Tag Archives: Music

WEEZER (Blue)

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WEEZER (Blue)
Weezer
1994

Weezer’s self-titled debut turned 30 on May 10th, 2024, the day I am writing this first draft. This album is the mainstream companion to the nerdcore rising of Weird Al Yankovic, They Might Be Giants, and Barenaked Ladies. Enough of the songs have plausible deniability that you can play one or two of them without devolving into a conversation about Monty Python, Mel Brooks, or stale YouTube videos. Almost every band signed to Fueled By Ramen cites Weezer as an influence. If I made a playlist of “the good Weezer songs not on the debut,” it would run about an hour, and every one of those songs is only really good in a live concert setting. Bassist and songwriter Matt Sharp left the band after Pinkerton somewhat acrimoniously, and with him he took all the harmonic complexity that makes the Blue Album more than “catchy.”

I absolutely love this album despite everything. While its relationship to Pixies’ Doolittle betrays them as the commercial correction to Nirvana, Weezer’s appeal lines them up alongside The Cars, Cheap Trick, Kiss. On this album, they’re writing extremely crunchy pop music that sounds phenomenal loud. Sharp and Patrick Wilson (no relation) make a perfect rhythm section responding to Cuomo’s best hooks. And I mean best hooks by a lot – Cuomo never wrote anything quite as complex and interesting as “Holiday”’s soaring, interlacing chorus, very consciously modeled after The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds but sung without any of the beauty of Al Jardine or the Wilsons. It’s yelled more than sung, the “Heart! Beat!” call and response – until the even more explicit Beach Boys breakdown, which is sung in a clean, low baritone.

He never wrote anything as pleasantly catchy as the “Buddy Holly” chorus, either. The verse is kind of a mess, a weird yelp over a fairly simple guitar part. But it builds perfectly into that chorus, the little “Ooh oohs!” setting up that “Ooh wee ooh!” so nicely. And then, of course, that iconic, corny, major key solo. Almost half of this album has been isolated and dissected into memes, maybe none more than “Buddy Holly,” and yet it can’t spoil the fun of just listening to the damn song for me.

Every year I end up relistening to this album and end up with different favorite songs. This time, “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here,” “Undone (The Sweater Song)” and “Holiday” jump out – sometimes, it’s “Surf Wax America,” “In The Garage,” “Only In Dreams.” It’s, admittedly, almost never “My Name Is Jonas,” though I love playing it in Guitar Hero! And it’s almost never “No One Else” though I dig its uptempo groove and the way Cuomo sings “Hou-ow-ow-ow-ouse!” but is Cuomo at his more toxic incel vibe. That ends up dominating Pinkerton, an album I spend very little time with, and then all edge is flushed out by The Green Album in ‘01, making music only for commercials afterward. As I said, there’s some catchy tunes left. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s basically this one album, an album you can warp into the dumbest configurations and then still come back and love. 

KEY TRACKS: “Undone (The Sweater Song)”, “Buddy Holly,” “Holiday”
CATALOG CHOICE: “All My Friends Are Insects,” “The Perfect Situation,” “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived”
NEXT STOP: Sincerely, Dude York
AFTER THAT: Little Busters, The Pillows

DOPESMOKER

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DOPESMOKER
Sleep
2003

I remember a high school night hanging out with an ex-girlfriend and her friends at IHOP till around two in the morning where one of the metalheads at our table invited me out to his car to listen to a song he was really excited about. The song was Dream Theater’s “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” which he did not inform me was 42 minutes long. I got out around minute 10 to go back to my date, but I’ve never forgotten that introduction. I ended up seeing Dream Theater with him a few years later.

Let me inform you that while the original version of Sleep’s Dopesmoker (released as Jerusalem in 1997) broke its 52 minute runtime into six tracks, the version I know is a full eleven minutes longer and presented as one song. That ends up being more true to the listening experience anyway – while there are movements and instrumental breaks, the experience of Dopesmoker is largely one outstanding build, grooving on this one riff and a seemingly eternal drone. Some people might find it too heavy, too oppressive – as far as metal riffs go, I feel it maintains a level of pleasant record store noise. Avoiding harsh noise, blast beasts, staying in a guitar tone without the shrill soloing of Kerry King or Steve Vai – it’s not quite “optimistic” music, but it never signals doom, either.

