Super-Expensive Japanese CDs: Taking A Closer Look

Like many other old-timers who have lived to rue the day they pitched ye olde record collection, I have eyed the expensive Japanese reformatted and remastered CDs and wondered if they were worth the bucks. Product description for these items assures the shopper that the CD packaging is faithful to the original album layout — basically you'll get your old record cover, as run through Poindexter's “Shrink-O-Matic.” But are the sound-files any different from what music companies are producing on our shores?

This month I finally swallowed the lure, and added Led Zeppelin's ZOSO to my amazon cart. The packaging is indeed a faithful miniaturization of the original half-acre of cardboard released in '71 (curious how shrinking it down to a scant few inches also reduces the vague sense of menace that attended the once-notorious album).

"The power of the commodity fetish," indeed.

As for the sound-files, here are the visuals of “Rock And Roll” as it exists in three different releases.

This is from the original boxed set, released in 1990. The remastering for this release was, ostensibly, a painstaking labour of love that Jimmy Page spent years fussing over (click for close-up):



This next is from 2007's Mothership. It is huge, and heavily compressed. The lows and highs are brought forward, while the mid-range sits somewhat to the rear — essentially, the sound that people have come to expect from their earbuds (Page, predictably enough, is rather reticent about the quality):



And this last is from a Japanese import, released in 2008:



How does it sound? I have to admit it is the best of them all. When he tweaked the knobs for the original CD release, Page embraced the newly-discovered high end a bit too readily — which the Japanese remastering corrects, without swinging to the other (American?) extreme of super-boosting the lows.

Is it worth the money? It depends. In this case, the item was only $20 (it seems to have climbed in price since then), an amount I have no qualms paying. $108 for Billion Dollar Babies, on the other hand, would be more difficult to justify — even if the sound quality of the American CD is so astonishingly shoddy it makes its $5 price-tag look like highway robbery.

Swinging The Bawdy Eclectic, With Sleigh Bells, Updike and DFW

What's an ambitious rock duet gotta do to distinguish itself from all the other riff-raff duets out there? Sleigh Bells surely know, but they ain't telling.



The prestige treatment they received in the glossies prior to the release of their sophomore album was something I hadn't seen since the Followill Boys groused their way to drunken stardom. Every glossy on the stand seemed to offer a blizzard of Photoshopped snaps of Derek E. Miller and Alexis Krauss in full-pout mode. A solid month of facing these two cutie-pies as they copped a surly 'tude made me want to bring them home and liquor them up with peach schnapps, just so I could watch them pee on the roses and puke on the cat.

I settled instead for buying the CD — Reign of Terror — at Walmart, and I've gotta say: I should have stocked up on the schnapps. Reign Of Terror is fine enough. It has its moments of sonic interest, even catchiness, and certainly suggests what must be a terrific stage show. But it's not going to get much repeat play in this household.

Another recent, impulsive CD purchase that won't be getting much repeat play: The Song Remains The Same. In Zep's case, though, I'm very fond of the music and the performances; it's just unlikely that I'll often be in the mood to indulge Jimmy Page's 28-minute attempts at tripping the light fantastic for his New York audience. Nor was he alone. All four of those dudes were ready and willing to unleash solos that ran as long as the average Sleigh Bells concert. I'll say this about that: whenever Zep took over a stage or studio or abandoned castle they made a point of hammering out music that they, at least, would never get bored playing.

A lofty ideal which, if Robert Plant's current attitude is any indication, ultimately failed them. It's also an ideal which the super-fragmented digital culture has lost all track of. Audiences and performers have changed, as they must, but I can't help nursing the codgery thought that today's music is just a wee bit (gasp!) disposable. But so it goes. Lofty expectations rarely serve anyone well in the mercurial world of rock 'n' roll.



I had lofty thoughts of my own, back when I was Sleigh Bells-aged. That was the early 80s, when I spent most weekday evenings penning Very Important Prose in Scribner notebooks. Like any young “artiste” I approached my chosen form the way Houdini approached a pair of handcuffs. Every short story was a brilliant reinvention of the wheel; every longer piece was . . . well, who knows what the hell they were? In the end they became a huge pile of paper in a box.

As I wrote I didn't mentally bother with any of my peers. If the cover of Esquire was any indication, they had yet to distinguish themselves. And while the generation of writers just ahead of me weren't without interest, I didn't pay much attention to them, either. My get-published strategy, such as it was, was to head directly for the king of the hill and push him off with the apparent immediacy of my own brilliant spin on their game. I figured there were three guys who routinely seized the title of America's Most Important Writer: Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and John Updike. Or, as my “peer” David Foster Wallace succinctly described them: the Great Male Narcissists.

