realized works, well instrumentalized and beautiful. Even the album art is wonderful, featuring the naïve colorized pattern collages that they returned to on Funeral.

This is a great EP. If you are a fan of Arcade Fire you should get it. It has none of the coherence of the albums and for the most part lacks the fun of Funeral or even The Suburbs…but it has the DNA of both embedded within its form. Listening to the EP you can hear the artistic sensibilities that unify all three albums, but oddly recombine; pieces of The Suburbs will coexist with pieces of Funeral in a stereotypical folk song structure, and then the next song with have the exploded, meandering song structures of Neon Bible in a song full of pop hooks. Not their best album, but a fascinating portrait of a band getting their musical legs and finding their muse. A work fans could probably argue about for hours.

For those who are not yet fans of Arcade Fire, or want some sort of unbiased review of its actual attributes, perish the thought, this EP is a bit tougher. Like all of Arcade Fire’s works the EP rewards repeated listens, but like Neon Bible, and unlike Funeral and The Suburbs, the EP gives the listener few early pop hooks. For those not used to the rigors of indie rock (lolz) this kind of rigor may be a chore, and if you don’t already have a commitment to the band I would forgive you for not finding it within yourself to do so. If, on the other hand, you are a fan of esoteric folk music you might find my critiques invalid. There is no deadwood here, though I feel the slowest songs are stacked to the front. Someone wanting to get into a really weird band and willing to expend a bit of energy to do so could well start here and easily segue into any of their other albums. For those who don’t view music as a kissing cousin of homework, I would really recommend you go get a copy of The Suburbs. It has a slew of great, poppy, fun songs while being less of a redheaded stepchild than Funeral. Goddamnit  I am talking about the other albums again. Ahh feck. Just go buy it. It’s fun.