That drone doesn’t get repetitive because Sleep is just so fucking conversational with their playing. They will introduce new notes, fills, and solos with such a casual approach to the spotlight. Because there is such consistency within the album’s sonic vocabulary, changes in time signature and in and out of sung verse come and go almost without notice. There’s a drum part that comes in around the 35 minute mark that electrifies the same guitar riff under an entirely new energy, and then just as quickly the drums back out and let the guitar charge some speed on their own. When the drums come back, they return to the rhythm the album began with, but the guitar has built new layers and the bass is filling new gaps. It progresses over the hour long runtime into something that Black Sabbath would envy.

The lyrics themselves, which tell the story of a modern stoner “weedian” being transported back to Biblical Nazareth and recreating the world’s image under the Weed Seed of Eden, are performed in a growling chant. The actual process of memorizing and recording this is an almost comical and nightmarish story of battling the equipment and finding that once they started playing, the song got slower, “freakier.”

David Rees referred to this album as like a “Mark Rothko painting hitting you over the head with a bag of hammers” in the New York Times. The album can either place you into a ceaseless meditation on a comforting surface or you can listen attentively for every textured brush stroke. I could honestly listen to another hour of Dopesmoker. I could loop this shit. It’s like sitting by a waterfall. Writing about Dopesmoker, I am both inviting you out to my car to hang out for an hour and fully aware that your date is back in the restaurant. Maybe instead we’ll just set aside an afternoon to sit in the sun and listen on a Bluetooth speaker.

CATALOG CHOICE: The Sciences (if you’re new to Sleep or sludge/stoner metal generally, I’d probably recommend The Sciences first!)

NEXT STOP: Mastodon, Blood Mountain
AFTER THAT: Baroness, Yellow & Green

EMOTION

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EMOTION
Carly Rae Jepsen
2015

Poptimism’s original incarnation won out of self-evidence. The original concept of poptimism is that pop music (as defined less by radio format and more by its relationship to disco, Max Martin and Madonna) is worth taking seriously in the same way as rock music. First coined in 2004, poptimism flourished with the early careers of Beyonce as a solo artist, Rihanna, Robyn, Lady Gaga – these albums are phenomenal, the songs enduring, the standards high. We’ve now hit a second wave that establishes that anything commercially successful must have inherent critical esteem. With maybe the sole exception of Maroon 5, who may be too crassly commercial and anonymous to defend, I’ve seen vociferous defenses of just about every artist with a radio hit this past decade. It’s frustrating because I want to find good music and want to know who to trust.

The rock critics who’ve integrated some pop music have kept space in their hearts for Carly Rae Jepsen, making her a borderline automatic answer for what “good pop music” someone might want to listen to instead of [insert musician people are going to yell at me for saying they made a bad album.] Her reputation for making more thoughtful, higher quality dance pop began with Emotion, or more specifically with the release of “Run Away With Me,” a song with a saxophone intro riff that served as her call to action. Within a year, she was the favorite new pop star of podcasters, rock critics, and millennial gays – but, with the exception of “Cut to the Feeling,” a song she made for children’s animated film Leap/Ballerina, she never really charted again. It feels just as contrarian to argue the market got this wrong, that the post-Robyn yearning of Dedicated or the 70s throwbacks of The Loneliest/Loveliest Time should have made her a superstar. But I can still feel strongly that “Too Much”, “The Loneliest Time,” and “Boy Problems” are all way better than [okay okay stop throwing things at me this is the problem i know i know]!

P.S. To be honest, sitting down to write this one, the first thing I want to talk about is the damn sweater. The original is a 1973 Valentino sweater, though in 2015 they reissued it. I’ve been fixated on it as a favorite garment for almost a decade now. If I could get something similar, it’d be my go-to pride gear until I wore it to shreds. The Chevron, the sleeve asymmetry, the lack of clearly identifiable pattern in the color sequencing – pop music demands an aesthetic, and that sweater is as sticky as many of the songs themselves.