My strategy (thankfully) didn't pan out. My peers, however, developed a unified strategy of their own that did indeed distinguish themselves from the GMNs, a protagonist they've shared in common: The Great American Loser. Elaine Blair surveys the field and admits it's a tactic that works, for her and a whole lot of other readers. But at what cost?

It's been curious to me the collective sigh of relief we've breathed at the passing of the GMNs. Roth still stirs a few people because he's still alive and writing, but is either Mailer or Updike on anyone's required reading list? It's been years since I bothered with either of them, so I recently thought I'd try an Updike, to see if the contents retained any sort of potency. I reached for Couples, figuring the voluminous sexual activity would, if nothing else, retain my interest.

After 75 pages I resorted to speed reading. A few more tries at that, and I finally put the book down, unfinished. The sex is boring, chiefly because the women are pliant ciphers. A few hundred pages of that can leave the reader with an impression of a fantasist whose masturbatory goals are best accomplished to the sound of his own voice.

This was a tune the GMNs never got bored of singing. It may be true that in the passing of their voices, our culture has swung decidedly to the fragmentary and disposable. But who could blame us?

Current Curiosities

There's an old (2005) CD I dusted off, after hearing someone lament the unknown stature of the band that recorded it. I spun it while doing the housework, and thought, “Not bad.” I spun it again while taxiing the daughters to their various gigs, and thought, “Actually, this is pretty damn good.” Somewhere around the half-dozenth spin I was thinking, “Why aren't these guys a household name?”

Breaks Co-Op — originally from New Zealand, now residing London, UK — have a unique and entirely palatable sound. It's hard to pin down. Apple calls it “Electronica,” someone else qualified it as “House.” I'm catching traces of Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads, Paul Simon and Trap Door-era T Bone Burnett — “World Beat,” I suppose. But then I'm also catching Buffalo Springfield, so what are you going to do with that? Any way you want to cut and dry their sound, Breaks Co-Op is deeply infectious. You should retrieve your own copy of The Sound Inside and give a spin or two, just to see if you don't find yourself listening to it for the half-dozenth time and thinking . . . there's something happening here.


Speaking of infectious: Here We Go Magic has released their first single, “Make Up Your Mind,” from their forthcoming album, A Different Ship due out in early May. It's got a lot of what I like, particularly in its West African-style guitar riff. Stream it, or even download the mp3, over here. And if the spectre of young women in their skivvies contorting in a squeamish state of erotic despair is your thing, by all means watch the creepy video, too.

"Gasp! Is that ... Plotto?!"

The case for bricks-and-mortar bookstores: some books really should be bought on spec, and not in good faith. Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is chief among them. Having skimmed through In Pursuit Of VALIS, the earlier Reader's Digest version of the Exegesis, I'm inclined to trust Rob Latham's judgement: Dick's metaphysics are best absorbed in his fiction, which has the incalculable benefit of having being written with publication in mind. And yet, and yet . . . looking at the list of contributors adding annotation to Dick's tome, I am still sorely tempted. (Addendum: r. crumb gives you his summary.)

Also worth a glance, if not a purchase, Plotto by William Wallace Cook. Its press makes it sound a bit like the first “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. But I could also envision (vaguely, at this point) a novel in which this book attempts to enforce a plot on the central character, and even the reader. Did Plotto anticipate the meta-plot? If so, this book poses a threat to life as we know it — and belongs on my shelf. (Addendum: uh-oh: Lytle Shaw knows!)

The Del Fuegos, Reunited And Back On The Road

I haven't found anything on the web to support this, but I've been told Dan and Warren Zanes spotted the name for their future band on a road atlas. They traced the Number 5 highway as far south as it went, to its final destination. You couldn't get any lower than Tierra del Fuego: ergo, the Del Fuegos.

Here's another early band story, with attribution: in the band's first year or two on the road, the budget for alcohol exceeded the Del Fuegos' budget for gas. No small feat, considering this was the 80s, when beer was cheaper than gas and gas was cheaper than water. Close observers knew the band's days were numbered.

Actually, close listeners knew it, too. When Smoking In The Fields was released, it became obvious that, as Gordon Lightfoot put it, “the alcohol was no longer helping.” Smoking is a sturdy enough album, but there are lyrical indications that at least one band member was slipping lower than Tierra del Fuego, into a place no-one really wants to hear about. If they were going to survive — as human beings, never mind as a band — the Del Fuegos had to hit the reset button.

Two decades after the reset button was hit, the Del Fuegos are back, delighting fans and I daresay themselves with energetic and focused performances that are the exclusive domain of the clean and sober. I'll try not to be bitter in my envy of the good folks in the remaining seven (of 11) US northeastern cities, but if you count yourself among these lucky citizens you should avail yourself of the chance to catch these well-seasoned rockers.

For those of us who can't make the drive, there is a collection of new Del Fuegos songs to be heard: Silver Star (A, e, i). Fans who gratefully partook of Dan Zanes' family-oriented rock 'n' roll pretty much know what's on tap. The Del Fuegos are in a celebratory mood, as the (for now) free track “Friday Night” indicates. For my money, the collection closer “Raw Honey” is the stand-out track, hearkening back to the erotic slow-hand contemplations of yore.

While I'm certainly digging the new material, I do kind of miss the low notes the younger band hit. The demons of a narcissistic youth have been shackled and banished, as is right, but surely other dark shadows loom. Maybe instead of looking south, the Del Fuegos could glance northward: hell, up here in Canada we're gutting the Alberta/Saskatchewan landscape until the place looks like Mordor. That's not just our grandchildren we're throwing onto the pyre of cheap fossil fuel — we're throwing yours, too!

But I digress. Concert-goers get the full range of low and high notes, which is the way it oughtta be. See 'em if they show up in a town near you. The rest of us will wait in hope that the Del Fuegos reunion tour might just expand to include us, too.



Photo from here.

Of Christmas Music, And Enduring Favourites

I'm keen on novelty Christmas collections. Ever since the Ultra-Lounge series came out, their Jingle-Bell-heavy selections are an inescapable element in my December playlist. Esquivel's Merry Xmas From The Space Age Bachelor Pad is also a frequent partner in aural crime. I'm even perverse enough to include the odd selection from Eban Schletter's Cosmic Christmas. This year to round out my collection I finally picked up Surfin' Christmas: 12 Yule Tide Classics by The Wave Benders, whose Dutch nationality only compounds the novelty of Dick Dale-style carolling. It's adroit, wipe-out free fun, and it works.



Closer in spirit and execution to Verve Remixed Christmas is this year's Santastic 6, marshaled together by beat-obsessed DJs still hip to the scene. Santastic 6 is a mixed bag of tricks, lacking the uber-polish of Verve's studio product, and striking the odd dud note (if you get the joke just reading the title, there's little point to listening to the entirety of “You're A Loser, Newt Gingrich”). But overall it's a raucous beat-heavy mash-up extravaganza. My personal favourites are Atom's “Wonderland Walker” (Peggy Lee vs Fats Domino vs Bjork), Danny J's mash-up of Danny Elfman and The Supremes, and Martinn's delirious “Blenda Ree” which pulls together Brenda Lee, Golden Earring, Bananarama and the Greenhill Dixieland Jazz Band.

Also, be sure to give Mojochronic's provocative “Merry Christmas 2U” a listen. He cuts and pastes elements from our largest stage-hungry pietists (U2 and MercyMe, for starters), producing a version of "Silent Night" and "Little Drummer Boy" that is surprisingly rousing. I thought his clincher, using the penultimate verse of Greg Lake's “I Believe In Father Christmas” as a benediction, struck me as weirdly flat-footed — a moment when the artist resorted to a sophomoric piety of his own. We all know people whose Christmas mode is to smile as they take the centre of the floor and announce, “It's nice we're all having fun, but let's not forget . . . ” In Mojochronic's case, he doesn't want us to forget It's all make-believe. Yeah, yeah: thanks Dad. Now can we get back to the fun?

With that one exception, these songs are meant to inject the not-unpleasant element of surprise into your Christmas Party Playlist (and if the final minute of “2U” bugs you like it did me, the issue is easily remedied using Audacity). I'm grateful to say, “Mission accomplished.”

Say, maybe next year these hepcats will put their grubby pawprints all over She & Him's Christmas offering, and transform it into something I'll actually play!



“The one thing I used to mourn,” writes txkimmers, in her Amazon review of Porcupine Tree's The Incident, "was the fact that I probably would never love a band the way I did the Beatles as a kid, or the Clash in high school, or Nirvana.” Man, do I love her review! It illustrates perfectly how the Amazon Customer Review (the sincere ones, of course: the snow-jobs are an art-form unto themselves) can trump the “pro” reviewers by taking full advantage of three key non-pro tactics: 1) compulsive re-editing, and additional, later thoughts that reinform the original piece; 2) brazen subjectivity; 3) an artful autobiographical précis that puts it all into context.