Emotion betrays a lot of the standard practice of modern pop songwriting. It’s not edgy or especially personal in subject matter. Most of the songs have a minimum of four songwriters between music and lyrics. The songs are silly, very clean, mostly a lot of fun. There’s a couple that are hornier than others (“All That” with music by Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, bonus track “Black Heart”) and a couple that are more general audiences in their aim (“I Really Like You,” lead single with a Tom Hanks music video, “Boy Problems”.) On paper, it’s the album for everybody and nobody designed by committee in the 2010s.

The secret to that formula is just getting a really great committee. Jepsen didn’t necessarily need to keep making pop music, working on Broadway as Cinderella in a Rodgers + Hammerstein production. “Call Me Maybe” gave her the clout and freedom to make whatever she wanted. As a result, she exhibits the creative control in choosing collaborators she actually admires, from Hynes to Ariel Rechtshaid (“Climax,” “Ring Off”, “Take Me Apart”) to Rostam (Vampire Weekend). It’s an organic collection of really smart people who contributed something alternative.

I can’t think of a better nine track run in pop music than the first nine songs on Emotion. Every summer, I have different favorites. When we were doing Maintained Madness, I recommended the title track as our entry because it has moments echoing almost every great moment of the album. The synth beat is delightful, the crescendo from verse to chorus is rousing every time, and Carly’s voice is as bright and energetic as anywhere else. But I love just as much the melancholy of “Gimmie Love,” a song which presages some of the sound of Dedicated. Today, I’m really enjoying “Let’s Get Lost,” which brings back the saxophone from “Run Away With Me” for a more 80s solo riot, a little bit sitcom, but a lot of fun. I’m still not tired of any of these songs. I suspect I never will be.

KEY TRACKS: “Run Away With Me,” “Emotion,” “All That”
CATALOG CHOICE: Dedicated, The Loveliest Time
NEXT STOP: Freetown Sound, Blood Orange
AFTER THAT: Women in Music Part III, Haim

REMAIN IN LIGHT (Kidjo)

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REMAIN IN LIGHT
Angelique Kidjo
2018

As an undergrad, I remember saying “The Talking Heads [sic] are the most underrated band in rock history.” I was going off an understanding of rock history shaped by classic rock radio, Rolling Stone magazine, and T-shirt shops. And even I was not really listening to Talking Heads all that much – I’d bought a copy of Remain in Light, their most acclaimed album, and I really liked it. Later, when I listened to their other albums, Remain in Light faded quite a lot in my estimation. It remains a transitional album in my ears, a mix of the New Wave and Brian Eno experimentation that defined the band’s early years and the branch into funk and the polyrhythm of Fela Kuti. I preferred the interpretation of those songs on Stop Making Sense to the studio recordings.

Kidjo’s reinterpretation of the album reasserts the African influence on the album. The instrumentation and arrangements she’s applied to these songs gives them such life. She gives some of these songs new tempos, some of them new brass and woodwind parts, new grooves, but they’re all perfectly suited interpretations of the songs. In her writing about recording the album for Pitchfork, Kidjo talks about how her approach was to build from percussion back into the full song. I wonder if Byrne borrowed that concept back when constructing the stage version of American Utopia, where every member of the cast carries their instrument, so many of them drums. 

While I love David Byrne with my whole heart, I think few would argue that he’s traditionally as strong a singer as Kidjo. But I adore that she does not pursue making these songs as melodic as possible. Kidjo sings Remain in Light with a great sense of humor, pushing the momentary anger, frustration, revelation over diva architecture. The way she sings “Once in a Lifetime” is with so much joy and naivete, a song to so many defined by that televangelist ecstasy of Byrne. The harmonies she adds throughout fit beautifully – her new vocal additions (generally not captured in lyric sheets, likely in Fon or Yoruba) feel equally natural.

This album highlights the false ceiling of my imagined canon of estimation as a young firebrand. It’s not that I was wrong that Talking Heads are more interesting than Aerosmith or AC/DC – it’s that I imagined I’d already heard the world’s most important music at twenty years old and everything else would just be “filling in gaps.” At that age I’d only read the name Angelique Kidjo. I didn’t imagine how she could blow the roof off the pop canon. This month, as I ease back into writing about music, I’m writing about a lot of that pop canon I’ve loved all these years – I’m hoping next time I have the confidence to push myself a little farther afield.