I'm also in complete agreement with her about Porcupine Tree “bringing back that kind of rush.” Their Signify originally earned a mere “honourable mention” from me in January 2011, getting nudged out by Arcade Fire and Elizabeth Cook. But let me say this about that: Signify has been this year's most-played album by a very wide margin, out-lapping and out-lasting last year's “favourites” by an astronomical distance, and choking out all would-be contenders for this year's prize of place. And as I've slowly collected the more recent PT offerings, they have quickly joined Signify and jostled for occupancy at the front of the queue. Until I'm able to give this band the Bangsian logorrheic existential shout-out it so richly deserves, txkimmer's Amazon review will have to suffice.

... KISS Me Twice ...

My parents got home from Bible Study, and asked if everything was alright. I said, “Yeah,” and kept fiddling with my homework.

“So what's the air rifle doing next to the door?” asked my father.

“Oh,” I said. I'd actually tucked it beneath the coats on the rack, to keep it from being seen, a ploy that apparently failed if you were hanging one up. “Right. I meant to put that away.”

“So?”

“Ah . . . I got this weird phone call, kinda freaked me out a bit.”

“What'd they say?”

What, indeed? It was hard to explain, so I took it from the top: I was seated at the basement desk, toiling on my homework. The phone rang. In those primitive days before Call Display, if you wanted to know who was calling you, you picked up the receiver and answered the phone. In this case, my caller didn't identify himself. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Fifteen,” I said, guessing at the age of my caller and hoping to one-up him. In fact I was 12.

“Perfect. Who's the greatest rock band in the world?”

“Uh . . .” The truth was I'd only started listening to the radio, and couldn't name more than two, maybe three bands, tops. I was nervous, and lunged for the obvious answer. “The Beatles?”

“The Beatles? No, no. I'm talking about your favourite rock band, the one you listen to the most.”

“The Beatles,” I said, resorting again to the lie. I didn't yet have a favourite rock band, but would have chosen one with a “harder” sound to it than the Beatles.

“Seriously? The Beatles?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Well . . . I was looking for KISS.” Then he hung up, and I retrieved my air rifle, lest some goon barge through the door to deal me the physical harm I had invited by giving the wrong answer to this improvised bit of polling.
With KISS you never knew. They were obviously tapping into something beyond the pale. The pancake makeup, the flash-pots. Breathing fire, spitting blood. The theatrics tended to inspire a similar degree of extremity in the fans. So far as I knew, none of my Mennonite friends listened to KISS, but there was a Ukrainian Catholic kid in my class who doodled the KISS logo on anything within reach. His locker was papered over with pictures of KISS concerts — a modest shrine compared to his bedroom back home, if you believed his claims (and I did). I wouldn't have classified my classmate as crazy, but I had read the story in the paper about the kid who took his father's shotgun to shop class and blew away another kid, later claiming he'd received direct orders from the band.

The fans called themselves an “Army” and I wasn't about to take any chances. Hence the air-rifle. Now that my father was home I figured I was safe enough. He could absorb the invasion's first salvo, while I crawled out the window and fled for my life.

That ain't workin'...

Thirty-five years later, there's a video of the band making a guest appearance on a sketch comedy show. They show up in regalia as a high-school girl's prom date. Her square parents are shocked and appalled. You can find it pretty quickly, but I'd advise against it. It's gratingly unfunny theatre, because it gets the social positioning completely ass-backwards. These days the scary, dangerous people from the fringe are Dad in his belly-cinched pants and Mom in her high-maintenance coif. The Munsters' high concept has been perfectly reversed, thanks in no small part to KISS.

Indeed the alleged “Knights In Satan's Service” aren't just identifiably human, they're struggling to keep the paint fresh on an increasingly bourgeois facade. Another round of memoirs, another season of Gene Simmons' meta-antics; costumes held together with duct-tape, an inveterate pussy-hound whose marriage is held together with the duct-tape of constructed celebrity drama.

There's the Wizard of Oz, and then there's the chap behind the curtain. Is there a curtain behind the curtain? Is there anything in the comic books that somehow peels back the vital layer and catches a glimpse of the edgy, conceptual power that once summoned an Army?

A Very She & Him Christmas

The CD cover shows our heroes decked out in retro hipster gear, standing before the crimson curtain, poised to deliver that retro sound we've come to expect: soaring strings with a haunting sha-boom, sha-boom chorus.



The cover, alas, is misleading. A more accurate photographic portrait of the musical contents would have revealed Him in boxers and a beater, and She in curlers and a fuzzy housecoat. Stripped-down is an understatement, and the “retro” these hip-cats reach for is no older than 23 years: the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session. There's very little instrumentation happening beyond ward's ukulele-strumming, and Deschanel very occasionally resorts to multi-tracking her voice to provide a sonic palette only slightly larger than the Junkies' singular album. This is much too muted to get noticed at Christmas parties, but it might set a pleasantly contemplative tone for late Christmas Eve eggnog sipping, if that's what you're after. I've got plenty of more satisfying alternatives for that purpose, and would have given this disc a pass if I'd been forewarned. So now I'm telling you.

Recording Artists vs. Marginal Utility

“Marginal Utility” is one of the few terms I still remember from the Intro To Economics course I took some 20 years ago. For those who can't be bothered with the wiki, here's how it works.

Let's say it's a hot day in July and you've just spent an hour mowing the lawn. You step into your kitchen, and your daughter hands you a tall glass of cold water. You gratefully accept it and guzzle it down, thinking this just might be the most satisfying glass of water you've ever drunk. She takes the empty glass from you, fills it again and hands it back. You take it and toss it back — it is, after all, a very hot day. She repeats the process, and this time you only take a sip, before putting the glass on the counter to return to later, if at all.

If you were to ascribe a value to these glasses, you might call that first drink of water a Five-Dollar Glass. You were still pretty thirsty when you got the second glass, so maybe you'd give a dollar for the refill. The third, however, rates only pennies. That decline in value is marginal utility in action.



This week I've been listening to a new album from an artist I admire and have very much enjoyed in the past. It's the fourth album of his I own, and I can tell it's terrific. The poetic sensibility remains acute, the orchestration is subtle and effective. There are people who already love this album. I might eventually become one of those people, but right now that doesn't seem likely.

It's not his fault. It's not like he got lazy and just slapped together something people have a right to ignore. I'm not going to be a dick (as I have been on occasion) and give him advice in the vain hope he might woo me back to the fold. And he will remain unnamed (you realize, of course, I might even be bluffing on the gender).

There's no delicate way to put this, but I'm wondering if the product of recording artists doesn't have a corresponding marginal utility. In fact, I'm wondering if the magic number for satisfying albums isn't three (3).

There are artists who seem to defy the odds. If my CD collection were cited as evidence, the case for Exceptionalism could be made for the Beatles, Bruces Cockburn and Springsteen, Los Lobos, Rush, Steely Dan and Talking Heads. And Megadeth. But in terms of actual play, Steely Dan is the only act who escapes the three-album fate. And that insidious, 10-year-old device — which relentlessly tracks play-count — bears this observation out.

What to make of it all? Nothing, really. The most important thing is for recording artists to proceed as if none of this mattered. There's no telling which three will make the final grade. The artist I referred to earlier put out eight(!) albums before producing the first-of-three that hooked me. Who knows? One or two Dylanesque reinventions might yet eclipse those.

But more than that, you can't argue with a live performance, which is what most albums harken back to anyway. Keep on keeping on. And please don't take it personally if I lose track of your latest greatest record.

The Latest Additions To My CD Collection, Courtesy Of ...

It seems WalMart is fast becoming the final refuge to which the beleaguered audiophile (at least of the Hornbyan variety) must cling: any other vendor foolish enough to stock and display CDs is too busy filing receivership papers to stay abreast of audiophile tastes.

Which, if WalMart's stock is any indication, are drearily predictable and deeply mired in the past. Pink Floyd re-re-releases, new (and old) Alice Cooper, Bob Seger live . . . flipping through "What's New," the most recent act I'm stumbling across is the late Amy Winehouse. Hey-hey, my-my: welcome to my record collection!



Some ado is being made of the latest coat of paint to be applied to the Pink Floyd catalog, particularly Dark Side Of The Moon, which is celebrating yet another anniversary. DSOTM happens to be one of the first CDs I bought when I set up my original stereo system, and it is an album that's been ripe for the attention of professional knob-fiddlers. Even so, after considering my budget, Dark Side Of The Moon was not the album I put into my shopping cart: The Wall was.

There are a couple of reasons for this. I'm a little more sentimental about The Wall than I am about Pink Floyd's most classic album. The Wall was the first of Floyd's albums to reach my adolescent ears, so it left the deepest impression. It is huge. It is hugely overindulgent, it is hugely narcissistic, it takes every grievance it has about humanity in a hugely personal way, and no stroke applied in protest of this abysmal condition could possibly be too broad for the work at hand. The Wall best embodies exactly what a Prog Rock Concept Album should be.

I'm also a sucker for reproduced cardboard gatefolds, even if the reduced size has an unfortunate bubblegum card effect on Gerald Scarfe's nuthouse artwork. But the sonic tweaking more than compensates for this bit of miniaturizing. When I first contrasted the original CDs with the new production on this collection, it was the selections from The Wall that stood out. There are all sorts of creepy little noises of things getting squeezed and/or broken that never quite made it through the surface noise of the LP, or even the original digital transfer. I don't expect to be replaying this monstrous behemoth often, but for those occasions when the daily news requires a gloomy, British yawp, I will be reaching for The Wall.