KEY TRACKS: “Crosseyed and Painless,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Listening Wind”
CATALOG CHOICE: Aye
NEXT STOP: Who Is William Onyeabor?, William Onyeabor
AFTER THAT: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Vol. 1

MY NAME IS MY NAME

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MY NAME IS MY NAME
Pusha T
2013

Of every rap album, this might be the one where the highest number of full verses wander back into my brain. Ten years removed from Clipse (whose “Grindin’” I maintain is the best song of the 00s,) Pusha T reclaims all-time status with My Name Is My Name, his debut album after a number of mixtapes exploring his identity and sound as a solo artist. Unlike many of the rap albums of the last fifteen years, the track list is sparse, with twelve radio length songs and zero bonus tracks or skits.

The musical variety on this album within that short runtime is impressive. There are aggressive songs that only make sense in the context of the house inspired album rap of Death Grips and Danny Brown. There are ballads that serve as alternatives to Drake’s sad rap – there are gritty, trap beat songs ready for NBA championship ads. Pusha unifies it all, from the movie references, the coke jokes, the stoic exhaustion of a man who’s been doing all this a little too long. He’s elevated to another level as a rapper, with the complexity of his flows and the energy of his vocal delivery reaching new highs. 

Normally I only do one video for these album write-ups, but this video is so incredible!

The list of collaborators is top of the industry then and now, including Future, Pharrell, Jeezy, 2 Chainz, Rick Ross, and Kelly Rowland. In a top 5 all time Kendrick guest appearance, “Nosetalgia” has a second verse that shatters the at-bats by everyone else. By the time the “taco meat laying on his gold” delivery arrives, I’m back in my little rap dork driver’s seat, hitting every line like I’m doing it at karaoke. The obvious bum note is Chris Brown singing the hook of “Sweet Serenade,” a choice I’d already feel shitty about given his history of abuse, but the hook also doesn’t sound especially good. You aren’t listening to My Name Is My Name for its kind heart – this is coke rap with violence at its outskirts (and sometimes center stage.) 

At some point, maybe I’ll feel like writing about Kanye West again. His work meant an incalculable amount to me for many years – his disintegration was probably less into being an offensive reactionary and more into being a very boring one. The closest I’ll come this year is his executive production on this album – while every song he’s credited for producing has an essential collaborator, it’s hard to deny the aesthetic overlap with his album Yeezus earlier that year. At the time, when I was hooked on the guy, I loved this album all the more for its part in that myth.

In my memory, this album retreats into the “yeah, it was cool when it came out, but how great is it really?” zone only maintained by cowards. The moment I hear the opening shrieks of that Hudson Mohawke sample and the insane beat on “King Push,” I’m all in forever. “CB4 when you rhyme, Simple Simon.”

KEY TRACKS: “King Push,” “Numbers on the Board,” “Nosetalgia”
CATALOG CHOICE: King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude
NEXT STOP: Wolf, Tyler the Creator
AFTER THAT: Shook, Algiers

RUMOURS

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RUMOURS
Fleetwood Mac
1977

For as long as I’ve moved to rating things out of 5, Rumours was my go-to example of a commonly accepted 5 star masterpiece. It’s a perfect cultural object, and it’s been rediscovered repeatedly my entire life. My friends and I found it through Rock Band 2’s inclusion of “Go Your Own Way” – then another generation through “The Chain” in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – then another through the “Dreams” longboarding cranberry juice TikTok. Part of the reason this album can keep being rediscovered is that every one of its eleven songs could be the song of a generation. I guarantee “Second Hand News” will get its day in the sun.

Of course, when you bring up Rumours, the instant association is with its mythology. A web of infidelity and broken hearts. If you’re a lyric-first listener, this is a vulnerable, rich text, and its legacy would be secured by that alone. But what makes Rumours such a consensus masterpiece is that you can just as easily zone out the lyrics’ meaning and purely enjoy the sound. Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and McVie sing almost every song with an impressive degree of remove, delightful break-up pop in the same vein as The Beatles’ White Album.

The exceptions, where I feel the weight of pain is really allowed to break the mask, are “The Chain” and “Oh Daddy.” The former’s blues intensity is shaped around Mick Fleetwood’s drum kick, but it’s the Buckingham/Nicks vocals that ascend the song into a ritual of divorce. Christine McVie provides backing vocals on the song as well, but “Oh Daddy” is really her chance to turn her back on the brave face of “You Make Lovin’ Fun.” It’s a more traditional pop ballad of the era, but the plaintive lead goes perfectly with Buckingham’s slinky guitar line.

Pop is mastered by the interplay of John McVie’s bass lines, Christine McVie’s keys, Buckingham’s guitar parts, and Fleetwood’s percussion. Everyone is so thoughtfully building every perfect structure with so many delightful musical details and fills. It makes every listen an opportunity for rediscovery. That interplay is really what makes Rumours so special to me. Its legacy as metatext is fun to talk about, but I think more than anything, the band poured their newfound independence into embellishing sonic opportunities with solid gold.

KEY TRACKS: “Dreams,” “The Chain,” “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” but also all of them!

CATALOG CHOICE: Buckingham/Nicks, Fleetwood Mac (1975,) Tusk

NEXT STOP: Heart Like A Wheel, Linda Ronstadt

AFTER THAT: Ask Rufus, Rufus & Chaka Khan

SYRO

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SYRO
Aphex Twin
2014

Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, referred to his most recent full length album as his “poppiest album yet.” I don’t know that I necessarily think anything here is more accessible or friendlier than “Alberto Balsam” or “Windowlicker,” but relistening to Syro, I’d forgotten just how melodic and beautiful the album tends to be. The earworm that’s been in my brain for a decade is “180db_[130]”, maybe the album’s most frantic dance cut, high drama that fits voguing or an evil movie nightclub more than an actual night out. When I spend time away from Syro, that harsh synth melody overtakes the more austere beauty of “XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix)” or “”syro u473t8+e” (piezoluminescence mix).”

You’ll also notice, if you’re unfamiliar with the album, that unless you’re listening to it so frequently you’ve got these titles memorized, that the album resists identifying individual tracks. According to James, the album consists of ideas written over six or seven years, none he considers forward-looking experimental music, all of which he considers ruminations on the past. The variation on this we might be more familiar with are letters and poem series, titled by date or sequence rather than by something more poetic and evocative. Most interpretations of the track titles here are descriptions of gear and technical detail – “minipops 67 [120.2]” refers to the MiniPops drum machine, likely take 67, set at 120.2 BPM, lord knows what a source field mix is. The album cover includes a record of the album’s production and promotional costs. Despite being a “pop album,” this is a documentation of a period of time more than a Concise Statement.

I’m as far from a scholar of electronic music as they come. I hear stuff, like what I like, integrate it into my playlists, and roll on. So when people say this is a culmination of thirty years of electronic music history, I believe them. I hear playful reverie, memories of holidays past, reflection on a quiet afternoon. I hear the soundtrack to a nightmare movie rave. I hear a feeling that the form has been mastered and now it’s simply about the pleasure of creation. These thoughts are abstract, and I’m not sure I could map them for you directly to a timestamp or even a track title. By disconnecting the music and its context, James has created a throughline from electronic instrumental music back toward the sort of classical roots. This album exists because the studio and equipment to create it existed and demanded to be played.

James has continued to make music, releasing EPs every few years rather than full length albums. He’s toured once in that time and played sporadic festivals as well. Based on the teaser timeline set last year leading to the EP “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/in a room7 760”, he’s due to disappear for another couple years before giving us another bite sized update. Between Syro and the previous full length album, Drukqs, James claimed he’d written six unreleased albums. It’s possible that like some classical composers before him, there are hundreds of recordings we won’t hear until a century has passed. I hope selfishly to get to hear some of his beautiful sounds sooner.

KEY TRACKS: “minipops 67 [120.2],” “XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix)”, “180db_[130]”

CATALOG CHOICE: …I Care Because You Do, Richard D. James Album

NEXT STOP: Black Origami, Jlin

AFTER THAT: Flamagra, Flying Lotus

LIFE WILL SEE YOU NOW

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LIFE WILL SEE YOU NOW
Jens Lekman
2017

I can’t remember if I found “How We Met, The Long Version” through Spotify’s recommendation algorithm or Pitchfork’s Best New Music – I read it regularly, having just started my tradition of making seasonal playlists and needing more new music than I ever had in my life prior. It’s an extremely catchy groove, but it’s heavily playing off the sample of Jackie Stoudemire’s “Don’t Stop Dancin’” with a Daft Punk style production (think “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and its relationship to “Cola Bottle Baby.”) What makes “How We Met, The Long Version” a Jens Lekman song is the lyrics, which tell the story of the start of a romantic relationship – dating back to the Big Bang. It comes across as a maybe tongue-in-cheek observation in isolation, to romanticize a love story that starts with borrowing a bass guitar by syncing about trilobites and crustaceans evolving to the point where love is possible – but, I think, to assume that it’s in anyway less than genuine is to misunderstand Lekman’s lyrical project.