I recently advised a friend to steer clear of the new Alice Cooper, Welcome 2 My Nightmare. He didn't ask for the advice, he didn't need it, and neither (probably) do you. But he was kind enough to solicit further thoughts on the matter. So I described it as, “One of those efforts where the addition of many big names — Bob Ezrin, Steve Hunter, Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Neal Smith . . . and Ke$ha — is a sure sign that nothing is working the way it should.” And I left it at that.

The number in the title indicates this is a follow-up to a well-known and deeply loved “classick” from the 70s — Welcome To My Nightmare. The trouble, I thought, probably started there. Why revisit an album that diehard fans have committed to memory for the last four decades?

Then again, why not? Vincent Furnier has made it clear he's too canny a showman to treat any of his albums as sacred writ, so why should his fans?

After playing the sequel another time, I retrieved the old album from the back of the closet and fed it into the player. Although it has a couple of songs I frequently put on playlists (“Department of Youth” and “Cold Ethyl”) it's been years since I listened to Welcome 1 from front to back.

I now realize why: Welcome 1 isn't much of an album, either. As with most Alice albums, the concept reads as a bit of an afterthought — a sales banner slapped on a collection of backlist retreads. If some fans kvetch about it, as they do on Amazon, well . . . it's a bit late in the game for that, isn't it? Alice runs a chop-shop. By now there isn't a single song of his which he hasn't ground up countless times and fed through the sausage machine.

So, yes: in 1975 it may have been possible to listen, without rolling one's eyes, to Vincent Price feasting on the scenery. Children singing like brats in thrall to an evil clown probably set the teeth of Nixon-era parents on edge, too. But 36 years later, even the Steven Suite tries the patience of jaded listeners who like their nightmares to move at a snappier pace.

Which, it must be said, Welcome 2 certainly does. The ballads have more oomph, the rockers rock, and the one song which does in fact disturb (“When Hell Comes Home”) is a propulsive grinder.

All of which leaves me a little baffled as to why Welcome 2 doesn't grab me. It's compulsively jokey, but that's usually a good thing, too. In fact the punchline to “I Gotta Get Outta Here,” in which the put-upon doofus who's been singing is set straight on the facts, cracks me up (response: “D'aaaah, excuse me?”). Oddly enough, it evokes for me the singular moment I most enjoy on Welcome 1: the second bridge in “Cold Ethyl” when Cooper says, “C'mere, Cold Ethyl! What makes you so c-o-o-o-o-o-l-d-d-d?” It's a throw-away line, but he is so snotty when he says it, it slays me.

Snottiness is the purview of the young, of course, and I am slow to recommend it (listen to any interview with Johnny Rotten from the last 15 years if you wonder how entertainingly an old-timer wears it). But it is a quality that sends me back to the old albums. I love to hear it.

In fact, I'd love to hear it better. Say, Coop and Co.: since you've already got my money with the new stuff and the old stuff, how's about taking a hint from Floyd and polishing up the classicks? As is, they sound terrible. Admit it: you're embarrassed. So why not rectify the situation? You know I'm not the only easy mark for such a naked cash-grab.



The only Bob Seger album I ever bought was Nine Tonight, in 1981. “Old Time Rock & Roll” was hoary even then, but a double album of The Silver Bullet Band's greatest hits struck me as too good a deal to pass up. The album didn't get much play, but I never regretted the purchase. There was too much energy on display for me to get uppity about ten bucks lost.

Thirty years later, there is also a suspiciously fine quality on display that makes me wonder just how “live” those recordings were. I hardly begrudge a showbiz schmoe like Seger for retreating to the dugout to apply a little studio spit, especially if his LIVE competition at the time included notorious bat-corkers like Peter Frampton and KISS. But it is amusing to hear, and still (as Lester Bangs took pains to point out) delivers more than reasonable value for the frugal listener's hard-earned buck.



I must confess that when she was alive, I lumped Amy Winehouse in with Britney Spears as a tabloid performer whose ouevre would never survive without the broadsheet antics, and left it at that without ever bothering myself to listen to her music. Since her death I've had several friends press me on the matter. Her CDs are now ridiculously cheap, so I finally caved and took them home.

Now I know what everyone else knows: this young woman possessed an astonishing depth of vocal and lyrical talent. Without attempting to tweak the public chorus, I'll just add that I tend to reach for Frank before I do Back To Black. The later album skates on a very thin and brittle sheet of self-awareness that is, at times, almost too difficult to listen to in retrospect. Still, she rises above the muck with a performance that conveys genuine good humour even as it acknowledges the inescapable bonds of gravity. It is a shame we've lost her.

Nick Lowe, The Old Magic

There's a lovely, very short bit on Nick Lowe in this week's New Yorker, which follows him as he shops for glasses. He makes mention of a clarifying moment he had as a rock 'n' roll star, I'm guessing in the late-70s, when he decided he wasn't going to be one of those aging performers aping the kids in an attempt to stay current. Instead he charted out an attitude and sound he figured he could properly wear into old age.

Having spun Labour Of Lust* through the summer months, and contrasted that with At My Age* and now The Old Magic, I would never have imagined in 1979 that the sound he was referring to would be akin to that of Max Bygraves or Guy Mitchell. But, especially in Mitchell's case, I think Lowe rather astutely latched onto a sensibility that works brilliantly. It's like he took Mitchell's approach to “Heartaches By The Number” — a weird performance in which Mitchell sounds like he couldn't be happier — and turned it inside out. Lowe also performs his narrators' voices as if they couldn't be happier, then makes it subtly clear what a shame this is.

Looks like Lowe has become the Elder Statesman of Cool.

The Sheepdogs, On The Cover Of The Rolling Stone — And Deeply Entrenched In My Playlist

My wife recently commented on the monthly fee that eMusic draws from our credit card. “You still get music from these guys?”

“Yep. I’ve grandfathered an introductory rate that still nets me 50 downloads a month — an incredible bar-goon.”

“So 50 new songs every month?”

“More or less.”

“What kind of music are we talking about? Have I heard any of it?”

The answer to the first question didn’t come easily. The answer to the second question did. She has her music, I have my music, we have our music. The girls have Glee. More often than not my monthly downloads don’t qualify for any of those categories.* But I keep with it, because it’s an inexpensive way to satisfy my curiosity.

eMusic’s stock and trade is stuff that gets played at Bonnaroo, or in the sort of nightclubs I lost the ability to locate when I became a father. A glance at my sidebar bears this out. Right now we have The People’s Temple, who seem to have recovered an echo from an unhappily concluded Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, and, on the super-hip nightclub side of things, the Handsome Furs. A couple of months ago there was Cut Copy, the lushly indulgent disciples of Human League, and Le Butcherettes, who sound like this picture looks:



A picture is worth 1000 words, but I feel like I ought to say more. WP, the quarter-century version, took a cussed and hearty delight in any sonic palette located just to the left of the radio dial.** WP, sliding toward the half-century mark, has become stingy about delight. You kids keep on rocking in the free world: I’m happy to listen. But that’s as much encouragement as you'll get from me.

“So what kind of music are you looking for?” was my wife’s natural next question.

In a flash of damning candor, I said, “I miss classic rock. I mean, I’m sick of hearing the standards being played over and over. I guess I want new classic rock.”

Good luck with that.

Occasionally I do luck out. My itching ears were well and truly scratched by the Supersuckers’ superlative Motherfuckers Be Tripping, as well as the neo-Psychedelic musings of Porcupine Tree. Alice continues to oblige, of course. Also, there was a brief moment when Kings of Leon seemed to be huddling over their Coleman stove and cooking up something promising.

And now we have The Sheepdogs, a Canadian band that wouldn’t have caught my ear if they hadn’t caught my eye by winning the Rolling Stone cover contest.



Again, Kings of Leon comes to mind because I think KoL strains to sound this good. The crucial difference is the Sheepdogs aren’t searching for a sound — they’ve nailed it down. If you spin this week’s release, Five Easy Pieces, or better yet, last year’s Learn & Burn, you’ll catch a heady bouquet of worthy influences: the edgy wistfulness of mid-career Guess Who, the tightly-controlled guitar-driven playfulness of Dinosaur Jr., the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, a slapdash of CCR when they were still having fun, and just enough of the Beatles to acknowledge the obvious and move on to the business at hand — putting on a rock show for the here and now.***



The fact that the production of Learn & Burn was financed by pocket change and returned empties astonishes me. At first spin, this does not come off as an “indy” project. The devotion to disciplined songcraft is remarkable — in contrast to the current norm of indecipherable wordplay, most Sheepdog lyrics actually make sense (though the band is still hip enough to title a song “Rollo Tomasi,” something the latent film buff in me deeply appreciates). And the musicianship is undeniably accomplished.