Life Will See You Now is, by and large, a series of relatively mundane anecdotal story-songs set to disco and new wave pop. In “Our First Fight,” a song with a tripping samba rhythm, Lekman’s conversational baritone delivers “I love you” and “No, I haven’t finished Season 3” in the same beautiful, neutral vocal tone, though that doesn’t stop a playful “Woo-hoo!” from taking center stage in the song’s climax. On “To Know Your Mission,” Lekman tells a story of meeting a Mormon missionary and telling him that he knows his mission – that “in a world of mouths, I want to be an ear” – that writing these songs and sharing these stories is the highest purpose. I think, for that reason, Lekman generally removes drama from the music and his singing, instead allowing the lyrics to build narrative momentum over music that remains playful and agile.

That’s not to say there’s no musical build-up, though. The way “Evening Prayer” or “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” (in my book, the two best songs on the album) build from humbler sonic beginnings to their final harmonies overwhelms me to the point of tears. “Evening Prayer” tells the story of two men meeting for beers after a successful cancer treatment, melts me. It chooses the friend instead of the cancer survivor Babak as its perspective character, who sits in deep anxiety about whether or not he and Babak are actually close enough friends for it to not be weird how deeply he worried for his sick friend. The eventual resolution is a tearjerker, and Loulou Lamotte’s harmonies in the final chorus send it home swinging for the fences.

“Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” sounds, more than anything else, like the Wii Sports theme song, and tells the story of comforting a struggling friend by literally breaking into the carnival. It slowly builds up to the title, a chorus which soars as an anthem, and then reaches its real confessional. Feature singer Tracey Thorn comes in to beg Jens, “If you’re gonna write a song about this, please, don’t make it a sad song.” Whether or not this is entirely fictional or, to any degree autobiographical, I think Lekman is once again returning to the confessional of “To Know Your Mission” – whether the stories are true, the feeling of what it means to listen and share stories is intimate, at times uncomfortable.

One of my other favorite moments on the album comes in “Wedding in Finistère” (I should mention, Lekman is Swedish, occasionally apparent from pronunciation more than from the lyrics.) The song tells the story of a somewhat sardonic exchange at a wedding, joking that it feels like getting married is where life ends when it’s supposed to be where it begins. But, then, suddenly, in the chorus, the sense of perspective zooms out, to generations watching the generation prior disappear into reverie.

Five-year-old watching the ten-year-olds shoplifting
Ten-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds French kissing
Fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds chain-smoking
Twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing

This section is sung at almost double-tempo of the rest of the song (hell, the rest of the album,) flying into a propulsive hand clap game. Lekman claims he wrote this the day after a longtime friend told him she was pregnant, which made him feel the weight of time and his own sense of immaturity compared to where she was at in life. This moment reminds me so much of a moment in Genzaburo Yashino’s “How Do You Live?” in which our protagonist, a boy named Copper, realizes for the first time that the hundreds of cars driving back into Tokyo are, in fact, people, who all have their own lives and their own families and their own uncles. That when he and his uncle drove to the building he’s watching from, they may have been watched by someone from that very building, and this sudden sense that he is a part of the world and not its center makes him feel like a droplet in the tide. In the world of drama, the world of music, these are small revelations. 

KEY TRACKS: “Evening Prayer,” “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” “Our First Fight,” “Wedding in Finistère”

CATALOG CHOICE: CORRESPONDENCE, The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom (or, if you can find the original 2007 version with the samples, Night Falls Over Kortedala)

NEXT STOP: American Utopia, David Byrne

AFTER THAT: Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?, Kara Jackson

THE SOFT BULLETIN

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THE SOFT BULLETIN
The Flaming Lips
1999

Not one of the eight Flaming Lips albums before The Soft Bulletin is a bad album. They’re all very solid indie rock. The base pleasures of Wayne’s singing and their riff-writing maintain a solid development period. But the best Flaming Lips songs prior to The Soft Bulletin are fun diversions, often intentionally so. “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “This Here Giraffe,” “Turn It On,” these are fun songs (and in fact, I miss some of that Primus-adjacent spirit of “Turn It On” in their later years!) but they aren’t anthems.