Further exposure brings out some amusingly rough edges. The obligatory traces of studio conversation are there, of course, contributing to a backyard party ambience. Then there’s the inclusion of a sax solo in “Right On,” a pleasing dash of mischief for this listener, and a huge middle-finger raised at what’s left of the reigning music industry. Atlantic is fortunate to sign an act that knows its mind and its sound to this degree. There’s little I’d bother tweaking, although I imagine that whoever Atlantic books to produce the next Sheepdogs album might offer some helpful tips on nailing vocal intonation. To my ears this little nudge could make the difference between great, which the Sheepdogs’ studio sound already is, to knocking the ball out of the park and into orbit.

It’s probably been 20 years since the cover of the Rolling Stone enticed me into a record store. I’m glad for this week’s interruption: Learn & Burn will be on near-continual rotation until Atlantic serves up the next Sheepdogs album. In the meantime anyone able to catch a Sheepdogs show, should, with all possible haste. I expect they’re mighty high from this experience, which will likely bring a whole new level of awesome to their performances.



*Unless it’s jazz, which gets played through the weekend.
** Something like this guy does.
***Prior to Learn & Burn we have two journeyman albums — Trying To Grow (2007) and Big Stand (2008, currently available as a free download on the band’s site). Although laid down with impressive assurance, these collections probably play best as happy reminiscences of a previously enjoyed live show.****
**** I remember the first two albums by U2 playing the exact same way.

Tropicália via Red Hot + Rio 2

My weekly habit of purchasing a newspaper occasionally pays off musical dividends. Until I read J.D. Considine's enthusiastic rave for Red Hot + Rio 2, "Tropicália" was not a genre I was familiar with, nor had I heard of any of the "Red Hot" projects. I've little to add to Considine's appreciative appraisal, except that my own ear tends to incline toward the more eclectic tunes: "Ela" by Curumin, "Bat Macumba" by Os Mutantes and of Montreal, and "Aquele Abraço," a fabulous stew served up by Brazilian Girls, Forro in the Dark and Angelique Kidjo. And "Freak le Boom Boom" by Secousse and Marina Gasolina is so virulently infectious, it makes me a little crazy — in a good way (I think...).

The curious should not delay: this is the ideal soundtrack for summer soirées on the patio.

1979, Revisited

Over at the Onion AV Club, Sean O'Neal offers a perspective on the 1979 music scene that is considerably more cultivated than my own. Head over there for some relief from all this meatball rock.

Grade 9, Final Track

"Up To My Neck In You," AC/DC

Okay, I lied. After yesterday's hokey song I couldn't see my way around any more fitting an endnote than an anthem from the Bon Scott years. Is it worth adding that this is a band that, so far as I'm concerned, never fully recovered from the death of their lead singer and best song-writer? I know the Mutt Lange albums brought in the money and cemented their fame in the USA, but seriously: once Bon died the songs struggled to achieve so much as a single entendre.

Anyway, it almost feels like a relief to end this disc, doesn't it? And it could have been so much worse. Some of the acts I considered and dismissed include: Styx, The Carpenters, Donnie Iris, Max Webster, Ian Thomas, Greg Khin, even (choke) Journey.

Thank your lucky stars, dude.

Alright: now it's your turn. Awaiting your reply,

Your godfaddah.

Grade 9, Track 21

"I Remember You," Frank Ifield

But this Slim Whitman performance of the same song -- for Andy Kaufman! -- is more worth your viewing time.

And finally . . .

Grade 9, Tracks 19 & 20

"Face The Day," The Angels; "Don't Let The Morning Come," Parchment

One person's sunshine and lollipop can be another's lament for the light of the early morning sun. You get two of the latter, because I'm still fond of them both.

Next!

Grade 9, Track 18

"Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows," Lesley Gore



Heh, heeeeeegh . . . next!

Grade 9, Track 17

“Gettin' Nowhere Fast,” Jason & The Scorchers

Wup — here we are at the present (where I've un-learned how to count). But it was a mixed tape of Jason & The Scorchers songs that got this loopy tradition going, back when you and your dad were bachelors, and the song seems to fit the motif.



Rockin' photo source: Collin Peterson

Next!

Grade 9, Track 16

“Rock The Casbah,” The Clash

There is a sound that a band makes when its members can no longer stand the sight of each other. If the listener hasn't been a fan from the beginning, she could be forgiven for thinking it's possibly their best sound to date. It is tight and bright and catchy as hell, but it also lacks a certain looseness, a sense of play behind the work that was so evident at the very beginning.

This is that sound.

Next!

Grade 9, Track 17

“Theme To The Mod Squad,” Earle Hagen

Earle Hagen's not-so-mod ditty has made me want to sprint ever since I was six years old.

Next!