The Flaming Lips ascend to the mainstream with The Soft Bulletin, its more complex musicality rivaling the intricacy of Radiohead’s OK Computer in a format more accessible than the four-LP experiment of Zaireeka. But, really, I think it’s less the complexity that attracted the mass attention that would allow them to blossom into one of America’s great rock bands with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and instead the escalation of stakes in their music. This happens lyrically, but it also happens sonically – the melodies are soar, and those new instrumental layers and drum machines arrive in sequence across each track’s runtime. This is not the maximalism of the 70s brought back directly – it’s repeatedly stripped back across the album down to the sound they mastered as indies.

I get that some people will never enjoy Wayne Coyne’s voice. It’s almost impossible to express how inescapable “Do You Realize??” was when I was a teenager. In the time right after Limp Bizkit and alongside James Blunt and Mika, I got very used to his thin, often pitchy lead vocals. I think it never sounds better than on The Soft Bulletin, where on a song like “The Spiderbite Song,” it disarms the Queen-like piano and drum arrangement and keeps a sense of humor around the lyrics. It makes him sound small enough that these near-misses with death could have destroyed him. That his final verse avoids talking about his own father’s death feels like he understands the character he’s built on The Soft Bulletin.

It’s this juxtaposition of soft-and-strong that makes The Flaming Lips a perfect anthem band for 1999. It lends a sincerity that the adult contemporary bands of the early 2000s like Coldplay and Train never bridged. Stripping back to the quietude of “What is The Light?”’s piano and bass drum intro or allowing nearly two full minutes of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” to pass before allowing any percussion to re-enter lends indie cred that kept The Flaming Lips cool. Well – sure, critics and audiences thought they were cool, but I just mean that I think they’re cool too.

KEY TRACKS: “Race for the Prize,” “The Spiderbite Song,” “Waitin For A Superman”
CATALOG CHOICE: Clouds Taste Metallic, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
NEXT STOP: Go Farther In Lightness, Gang of Youths
AFTER THAT: The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING

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IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING
King Crimson
1969

I’ve been trying to be cool enough to enjoy King Crimson since hearing the iconic “21st Century Schizoid Man” sample in Kanye West’s “Power.” As a teenager, I wasn’t ever able to access the split between that track and the remaining four. The instrumental groove on “Moonchild (The Illusion)” is the kind of thing I used to get impatient with – now, I appreciate being peppered with small, fragmentary sounds. I’m more attracted to songs like “I Talk To The Wind” and “Epitaph,” adoring their sweet sadness. In the Court of the Crimson King’s loose, relaxed songs primarily anchor themselves on Greg Lake’s plaintive vocals and gorgeous, low-key instrumentals.

You can hear in “21st Century Schizoid Man” and “In The Court of the Crimson King” the germ of progressive rock’s experimentation with major tempo shifts and extended jazz instrumental breakdowns. But the titles there betray a semi-mythical status the songs don’t necessarily employ – the lyrics throughout the album are closer to the poetics of folk music than the arcane mythology of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s later “Karn Evil 9” or the rock opera of Rush’s 2112. The “21st Century Schizoid Man” is a survivor of war. The title track has medieval themes, but is in line with Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.”

The later evolution of the Tolkienesque and science fiction in progressive rock is what I anticipated hearing that future blast through that opening riff, that vocal distortion effect, the absolute chaotic ramp into high tempo chaos. I was really into Stephen King, Mass Effect, and Dungeons & Dragons at the time. I don’t blame that kid for not enjoying the pleasures of Ian MacDonald’s woodwind solos – now, I really adore them. This being the inaugural album for this birthday project, it feels apropos that it’s one that had to grow on me over thirteen years.

KEY TRACKS: “21st Century Schizoid Man,” “I Talk to the Wind”

NEXT STOP: Close to the Edge, Yes

AFTER THAT: Ege Bamyisi, Can